Author Archives: McEwen

William H. Allen

W.H. Allen appears as the co-author with McLuhan of ‘Title VII Research Abstract’ (for Report on Project in Understanding New Media), Audio Visual Communication Review, 9:4, 1961. Allen might have appeared with McLuhan in this way for several reasons.

First and most simply, Allen was the founding editor of this journal and may have helped McLuhan put the abstract into the required form for it.

Second, as recorded in the ‘Itinerary and Summary of the Activities of the Consultant’ section of the Report:

February 28-March 5 (1960): The DAVI [Department of  Audiovisual Instruction of the National Education Association] Convention in Cincinnati where I was a member of a continuing panel. The major effect of this conference for my  studies was the sudden awareness that my approach to the media is close to the Systems Development type of effort. I owe this discovery to William Allen, Rand Corporation [and editor of the DAVI journal, Audio Visual Communication Review], and James Finn, DAVI President. As a result I have begun to work with our electrical engineering department here at Toronto.

With the shared by-line, McLuhan may have been expressing his appreciation of Allen’s help with his thinking more broadly.

Third, since Allen’s influence in the educational AV community was second to none, this might have been a way on his part to promote consideration of McLuhan’s work in that community. In fact, in the 1959-1964 period, discussion of McLuhan was nowhere as prevalent as it was in the Audio Visual Communication Review.

Fourth, Allen was both an academic (at USC) and an associate with the Rand Corporation. As was the case with Bernard Muller-Thym and Peter Drucker, McLuhan appreciated scholars who worked outside of the academy and who attempted to apply their ideas in real life.  As he repeatedly expressed, he had this ambition for himself.

Fifth, Allen combined his technology and education research with an intense concern with Christianity.  Also this sort of multiple avocation greatly appealed to McLuhan. It was one of the reasons for his longtime friendship with Muller-Thym and may well have been a factor in his relation with Allen.

The description of the papers of Andrew Christian Lohr (

This material was collected by William Homer Allen (1914-2009). Raised in Glendale, California, and in Arizona, he received an AB from UCLA (1941); MA, Claremont Graduate School (1948); and EdD, UCLA (1950). He was a captain in the Army, serving from 1941 to 1946.
Allen taught at San Diego State College, University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California. He worked for the RAND Corporation from 1957 to 1960. He founded and edited the journal, AV Communication Review, published by the Department of Audiovisual Instruction [DAVI] of the National Education Association. (…)1 He retired from USC as professor in the education department in 1978.
Allen’s parents were Christian Scientists and then members of the Unity Church. They met Andrew Christian Lohr (1880-1960) in the early 1930s and became part of the group who met with him on a regular basis. They held teachings at their house in Glendale.
After he retired, Allen transcribed and organized Lohr’s teachings, leading to a self-published book, Born of Water and Spirit: Teachings in Mystic Christianity (1990). The book is organized into four parts: The Realm of God, The Realm of Man, Aspects of Man’s Regeneration, and Ways to Spiritual Attainment. Additional books with Lohr’s talks were planned but never published. Allen also painted and wrote an unpublished book on the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus. He died in 2009.

  1. The description of Allen has “After 18 years” here, but this number seems mistaken since Allen was at USC already in the 1950s.  His career there lasted easily over 20 years. It may well be, however, that he became “professor in the education department” in 1960 and then retired from that position “after 18 years”. ↩

“Factual means of avoiding disaster”

The so-called new criticism (…) followed after the new poetry which followed after the new [scientific and industrial] developments in our Western world [in the first half of the 19th century]  (…) It was the new media themselves, from the telegraph (1830) onward which created the situation which the poets and painters tried to explain to us by “prophetic” new art forms. (…) For the past century, the artist has been our only navigator in social and political terms. The models which he makes are not wishful dreams (…) but urgent factual (…) means of avoiding disaster. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media: ‘What I Learned On The Project’, 1960)

As McLuhan already affirmed to Harold Innis in 1951, he saw techniques developed in the arts  as eminently practical.1 What was needed was application of them to our looming social, political and ecological problems.

In one of his few publications in 19582, ‘Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication (A Canadian View)’, just prior to the explosion of communications he would issue between 1959 and 1964, McLuhan “attempted to sketch a strategy of observation and exploration by which it would be possible to apply some of the recent information concepts to (…) teaching and learning in the age of the new media.”3 Given the context of his essay in a Yearbook of Education, McLuhan naturally directed his remarks here to “teaching and learning”.  But he was increasingly clear that that human beings were facing catastrophe especially in war and ecology and that the one “means of avoiding disaster” at our disposal was the application of ideas that had been developed in the century between 1850 and 1950 — above all in the seemingly remote realms of poetry and criticism.

Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication (A Canadian View):

  • We welcome the non-Euclidean spaces of modern physics which are not visualizable. And in these fields of relations we find it easy to recognize that any new factor of information (…) will somewhat modify the entire field of relations.  This admission from the world of mathematics and physics was introduced into literary discussion by T. S. Eliot in 1917 in his Tradition and the Individual Talent when he indicated that for the twentieth century it was natural to consider “that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”. This type of perception, so natural to a world in which all kinds of information flow with electronic velocity, involves the obvious corollary which Mr. Eliot at once pointed out: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (…) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.” To the literary mind, accustomed to the lineal arrangement of language on the page, the notions of simultaneity and of transformation by mutual interaction are very difficult concepts. They are alien and repugnant ideas. But even the literary person has no trouble recognizing the way in which a musical theme or harmony simultaneously modifies all the portions of a musical work. In a musical structure it is easy to observe the total relevance of every phrase to the entire work. The gradual admission of this organic criterion of ‘total relevance’ has come about in all fields of discussion in this century. It is equally the basis of anthropological study of cultures and of critical method in literature. The so-called ‘new criticism’ is, in the main, a recognition of the validity of the ‘total relevance’ attitude to all forms of speech and composition.
  • The work of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny group at Cambridge has been the most notable effort to meet the new situation. They diagnosed the problem as one resulting from failure to notice the exact verbal arrangement of words on the page. Training in attention to the nuances of tone and rhythm as a key to the total response indicated was excellent both in intention and in result. However, this strategy, though brilliantly carried out, merely propped up a sagging literary culture. It assumed that literary training was inevitably the norm of all educational effort. In their Culture and Environment, Leavis and Thompson turned  the trained literary eye upon the non-literary scene, revealing at once how vulgar that scene was. But the poets of our time have used press and cinema, radio, television as new techniques for organizing experience. They have learned the grammars of these new media4 and assimilated them to (…) the tasks of poetry.
  • If we are to retain the values of book-trained perception and judgment, it can only be by learning how to incorporate the former lineal and analytic habits of mind into the new patterns of mind already being established by the new media, which are not at all lineal in their modes of arranging and presenting information. (…) We have to consider that we can no longer teach reading to-day, with its slow, eye-dropper mode of verbal flow, as if we were teaching students who lived in a world which took such a form of information and experience as predominant and normal. It [“book-trained perception”] is to-day a secondary rather than a constitutive form. And if it is to be taught it has to be done realistically, as the presentation of a specialized and somewhat alien type of experience.
  • To-day, our new media compel us to notice that English is a mass medium (…) and that the new media are new languages with unique powers and deficiencies.5
  • Not to recognize this situation is to encourage the rise of a new tower of Babel. That the new media, with their non-lineal means of presenting complex information and attitudes, have already had a strong influence even on older modes of literary study appears in the great vogue of Mr. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Previously, literary people had encouraged the assumption that meaning was something that could be obtained from the page by a single-minded pursuit of the plain sense offered by words in sequence; (…) Hobbes abandoned art and history in favour of Euclidean rationalism, saying: “The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity.” Mr. Empson demonstrated that this aim was sheer illusion. We had been taught [in the Gutenberg era] to ignore the complexities of verbal experience, and [now] the twentieth century (…) was eager to explore the non-lineal aspects [and other complexities] of language and experience. It is this situation which has brought into vogue the concern of the ‘new criticism’ (…) with the ‘total relevance’ of word and phrase6 — much to the chagrin of the true bookmen who continue to insist on the ‘one plain meaning’ coming off the assembly-lines of print.
  1. McLuhan to Innis, March 1951: “the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) (…) have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. (…) this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. (…)  I have been considering an experiment in communication (…) linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis (…) the organizing concept would naturally be “Communication Theory and Practice.” (…) Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience.” (Letters, 220, 221, 223) ↩
  2. McLuhan’s Letters includes no correspondence at all from 1958. ↩
  3. ‘Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication (A Canadian View)’, Yearbook of Education for 1958, 225-232. ↩
  4. See Grammars of the Media from the same year of 1958. ↩
  5. See the previous note. ↩
  6. McLuhan: “It is this situation which has brought the methods of the ‘new criticism’, with all their concern in any composition into vogue with the ‘ total relevance ‘ of word and phrase, much to the chagrin”… ↩

Project 69: What I Learned On The Project

With the exception of its Bibliography and Appendices, Report on Project in Understanding New Media concludes with a section on ‘What I Learned On The Project (1959-1960)’.1 The final sentences of this final section read:

Another basic aspect of the electronic is this: it telescopes centuries of development and evolution into weeks or months. In speeding up actual change, it makes the understanding of change much more feasible just as a movie of an organic process may reveal years of growth in seconds. But such acceleration of growth in no way prepares the human community to adapt to it. Suddenly there is a nine foot redwood where in the morning you had experienced a bedroom. Our educational, political and legal establishments are scarcely contrived to cope with such change. There is no mercy for culture-lag in our new technology. There is no possibility of human adaption. Yet in all these situations we confront only ourselves and extensions of our own senses. There is always the possibility of escape into understanding. We can live around these new situations, even if we cannot live with them. (…) In purely realistic terms, I feel that the associated power of specialist and vested interest of many kinds definitely insures that we shall fail to meet any and every challenge that is offered to us in the electronic age. Why should we [come to] understand [our] new media when no generation of the Western past has understood [its]2 media? However, now that we have begun to [try to] understand all media for the first time (see H.A. Innis, Empire and  Communications) there is the outside possibility that we might decide to consider them as fit objects of study and control.3

McLuhan ended his Report in this way by implicating the great problem of time plural, namely, the problem of understanding the relation4 of “development and evolution” (aka “adaption”), on the one hand, to what can come only “suddenly”, on the other. This was a labyrinthine question which had been raised by great minds for millennia and never solved intellectually or socially (“study and control”). McLuhan was plainly divided as to the prospects5, but knew that in either case, utter disaster or understanding at last, “we confront only ourselves”.

In fact, McLuhan’s lifelong enterprise might be put as the question of what is to become of human extension? Will it continue only outward to oblivion or turn back inward to what is already there, namely, the underlying prior possibility of such extension? And of its potential return?

On the way to these concluding thoughts, ‘McLuhan made a series of related points:

Correction for Lasswell formula6 [Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect] — not who is speaking to whom, but what is speaking to whom. Lasswell ignores the media, except speech; but obviously if a person is speaking into a P.A. system or into a radio microphone, etc., the who and the what are profoundly transformed.

McLuhan’s observation here is indeed obvious enough: media do transform who we are, what we communicate and to whom we communicate. Yet this massive field has been virtually ignored even while its world-transforming effects have gigantically accumulated.  Now in 2018, almost 40 years after McLuhan’s death, in an age of grossly inflated fake news and unforgivably inflated real deaths, his observations about information war ring more true than ever:

Today, when the largest commodity of all is information itself, war means no longer the movement of hardware [like weapons], but of information. What had previously been “a peace time” activity within our own boundaries now becomes the major “cold-war” activity across frontiers.

Therefore:

Today, civil defence would seem to consist in protection against media fallout.

But beyond the pressing practical need for the investigation of media in matters of war and peace, there was also the prior question of just who we are as human beings:

Media are extensions of the human senses. They modify the patterns of human association while remaining rooted in this or that sense, and these staples are not limited to any geographical area, but are co-extensive with the human family itself.

  1. Presumably this section (and others like ‘Purpose of the Project’, ‘Materials Developed by the Project’, ‘Itinerary And Summary Of Activities Of The Consultant’, etc) was required by the terms of the research grant. ↩
  2. McLuhan has “all media” here, a phrase evidently intended to contrast with Innis studying “all media” in the next sentence. But behind this matter of vocabulary and style lay his conviction that we can come to understand any medium at all only by understanding media per se. ↩
  3. It would seem that McLuhan wrote ‘What I Learned On The Project’ hurriedly and with little or no revision.  Awkward phrasing and repetitions are common in it.  The apparent explanation for such haste is given in the ‘Itinerary and Summary of Activities of the Consultant’ section: “Project 69 travel was amply rewarding in insight and friendship. Unfortunately, it had adverse effects on my health, requiring hospitalization and a long period of rest, delaying the conclusion of these reports and the summarizing of the results of this project.” ↩
  4. “Relation”: both the fundamental difference and the equally fundamental harmony of the two. ↩
  5. Soon after this, in 1962, McLuhan would publish two papers on our dim prospects: ‘Prospect’ in Canadian Art magazine and ‘Prospect of America’, a review in UTQ of The Image: What Happened to the American Dream by Daniel Boorstin. ↩
  6. Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) and his communication model. Lasswell already appears in the references of Harold Innis — both had their PhDs from the University of Chicago in the early 1920s. Lasswell’s concerns with the political, social and psychopathological implications of communications might usefully be compared and contrasted to those of McLuhan. ↩

Kenneth Boulding

Unlike most of the authors and investigators McLuhan studied in his crucial 1958-1962 period (such as Adolf Hildebrand, Heinrich Wölfflin, William Ivins, Georg von Békésy and Tobias Dantzig), Kenneth Boulding’s work continued to be cited by McLuhan into the 1970s. Furthermore, he had come to know of Boulding’s work earlier than these others — Boulding contributed ‘The Information Concept’ to Explorations 5 in 1955.

Media Alchemy in Art and Society, 1958

Kenneth Boulding’s The Image [1956] is an important event in advancing our knowledge of alchemical change in all types of structure. And we achieve this advance by seeing every kind of structure, from the botanical to the animal and human, as a knowledge structure subject to information in-put. The structure is the image: “We must distinguish carefully between the image and the messages that reach it. The messages consist of information in the sense that they are structured experiences. The meaning of the message is the change which it produces in the image.” Boulding is disposed to regard some information as neutral (“We may imagine that the message is going straight through without hitting it.”). Such neutral messages bombarding the inattentive image or structure have tended in our time to be cut down almost to zero. Modern psychology is here in accord with the arts in thinking that subliminally received messages (what used to be called cultural conditioning) are much the most effective as shaping powers. Massive achievements like Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Archiitecture or his Mechanization Takes Command offer as it were a vivisectional awareness of the living inter-relational current of forms and information.

McLuhan to Harry Skornia, June 5, 1959

Ken B is going to be one of my earliest approaches. (…) Look Harry, the first big miracle has occurred [= the funding of the Understanding Media project].  Those that follow will be easier and bigger but more natural as it were.  Let’s keep in mind that events and actualities are all on our side.  The opposition has to be by-passed not clobbered.  Ours must by mobile war not positional, if we are to salvage an appreciable proportion of our establishment, educational and political.  We must waste no time or strength in opposition or diatribe.  People love to fight but don’t want to be left out of main trend!

McLuhan to Claude Bissell, May 6, 19601

At the very high level of information movement in which to-day we are involved, we find ourselves less in a university of subjects than in what Meister Eckhart called the university of being. For in each subject concerned with method and creative insight tends to bring each subject directly into the mode of contemplation of its relation to Being. For example, Ken Boulding in The Organizational Revolution, on p. 66, mentions that “the idea that a theory of organization is possible is one of the important ideas of our time“. Notice that if information moves so fast that the causes and effects of any action are felt almost together — then it becomes indispensable to have a theory of organization, but it also becomes possible. It is the telescoping of actions and consequences which makes understanding of principles easier. Another way of putting this, Claude, is to say that control is only possible through acceleration of change. A ship that is moving at the same speed as the current has no steerageway. What is ordinarily called planning is, in effect, acceleration. In the same way, the greatly increased speed of action and reaction, because of electronic information movement, compels organizations to assume an ethical character in the sense of having inclusive rather than exclusive purposes. Specialized lines of development are intolerable, when every line crosses every line. That is to say, that the dialogue now characterizes the interplay of things themselves, and any effort to understand or control such situations by any means less inclusive than the dialogue will scarcely work. Should be able to get the Meier paper to you late on Monday. Between him and Boulding2, you should be able to manage very well indeed with the Manufacturers’ Association. By the way Ken Boulding’s book. The Image, 1959, is small and richly nourished. It has lots of economic tie-ins.

Understanding Media, 1964

Kenneth Boulding put this matter in The Image by saying, “The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image.” Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement. (26)

…in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a “break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes“… (38)3

Take Today, 1972

NOTHING EXCEEDS LIKE EXCESS. Writing on the “Failures and Successes of Economics” (THINK, May- June, 1965), Kenneth E. Boulding cites “Phillips Curve” to the effect that beyond a certain point “the more employment the more inflation”. Boulding, in The Image, was one of the first to note that the gist of economic life had moved into the information or “software” orbit. Political economy had, in fact, become economic politics. The trend to what he calls THE GRANTS ECONOMY is a reversal of an age-old and opposite trend of the separation of work and residence. The increase of “software” and information as industries become knowledge-oriented can have only one terminal, namely, the restoration of the decentralized “cottage economy”. So far this development has been called “moonlighting” and “starlighting.” “Do-it-yourself” now permits use of the total environment as a private resource. Earlier, it had been an elite that exploited the “public benefits for private vices.” Now it is everybody who gets in on the act. This, naturally, via Hertz Law of Complementarity brings the flip or reversal of effect. In Boulding’s words, “grants may be made out of fear rather than out of love.” The grant as tribute, levied on a puzzled public, becomes a feature of the “threat system,” as in Speenhamland. (81-82)

  1.  Letters 273 ↩
  2. “Between him (Meier) and Boulding” —  at this time Richard Meier and Boulding were colleagues at the University of Michigan. ↩
  3. This passage from Understanding Media is cited in Laws of Media, 107. ↩

McLuhan’s #1 breakthrough

the (…) way in which the lines of force in any medium are structured. (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, 25 January 1960)1

When stress moves from product to process… (McLuhan to Claude Bissell, May 6, 1960)2

Understanding Media [= Report on Project in Understanding New Media] postulates the basic hypothesis that any means of codification of experience in terms of any sense whatever inevitably transforms the ratio among the other senses and thereby alters patterns of thought, feeling, and action. (‘Title VII Research Abstract’, 1961)3  

McLuhan experienced enough self-styled breakthroughs in his career that he sometimes complained that he didn’t have time to write them down.  The single most important one of these occurred in January 1960:

Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.4 Radio, for example, has an intense visual effect on listeners. But then there is the telephone which also proffers an auditory impression, but has no visual effect. In the same way television is watched but has a very different effect from movies. These observations led to a series of studies of the media, and to the discovery of basic laws concerning the sensory effects of various media. These will be found in this report.  In 1915 Heinrich Wölfflin published his Principles of Art History which has since then revolutionized the study of many matters besides art. His entire approach confirms what I discovered about media: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts“5… (Report on the Project in Understanding New Media)

The last few days have seen a major breakthrough in media study. Working with the fact that each medium embodies one or more of the human senses, it struck me that we are impelled in perceiving each medium to complete the scale or spectrum of our sensorium. So that, radio impels us to provide a visual world moment by moment, and photography, which is so adequate in visual terms, compels us to complete the tactual and kinesthetic part of the sensorium. Thus the degree of sensuous completion is one way in which the lines of force in any medium are structured. (McLuhan to Harry Skornia, 25 January 1960)6

The break-through in media study has come at last, and it can be stated as the principle of complementarity: that the structural impact of any situation is subjectively completed as to the cycle of the senses. (McLuhan to Bernard Muller-Thym, February 19th, 1960)7

As far as the project goes, rather large developments and discoveries have occurred in the last few weeks which will enable me to complete it in a very satisfactory manner while, at the same time, opening a new phase of media study… (McLuhan to John Wain, March 11, 1960)8

Some large breakthroughs have occurred in communication study…9 (McLuhan to Peter Drucker, April 18, 1960)10

At first following Innis, Havelock and Richards in the late 1940s11, and then working with the Explorations seminar group in the middle 1950s, McLuhan by 1960 had considered for more than a decade how media shape experience through the manipulation of the senses — particularly the ear in illiterate cultures and the eye in literate ones. But now, in January 1960, he came to the idea that media — and therefore all human experience (since all human experience is media-ted at the very least by language and culture) — that media and all human experience might be characterized by specifiable structure.12 Furthermore, he saw that such a specifiable structure, once tentatively accepted for collective investigation, could represent the “opening [of] a new phase of media study” leading to “the discovery of basic laws”.

He immediately saw that collective study along these lines, with the promise of the sorts of progressive and sometimes revolutionary findings that other sciences such as chemistry and genetics had made once an elementary structure had been identified for common focus in their fields, could have enormous effect on the great questions of the contemporary world. And, given the state of the world with the threat of nuclear weapons in war, of pervasive automation in the economy, and environmental disaster in the biosphere, this effect could hardly be for the worse. Indeed, the accumulative result of the new investigation was its promise finally to lift the automata-like slavery of humans to the media control of their experience — which was leading the planet into multiple disasters.

Once he began looking at media as structures, McLuhan saw various possibilities for scientific investigation. For example, he saw that different media stimulated the human sensorium with different intensities: what he called High Definition (HD) and Low Definition (LD). Already in 1960 this would lead him to the famous typology of hot (HD) and cool (LD) media. Then, given some such input, he hypothesized that “we are impelled in perceiving each medium to complete the scale or spectrum of our sensorium”. The initial idea (never fulfilled in practice, but perhaps never yet fully appreciated) was that it might be possible to establish that the ratio between the sensory input of a medium and the inverse (high response to low input and vice versa) ‘subjective completion’ (SC)13 of a perceiver would maintain itself according to some dynamic constant or, at least, might prove to have predictable action somewhat as valence does in chemistry. Comparable to the action of valence, the hypothetical goal of all experience would be to convert an unstable initial situation into a subsequent stable one.14 On this model, human being would ceaselessly function as a kind of gyroscope working to keep the changing inputs of experience in balance.  As McLuhan wrote to Jackie Tyrwhitt on December 23, 1960:

Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space, [a question] not [of] fixed but [of] ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness?15

Or again in the 1961 ‘Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation’:

the senses never operate in isolation [from one another]. 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 [relatively] isolated by stress or intensity we are in the state of hypnosis at once. Pushed a bit further, the [more extreme] isolation of [a] sense [relative to the others] leads swiftly to insanity.

This implicated the further idea that scientific investigation might focus on the senses themselves in their attempt “to maintain that steady ratio among the senses which is the norm of human consciousness“. This facility dynamically seeking sensory stability was called by McLuhan ‘tactility’ — or ‘kinesthesia’ or ‘synesthesia’ or ‘equilibrium’ or ‘the sensus communis‘ — and he postulated that it could be defined in terms of the ratio between the visual and the aural:

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the (…) eye and ear… (Take Today, 22)

The idea was not that the eye and the ear ever function aside from the ‘synesthesia’ of the five senses, but that they have a specialized role in the investigation of human experience comparable to the specialized role of the electron (which in practice never functions aside from a host of other particles in the atom) in the investigations of chemistry (particularly in regard to valence). Moreover, the visual and the aural were to be defined, not in terms of either sent or received sense data — “the sensory impression” — but in terms of “the effect”.16 And the effects of media were the “variants” of time-space experience: 

each sense actually makes its own space with its own distinctive perceptual structure. (Take Today, 137)

The elements of experience would then be the plenary spectrum of time-space configurations specifiable as variations of the basic ear-eye ratio. The hope would be that they would prove as fertile for new discoveries, and indeed even for whole new sub-sciences, as was the case following the definition of elementary structures in chemistry and genetics. And this, in turn, might provide an answer to the “threat to continued existence and to sanity”17 posed to the planet, then and now, by the limitless assertion of unconsidered assumptions.18

 

  1. See note 6 below. ↩
  2. Letters, 273 ↩
  3. McLuhan and Allen, ‘Title VII Research Abstract’ for Report on Project in Understanding New Media, in Audio Visual Communication Review, 9:4, A25-A26, 1961. ↩
  4. This is the first sentence of the most important section of Report on the Project in Understanding New Media: ‘General Introduction to the Languages and Grammars of the Media’. More than a decade later, in Take Today, McLuhan continued to emphasize “the continual transformation of sensory inputs into outputs of quite different kinds. Food for the mind is like food for the body; the inputs are never the same as the outputs!” (137) ↩
  5. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, Dover edition, 62. ↩
  6. Cited in Gordon,  Escape into Understanding 399-400, n99. ↩
  7. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 313-314. ↩
  8. Letters, 266. In his fine ‘Incidental Thoughts of Marshall McLuhan’, Wain recalls of this early 1960 period: “I think indeed that I had struck him at a moment of immense fecundity, when a mass of apparently random ideas had begun to form into a whole in his mind. He must have been putting the finishing touches to The Gutenberg Galaxy”. ↩
  9. This passage continued: “pushing media (study) towards Systems Development and I am now working with the (UT) Electrical Engineering Dept.” The idea of investigating media as systems in an electrical engineering sense may have come to McLuhan as a result of hearing Richard Meier at Michigan earlier than same month. In his 1960 paper, ‘Technology, the Media, and Culture’, McLuhan quoted Meier as follows: “With the elaboration of electrical engineering, and the fusing of many strands of chemical knowledge, a field that was evolving rapidly in a mainstream of its own that led from mass reactions to molecular, to atomic, and most recently to nuclear reactions, the possibility of a flexible, quick-acting, autonomous economy emerged. It is capable of substituting one set of raw materials by others so as to meet virtually all foreseeable emergencies which reduce or cut off supplies.” But see the next note for a slightly earlier source for a Systems Development approach. ↩
  10. Letters, 269; the Systems Development approach (see previous note) apparently came from William Allen — see Project 69: Purpose, note 8. ↩
  11. At the same time in the late 1940s McLuhan was following developments in the then-new field of cybernetics, particularly in the work of Norbert Wiener and his colleagues at MIT. In the 1969 UT President’s Report, Claude Bissell noted that McLuhan “received the British Institute of Public Relations’ Presidential Medal for 1969 and while in London was the guest of honour at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, proposing the main toast of the evening to the 21st anniversary of the formal birth of cybernetics!” ↩
  12. McLuhan to Peter Drucker, April 26, 1960: “As with me in media study, he (“my friend, Tom Easterbrook”) has reached the structuralist stage where content is indifferent. He has isolated the dynamics of the inter-relation between power centers and marginal areas, and momentarily we have a bond in the matter of media as staples.” ↩
  13. “The concept of closure or completion is basic in understanding media, since it becomes possible to see why no sense can operate in isolation from all the others and no medium can exist by itself.” (‘Title VII Research Abstract’ for Report on Project in Understanding New Media, in Audio Visual Communication Review, 9:4, A25-A26, 1961) ↩
  14. A fundamental question here would be in what time this ‘initial-subsequent’ process takes place? Clearly it does not occur in clock time: our experience of the world does not wait upon the completion of such an action. But if that is the case, when and where and how does the action take place? ↩
  15. Letters, 277-278 ↩
  16. As he first attested in Report on Project in Understanding New Media, McLuhan learned (or confirmed what he already suspected) from Heinrich Wölfflin’s  Principles of Art History that “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts“. See McLuhan on ‘effect’ in 1946. ↩
  17.  Report on Project in Understanding New Media: ‘Purpose’ ↩
  18.  For further discussion of these issues, see McLuhan’s new sciences: “only the authority of knowledge”. ↩

Richard L Meier and “substitutability”

I would like to draw attention to the fine paper of Richard L. Meier on “Information, Resource Use, and Economic Growth,” (read at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 1960). Not only does he point to the media of communication as staples or natural resources, and to our senses as the climate of information, but [also to the fact that] the natural effect of the electric is to substitute  information movement for transportation of things. As information movement increases, “machines can be designed which normally make for [far?] fewer mistakes than humans.” That is, as information moves into very high level phases there occurs (…) reversal and substitution of forms (…). Above all, information movement at electric speeds results in a society “capable of substituting one set of raw materials by others“. “Now, however, it is impossible to specify any set of resources which are crucial”. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media: ‘General Introduction to Charts’)

McLuhan heard Meier’s paper at a conference on Natural Resources and Economic Growth held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7-9, 1960.1 Apparently on account of its ontological implications, McLuhan immediately began to discuss Meier’s notion in his correspondence and papers: 

I want to mention some aspects of the Richard Meier script which came to mind yesterday. A propos of his theme of substitutability, notice that when information flow reaches a sufficient level almost any resource material can be substituted for any other, then the situation closely resembles the activity of the sensus communis in translating one sense into another. (…) I am exceedingly grateful to Richard Meier, but I understand what he is saying so much better than he does that I am really in some doubt as to what sort of credit to hand him when these things come to publication. (McLuhan to Bernard Muller-Thym, Letters 270-272, May 5, 1960)

Now, from your point of view, it seems to me that some of these points directly concern the university. The principle, that at very high levels of information movement  substitutability  occurs, (this by the way applies also to our own sense lives in which each sense typically translates itself into each of the other five senses) applies to the studies of the university. When stress moves from product to process, all of the subjects in the university also become substitutable for one another. At the very high level of information movement in which to-day we are involved, we find ourselves less in a university of subjects [or disciplines] than in what Meister Eckhart called the university of being. For (…) method and creative insight [today] tends to bring each subject directly into the mode of contemplation of its relation to Being. (McLuhan to Claude Bissell, May 6, 1960, Letters 273)

Richard Meier, in a paper given at Ann Arbor this past April, formulated a natural law for media when he pointed out that increased levels of information flow result in substitutability: “With the elaboration of electrical engineering, and the fusing of many strands of chemical knowledge, a field that was evolving rapidly in a mainstream of its own that led from mass reactions to molecular, to atomic, and most recently to nuclear reactions, the possibility of a flexible, quick-acting, autonomous economy emerged. It is capable of substituting one set of raw materials by others so as to meet virtually all foreseeable emergencies which reduce or cut off supplies. (…) The task that remains is one of redesigning social institutions so that they are consonant with the revealed potentials of resource availability and technological efficiency.” (Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960)

information theory is able to reveal in the person and the paper of Richard Meier that “the degree of substitutability of one resource for another increases when either the stock of knowledge or the flow of communications increases.” (…) Meier, in the paper already referred to, notes: “We are forced to conclude that natural resources have an informational aspect, in addition to the bulk and utility features mentioned earlier.” But if media as extensions of our senses offer ready access to our inmost lives, putting the lever of Archimedes in the hands of bureaucrat and entrepreneur alike, natural resources can also be seen as media of communication. (…) To put it in Meier’s terms again, with the rise of information levels and speeds, war may cease to be the exchange of bulk or heavy goods, and may become an information exchange before a global public. If adjustment (economic, social, or personal) to information movement at electronic speeds is quite impossible, we can always change our models and metaphors of organization, and escape into sheer understanding. Sequential analysis and adjustment natural to low speed information movement becomes irrelevant and useless even at telegraph speed. But as speed increases, the understanding of process in all kinds of structures and situations becomes relatively simple. We can literally escape into understanding when the patterns of process become manifest. (Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, 1960)

The theme appears a few years later in Understanding Media as follows:

Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. (Understanding Media, 35–36)

McLuhan wrote to Walter Ong:

A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build. (McLuhan to Walter Ong. Nov. 18, 1960? 1961?, Letters 281)

Meier’s principle of the substitutability of “one set of raw materials by others” seemed to give him a concrete illustration of the objectivity of the sensus communis. As he wrote to Muller-Thym in the letter from May 5, 1960 already cited above:

when information flow reaches a sufficient level almost any resource material can be substituted for any other, then the [external] situation closely resembles the activity of the [internal] sensus communis in translating one sense into another. 

And as he wrote the next day to Claude Bissell:

today (…), we find ourselves (…) in what Meister Eckhart called the university of being. (…) dialogue now characterizes the interplay of things themselves… (McLuhan to Claude Bissell, May 6, 1960, Letters 273)2

Indeed, two years before, in 1958, he had already seen that some kind of “knowledge structure subject to information in-put” was characteristic not only of the human mind but of everything in nature:

Kenneth Boulding’s The Image [1956] is an important event in advancing our knowledge of alchemical change in all types of structure. And we achieve this advance by seeing every kind of structure, from the botanical to the animal and human, as a knowledge structure subject to information in-put. (Media Alchemy in Art and Society)

  1. The papers presented at the conference, including Meier’s, were published in 1961 in Natural Resources and Economic Growth, ed J.J. Spengler. ↩
  2. McLuhan continued this passage: “and any effort to understand or control such situations by any means less inclusive than the dialogue will scarcely work.” ↩

Project 69: Purpose of Project

Report on Project in Understanding New Media: ‘Purpose of Project’1

  • Project 69 in Understanding Media proposed (…) a new tactic (…), namely to consider not so much the constituents nor the “content” of media, as their effects. I therefore raise the question at once: “Why have the effects of media, whether speech, writing, photography or radio, been overlooked by social observers through the past 3500 years of the Western world?” The answer to that question (…) is in the power of the media themselves to impose their own assumptions upon our modes of perception. Our media have always constituted the parameters and the framework for the objectives of our Western world.
  • In top-management study and planning today assumptions and objectives are recognized to be distinct (…) “Now, the primary difference between an assumption and an objective, is that an assumption pertains to things that are beyond your control, and an objective pertains to things that are achieved through your own effort.”2  What the writer of this brief does not know is that assumptions can also come within the range of prediction and control just as soon as it is recognized that the new media of communication in any age, as they penetrate and transform the older media, are the source of new assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our objectives.
  • Media study has not begun to approach such awareness because it has not established the sort of “self-sustained growth” enabled by the “take-off mechanism”3 of social change involved in the shaping and speeding of information for eye and for ear and for touch and kinetics.4 Project 69 set out to bring media study within the range of [such] expanding awareness here indicated by Rostow5 in economics. My assumptions, then, were (…) that such understanding was quite possible [and that] media assumptions do not have to remain subliminal…

In these passages from his short (965 words on 3.5 typed pages) introductory overview of Project 69, McLuhan makes a series of points which remain startlingly unconsidered today — almost 60 years later. These points may be summarized as follows:

  1. It is necessary to differentiate between conscious and (currently) unconscious (or “subliminal”) factors in experience, corresponding to objectives “achieved through your own effort” and assumptions “beyond your control”.
  2. But “assumptions do not have to remain subliminal” and, consequently, “assumptions can also come within the range of prediction and control”.
  3. Assumptions as “the causes of change in our objectives” must be investigated through “a new tactic (…) to consider (…) their effects“, aka through the objectives they engender.
  4. Media are the vectors of assumptions and therefore are the vectors of the effects and objectives of assumptions: “media have always constituted the parameters and the framework for (…) objectives”.6
  5. “In these circumstances Understanding Media must mean the understanding of the effects of media.”
  6. However, media as the vectors of assumptions can as much obscure assumptions as illuminate them. Everything depends on making the transition from the former to the latter.
  7. New media can illuminate through being “the source of new assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our objectives”.
  8. The new media of today can enable the needed illumination of assumptions (dual genitive!) only if their study is revolutionized through the sort of “social change involved in the shaping and speeding of information” as described for economics by Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth (and, two years later in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn for the physical sciences in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions7).  As McLuhan cited from Rostow’s Stages in The Gutenberg Galaxy, this is the metamorphosis in thought and practice initiating “that decisive interval in the history of a society when [“self-sustained”8 economic or scientific] growth becomes its normal condition” (Gutenberg Galaxy, 90).

In sum:

The globe has become on one hand a community of learning [but so far only in fields other than media], and at the same time, with regard to the tightness of its inter-relationships, the globe has become a tiny village. Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity.

This mortal threat even to our “continued existence” has its ground in the retention of pre-nuclear assumptions and their objectives in a nuclear age, and, at the same time, in the impediment by those pre-nuclear assumptions of the sort of media study that might alone bring assumptions “within the range of prediction and control“. This blockage occurs because recognition, let alone study, of underlying assumptions (especially its own underlying assumptions) necessarily remains “subliminal” within the Gutenberg galaxy. For this is that epoch whose very world-altering success depends upon its proceeding in principle upon a single level only: “the single-plane approach of the older literacy“.9 Within the terms of pre-nuclear objectives there is, therefore, not only no defence against their fatal implications, there is their limitless assertion. As McLuhan noted in the same year as Project 69:

the subliminal legacy of print can have strange effects in the highest scientific quarters of the post-print age. (Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media)

A peculiarly insidious example of this point is provided by all current McLuhan ‘research’. But  McLuhan himself summed up his work as follows: 

All the recommendations 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.10

McLuhan ‘research’ thus far has had — and has today — no other objective than to hoick his work back into the Gutenberg galaxy where assumptions are once again subject to “blackout”. In this way, McLuhan has been — and continues to this day to be — harnessed to the very forces he desperately attempted to combat.

  1. All citations in this post, unless otherwise identified, are taken from this introductory ‘Purpose of Project’ section of McLuhan’s Report. ↩
  2. Citation from “a Westinghouse ‘Long Range Planning’ brief of August 3, 1960″. This is one of many references in the Report which are later than the June 30, 1960 date given on its cover. ↩
  3. Citation from W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge University Press, 1960) — one of the many 1960 books extensively cited in Project 69 (like Gombrich, Art and Illusion and Békésy, Experiments in Hearing). Despite the date on its cover of June 30, 1960, McLuhan seems to have completed the Report only late in 1960 or even in 1961. ↩
  4. “Eye (…) ear and (…) touch and kinetics” is the formula for McLuhan’s proposed elementary structure of media and experience: the ratio of eye to ear as modulated by touch and kinetics. ↩
  5. See note 3 above. ↩
  6. McLuhan in a 1961 review of Edward Hall’s The Silent Language wrote of “the effects of media in setting the assumptions of cultures”. There is a circularity here of the highest importance: media have the effect of resetting what is prior to effects!  It is this unaccountable temporal power of media which McLuhan wanted to direct towards — understanding media. ↩
  7. Kuhn’s study was cited infrequently by McLuhan in the last decade of his life beginning with From Cliché to Archetype in 1970. He seems to have been alerted to it by Barrington Nevitt in ‘Predicting Scientific Prediction’ which appeared in the new series of Explorations in the University of Toronto Varsity Graduate, 13:3, 49-64, May, 1967. ↩
  8. Full passage quoting Rostow cited above from Report on Project in Understanding New Media: “Media study has not begun to approach such awareness because it has not established the sort of “self-sustained growth” enabled by the “take-off mechanism” of social change involved in the shaping and speeding of information”. ↩
  9. See ‘Multi-levels of simultaneous presentation‘. ↩
  10. Report on Project in Understanding New Media: ‘Recommendations’. Also in W.H. Allen and H.M. McLuhan, ‘Title VII Research Abstract’ (for Report on Project in Understanding New Media), Audio Visual Communication Review, 9:4, 1961. ↩

Georg von Békésy

Georg von Békésy’s Experiments in Hearing was published in 1960 and immediately put to use by McLuhan in his own writings that year, especially in Report on Project in Understanding New Media. Two years later, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan continued to cite von Békésy extensively.

Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960)

  • Switching attention to effects away from “the sensuous facts” high-lighted (…) that the two-dimensional in visual presentation is in effect very tactile, resonant, and auditory. Three dimensional representation on the other hand remains primarily visual, pictorial, retinal, abstract and exclusive of the non-retinal. (…) In direct connection with this, it is most illuminating, at the very beginning of Georg von Békésy’ s Experiments in Hearing (McGraw-Hill, 1960), to find him contrasting two-dimensional and three-dimensional  paintings. His purpose is to explain how in the study of hearing, “mosaic” methods of research are more effective than “perspective” methods. Acoustical research is necessarily “depth” study since hearing is from all directions at once. Two-dimensional mosaic structures with their multi-levelled effects are therefore of great relevance to auditory research. There can be no fixed point of view with perspective and vanishing point, in such study. But Békésy is naturally apologetic in abandoning the conventional “perspective” patterns of research (such as are still used in audio-visual media study): “It is possible to distinguish two forms of approach to a problem. One, which may be called the theoretical approach, is to formulate the problem in relation to what is already known, to make additions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles, and then to proceed to test these hypotheses experimentally. Another, which may be called the mosaic approach, takes each problem for itself with little reference to the field in which it lies, and seeks to discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed area.”1 Békésy then proceeds to introduce his two paintings: “A close analogy to these two approaches may be found in the field of art. In the period between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries the Arabs and the Persians developed a high mastery of the arts of description and portrayal and they used the mosaic style (…) Later, during the Renaissance, a new form of representation was developed in which the attempt was made to give unity and perspective to the picture and to represent the atmosphere (…) When in the field of science a great deal of progress has been made and most of the pertinent variables are known, a new problem may most readily be handled by trying to fit it into the existing framework [or perspective]. When, however, the framework is uncertain and the number of variables is large the mosaic approach is much the easier.”
  • Just as Békésy found perspective irrelevant to acoustical research, so today by virtue of electric information movement all of us live globally in a kind of tribal drum of simultaneous resonance. When information moves to and from all directions and locations at the same moment, we return to a mode of experience that is structured as an auditory field of simultaneous relations. Even our visual experience is now a mosaic of items assembled from every part of the globe, moment by moment. Lineal perspective and pictorial organization cannot cope with this situation.
  • in concluding this general introduction I want to revert to Georg von Békésy’s discovery that you can’t investigate auditory problems by conventional scientific methods of  perspective. The auditory must be handled on its own terms, and these call for a mosaic approach, not a three-dimensional perspective approach. The auditory forbids perspective if only because it is inaccessible to any fixed position.
  • Edison once laid down a general rule for aspiring inventors: “When you are experimenting and you come across anything you don’t understand, don’t rest until you run it down; it may be the very thing you are looking for or it may be something far more important.” The technique of research that Edison here points to is the “mosaic” one described by Georg von Békésy at the opening of his Experiments in Hearing. “The very thing you are looking for” is the natural way of referring to our standard method in research in which we try to get everything into a single consistent picture or perspective. The exploratory “mosaic” pattern of research is the one referred to by Edison when he says: “or it may be something far more important.”

Effects of the Improvements of Communication (1960)

  • Perspective, with arbitrarily fixed point of view and its vanishing point, is natural to the reader of uniform lines of repeatable type. It is not natural at all in our nuclear age when information does not move exclusively in such patterns any more. And Georg von Békésy, in his Experiments in Hearing finds it necessary to criticize the perspective techniques in scientific research, as compared with the mosaic techniques needed in field theory and non-visualizable problems. 

McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff Dec 19, 1960

  • it is equally observable in preliterate societies, as in our own post-literate global village, that we begin to note a heightening of auditory values after centuries of neglect through [visual]2 stress. (Georg von Békésy in the Psychological Review for January 1959 has an article on ‘The Similarities between Hearing and Skin Sensations‘.) But in preliterate societies where the auditory is supreme as the mode of organizing experience, there is a deprivation of value in the other senses equivalent to the worst excesses of abstract visuality and pictorial space.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

  • A recent work by Georg von Békésy, Experiments in Hearing, offers an exactly reverse answer to the problem of space to the one which Carothers and Wilson have just given us. Whereas they are trying to talk about the perception of non-literate people in terms of literate experience, Professor von Békésy chooses to begin his discussion of acoustical space on its own terms. As one proficient in auditory spaces, he is keenly aware of the difficulty of talking about the space of hearing, for the acoustical is necessarily a world in “depth.” It is of the utmost interest that in trying to elucidate the nature of hearing and of acoustic space, Professor von Békésy should deliberately avoid viewpoint and perspective in favour of mosaic field. And to this end he resorts to two-dimensional painting as a means of revealing the resonant depth of acoustic space. Here are his own words: “It is possible to distinguish two forms of approach to a problem. One, which may be called the theoretical approach, is to formulate the problem in relation to what is already known, to make additions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles, and then to proceed to test these hypotheses experimentally. Another, which may be called the mosaic approach, takes each problem for itself with little reference to the field in which it lies, and seeks to discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed area.” Von Békésy then proceeds to introduce his two paintings: “A close analogy to these two approaches may be found in the field of art. In the period between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries the Arabs and the Persians developed a high mastery of the arts of description (…) Later, during the Renaissance, a new form of representation was developed in which the attempt was made to give unity and perspective to the picture and to represent the atmosphere (…) When in the field of science a great deal of progress has been made and most of the pertinent variables are known, a new problem may most readily be handled by trying to fit it into the existing framework. When, however, the framework is uncertain and the number of variables is large the mosaic approach is much the easier.” The mosaic approach is not only “much the easier” in the study of the simultaneous which is the auditory field; it is the only relevant approach. For the “two-dimensional” mosaic or painting is the mode in which there is muting of the visual as such, in order that there may be maximal interplay among all of the senses. Such was the painterly strategy “since Cezanne,” to paint as if you held, rather than as if you saw, objects. (GG 41-42)
  • The paradox presented by Professor von Békésy is that the two-dimensional mosaic is, in fact, a multidimensional world of interstructural resonance. It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space that is, indeed, an abstract illusion built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses.  (GG 43)
  • the suppression of the visual sense in favour of the audile-tactile complex, produces the distortions of tribal society, and of the configuration of jazz and primitive art imitations which broke upon us with radio, but not just “because” of radio. [McLuhan’s footnote: “Georg von Békésy’s article on “Similarities between Hearing and Skin Sensations”, (Psychological Review, Jan., 1959, pp. 1-22) provides a means of understanding why no sense can function in isolation nor can be unmodified by the operation and diet of the other senses.]  (GG 53)
  • Coexistence and interplay among the figures in the flat field create a multilevelled and multi-sensuous awareness. This mode of approach tends to partake of the character of auditory, inclusive, and unenclosed space, as Georg von Békésy has shown in his Experiments in Hearing.  (GG 63)

Cybernetics and Human Culture (1964)

  • Sculpture itself, which today is manifesting such vigor and development, is a kind of spatial organization that deserves close attention. Sculpture does not enclose space. Neither is it contained in any space. Rather, it models or shapes space. It resonates. In his Experiments in Hearing, Georg von Békésy found it expedient to explain the nature of sound and of auditory space by appealing to the example of Persian wall painting. The world of the flat iconic image, he points out, is a much better guide to the world of sound than three-dimensional and pictorial art. The flat iconic forms of art have much in common with acoustic or resonating space. Pictorial three-dimensional art has little in common with acoustic space because it selects a single moment in the life of a form, whereas the flat iconic image gives an integral bounding line or contour that represents not one moment or one aspect of a form, but offers instead an inclusive integral pattern. This is a mysterious matter to highly visual and literate people who associate visual organization of experience with the real world and who say, “Seeing is believing.” Yet this strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply.

 

  1. A note is inserted in square brackets at this point in the typescript. It reads simply: “light through”. ↩
  2. McLuhan has a typo here: “auditory”. ↩

Multi-levels of simultaneous presentation

The meaning of the New Criticism today is not just literacy but a shift to reading in depth (…) rather than the single-plane approach of the older literacy. (Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media, 1959)

A passage from McLuhan’s 1953 ‘Trivial and Quadrivial’ essay tells us everything we need to know about his project: 

Joyce underlines the skill of Bloom’s social decorum in a peculiarly witty way. Homer’s Odysseus learns from Circe that after passing the Sirens there were two courses open to him. One is by way of the Wandering Rocks, which Jason alone had passed in the Argo. The other is the way of Scylla and Charybdis, rock and whirlpool. Odysseus avoids the labyrinth of the Wandering Rocks. But Bloom navigates both labyrinths safely, thus excelling Odysseus. The Rocks are citizens and society seen in abstraction as mindless, Martian mechanisms. The “stone” men are children of the sun, denizens of space, exempt from time (…) Opposed to them are “The Dead” (see last story in Dubliners) children of the moon, the Celtic twilight (“cultic twalette”), moving in the aquacities of time, memory, and sentiment. On these dual labyrinths of stone and water Joyce has built almost every line he has written. (emphasis added) 

There are “two courses” or “dual labyrinths” to all human action and experience. Known or unknown, all human beings constantly “navigate” each of the two and between the two in every present moment of their lives. These two courses are arrayed vertically in synchronic time such that each of us perpetually traverses also a third labyrinth between them. This is the famous ‘gap where the action is’.  As Eliot has it in one of his two epigrams from Heraclitus for his Four Quartets: ‘odos ano kato. The way between (‘odos as in ‘meth-od’) and above (ano as in ‘an-ode’) and below (kato as in ‘cath-ode’): one, two, three.

Those who do not know of this constant back and forth of katabasis and anabasis are

citizens and society seen in abstraction as mindless, Martian mechanisms. The “stone” men are children of the sun, denizens of space, exempt from time.

But these are “mindless Martian mechanisms” only “in abstraction”, as McLuhan notes, because navigating these courses cannot not be done by humans. And so also these “citizens”, who conceive themselves as living only in the sun, have in fact made the “twilight” journey from their everyday lives above, to and within the dark below: “the aquacities of time, memory, and sentiment”. Indeed, their deportment above as “mechanisms” always reflects this action below — but only behind their own backs. Each one of them has reconnoitered these nether regions over and over again — but in blackout mode and utterly unconsciously.

It seems necessary to postulate a profound motivation for such universal somnambulism. (Take Today, 192, emphasis added)

This watery environment is therefore the last thing that human fish of this ilk can come to know.  But they can come to know it1 and exactly as the spectrum of sensory thresholds through which all their experience, individually and collectively, is ordered.2

Now McLuhan had this tiered model of human being in mind, at lest vaguely, from the very start of his career. A letter to his family from Cambridge on Dec 6, 1934 records:

Of late I have been wayfaring among the work of T.S. Eliot (…) the poems I am reading [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, [obscured and unknown] behind life… (Letters 41, emphasis added)

Eliot’s Norton lectures at Harvard (The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism, 1933) had just been published at this time, doubtless to enormous interest in Cambridge (where repeated attempts had been made to add Eliot to the English School faculty, especially by Eliot’s friend, I.A. Richards). McLuhan’s letter to his family had perhaps already been influenced by a passage from the lectures that he would never stop citing for the rest of his career:

What I call this “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.3

For McLuhan, this dynamic ano-kato movement (“returning to the origin and bringing something back“) was “the centre of the poetic process [and of the cognitive process in general that all great art mirrors in some way4], which Mr. Eliot, among others, has revealed in our time.”5

McLuhan’s 1943 Ph.D. thesis on Nashe told the story of these tiers or levels of life in terms of a background “quarrel” of the three disciplines of the trivium between 400 BC and 1600 AD. His 1946 paper on ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ brought the story into the present day.  And for the following 35 years of his lifetime he would continue in a whole series of ways to investigate this notion of the synchronic dynamic of experience and to attempt to communicate his findings to the world.

The most direct of these ways (although nothing in this area is properly said to be direct) was to describe, over and over and over again, this “multi-level” perception of human being (dual gen!):

1947
 the awareness of the unity of mythopoeic activity in history and art (…) has given modern man a sense once more of the simultaneity of all history seen at the psychological and intellectual level, as well as of the close bonds between all members of the human family past and present. (Inside Blake and Hollywood )

1947
Even [Etienne] Gilson (…) has no developed sensibility in contemporary art. I heard him on the puns in St Aug’s Confessions. He noted that they were inseparable from the multi-levels of simultaneous presentation without seeing that this is precisely our contemporary “cubist” sensibility. (McLuhan to Walter Ong, December 1947)6

1951
This secret [of Dante] consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery for the technique of fission [aka the discernment of plural levels] of the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry)

1951
this kind of single-level awareness [of Dos Passos] is not possible to anybody seriously manipulating the multiple keyboards of Joyce’s art. (Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility)

1952
The multi-leveled consciousness fostered by modern physics and anthropology is matched in the contemporary arts of music, poetry, and painting.  The unilateral perspectives of nineteenth century biological theory cannot be imposed even in an academic milieu any longer. (Review of Auden: An Introductory Essay)

1953
The theme of this admirable work is that Herbert’s work is embedded in the matrix of orthodox Christian experience.  St. Thomas pointed out that all levels of meaning are contained in the literal. Miss Tuve says of Herbert that “he reads the spirit in the letter. Not into but in: he writes in symbols because he thus sees it as a web of significance not as a collection of phenomena (…) He writes not of events and facts, but of meanings. and values, and he uncovers rather than creates these meanings.” This sort of approach, now widely accepted, really speIls the end of the Cartesian era of culture. (Symbolist Communication, review of A Reading Of George Herbert, by Rosemond Tuve)

1953
[Bloom’s bar of] soap is a sign of grace uniting earthly and stellar, hermetic and astrologic, East and West labyrinths. These two levels of reality, which are in conflict all during Bloomsday, are thus reconciled among the stars. In the same context Dante is invoked obliquely as another sign of the reconciliation of Bloom and Stephen. For Dante, like Joyce and Eliot, employs grace to reconcile East and West. Reconciliation is not merging, however. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1953
the trivium and quadrivium represent seven crossroads for the meeting of the various degrees and levels of reality.  (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1953
The trick is in finding the principle of intelligibility (…) in active relationships in existing dynamic situations. (The Later Innis)

1954
a passage of Greene, Lyly, or Nashe is not prose in the 18th or 19th century sense. The focus of attention has to be readjusted for changes of tone and attitude in every sentence. Print had not yet imposed its massive mechanical weight to level off the oral and colloquial features of prose. (New Media as Political Forms)

1955
Sixteenth-century prose 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. The individual scholar, alone with his text, had to develop habits of self-reliance which we still associate with the virtues of book culture. (Historical Approach to the Media)

1957
the poem [The Ancient Mariner] achieves a kind of continuous parallel between two levels of action, as does Joyce’s Ulysses in moving simultaneously in modern Dublin and ancient Ithaca. And it is in this same way that Tiresias in The Waste Land moves “between two lives.”

1957
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, 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)

1957
For 500 years our idea of efficacy and efficiency was rooted in the technology of explicitness. To make happen and to explain scientifically have both meant the consecutive spelling out of consequences, one at a time. In the electronic age we enter the phase of the technology of implicitness in which by grasp of total field relationships we package information and deliver messages on many levels, all in an instant. (The Subliminal Projection Project)

1958
Electronic media are not mechanical but post-mechanical, and they evoke very different attitudes of mind from the mechanical age. On all sides we can see the rise of the “oral man” once more, the man whose awareness is shaped by the simultaneous flow of information from every quarter at once, a man who takes for granted that any situation has many levels at once. (Media Alchemy in Art and Society) 

1959
The multilayered montage or “transparency,” with its abridgement of logical relationships, is as familiar in the cave painting as in cubism. Oral cultures are simultaneous in their modes of awareness. Today we come to the oral condition again via the electronic media, which abridge space and time and single-plane relationships, returning us to the confrontation of multiple relationships at the same moment. (Myth and Mass Media)

1959
A low definition form like ordinary speech operates on many levels at once, and manuscripts were close to speech in offering a multi-leveled discourse to the reader. But print being of high visual definition did not exact the degree of participation that the manuscript did and does. Print could be read fast on one level… (Supplement to ‘Electronics and the Changing Role of Print’)

1960
The modern world of dynamics is an all-at-once world in which there cannot be single levels or one-thing­-at-a-time awareness. (The Medium is the Message)

1960
Automation depends upon an exactly syncronized information flow from electronic tapes, and substitutes the multi-levelled complex for the single-plane assembly line. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

1960
dialogue  (…) depends upon an everyway simultaneous flow which is a very far cry indeed from the one direction, one level flow of the printed page, or of the lecture platform. Electronic technology instructs the world again with simultaneous, every direction information flow. We cannot choose but live this way under electronic conditions. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

1960
With radio it is easy to notice one of the major features of electronic media, namely the powerful drive toward the extension of human dialogue into all levels of human affairs. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

1960
The barbarian plays it by ear. The civilized man plays it by eye. The barbarian lives in the all-at-once world of many directions and many levels of meaning at a single moment. Whereas the literate man lives by the eye, one-thing-at-a-time, one direction at a time, one level at a time. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

1960
mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time.  (‘Introduction’ to Explorations in Communication)

1960
Multi-levelled exegesis of7 Ovid or Virgil or the Scriptures was not only a medieval mode of reading and writing. It preceded Christianity and was the norm among ancient “grammarians.” To-day it is again the norm in physics, in psychology, in poetry and the arts. (Grammars for the Newer Media)

1962
there is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 72)

1962
Senecan antithesis and “amble” (…) 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, 103)

1962
To the oral man the literal is inclusive, contains all possible meanings and levels. So it was for Aquinas. But the visual man of the sixteenth century is impelled to separate level from level, and function from function, in a process of specialist exclusion. The auditory field is simultaneous, the visual mode is successive. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 111)

1962
The study of the Bible in the Middle Ages achieved conflicting patterns of expression which the economic and social historian is also familiar with. The conflict was between those who said that the sacred text was a complex unified at the literal level, and those who felt that the levels of meaning should be taken one at a time in a specialist spirit. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 112)

1962
The scholastic method was a simultaneous mosaic, a dealing with many aspects and levels of meaning in crisp simultaneity. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 129)

1962
Structuralism as a term does not much convey its idea of inclusive synesthesia, an interplay of many levels and facets in a two-dimensional mosaic. But it is a mode of awareness in art language and literature which the West took great pains to eliminate by means of Gutenberg technology. It has returned in our time, for good or ill…  (Gutenberg Galaxy, 230-231)

1963
It is important to observe that the quality of the new “structural,” as opposed to the old lineal, sequential and mechanical, is the quality of the simultaneous. It is the simultaneous “field” of multitudinous events in equipoise or interplay that constitutes the awareness of causality that is present in ecological and nuclear models of perception today. Our electric mode of shaping the new patterns of culture and information movement is not mechanical but biological. (We Need a New Picture of Knowledge)

1963
In obtaining an eye for an ear, Western man clearly abandoned depth or structural knowledge in favor of applied knowledge. For the phonetic alphabet gave him the means of translating and reducing the complexities of the ear world to the flat retinal level of visually organized data. With Gutenberg came a further stage of this transfer of multi-leveled awareness into the typographic forms of exactly repeatable data. This very large step of transferring a manual craft into a mechanical form was done strictly within the compass of phonetic technology; that is, the further analysis of functions into uniform segments of movable and replaceable kind was the step that created at once the infinitesimal calculus, the uniform citizen armies of Napoleon, and the assembly lines of mechanical industry. (We Need a New Picture of Knowledge)

1963
The Gutenberg era of our Western world saw the suppression of dialogue in favor of visual systems and blueprints of knowledge laid out in “subjects” and “fields” packaged in varying degrees of processing and predigestion. Our Gutenberg technology enabled us to “apply” knowledge freely; that is, we learned how to translate every sort of knowledge into single planes of homogeneous kind. Applied knowledge is a process of translation and reduction of varied forms into a single form. This process of homogenization, as it gathered momentum, struck panic into the nineteenth century mind, but it greatly increased property and wealth and made the first consumer society. (We Need a New Picture of Knowledge)

1964
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement. (Understanding Media, 26)

1964
The first great change in [prose] style came early in the eighteenth century, when the famous Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele discovered a new prose technique to match the form of the printed word. It was the technique of equitone. It consisted in maintaining a single level of tone and attitude to the reader throughout the entire composition. (Understanding Media, 206)

1964
 As early as 1830 the French poet Lamartine had said, “The book arrives too late,” drawing attention to the fact that the book and the newspaper are quite different forms. (…) The mosaic of the [ newspaper] press manages to effect a complex many-leveled function of group-awareness and participation such as the book has never been able to perform. (Understanding Media, 205, 216)

1964
“depth” means “in interrelation”, not “in isolation”. Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular. (Understanding Media, 282-283)

1965
The new stories tend to be much more compressed and on two levels at once, like the sort of Finnegans Wake phrase: “though he might have been more humble, there’s no police like Holmes.”8 That kind of compressed double-plot story is a  very interesting development… (Address at Vision 65)

1967
Highly literate people speak on one level, in a monotone. “Good” prose is spoken this way. A [singular] level of form, one plane. You cannot discuss multi-relationships on a single plane, in a single form. That’s why the poets of our time have broken all the planes and sequences, forming a cubist prose. (Hot & Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn)

1967
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams reveals the amazing power that all people have in their dream life of invention and poetic discovery; that the most ordinary person in his dream life is a tremendous poet. Most Freudians are concerned with the subject-matter of this poetry. That never interested me. I was always fascinated by the amazing ingenuity, symmetry, and inventiveness of the dreamer. We all have these tremendous unused powers which we use surreptitiously. We are afraid to use them in our waking lives. Except the artist. The artist uses in his waking life the powers an ordinary person would use in his dream life. The creative man has his dream life while awake. (…) The dream is a way of processing waking experiences in a pattern which is non-lineal, but multi-leveled. (McLuhan interview with  Gerald Stearn, McLuhan Hot & Cool)

1967
Consciousness (…) is a specialist and fragmentary operation which works by exclusion rather than inclusion. The subconscious by contrast is inclusive rather than exclusive  It accepts all things and all times and all places, and accepts them all-at-once. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest)

1968
The seventeenth-century interassociation of varied levels of fact had begun to appear incompatible with the new science of the time. (Through the Vanishing Point, 10)

1968
Much of A Preface to Chaucer by D. W. Robertson (Princeton University Press, 1962) is concerned with explaining how the world of space and  time in the art of Chaucer is discontinuous and multileveled. For the modern scholar, the discovery of discontinuity creates dismay since it disrupts his ordinary procedures and classifications. Robertson, for example, declares that the principles of conventional philology are quite inadequate to the task of  establishing an encounter with the Medieval habits of multileveled exegesis. (Through the Vanishing Point, 238)

1968
Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. (All of the Candidates are Asleep)

1968
The mechanical enthroned the “point of view”, the static position with its vanishing point. The electric age favors a total field approach, a kind of X-ray in depth which not only avoids a point of view but avoids looking at situations from any single level.  (Environment As Programmed Happening)

1968
The same speed of access to many kinds of data has given us the power to X-ray all the cultures and subcultures in the world. We no longer approach them from any point of view or for the purpose of taking a picture of them. The new approach is the X-ray approach of penetration in depth to achieve awareness on many levels at once. It is natural that we should adapt this approach to our own condition. The psychiatrists have done so for the individual, and comparable analysis is now available for the corporate or group condition. (Environment As Programmed Happening)

1968
The simultaneous interrelations between many levels of meaning of the word have to be sacrificed in keeping everything moving on a single plane on one level. (The Medium Is The Massage LP)

1970
L. P. Smith in Words and Idioms draws attention to a mysterious property of language, namely, the ineradicable power of doublets. The Greek word for these structures [is] hendiadys, “one through two”… (From Cliché to Archetype, 108)

1970
consciousness is (…) a multileveled event (From Cliché to Archetype, 117)

1972
How about the adman’s rip-off?  He must move on more than one level in order to obtain the the interplay that involves the public. (‘Introduction’ to Subliminal Seduction)

1974
There was for many centuries [up to the end of the middle ages] a decorum in dress and costume as much as in speech and levels of rhetorical style. The structuralism upon which these distinctions was based was not visual but acoustic, and [when this ended] the same process of levelling in dress or in costume proceeded by the same means as the levelling of rhetorical styles and exegetical levels of interpretation of scripture. Those means were, of course, the advent of [Gutenbergian] technologies which stepped up visual stress to new levels of intensity, just as today the advent of powerful new acoustic structures in the environment have disposed human perception towards an easy understanding and acceptance of complex non-visual structures once more. (The Medieval Environment)

1974
Bacon’s organic approach, I suggest, is derived from the multi-levelled exegesis of the book of nature and Scripture alike. The simultaneity of all levels in ancient grammatica coincides with twentieth century quantum mechanics which is concerned with the physical and chemical bond of nature as the “resonant interval.” The acoustic simultaneity of the new physics co-exists with “synchrony” and structuralism in language and literature and anthropology as understood in Ferdinand de Saussure and Levi-Strauss. (Bacon, Ancient or Modern?)

1979
Contemporary linguistics [ie, Saussure] has recovered the multileveled study of language in our time. (Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land )

 

  1. “If man, by his ingenious extensions of himself, creates new dimensions and new environments, he also has another creative power for making himself aware of these new forms, and of giving himself cognizance of their effect upon him.” (Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965) ↩
  2. These “thresholds” are the elementary media of human experience and action. They are the message that is constantly expressed but seldom heard. The riddle lies in finding the one medium among the media through which these media might first be perceived in their dynamic action. ↩
  3.  Leaving aside McLuhan’s great many bare references to “auditory imagination”, this passage from Eliot is cited in full in all of the following essays and books: ‘Coleridge As Artist’ (1957), ‘Environment As Programmed Happening’ (1968), From Cliche to Archetype (1970), Culture is Our Business (1970), Take Today (1972), ‘Media Ad-vice: An Introduction’ (1973), ‘Liturgy and Media’ (1973), ‘The Medieval Environment’ (1974), ’English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study’ (1974), ‘At the Flip Point of Time’ (1975), ‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’ (1976), ’Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’ (1979). In her thesis (59), Liss Jeffrey cites it from McLuhan’s unpublished note ‘My Last Three Books’. Further citations of it will doubtless be found as McLuhan’s papers continue to be vetted. ↩
  4. See, eg,  the citation above from the 1951 ‘Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’. ↩
  5. ‘Eliot and The Manichean Myth As Poetry’, Address to Spring symposium of the Catholic Renascence Society, April 19, 1954. ↩
  6.  Letters 190. ↩
  7. Dual genitive! ↩
  8. McLuhan often cited this punny sentence and attributed it to Joyce in FW. In fact, however, it derives from E. W. Hornung, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, as recorded in Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924). It is another question, however, whether Joyce knew of Hornung’s pun and signaled to it in some fashion in FW, where the adventures of Shedlock Homes are a thread in Joyce’s tapestry. Perhaps McLuhan go confused between puns. ↩

Tobias Dantzig

McLuhan discovered the work of Tobias Dantzig (1884-1956) during his travel for Project 69 (as he styled his ‘Project in Understanding New Media’):

This book [Tobias’ Number: The Language Of Science], which Einstein proclaimed “the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics that has ever fallen into my hands”, fell into my hands at the Washington, D. C. airport. This is relevant to the present report since I was then in Washington in connection with Project 69. (Report)

This must have been in November 1959 or January 1960, since McLuhan’s itinerary for the project (included in his Report) showed him in Washington at these times.

Dantzig then joined the art historians, Hildebrand, Wölfflin, Ivins and Gombrich, as a major resource for the Report — and for papers and books prepared by McLuhan over the next few years extending to the 1964 Understanding Media (which was based on the Report).

Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960)

  • Since we consider that our way of life is rooted in literacy it concerns us deeply to know why our children will increasingly spurn it, just as our artists and physicists rejected perspective a century ago. I think the best way (…) to explain this matter further is to cite the evidence of Tobias Dantzig in his Number: The Language Of Science. (…) Pages 139-147 provide all that is needed to understand why phonetic writing created Euclidean space, or the Greek miracle of perspective and naturalistic illusion. The same pages also explain why the Western world since Newton has steadily dissolved Euclidean space and pictorial illusion, and shifted to non-Euclidean geometries and non-objective art. In a word, here are all the clues to the mystery of the rise and fall of Western man, the mystery of his detribalization by literacy and his retribalization by electric communication.
  • More than anybody else, the mathematician is aware of the arbitrary and fictional character of this continuous, homogeneous visual space. Why? Because number, the language of science, is a fiction for re-translating the Euclidean space fiction back into auditory and tactile space. The example Dantzig uses on page 139 concerns the measurement of the length of an arc: “Our notion of the length of a curve may serve as an illustration. The physical concept rests on that of a bent wire We imagine that we have straightened the wire without stretching it; then the segment of the straight line will serve as the measure of the length of the arc. Now what do we mean by ‘without stretching?’ We mean without a change in length. But this term implies that we already know something about the length of the arc. Such a formulation is obviously a petitio principii and could not serve as a mathematical definition. The alternative is to inscribe in the arc a sequence of rectilinear contours of an increasing number of sides. The sequence of these contours approaches a limit, and the length of the arc is defined as the limit of this sequence.  And what is true of the notion of length is true of areas, volumes, masses, movements, pressures, forces, stresses and strains, velocities, accelerations, etc., etc. All these notions were born in a linear, ‘rational’ world where nothing takes place but what is straight, flat and uniform. Either, then, we must abandon these elementary rational notions — and this would mean a veritable revolution, so deeply are these concepts rooted in our minds; or we must adapt these rational notions to a world which is neither flat, nor straight, nor uniform.” (…) The invaluable demonstration of Dantzig is that in order to protect our vested interest in Euclidean space (i. e. literacy), Western man devised the parallel but antithetic mode of number in order to cope with all of the non-Euclidean dimensions of daily experience. He continues: “But how can the flat and the straight and the uniform be adapted to its very opposite, the skew and the curved and the non-uniform? Not by a finite number of steps, certainly! The miracle can be accomplished only by that miracle-maker, the infinite. Having determined to cling to the elementary rational notions, we have no other alternative than to regard the ‘curved’ reality of our senses as the ultra-ultimate step in an infinite sequence of flat worlds which exist only in our imagination. The miracle is that it works!”
  • The Graeco-Roman galaxy had a one-way road of conquest of all other cultures in the phonetic alphabet. But (…) this one-way road led from sound to sight. This was the road that hoicked Western man from the tribal space of ear and tactility to the civilized visual space of the straight, the flat and the uniform. [Two millennia later,] print, of course, gave [even]1 greater stress and emphasis to the pictorial space of the straight, the flat and the uniform. The phonetic alphabet was the first technological medium that gave obvious salience to the fact that all media are natural resources or staples. Number, as Dantzig implies, is subservient to letters and meaningless without a civilized, pictorial culture to support it. 
  • Letters translated us out of the all-at-once auditory and tactile world of pre-literate man, while Numbers: The Language of Science (…) developed parallel with letters as a means of translating the visual and the literate back into the non-visual and the tactile. The artist faces the problem of responding to this type of awareness with new forms of relevance for mankind. Pre-literate society enthroned the artist as medicine man. Post-literate society (the electronic) must enthrone the artist as navigator.

Technology, the Media, and Culture (1960)

  • In his book Number: The Language of Science, Tobias Dantzig tells us that “The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics.” Today, that crisis is occurring on a massive cultural scale. Our rational Euclidean world of continuous and homogeneous space, extrapolated by the phonetic alphabet from the resonating tribal world, has now to face the electronic challenge of its own irrelevance and superfluousness. l think Dantzig can help us some more to get our bearings here. Just before the passage already quoted he is explaining the crucial use made in mathematics of the Renaissance concept of the “infinite process.” If this concept does not derive from the new perception of perspective or vanishing point, it is at least parallel to it. “The prototype of all infinite processes,“ says Dantzig, “is repetition.” And this is a facet of the concept of convergence, recession, vanishing point, perspective, infinity which is inseparable from Gutenberg technology. For uniformity and repeatability are as basic to print as visuality to the phonetic alphabet. 
  • Dantzig continues: “The importance of infinite processes for the practical exigencies of technical life can hardly be overemphasized. Practically all applications of arithmetic to geometry, mechanics, physics and even statistics involve these processes directly or indirectly. . . . Banish the infinite process, and mathematics pure and applied is reduced to the state in which it was known to the pre-Pythagoreans.” That is to say, without the minute segmentation, whether of alphabet or of the infinitesimal calculus, there can be no translation, no bridge from the tactile, resonating, tribal world, to the rational, flat, visual world. Dantzig simply points out that number aided by infinite process can measure our world by translating visual, Euclidean space created by the phonetic alphabet back into the tactile modalities of touch and sound. One of the many prices we paid for abstracting ourselves from the tribal, multi-sensuous world was that we came to rely more and more on number to get us back into relation to that tribal world. It is not surprising therefore that number, the servant of letters, finally outgrew its  master, civilization. For pushed all the way, number or tactile measurement gave us the new electric media which restore the resonating, tactile world as an immediate datum and all-embracing matrix of culture. 
  • “Our notion of the length of an arc of a curve,” says Dantzig, “may serve as an illustration. The physical concept rests on that of a bent wire. We imagine that we have straightened the wire without stretching it; then the segment of the straight line will serve as the measure of the length of the arc. Now what do we mean by “without stretching?” We mean without a change in length. But this term implies that we already know something about the length of the arc. Such a formulation is obviously a petitio principii and could not serve as a mathematical definition. The alternative is to inscribe in the arc a sequence of rectilinear contours of an increasing number of sides. The sequence of these contours approaches a limit, and the length of the arc is defined as the limit of this sequence.” Calculus, that is to say, is a means of translation of one kind of space into another — especially of visual into tactile and auditory fields of measurement. “And what is true of the notion of length is true of areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains, velocities, accelerations, etc., etc. All these notions were born in a “linear,” “rational” world where nothing takes place but what is straight, flat, and uniform. Either, then, we must abandon these elementary rational notions — and this would mean a veritable revolution, so deeply are these concepts rooted in our minds; or we must adapt those rational notions to a world which is neither flat, nor straight, nor uniform. But how can the flat and the straight and the uniform be adapted to its very opposite, the skew and the curved and non-uniform? Not by a finite number of steps, certainly! The miracle can be accomplished only by that miracle-maker, the infinite. Having determined to cling to the elementary rational notions, we have no other alternative than to regard the “curved” reality of our senses as the ultra-ultimate step in an infinite sequence of flat worlds which exist only in our imagination.” The same navigational techniques of adaptation, compensation, and correction for distortion, which the mathematician provides for the sciences, the artist provides for sensibilities distorted by social technologies and media change.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

  • Tobias D. Dantzig points out in his Number: The Language of Science (pp. 141-2): “The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics. The two relatively simple problems, the determination of the diagonal of a square and that of the circumference of a circle, revealed the existence of new mathematical beings for which no place could be found within the rational domain (…) A further analysis showed that the procedures of algebra were generally just as inadequate. So it became apparent that an extension of the number field was unavoidable (…) And since the old concept failed on the terrain of geometry, we must seek in geometry a model for the new. The continuous indefinite straight line seems ideally adapted for such a model.” (GG 81)
  • Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (…) Tobias Dantzig, in his Number: The Language of Science, has provided a cultural history of mathematics which led Einstein to declare: “This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics that has ever fallen into my hands.” The explanation of the rise of Euclidean sensibility from the phonetic alphabet was given in the early part of this book. Phonetic letters, the language and mythic form of Western culture, have the power of translating or reducing all of our senses into visual and “pictorial” or “enclosed” space. More than anybody else, the mathematician is aware of the arbitrary and fictional character of this continuous, homogeneous visual space. Why? Because number, the language of science, is a fiction for retranslating the Euclidean space fiction back into auditory and tactile space. The example Dantzig uses on page 139 concerns the measurement of the length of an arc: “Our notion of the length of an arc of a curve may serve as an illustration. The physical concept rests on that of a bent wire. We imagine that we have straightened the wire without stretching it; then the segment of the straight line will serve as the measure of the length of the arc. Now what do we mean by ‘without stretching’? We mean without a change in length. But this term implies that we already know something about the length of the arc. Such a formulation is obviously a petitio principii and could not serve as a mathematical definition. The alternative is to inscribe in the arc a sequence of rectilinear contours of an increasing number of sides. The sequence of these contours approaches a limit, and the length of the arc is defined as the limit of this sequence. And what is true of the notion of length is true of areas, volumes, masses, movements, pressures, forces, stresses and strains, velocities, accelerations, etc., etc. All these notions were born in a ‘linear’, ‘rational’ world where nothing takes place but what is straight, flat, and uniform. Either, then, we must abandon these elementary rational notions — and this would mean a veritable revolution, so deeply are these concepts rooted in our minds; or we must adapt those rational notions to a world which is neither flat, nor straight, nor uniform.” (GG 176-177)
  • The invaluable demonstration of Dantzig is that in order to protect our vested interest in Euclidean space (i.e., literacy) Western man devised the parallel but antithetic mode of number in order to cope with all of the non-Euclidean dimensions of daily experience. He continues (p. 140): “But how can the flat and the straight and the uniform be adapted to its very opposite, the skew and the curved and the non-uniform? Not by a finite number of steps, certainly! The miracle can be accomplished only by that miracle-maker the infinite. Having determined to cling to the elementary rational notions, we have no other alternative than to regard the ‘curved’ reality of our senses as the ultra-ultimate step in an infinite sequence of flat worlds which exist only in our imagination.” The miracle is that it works! (GG 178)
  • today number is as obsolete as the phonetic alphabet as a means of endowing and applying experience and knowledge. We are now as post-number as we are post-literate in the electronic age. There is a mode of calculation that is pre-digital Dantzig points out (p. 14): “There exists among the most primitive tribes of Australia and Africa a system of numeration which has neither 5, 10, nor 20 for base. It is a binary system, i.e., of base two. These savages have not yet reached finger counting. They have independent numbers for one and two, and composite numbers up to six. Beyond six everything is denoted by ‘heap’.” Dantzig indicates that even digital counting is a kind of abstraction or separation of the tactile from the other senses, whereas the yes-no which precedes it is a more “whole” response. Such, at any rate, are the new binary computers that dispense with number, and make possible the structuralist physics of Heisenberg. (GG 178-179)
  • Dantzig explains in his Number: The Language of Science a great step in numeration and calculation taken by the Phoenicians under commercial pressure: “The ordinal numeration in which numbers are represented by the letters of an alphabet in their spoken succession.” But using letters, Greek and Roman alike never got near a method suited to arithmetical operations: “This is why, from the beginning of history until the advent of our modern positional numeration, so little progress was made in the art of reckoning.” That is, until number was given a visual, spatial character and abstracted from its audile-tactile matrix it could not be separated from the magical domain. “A man skilled in the art was regarded as endowed with almost supernatural powers. . . . even the enlightened Greeks never completely freed themselves from this mysticism of number and form.” It is easy to see with Dantzig how the first crisis in mathematics arose with the Greek attempt to apply arithmetic to geometry, to translate one kind of space into another before printing had given the means of homogeneity: “This confusion of tongues persists to this day. Around infinity have grown up all the paradoxes of mathematics: from the arguments of Zeno to the antinomies of Kant and Cantor.” It is difficult for us in the twentieth century to realize why our predecessors should have had such trouble in recognizing the various languages and assumptions of visual as opposed to audile-tactile spaces. It was precisely the habit of being with one kind of space that made all other spaces seem so opaque and intractable. From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries the Abacists fought the Algorists. That is, the literate fought the numbers people. In some places the Arabic numerals were banned. In Italy some merchants of the thirteenth century used them as a secret code. Under manuscript culture the outward appearance of the numerals underwent many changes and, says Dantzig: “In fact, the numerals did not assume a stable form until the introduction of printing. It can be added parenthetically that so great was the stabilizing influence of printing that the numerals of today have essentially the same appearance as those of the fifteenth century.” (GG 180)  
  • The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. Print assured the victory of numbers or visual position early in the sixteenth century. By the later sixteenth century the art of statistics was already growing. Dantzig writes: “The late sixteenth century was the time when in Spain figures were printed giving the population of provinces and the population of towns. It was the time when the Italians also began to take a serious interest in population statistics — in the making of censuses. It was the period when in France a controversy was carried on between Bodin and a certain Monsieur de Malestroit concerning the relations of the quantity of money in circulation to the level of prices.” There was soon great concern with ways and means of speeding up arithmetical calculations: “It is hard for us to realize how laborious and slow were the means at the disposal of medieval Europeans for dealing with calculations ‘which seem to us of the simplest character’. The introduction of Arabic numbers into Europe provided more easily manipulated counters than the Roman numbers, and the use of Arabic numbers seems to have spread rapidly towards the end of the sixteenth century, at least on the Continent. Between about 1590 and 1617 John Napier invented his curious ‘bones’ for calculating. He followed this invention with his more celebrated discovery of logarithms. This was widely adopted all over Europe almost at once, and in consequence arithmetical calculations were immensely accelerated.” (GG 181)
  • “Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world,” cries Lear as a curse to snap “the most precious square of sense.” And the striking flat, the isolation of the visual is the great achievement of Gutenberg and the Mercator projection. And Dantzig notes: “Thus     the alleged properties of the straight line are of the geometer’s own making. He deliberately disregards thickness and breadth, deliberately assumes that the thing common to two such lines, their point of intersection, is deprived of all dimension … but the assumptions themselves are arbitrary, a convenient fiction at best.” It is easy for Dantzig to see how fictional classical geometry was. It got huge nourishment from printing after being engendered by the alphabet. (GG 182)

Understanding Media (1964)

  • So far as Tobias Dantzig is concerned in his Number: The Language of Science, the progress from the tactile fingering of toes and fingers to “the homogeneous number concept, which made mathematics possible” is the result of visual abstraction from the operation of tactile manipulation. (UM 113)
  • Dantzig, having made clear that the idea of homogeneity had to come before primitive numbers could be advanced to the level of mathematics, points to another literate and visual factor in the older mathematics. “Correspondence and succession, the two principles which permeate all mathematics—nay, all realms of exact thought—are woven into the very fabric of our number system,” he observes. So, indeed, are they woven into the very fabric of Western logic and philosophy. We have already seen how the phonetic technology fostered visual continuity and individual point of view, and how these contributed to the rise of uniform Euclidean space. Dantzig says that it is the idea of correspondence which gives us cardinal numbers. Both of these spatial ideas — lineality and point of view — come with writing, especially with phonetic writing; but neither is necessary in our new mathematics and physics. Nor is writing necessary to an electric technology. Of course, writing and conventional arithmetic may long continue to be of the utmost use to man, for all that. Even Einstein could not face the new quantum physics with comfort. Too visual a Newtonian for the new task, he said that quanta could not be handled mathematically. That is as much as to say that poetry cannot be properly translated into merely visual form on the printed page. (UM 113-114)
  • Dantzig develops his points about number by saying that a literate population soon departs from the abacus and from finger enumeration, though arithmetic manuals in the Renaissance continued to give elaborate rules for calculating on the hands. It could be true that numbers preceded literacy in some cultures, but so did visual stress precede writing. For writing is only the principal manifestation of the extension of our visual sense, as the photograph and the movie today may well remind us. And long before literate technology, the binary factors of hands and feet sufficed to launch man on the path of counting. (UM 114)
  • Dantzig reminds us also that in the age of manuscript there was a chaotic variety of signs for numerals, and that they did not assume a stable form until printing. (UM 114)
  1. McLuhan: “much”. ↩

Ernst Gombrich

In McLuhan’s decisive ‘art history’ period, 1958-1962, Ernst Gombrich played a central role along with Adolph Hildebrand, Heinrich Wölfflin and William Ivins.  Art and illusion, Gombrich’s retitled 1956 Mellon lectures, appeared in print in 1960 and was instantly and repeatedly, almost compulsively, cited by McLuhan in multiple publications that same year and continuing to 1962.  As with the other art historians, Hildebrand, Wölfflin and Ivins, McLuhan then returned to Gombrich only briefly thereafter (with the notable exception of the important citation, given below, in ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ from 1973).

Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960)

  • In 1915 Heinrich Wölfflin published his Principles of Art History which has since then revolutionized the study of many matters besides art. His entire approach confirms what I discovered about media: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts“, (Dover Publications, p. 62). This is also the theme of E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (Pantheon Books, 1960), in which be provides “a study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation,” bridging and fusing much recent perception study with the history of culture.
  • In his extensive survey and analysis of the illusion and ambiguities of perspective and the third dimension, E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) again and again reverts to the Greek miracle: “the discovery of fore-shortening and the conquest of space early in the fifth century” (p. 116). The cause of this “miracle” was the phonetic alphabet. Again, let it be stressed, concern with the sensory data rather than effects has for many centuries concealed the operation of this cause.
  • At the end of his classic study of Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich says: “In investigating the growth of the language of representation we may have gained some insight into the articulation of other languages of equivalences. Indeed, the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent.”
  • I am going to draw heavily on E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (Pantheon Books, 1960) simply because (…) his ample use of current perception study will give comfort to the scientifically-minded. (…) He notes: “Now the historian knows that the information pictures were expected to provide differed widely in different periods. Not only were images scarce in the past, but so were the public’s opportunities to check their captions. …How many travelled widely enough to tell one city from another?” Low Definition images were merely take-off strips for private fantasy: “All they were expected to do was to bring home to the reader that these names stood for cities.” But to that very degree they elicited maximal effort on the part of the beholder. Of a sixteenth century picture of Rome, Gombrich says: “I am fond of this coarse woodcut because its very crudeness allows us to study the mechanism of portrayal as in a slow motion picture.” 
  • Its [television’s] mosaic has brought us back to the two-dimensional and to the fascination with tactile process. Gombrich writes: “It has become increasingly clear since the late nineteenth century that primitive art and child art use a language of symbols rather than ‘natural signs.’ To account for this fact it was postulated that there must be a special kind of art grounded not on seeing but rather on knowledge, an art which operates with ‘conceptual images.’ The child — it is argued — does not look at trees; he is satisfied with the ‘conceptual’ schema of a tree that fails to correspond to any reality since it does not embody the characteristics of say, birch or beech, let alone those of individual trees. This reliance on construction rather than on imitation was attributed to the peculiar mentality of children and primitives who live in a world of their own. But we have come to realize that the distinction is unreal. Gustaf Britsch and Rudolph Arnheim have stressed that there is no opposition between the crude map of the world made by a child and the richer map presented in naturalistic images. All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself… “
  • The general principle that LD or Low Definition situations are especially evocative of participation of the beholders is illustrated many times in Gombrich. The correlative principle that HD or High Definition situations keep the public in an external, consumer role is likewise illustrated over and over again (…) For example he shows how we learn from over-simplified hypotheses rather than from the carefully elaborated ones: “In order to learn we must make mistakes, and the most fruitful mistake which nature could have implanted in us would be the assumption of even greater simplicities than we are likely to meet with in this bewildering world of ours.”
  • The age-old clash between walking and marching is the clash between LD [Low Definition] art in which there is much participation in the creative process, and HD  [High Definition] art which tends towards (…) pictorial [realism]1 “There are few civilizations that even made the change from walking to marching, and only where the image has been developed to a high degree of articulation does that systematic process of comparison set in which results in illusionist art.” (Gombrich) But HD art and technology speeds the process of change and transformation. It is an absolute principle that to the degree that any situation is put in HD by a flow of much information, that situation is at the point of drastic change and of the manifestation of opposite characteristics. “An artist of our own day, Georges Braque, has recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket, a brazier. We have seen that this faculty for finding and making underlies the child’s discoveries no less than the artist’s.” (Gombrich).
  • Chiasmus is indispensable to understanding media since all information flow (…) operates simultaneously in opposite modes. (…) One more illustration from Gombrich illustrates the above point: “I believe the student of these inventions will generally find a double rhythm which is familiar from the history of technical progress but which has never yet been described in detail in the history of art — I mean the rhythm of lumbering advance and subsequent simplification. Most technical inventions carry with them a number of superstitions, unnecessary detours which are gradually eliminated through shortcuts and a refinement of means. In the history of art we know this process mainly in the work of the great masters. Even the greatest of them began their careers with a very circumspect and even heavy technique, leaving nothing to chance.”
  • Gombrich provides (…) illustration of how SI-SC [Sensory Impression/Subjective Completion] merge with HD-LD [High Definition/Low Definition]. He is speaking of how the impressionists exploited “the charm and challenge of incomplete representation”: “But where the earlier masters prepared the beholder for this artifice and facilitated the projection, the impressionists wanted him to enjoy the challenge of a visual shock. (…) The amount of information reaching us from the visible world is incalculably large, and the artist’s medium is inevitably restricted and granular…. in the end he will always have to rely on suggestions when it comes to representing the infinitely small.”
  • SI is not SC. The impression is not the experience. The beholder must collaborate in creating the illusions of space, as of time. The receiver of a structured impression, such as any medium offers, must be attuned to that structure. It must be for him a sort of familiar keyboard on which he can play a great variety of melodies. Such, for us all, is our native tongue. Such is the written and the printed word. Such are the impressions from all our technology. “Psychologists have long recognized that our reaction to images also transforms what we ‘see’ in a much more radical way than we usually notice”. (…). The fact that the area of the mirror that reflects the face is always exactly half the size of the face is so startling as to meet with skepticism on the part of most people who have looked into mirrors all their lives. Obviously, therefore, that is not what they see. They see the face in the distance behind the mirror surface, and thus they see it correspondingly larger” (Gombrich). SI and SC, or impression and response, are much like the old pair of “seeing” and “knowing”: “What we see when we respond to moistness or smoothness is the ‘global’ quality itself, not the elements of local color and reflection” (Gombrich). That is, the SC of many visual presentations is not visual at all any more than the SC of radio’s SI is auditory. What I’m trying to do (…) in the questions and suggestions that go with them is to discover the dynamic symmetries and contours of the media. There is no point in being apologetic since the entire effort is experimental. As Gombrich puts it again, in a sentence that also seems to me to illustrate the relations between SI-SC: “Not even the most skillful artist should claim to be able to plan a single stroke with the pen in all its details. What he can do is to adjust the subsequent stroke to the effect observed in the previous one. (…) In this new process of schema and modification, the artist is one controlling fact, the public another (Gombrich).

Technology, the Media, and Culture (1960)

  • E.H. Gombrich, in his recent Art and Illusion, regards cubism as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture — that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” Cubism, the means of seeing all aspects of an object from numerous points of view, at the same moment, is the near-equivalent of the telegraph press, which provides an inclusive global snapshot from hour to hour. Gombrich is right, however, in suggesting that when the ambiguities of perspective or the third dimension are pushed far enough they yield suddenly a reverse set of characteristics. Instead of pictorial space, we are suddenly confronted with formal space. Instead of a visual world that contains objects, we meet a world in which each object creates its own space, and imposes its own assumptions like a melody. There is one passage in Gombrich’s Art and Illusion which has instant appeal to a literary man. He is discussing the ambiguities of the third dimension as they are rendered in the Adelbert Ames perception laboratory. He wants to pin down (…) why (…) [we] think of the third or perspective dimension as non-illusory: “It is important to be quite clear at this point wherein the illusion consists. lt consists, I believe, in the conviction that there is only one way of interpreting the visual pattern in front of us.” This was also the most cherished illusion of the print reader. For reasons never yet investigated, the notion of the “one plain meaning” never “bugged“ the manuscript reader, ancient or medieval. Possibly the higher definition of print created the expectation of exclusive rather than inclusive meaning. But it was only a generation ago that the literary world was startled by the rediscovery of multiple levels of statement in the simplest words and syntax. As we move deeper into the electronic galaxy the pressure to reconfigure age-old patterns in the alphabetic and Gutenberg galaxy becomes overwhelming. It is therefore with ready understanding that we can nowadays confront the disturbance felt in the ancient world when the alphabet was new. The growth of the Euclidean fictions in the patterns of human sensibility were as upsetting then as the return of nuclear non-Euclidean modalities of experience today. Gombrich, writing of the  rise of pictorial space and illusion in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., says: “The very violence with which Plato denounces this trickery reminds us of the momentous fact that at the time he wrote, mimesis was a recent invention.“  And again: “There is finally the history of Greek painting, as we can follow it in painted pottery, which tells of the discovery of foreshortening and the conquest of space early in the fifth century and of light in the fourth.“ What we today can see very easily is that the departure of the Greek world into pictorial and Euclidean space was anything but natural.

The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion (1962)

  • Today the hypnotized and somnambulistic citizen [is] percussed by the electronic implosion in general and the TV image in particular (…) A fixed position from which to gaze at the current plasma of super-heated events is consistent with the old technology of “single vision and Newton’s sleep”. A fixed point of view yields what E. H. Gombrich calls “the anguish of the third dimension.” It is based on the isolation of the visual sense from the interplay of the other senses, and it never seeks nor finds insight into the actual structure of any situation. By substituting point of view for insight we trap ourselves in a single isolated sense as is shown at length in The Gutenberg Galaxy.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

  • In his Art and Illusion, E.H. Gombrich writes (p. 116) : “If I had to reduce the last chapter to a brief formula it would be ‘making comes before matching’. Before the artist ever wanted to match the sights of the visible world he wanted to create things in their own right. (…) The very violence with which Plato denounces this trickery reminds us of the momentous fact that at the time he wrote, mimesis was a recent invention. There are many critics now who share his distaste, for one reason or another, but even they would admit there are few more exciting spectacles in the whole history of art than the great awakening of Greek sculpture and painting between the sixth century and the time of Plato’s youth toward the end of the fifth century B.C.” Etienne Gilson makes much of the distinction between making and matching in his Painting and Reality. And whereas till Giotto a painting was a thing, from Giotto till Cezanne painting became the representation of things. (GG 51)
  • Gombrich begins his tenth chapter of Art and Illusion with further observations on visual mimesis: “The last chapter has led this inquiry back to the old truth that the discovery of appearances was not due so much to a careful observation of nature as to the invention of pictorial effects. I believe indeed that the ancient writers who were still filled with a sense of wonder at man’s capacity to fool the eye came closer to an understanding of this achievement than many later critics … but if we discard Berkeley’s theory of vision, according to which we “see” a flat field but “construct” a tactile space, we can perhaps rid art history of its obsession with space and bring other achievements into focus, the suggestion of light and of texture, for instance, or the mastery of physiognomic expression.” Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision ( 1709) (…)  was concerned to refute Descartes and Newton, who had wholly abstracted the visual sense from the interaction of the other senses. On the other hand, the suppression of the visual sense in favour of the audile-tactile complex, produces the distortions of tribal society2 (…) Gombrich not only has all the most relevant information about the rise of the pictorial mode; he has all the right difficulties. He ends his Art and Illusion by commenting: “There is finally the history of Greek painting as we can follow it in painted pottery, which tells of the discovery of foreshortening and the conquest of space early in the fifth century and of light in the fourth (…) Emanuel Loewy at the turn of the century first developed his theories about the rendering of nature in Greek art that stressed the priority of conceptual modes and their gradual adjustment to natural appearances … But in itself it explains very little. For why was it that this process started comparatively so late in the history of mankind? In this respect our perspective has very much changed. To the Greeks the archaic period represented the dawn of history, and classical scholarship has not always shaken off this inheritance. From this point of view it appeared quite natural that the awakening of art from primitive modes should have coincided with the rise of all those other activities, that, for the humanist, belong to civilization: the development of philosophy, of science, and of dramatic poetry.” (GG 52-53)
  • The relation of tactility to the visual, so necessary to an understanding of the fortunes of the phonetic alphabet, only became starkly defined after Cezanne. Thus Gombrich makes tactility a central theme of Art and Illusion, as does Heinrich Wölfflin in his Principles of Art History. And the reason for this new stress was that in an age of photography the divorce of the visual from the interplay of the other senses was pushed all the way into reaction. 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” and led at once to the disintegration of the idea of the “imitation of nature” as a [merely] visual affair. Gombrich writes: “Two German thinkers are prominent in this story. One is the critic Konrad Fiedler, who insisted, in opposition to the impressionists, that ‘even the simplest sense impression that looks like merely the raw material for the operations of the mind is already a mental fact, and what we call the external world is really the result of a complex psychological process.’ But it was Fiedler’s friend, the neoclassical sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, who set out to analyze this process in a little book called The Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts, which came out in 1893 and gained the ear of a whole generation. Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: ‘if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds’.” It is hardly an accident that the period when these ideas were so eagerly debated was also the period when the history of art emancipated itself from antiquarianism, biography, and aesthetics. Issues which had been taken for granted so long suddenly looked problematic and required reassessment. When Bernard Berenson wrote his brilliant essay on the Florentine painters, which came out in 1896, he formulated his aesthetic creed in terms of Hildebrand’s analysis. With his gift for the pregnant phrase, he summed up almost the whole of the sculptor’s somewhat turgid book in the sentence “The painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile value to retinal impressions.” (GG 81-82)

Through the Vanishing Point (1968)

  • In Art and Illusion, Gombrich comments: “After the many weighty tomes that have been written on how space is rendered in art, Steinberg’s trick drawings serve as a welcome reminder that it is never space which is represented but familiar things in situations.” It might seem to the casual reader that Gombrich assumes that the only real space is based on vision. This is to postulate that space is a container for things. On the contrary, as painters well know, space is created or evoked by all manner of associations among colors, textures, sounds and their intervals. The works of painters like Jackson Pollock, for example, present spaces evoked by proprioception and kinesis, as well as other sensory relationships. (6)

The Argument: Causality in the Electric World (1973)

  • Making sense involves “unified sensibility” or synesthesia, as E. H. Gombrich explains in Art and Illusion: “What is called “synesthesia,” the splashing over of impressions from one sense modality to another, is a fact to which all languages testify. They work both ways — from sight to sound and from sound to sight. We speak of loud colors and bright sounds, and everyone knows what we mean. Nor are the ear and the eye the only senses that are thus converging to a common center. There is touch in such terms as “velvety voice” and “a cold light,” taste with “sweet harmonies” of colors or sounds and so on through countless permutations. (…) Representation is never a replica. The forms of art, ancient and modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of what the artist sees in the outer world. In both cases they are rendering within an acquired medium, a medium grown up through tradition and skill — that of the artist and that of the beholder. [We fix our attention not on likeness of elements but on structural relationships.] (…) synesthesia concerns relationships.”3 (22-23)
  1. McLuhan has “illusion” here instead of “realism”. He meant, of course, the “illusion” of realism, “where (as Gombrich has it), the image has been developed to a high degree of articulation”. ↩
  2. McLuhan has a note here: “Georg von Bekesy’s article on ‘Similarities between Hearing and Skin Sensations’ (Psychological Review, Jan., 1959, pp. 1-22), provides a means of understanding why no sense can function in isolation nor can be unmodified by the operation and diet of the other senses.” ↩
  3. ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ was written with Barrington Nevitt. When Nevitt cited this passage from Gombrich in this 1980 ABC of Prophecy (38-39 in the so-called ‘preview edition’) he included the sentence which is given in square brackets. An interesting question: how could McLuhan have failed to include this passage, with its discussion of ‘synesthesia’, ‘touch’, ‘medium’ and ‘relationships’, in his earlier citations from Gombrich in 1960-1962? At a guess, he failed to do so because he was fixated in those years on the insight that “SI (structural impact) is not SC (subjective completion). The impression is not the experience. The beholder must collaborate in creating…”. He had to digest this notion, at last, before attempting to integrate it with his other concerns. (‘At last’, because this notion was implicated in his earliest concerns as an undergraduate in Winnipeg with Lodge’s — and Elsie’s — multiple modes of experience in  philosophy and literature. But he seems only with his breakthrough in 1960, more than 25 years later, to have perceived the revolutionary inferences to be drawn from that notion of fundamental pluralism.) ↩

William Ivins

Ivins, Wm. M. (Jr.), Prints and Visual Communication. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1953) This is surely one of the great books of our very great time. The print being the lowest of definitions in informational terms, it has a great deal in common with the television image. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960)

McLuhan first read William Ivins (1881-1961) in the late 1950s and was helped by him, as by the other art historians McLuhan came to read at that time, to his proposal of the sensus communis, aka tactility, as the elementary structure of experience and of its resulting science or sciences.  This decisive ‘art history’ phase of McLuhan’s work lasted from 1958 to 1962 and it was in this period that his concern with Ivins was concentrated.

The Electronic Revolution in North America (1958)

  • In his Prints and Visual Communication, William Ivins explained the stages of development of a visual syntax which codified complex information in a ‘net of rationality’ as the engraver’s lines were called. Exactly repeatable visual statement developed steadily until the photograph. At that stage, line1 disappeared, syntax ended, and statement became not partial but total.

Myth and Mass Media (1959)

  • In his Prints and Visual Communication (…), William M. Ivins explains how the long process of capturing the external world in the “network of rationality”, by the engraver’s line and by ever more subtle syntax, finally reached conclusion in the photograph. The photograph is a total statement of the external object without syntax. This kind of peripety [from the extreme of one medium to a different one] will strike the student of media as characteristic of all media development.

Printing and Social Change (1959)

  • As William Ivins analysed it in Prints and Visual Communication, the woodcut and engraving moved through many stages of statement about the visible world, achieving an ever more subtle syntax, until photography suddenly presented us with total statement minus syntax. The suggestion that print from movable type created a new kind of codification of reality, a new way of representing and communicating mental activity is readily assented to. But to relate this new form of expression and statement to the science and culture of its time needs the scrutiny and collaboration of many minds.
  • …until the Renaissance, classroom time was spent to a great degree in making rather than in studying the text. The stress which William Ivins has given, in Prints and Visual Communication, to the new power of exactly repeatable information has not yet found its analyst and commentator (…). Such a commentator would be obliged to examine the effects of this exact repeatability in developing a new consumer orientation in market place and study alike.
  • I suggest that the real reversal which has overtaken print technology [from within print technology itself] is to be found in the photograph and the movie, and that these forms of total ‘statement without syntax,’ as William Ivins describes it, are utterly unlike telegraph, radio, and TV. Somehow we must unriddle the complex of new messages involved in this new situation which has been created by print technology itself. So far nothing has been done to explicate the situation because we still imagine that these forms of codifying information can co-exist [as atomic units in successive time and space] without transforming one another. This attitude, now suicidal, is yet a natural legacy of print culture.

Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960)

  • It would be a sufficient justification to include this section on prints [in McLuhan’s Report] if only to bring to the students’ attention the work of William M. Ivins, Jr. His Prints and Visual Communication (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953) stresses the meaning which prints have had in the development of science. Until there was some uniform and repeatable means of transmitting non-verbal information, it was impossible for scientists to communicate. Mr. Ivins helps us to define a “backward country” as “one of those that have not learned to take full advantage of the possibilities of pictorial statement and communication” (p. 1). He spots, at once, the disadvantages to knowledge of the “persistent habit of regarding prints as of interest and value only insofar as they can be regarded as works of art” (p. l).
    He will receive increasing recognition as a master of media analysis, because of such critical awareness as this: “Historians of art and writers on aesthetic theory have ignored the fact that most of their thought has been based on exactly repeatable pictorial statements about works of art rather than upon first hand acquaintance with them. Had they paid attention to that fact, they might have recognized the extent to which their own thinking and theorizing have been shaped by the limitations imposed on those statements by the graphic techniques. Photography and Photographic process, the last of the long succession of such techniques, have been responsible for one of the greatest changes of visual habit and knowledge that has ever taken place and have led to an almost complete rewriting of the history of art as well as a most thoroughgoing revaluation of the arts of the past” (p. 2). Mr. Ivins does not merely offer valuable data, he offers us better ways of perceiving data,     an approach rather than conclusions. We must look on prints “from the point of view of general ideas and particular functions, and, especially we must think about the limitations which their techniques have imposed on them as conveyors of information and on us as receivers of that information” (p. 3). To extend this kind of awareness, not only to prints but to all media, is the aim and scope of understanding media. The approach of Mr. Ivins readily reveals why historians until recent times “have rarely found anything they were not looking for” (p. 4).
  • Art and Geometry, Wm. M. Ivins, Jr: This book is concerned, among other things, with the nature of Euclidean space. One of its themes is that it was not until the Renaissance that  Western man finally freed the visual from the tactile. We have seen how print culture strongly stressed segmental one-thing-at-a-time approach to problems of organization of space and time.
  • Wm. M. Ivins suggested, in Art and Geometry (Cambridge, Mass., 1946) that the Greek geometric sense was profoundly tactual and that Euclidean geometry thus had to wait further development until the visual sense had been abstracted from the tactual sense in the Renaissance. (…) In fact, it was only the pictorial abstractness of print that made possible the diminishing of the tactile values sufficiently to advance mathematics to its eighteenth century phase.
  • William M. Ivins, Jr., in his Prints and Visual Communication (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1953) traces the stages of lineal syntax in prints and woodcuts all the way to that point of no return where photography provides a total statement without snytax. “With photography, however, we come to a kind of print that no one could have made before the nineteenth century,” (p, 116). He proceeds with his theme (p. 128): “At last man had discovered a way to make visual reports in printer’s ink without syntax, and without the distorting analyses of form that syntax necessitated. Today we are so accustomed to this that we think little of it, but it represents one of the most amazing discoveries that man has ever made — a cheap and easy means of symbolic communication without syntax” (pp, 128-9).
  • In his Prints and Visual Communication, William M. Ivins, Jr., traces the rise of the print with its “network of rationality” or mesh of lines for capturing the external world. The minute mesh of lines, or statements about the external world suddenly yield in the photograph an image without lines. Reality is there as a total statement without syntax. It was as if by reversal that things drew themselves instead of being drawn.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

  • William Ivins, Jr., in Prints and Visual Communications, stresses how natural it is in the world of the written word to move towards a merely nominalist position such as no non-literate man could dream of: “Plato’s Ideas and Aristotle’s forms, essences, and definitions, are specimens of this transference of reality from the object to the exactly repeatable and therefore seemingly permanent verbal formula. An essence, in fact, is not part of the object but part of its definition. Also, I believe, the well-known notions of substance and attributable qualities can be derived from this operational dependence upon exactly repeatable verbal descriptions and definitions — for the very linear order in which words have to be used results in a syntactical time order analysis of qualities that actually are simultaneous and so intermingled and interrelated that no quality can be removed from one of the bundles of qualities we call objects  without changing both it and all the other qualities. After all, a quality is only a quality of a group of other qualities, and if you change anyone of the group they all necessarily change. Whatever the situation may be from the point of view of a verbalist analysis, from the point of view of visual awarenesses of the kind that have to be used in an art museum the object is a unity that cannot be broken down into separate qualities without becoming merely a collection of abstractions that have only conceptual existence and no actuality. In a funny way words and their necessary linear syntactical order forbid us to describe objects and compel us to use very poor and inadequate lists of theoretical ingredients in the manner exemplified more concretely by the ordinary cook book recipes.” Any phonetic alphabet culture can easily slip into the habit of putting one thing under or in another; since there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that the written code carries for the reader the experience of the “content” which is speech. But there is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. (GG 71-72)
  • It is necessary for the understanding of the visual take-off that was to occur with Gutenberg technology, to know that such a take-off had not been possible in the manuscript ages, for such a culture retains the audile-tactile modes of human sensibility in a degree incompatible with abstract visuality or the translation of all the senses into the language of unified, continuous, pictorial space. That is why Ivins is entirely justified in maintaining in his Art and Geometry (p 41): “Perspective is something quite different from foreshortening. Technically, it is the central projection of a three-dimensional space upon a plane. Untechnically, it is the way of making a picture on a flat surface in such a manner that the various objects represented in it appear to have the same sizes, shapes, and positions, relatively to each other, that the actual objects as located in actual space would have if seen by the beholder from a single determined point of view. I have discovered nothing to justify the belief that the Greeks had any idea, either in practice or theory, at any time, of the conception contained in the italicised words in the preceding sentence.” (GG 112)
  • William Ivins has made a more thorough analysis of the esthetic effects of prints and typography on our human habits of perception than anybody else. In Prints and Visual Communication he writes: “Each written or printed word is a series of conventional instructions for the making in a specified linear order of muscular movements which when fully carried out result in a succession of sounds. These sounds, like the forms of the letters, are made according to arbitrary recipes or directions, which indicate by convention certain loosely defined classes of muscular movements but not any specifically specified ones. Thus any printed set of words can actually be pronounced in an infinitely large number of ways, of which, if we leave aside purely personal peculiarities, Cockney, Lower East Side, North Shore, and Georgia, may serve as typical specimens. The result is that each sound we hear when we listen to anyone speaking is merely a representative member of a large class of sounds which we have agreed to accept as symbolically identical in spite of the actual differences between them.” In this passage he not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience in print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. The reduction of experience to a single sense, the visual, as a result of typography leads him to speculate that “the more closely we confine our data for reasoning about things to data that come to us through one and the same sense channel the more apt we are to be correct in our reasoning”. However, this type of reduction or distortion of all experience to the scale of one sense only is in tendency the effect of typography on the arts and sciences as well as upon human sensibility. Thus the habit of a fixed position or “point of view” so natural to the reader of typography, gave popular extension to the avant-garde perspectivism of the fifteenth century: “Perspective rapidly became an essential part of the technique of making informative pictures, and before long was demanded of pictures that were not informative. Its introduction had much to do with that western European  preoccupation with verisimilitude, which is probably the distinguishing mark of subsequent European picture making. The third of these events was Nicholas of Cusa’s enunciation, in 1440, of the first thorough-going doctrines of the relativity of knowledge and of the continuity, through transitions and middle terms, between extremes. This was a fundamental challenge to definitions and ideas that had tangled thought since the time of the ancient Greeks. These things, the exactly repeatable pictorial statement, a logical grammar for representation of space relationship in pictorial statements, and the concepts of relativity and continuity, were and still are superficially so unrelated that they are rarely thought of seriously in conjunction with one another. But, between them, they have revolutionized both the descriptive sciences and the mathematics on which the science of physics rests, and in addition they are essential to a great deal of modern technology. Their effects on art have been very marked. They were absolutely new things in the world. There was no precedent for them in classical practice or thought of any kind or variety”. (GG 125-126)

 

  1. in Principles of Art History, Wölfflin put forward ‘line’ as one of his principles. ↩

Heinrich Wölfflin

the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts. (Wölfflin, Principles of Art History)

Giedion gave us a language for tackling the structural world of architecture and artifacts of many kinds in the ordinary environment. He learned this language from his preceptor, Wölfflin, whose Principles of Art History revolutionized the entire language of art criticism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. (Stearn Interview)

McLuhan long knew of Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) through Sigfried Giedion’s frequent mention of him as his mentor.  In Space, Time and Architecture, for example, which McLuhan read immediately after meeting Giedion in 1943 in St Louis, Giedion described his study with Wölfflin in explaining “where I come from“:

As an art historian, I am a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin. In our personal contacts with him as well as through his distinguished lectures, we, his pupils, learned to grasp the spirit of an epoch. Wölfflin’s incisive analysis made clear to us the true meaning and significance of a painting or a piece of sculpture. He delighted in contrasting one period with another. He employed this method most effectively both in his teaching and in his books — in his Renaissance and Baroque [Renaissance und Barock] (1889), in Classical Art [Die klassische Kunst] (1899), in which the fifteenth century is opposed to the sixteenth, and even in his Principles of Art (Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915), which had just appeared when I studied under him at Munich. Many of his pupils have tried to emulate this method of contrasting styles, but none have achieved the same depth and directness. In my own first book (…)1 I tried to follow Wölfflin’s method.

The great question was whether “the spirit of an epoch” might be defined rigorously via Grundbegriffe or fundamental principles such that investigation of it and of other epochs, alone and in combination, might be established on a new basis.

Now although McLuhan began reading Giedion in the mid-1940s and learning about Wölfflin through him, he seems not to have read Wölfflin himself until the late 1950s when art history began to play a decisive role in his thought. With Adolph Hildebrand, William Ivins and Ernst Gombrich, Wölfflin effected a revolution in McLuhan’s thinking at this time that provoked his notion of the elementary structure of experience and its resulting science or sciences. As cited below from The Gutenberg Galaxy, this was the notion that 

[there is] “unconscious inference” or mental action even in the most basic sense experience. “Tactility” or interplay among all the senses is2 (…) the very mode of this “inference”. (81)

Like Hildebrand and Ivins, Wölfflin was treated by McLuhan chiefly in publications between 1960 and 1962:

Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960)

  • In 1915 Heinrich Wölfflin published his Principles of Art History which has since then revolutionized the study of many matters besides art. His entire approach confirms what I discovered about media: “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts” (…) Switching attention to effects away from “the sensuous facts” highlighted (…) that the (…) visual (…) is in effect very tactile, resonant, and auditory. 
  • But just how tricky the analysis of the quality of prints can be is revealed by Wölfflin (…) He analyses two engravings, one by Dürer, one by Rembrandt. The Dürer he shows has an SC [Subjective Completion] that is highly tactual. The Rembrandt has an SC that is highly visual. (…) The processing which the SI [Structural Impact or Sensory Impression] undergoes in each of us is bound to vary, just as the effect of radio or movie differs widely as it is processed through different cultures.

Inside the Five Sense Sensorium (1961)

  • The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic or tangible-tactile — and Wölfflin’s pupil, Sigfried Giedion, embodied [!] it in his Space, Time and Architecture. 

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

  • if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly be opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. As Heinrich Wölfflin stated the matter in 1915, in his revolutionary Principles of Art History (p. 62) “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts.” Wölfflin began working from the discoveries of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, whose Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts had first clearly explained the disorder in ordinary human sense perception, and the role of art in clarifying this confusion. Hildebrand had shown how tactility was a kind of synesthesia or interplay among the senses, and as such, was the core of the richest art effects. (41)
  • The relation of tactility to the visual, so necessary to an understanding of the fortunes of the phonetic alphabet, only became starkly defined after Cezanne. Thus Gombrich makes tactility a central theme of Art and Illusion, as does Heinrich Wölfflin in his Principles of Art History. And the reason for this new stress was that in an age of photography the divorce of the visual from the interplay of the other senses was pushed all the way into reaction. Gombrich records the stages of nineteenth-century discussion and analysis of “sense data” leading to the Helmholtz3 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”… (81)

 

  1. Giedion’s specification of his “first book” is omitted here: “Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism (= Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus), Munich, 1922, written as a thesis”. ↩
  2. McLuhan has “was” here, not “is”. The full passage from GG is given at the end of the post above. ↩
  3. This was the same Hermann von Helmholtz, of course, whose study of the liquid vortex led to the idea of the vortex structure of the atom and to the adoption of the vortex in literary theory by Pound and Lewis. ↩

Adolf Hildebrand

McLuhan first read The Problem of Form by Adolf von Hildebrand (1847-1921) in the late 1950s when, not coincidentally, he made his great breakthrough into the scientific investigation of experience in a ‘classroom without walls’.  Along with other art historians and theorists like Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), William Ivins (1881-1961) and Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001), all of whom McLuhan initially encountered in these same years, Hildebrand helped McLuhan perceive how a number of seemingly disparate lines of inquiry might suddenly crystallize into a single coherent structure:

  • Aristotle and Thomas on the fundamental role of sensibility in human experience and thought
  • Eliot on the “dissociation of sensibility”
  • Mallarmé, Eliot, and Joyce on impersonality and the poetic genesis of experience
  • Innis and Havelock on media as determinants of experience
  • Innis, Havelock and Richards on media as forms of sensibility

McLuhan treated Hildebrand primarily in three publications in 1961 and 1962:

1961 — ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium’

  • 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.
  • television offers a massive Bauhaus program of the re-education for North American sense life. That is (…) 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.
  • television has the power of imposing its own conventions and assumptions on the sensibilities of the viewer. It has the power of translating the Western literate back into the world of non-literate synesthesia, just as effectively as the phonetic alphabet can hoick the native out of his haptic matrix into a world of mechanistic individualism, and sequential cause-and-effect relations. Far from regarding these developments with any feeling of euphoria, I would suggest that 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’. This drive towards ‘spontaneity of consciousness’ fostered the child cult, as well as primitivism of many varieties, but it represented a rebellion against merely visual culture — a rebellion that had begun in the eighteenth century with Rousseau and others.

1962 — addition to ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (originally published in 1951)

  • One reason why Hildebrand had such an immediate effect on the artists of his time is that he was able to explain why synesthesia is [the elementary structure of]1 human experience, [and]2 he showed why the [relative] isolation of the retinal or [of] the haptic or [of] any [one sort of sense] impression was, artistically, a disaster. Humanly speaking, the [imbalance]3 of the senses is the formula for insanity. (…) Hildebrand saw with absolute clarity that photography and photo-engraving were effecting [a relative]4 isolation of retinal impression from the other senses. After his book appeared, the critics like Bernard Berenson and later Roger Fry and Clive Bell began to stress the urgency of haptic, tactile [balance with]5 retinal impression.(…) The role of Hildebrand in shaping the vortex idea of Lewis, Pound, and TS Eliot is as decisive as his effect on Heinrich Wölfflin and the Bauhaus.
  • Always with Hildebrand, then, is the prime stress on the interplay of [gen obj!] knowing and making. The intelligible is Being, says Aquinas; and it is the splitting up of knowing and making which impoverishes art, experience, and Being alike says Hildebrand in a passage relevant to “dissociation of sensibility”. 
  • Hildebrand points the corollary for Art: “If one would speak, then, of a mission of Art, it can be no other than this: in spite of all temporal eccentricities, to reestablish and make felt the sound and natural relations between our thought and sense activities.” [123] This is surely close to Baudelaire’s notion that the role of Art is to diminish the traces of original sin. 
  • [Hildebrand ] rejects the “innocent eye” notion of art as postulating a separation rather than an interplay of the senses: “The height of positivism would be attained if we could perceive things with the inexperience of a new-born child. This theory would lead us to regard the sculptor’s art as appealing exclusively to the tactual-kinesthetic sense of the esthetic percipient; the painter’s art, on the other hand, as appealing entirely to the visual sense quite apart from all experience of form. (…) In true Art the actual form has its reality only as an effect. By conceiving Nature as a relation of kinesthetic ideas to visual impressions, all combined and interrelated in a totality, [and this as [underlying] cause of the effect Art presents], Art frees her [Nature] of change and chance.”

1962 — The Gutenberg Galaxy

  • if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly be opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. As Heinrich Wölfflin stated the matter in 1915, in his revolutionary Principles of Art History (p. 62) “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts.” Wölfflin began working from the discoveries of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, whose Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts had first clearly explained the disorder in ordinary human sense perception, and the role of art in clarifying this confusion. Hildebrand had shown how tactility was a kind of synesthesia or interplay among the senses, and as such, was the core of the richest art effects. (41)
  • [McLuhan citing Ernst Gombrich at length from Art and Illusion:] “Two German thinkers are prominent in this story. One is the critic Konrad Fiedler, who insisted, in opposition to the impressionists, that “even the simplest sense impression that looks like merely the raw material for the operations of the mind is already a mental fact, and what we call the external world is really the result of a complex psychological process.” But it was Fiedler’s friend, the neoclassical sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, who set out to analyze this process in a little book called The Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts, which came out in 1893 and gained the ear of a whole generation. Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds. It is hardly an accident that the period when these ideas were so eagerly debated was also the period when the history of art emancipated itself from antiquarianism, biography, and aesthetics. Issues which had been taken for granted so long suddenly looked problematic and required reassessment. When Bernard Berenson wrote his brilliant essay on the Florentine painters, which came out in 1896, he formulated his aesthetic creed in terms of Hildebrand’s analysis. With his gift for the pregnant phrase, he summed up almost the whole of the sculptor’s somewhat turgid book in the sentence: ‘The painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile value to retinal impressions’.” (82)
  1. McLuhan: “synesthesia is not only normal human experience, but (also)”. ↩
  2. McLuhan: “but”. ↩
  3. McLuhan: “separation”. ↩
  4. McLuhan: “an isolation”. ↩
  5. McLuhan: “quality in”. ↩

Grant on Innis and Cochrane

In a conversation originally included1 in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations (ed Lawrence Schmidt, 1978), Grant recorded the following interesting tidbit about Harold Innis’ relation with Charles Cochrane:

The person who educated Innis in his later life was Cochrane, because they went for walks around the University of Toronto. He helped Innis move beyond the fur trade, etc., into deeper subjects. (61)

Innis thanked Cochrane along with Cochrane’s colleague in the classics department, E.T. Owen,  in the ‘Preface’ to his 1950 Empire and Communications.  Cochrane had died in 1945 and Owen in 1948.

  1. Now also in Grant’s Collected Works, v4 ↩

Not a mode of being but a mode of processing

the world of the press has been aware for more than a century that news is entirely an artefact, since anything becomes news only by virtue of being printed. This is also the character of fame and celebrity, since they consist not in a mode of being but in a mode of processing by various media. Today the available means of such processing are so fantastic that a four-year stint in the White House is no longer easily distinguishable from something arranged by a booking agency.1

  1.  ‘Prospect Of America’ (Review of: The Image: What Happened to the American Dream, by Daniel J Boorstin), University of Toronto Quarterly, 32:1,  October 1962 ↩

The American dream

… so far as the American dream is concerned, the dream of the open society and of the open road, that too was an outer landscape, which has gone the way of picturesque poetry into the dustbin of obsolescent equipment.1

  1. ‘Prospect Of America’ (Review of: The Image: What Happened to the American Dream, by Daniel J Boorstin), University of Toronto Quarterly, 32:1,  October 1962 ↩

Universal abdication of human motive

McLuhan in 1948!

No college and no business city or govt is run by human persons anymore. I have yet to meet anybody who knew what he was doing let alone why he was doing it. Universal abdication of human motive is now plain. How to tackle that situation? Zombies. Sleepwalkers. Can’t argue with such. They agree with anything you say and go on. Mark that as the present feature. No disagreement. (McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 30, 1948, Letters 198-199)

McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff

McLuhan wrote a long letter to Serge Chermayeff in December, 1960.  It is not included in the Letters, but is referenced in a letter a few days later to Jackie Tyrwhitt (Dec 23, 1960, Letters 277).

Part of the letter was later included in Chermayeff and Alexander’s Community and Privacy: toward a new architecture of humanism. It appears that Chermayeff sent McLuhan a draft of this book (“your manuscript”) asking for his comments on it. This may have been on Tyrwhitt’s initiative, since she is mentioned in the letter to Chermayeff and he is mentioned in the letter to her.

The Chermayeff letter is given here with permission of the McLuhan estate.

December 19, 1960

Dear Professor Chermayeff,

It was a delight to read your book, and of course very exciting to be in at the formative stage of a great work. It would be very presumptuous of me to do more than to offer suggestions such as pop into my head from my interests where they concern yours tangentially.

My own world of media study has not yet become involved in polemic because so little has been done about it. If I should tread on touchy ground where your interests are concerned, I’m sure you will realize it is in all innocence and unawareness. On the other hand, should my concepts derivative from media study sound unwelcome or unpleasant, please credit me there,too, with innocence.

The media from writing to television are extensions of our senses. Any technological means of extending one or another sense naturally upsets whatever ratio has preexisted among those senses. As such, it is revolutionary and alters the whole pattern of human sensibility. Today, when all of the senses have been  externalized, the human sensorium is itself a global envelope, it is not only the mix of sense components which is altered, but the total environment of sense has become potentially integral but actually alien and disruptive.

My own suggestion is that we are helpless as long as we imagine that it is by some control of programming and “content” that we can make sense of the whole situation.

Allow me then to pause here and there in your manuscript for a brief comment or so, hoping to have a proper chat sometime. I agree entirely with you about the obsoleteness of the “diverse pieces of man’s habitat”. This raises a very large question to which I will recur, the conditions under which the wheel is abstracted from animal form now recur in reverse and it is wheel which is obsolete. In an electronic age, all that properly moves is information. The massive overlay of antecedent and existent technologies takes on a peculiar character of simultaneity in the electronic age. All technologies become simultaneous, and the new problem becomes one of relevance in stress and selection, rather than of commitment to any one.

On the other hand the rise of the phonetic alphabet which translated sight into sound, and sound into sight, created the experience which we call Euclidean space, uniform and homogeneous and single-planed. Such space now is totally without foundation in our electronic technology, but it continues to have enormous foundations in western languages, and all our means of codifying experience in legal and educational and political institutions.

The question of obsoleteness encounters the need for some continuity in transition, but in practice total brainwashing is more likely to occur. Enclosed pictorial space, based on the alphabet and the abstraction of sight from the matrix of the other senses, is the foundation of western privacy and individual existence. It reached its peak in mechanism, and also its reversal in the telegraph and afterwards. I know with absolute clarity exactly why the electronic age means the end of Euclidean space, as of perspective and points of view, if we merely follow the lines of force in the electronic technology. If there are permanent values involved in this galaxy of alphabet, perspective and machine, they cannot any longer be generated or maintained by the technology which brought them into being. It is only by astute use of the new technology alien to these older values that we can recreate their image in a new milieu.

Now that we begin to understand how over-all changes in sensibility, in preference, in daily awareness of space and of time, alters with the new impact of any medium, any new means of moving information, it is possible to reverse that process, and by a careful selection of the means by which we move information we can enrich or deprive any milieu of this or that feature. That is to say that radio as radio would have an utterly different effect upon the sensibilities of India or China, just as it had a very different effect upon North America from its effect on Germany. Radio at this moment is exerting the most devastating effect upon the tribal community of Africa — since it is an auditory field of force, itself capable of generating tribal patterns of inter-association even in the most fragmented and literate consciousness. Literacy on the other hand is profoundly traumatic to Africans (see Psychiatry magazine, November 1959; article by J.C. Carothers in which he mentions that the preliterate African scarcely regards sight as a sense organ at all). On the other hand, sight is isolated and intensified by phonetic alphabet technology, which translates the entire auditory complex into visual terms, releasing the individual from the tribal matrix, and initiating those characteristics which we associate with individualism and privacy.

And in this connection it is equally observable in preliterate societies, as in our own post-literate global village, that we begin to note a heightening of auditory values after centuries of neglect through auditory stress. (Georg von Békésy in the Psychological Review for January 1959 has an article on ‘The Similarities between Hearing and Skin Sensations‘.) But in preliterate societies where the auditory is supreme as the mode of organizing experience, there is a deprivation of value in the other senses equivalent to the worst excesses of abstract visuality and pictorial space.

It would seem that, beginning with writing at least, there is a technological externalization of one sense which disrupts the economy of the senses, but which does permit a tremendous visual organization of experience, the rise of lineal logics, of roads, of sequential processes and special subject-matters. This is more particularly true of the phonetic alphabet than of other forms of writing. In the past, then, we have progressively externalized all of the senses and now we have globally an external and collective sensorium which demands the same degree of nutrition and titillation that our private sensorium does. Put in these terms, do not all the complaints about the excesses of our media take on a new meaning? When only one or two senses had been given technological externalization, there was less motive to regard such external senses as part of ourselves. Conversely, with the externalization of all the entire sensorium we are impelled toward the discovery of a global order and equilibrium of media experience with the same intensity with which we pursue the same [sort of] order in our private lives. Yet the total absence of any precedent for such a global quest merely seems to threaten individual values. All of our institutions, legal, political, including spoken language, resist such global order. The answer, of course, must lie in the direction of pluralism, rather than monism, and here is where the image of the City is an inevitable and necessary model. Because the city is precisely the area of multiple modes of awareness in a montage of luminous unity.

But this raises another set of problems. Electronically considered the human population of the globe occupies a very small village. It may never become a city. In terms of information movement, the patterns of human association now have the immediacy and the explosiveness of close oral contact in a tiny village. Sooner or later the same strategies of culture will suggest themselves to the global family as suggested themselves to small tribes. Since everything that happens in them happens at the same time for everybody, it is extremely inconvenient when anything happens at all. Institutional steps are soon taken that nothing will ever happen at all.

Let me approach this whole matter in a somewhat different way. Natural resources and staples, whether cotton, fish, lumber, coal, iron, water power or water ways are in certain respects low-grade media of communication gradually imposing their assumptions upon the entire community, creating a kind of organic unity. But our electronic media are in a very basic sense new natural resources, new staples of global extent and distribution since they are extensions of our own private senses. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” Photography, radio, television, et cetera enable anybody to stand on the collective human ear, eye, skin and to manipulate the entire human population as natural resource. Cultural experience gained from earlier media is not only useless, but confusing when confronted with this electronic situation.

What I’m saying is that the globe has become the scene of a new set of natural resources and staples, and culturally and politically we are being urged toward those patterns of life which characterize a staple economy such as is marginal to great economic centers. One characteristic of staple economies is a pattern of deep persistence and of intense resistance to innovation and technological change. Centers as opposed to margins, are the areas of response to innovation and technological change. Again, with the electronic movement of information, any area whatever on the globe can be a center and can simultaneously be a margin. Centers and margins can no longer have a clear positional aspect. Is not this one of the basic problems of our time? Are we not still trying to solve this problem positionally? Must we not now expect every position whatever to be simultaneously a montage of all others?

This illumination by light through rather than light on, while friendly to mosaic, two-dimensional experience, would seem to include much more.

In a paper by my friend Muller-Thym which I recently sent on to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, he traces the development of new structures of management in the past ten years, conclusively showing that the only workable ones have a common pattern. In fact with great self-consciousness they depart from the pyramidal and hierarchical character of antecedent management structures, and insist upon small team patterns in which the members of the team, habituated to crossing functional boundaries, display diverse competences.

Parallel to this, management no longer talks about making the public conscious of product, but of making the product conscious of the consumer. The consumer is included in the product by becoming co-producer. Basically then the change is this: big managerial centers now deliberately create marginal conditions at their very heart. Conversely our job today on a global scale is to introduce urban awareness into rural conditions, and rural freedom into urban centers. The overall model must be the global village since that is imposed upon us by electronic speed of information movement. Should we in time understand our technology sufficiently we might dream of a global city. For the present we must put up with the global village, swept alternately by panic and apathy, terror and complacency.

In terms of these observations, I do think it possible not only to analyse form as a continuous process, but to predict and to control form. The tactile depth and sculptural contour of the TV image is Europeanizing North America as rapidly as pictorial values and consumer goods are Americanizing Europe. The kinds of literacy and pictorial intensity which characterized whole sectors of American life from the beginning had eliminated tactility and producer orientation in favor of visual and consumer values. Is not tactility and the mode of creative process that very interplay of the senses which we call synesthesia? The literary mind is easily misled by the program content of our mass media. The constitutive character of their imagery has very little to do with their program content.

I suggest that “maximal passivity” and the vicarious are most characteristic of the abstract pictorial values of a literary and consumer culture. North America is the only place that ever took Gutenberg with uncritical seriousness. To Gutenberg we owe our massive uniformity and repeatability at all levels of our institutions. To the merely newcomers to print culture (the backward countries) our uniformity and repeatability are utopian ideals. I do not know myself whether this phase is necessary or bypassable for the achievement of what Rostow calls “economic takeoff.”

Apropos of (…) your remark that “interference will turn into control,” are you not assuming that control equals misunderstanding? 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 than any previously envisaged, and would not such equilibrium or interplay be capable not of control but of true freedom? Just as a lecture is a kind of superimposed control, whereas a dialogue among a few people is a process of interplay, insight and discovery, can we not create the ideal conditions of global dialogue or multiple dialogues, both verbal and non-verbal? Is not this already happening in spite of ourselves, and our natural disposition to impose antecedent imagery upon new situations? 

One peculiarity of center-margin relationships is that when freedom of interplay between these areas breaks down in any kind of structure, the tendency is for the center to impose itself upon the margin. In the field of attention which we call perception, when the center enlarges and the margin diminishes beyond a certain point, we are in that induced state called hypnosis. The dialogue has ended.

Apropos of “the problem of keeping the capsule’s inhabitants human”. For the capsule there can be no margin. Or rather let us consider that for the capsule the problem is the creation of margin that there may be dialogue.

You of course are far more familiar than I am with a very great number of occasions in our contemporary world when by inadvertence we have designed environments which lacked the ratio between center and margin necessary to dialogue.

I hope I have said enough to indicate how extremely relevant and exciting I find your thoughts and observations. I sense that you have made a very great book indeed, and not only look forward to its publication but to some opportunity of pursuing its themes with you in private conversation.

With most cordial good wishes,

 

 

McLuhan’s new sciences: “only the authority of knowledge”

it is no longer feasible in decision-making to exercise delegated authority, but only the authority of knowledge. (Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960)1

Telephone in hand, the decision maker can exercise only the authority of knowledge, not delegated authority. (Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, 19602 

it was his mastery of the art process in terms of the stages of apprehension that enabled Joyce to install himself in the centre of the creative process. Whether it appears as mere individual sensation, as collective hope or phobia, as national myth-making or cultural norm-functioning, there is Joyce with cocked ear, eye and nose at the the centre of the action. He saw that the change of our time (‘wait till Finnegan wakes !’) was occurring as a result of the shift from superimposed myth to awareness of the character of the creative process itself. Here was the only hope for a world culture which would incorporate all previous achievements. The very process of human communication, Joyce saw, would afford the natural base for all the future operations and strategies of culture. Towards this vivisectional spectacle of the human community in action we have been led ever more swiftly in recent decades by increasing self-consciousness of the processes and effects of the various media of communication. Our knowledge of the modes of consciousness in pre-literate societies together with our sense of the processes of culture formation in many literate societies past and present, have sharpened our perceptions and led to wide agreement that communication itself is the common ground for the study of individual and society. To this study Joyce contributed not just awareness but demonstration of individual cognition as the analogue and matrix of all communal actions, political, linguistic and sacramental. (Notes on the Media as Art Forms 1954)

No sense operates in isolation. Vision is partly structured by ocular and bodily movement; hearing, by visual and kinesthetic experience. (The Effect of the Printed Book on Language in the 16th Century, 1957)

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. (Compliment Accepted, 1957)

the ratio among [1] sight and [2] sound, and [3] touch and motion, offer precisely that place to stand which Archimedes asked for: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” The media offer exactly such a place to stand, for they are extensions of our senses, if need be into outer space. (Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, 1960)

The globe has become on one hand a community of learning, and at the same time, with regard to the tightness of its inter-relationships, the globe has become a tiny village.  Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity. (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960)

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. (Two Aspects Of The Communications Revolution, 1961)

One reason why [Adolf] Hildebrand had such an immediate effect on the artists of his time is that he was able to explain not only why synesthesia is normal3 [to all] human experience but he showed [as well] why the isolation of the retinal or [of] the haptic or [of] any [one sort of sense] impression was, artistically, a disaster. Humanly speaking, the [extreme imbalance]4 of the senses is the formula for insanity. (1962 addition to ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’)

Depending on which sense or faculty is extended technologically (…) the “closure” or equilibrium-seeking among the other senses is (…) predictable. It is with the senses as it is with color. Sensation is always 100 per cent, and (…) color is always 100 per cent (…) But the ratio among the components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely.5 (Understanding Media, 1964, 44)

There are certain questions concerning the work of Marshall McLuhan whose importance can hardly be overstated. First, did he propose a way in which rigorous scientific investigation in the humanities and social sciences might be inaugurated? Second, if he did, was his proposal in fact capable of igniting the sort of investigation he foresaw? Third, was he correct that this sort of investigation, and this sort of investigation alone, could address the problems which threaten the survival of humans (and perhaps the rest of earth’s biosphere along with them)? 

So far, it must be said, research into McLuhan’s writings has failed to pose even the first of these questions — which is required for the second and third. Reading his work, it may be, has yet to begin.

When chemistry and genetics were established as rigorous sciences in the course of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth6, the initial suggestions regarding the definition and functioning of their elements7 were far from perfect. Subsequent research would find critical imprecision and outright errors in them.  Despite this, subsequent research (including revision of the initial suggestions) was indeed enabled on their respective bases and can, it seems, be continued indefinitely.8 This (along with comparable advances especially in physics) has revolutionized the world — but also imperiled it.  Never before have there been such threats to our social, political and ecological orders.  It is now all too easy to contemplate the extinction not only of the human species but even of the entire biosphere of the earth.

McLuhan saw these dangers and thought that the only answer to them was an analogous sort of investigation in the humanities and social sciences (as we call them) to that of the physical sciences.9 It appears that he became conscious of the key to this hope in the course of writing Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1958-1960):

Survival indicates10 that we grasp by anticipation the inherent causes (…) of the electronic media (…) and make a fully conscious choice of strategy (…)  We need prescience of the full causal powers latent in our new media (…). A kind of alchemical foreknowledge11 of all the future effects of any new medium is possible.  Under electronic conditions, when all effects are accelerated in their mutual collision and emergence, such anticipation of consequence is basic need as well as new possibility. (‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’, 1959)12

Although McLuhan repeatedly cited the need to understand “our new media” in this passage, he was aware that this would require understanding all media — just as chemistry and genetics necessarily apply to all materials and to all heredity. His particular focus on “new media” came from the role they were playing in destroying our old world, or worlds, without supplying anything stable in return. At a time when, as a result, “we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation” (Understanding Media, 108), our survival as a species now hung in the balance such that:

The affairs of the world are now dependent upon the “highest information” of which man is capable. (Take Today, 232)

McLuhan set out his intuition of such “highest information” in letters from the end of 1960. This was the year in which he experienced his first major stroke13 and had been close enough to death that the last rites were administered. In this situation, his letters at the end of the year to friends and colleagues take on the flavor of a recap, not only of a year, but of a lifetime and a lifetime’s vocation.

we are impelled toward the discovery of a global order and equilibrium of media experience (…) When there is no longer a [foundational order of] center-margin interplay  in a positional or spatial sense [ie, deriving from political or commercial empire], is it not yet possible to have a more inclusive ecology than any previously envisaged14, and would not such equilibrium or interplay be capable (…) of [instigating and sustaining] true freedom [via “a fully conscious choice of strategy”]15? (McLuhan to to Serge Chermayeff, December 19, 1960)16

we are in the desperate position of not having any [external or public] sensus communis. (…) From Aristotle onward, the traditional function of the [individual] sensus communis [was seen as being]17 to translate each sense into the other senses, so that a unified, integral image is offered at all times to the mind. (…) The problem (…) is assuming more and more the character of language itself18, in which all words at all times [implicate]19 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, [a question] not [of] fixed but [of] 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 [with the sensus communis of] the private person. (…) [But] before we can return to one another [in such dialogue and consensus], a good deal of clarification is needed for the purposes of reconciliation. (McLuhan to Jackie Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960)20

The university itself would seem to become the only possible model of such consensus, inviting the concept of a university of being and experience, rather than of subjects [like mathematics and economics]. Such a concept of university could supersede the concept of [a political] urban center [as the source of order] in an age of electronic information movement, and need not be locational, or geographic. (McLuhan to Claude Bissell, January 4, 1961)21

In a fourth letter, which the editors of McLuhan’s Letters assigned to 1961, but may well be from 1960 a few weeks before the letters to Chermayeff, Tyrwhitt and Bissell, McLuhan summarized his position for Walter Ong:

I am naturally eager to attract many people to such study as this and see in it the hope of some rational consensus for our externalized senses. A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build. (McLuhan to Walter Ong. Nov. 18, 1961?, Letters 281)

In a 1961 review of Edward Hall’s The Silent Language, McLuhan reiterated these ideas:

having driven our senses out of ourselves by technological extension, do we not lack entirely a consensus? (…) these externalizations, however separate and distinct, [do] yet speak22 a common language which can be learned even by the occupants of the Tower of Babel. The practical program implicit in The Silent Language is that there can be a consensus for all the separate senses and faculties which we are endlessly externalizing. We can learn how to translate all the diverse, external manifestations of our inner lives into a coherent statement of human motive and existence.23

By “externalizations” and “externalized senses” McLuhan meant both such automated sensory devices as the tele-phone and tele-vision, but also all the ‘senses’ or meanings of the word with which we are now bombarded in the “global village”: “the character of language itself in which all words at all times [implicate] all the senses”24. In a “worldpool” of “allatonceness” everything in world history is suddenly present25 to us:

In our time we are re-living at high speed the whole of the human past. As in a speeded-up film we are traversing all ages and all experience including the experience of pre-historic men. Our experience is not exclusive of other peoples’ experience but inclusive. (New Media in Arts Education, 1956)

From the far reaches of contemporary space and of historical time, we are confronted with the brute fact of diverse mindsets and their associated cultural practices. The outstanding question is how to understand this diversity as the only way to understand our own mindset and cultural practice as one modality of it. Hence the imperative to understand all media.

This situation is described in Understanding Media (a book based on McLuhan’s Report on the Project in Understanding New Media) as follows:

we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. (…) Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness. (108)

The same page in Understanding Media (as cited above) refers to “a world-wide fragmentation” at present, assimilating us today to Dante’s “broken fragments” and to his vision of hell.26

The uniting and “inclusive consciousness” which could save us from such “fragmentation” is nearly always interpreted by readers of McLuhan as something vaguely mystical  — when attention is paid to it at all. But, as recorded in the citations from his correspondence above, this “more inclusive ecology than any previously envisaged” was to be based on, and to further, “rational consensus“. To Claude Bissell, McLuhan’s friend, one-time colleague in the UT English department27 and now president of UT, McLuhan called this “a university of being and experience“. One intent, of course, was to suggest to Bissell a calling for the university that he might not be considering even as its head.  But, as is clear from the unusual phrase “a university of being“, it also represented a nod in the direction of McLuhan’s continuing debt to, and dialogue with, his very close friend, Bernard Muller-Thym. Muller-Thym’s PhD thesis at UT was published in 1939 as The Establishment of the University of Being in the Doctrine of Meister Eckhart of Hochheim. This was the same year Muller-Thym was the best man at McLuhan’s wedding in St Louis and two years before he would be the Godfather of the McLuhans’ first child, Eric. 

In fact, McLuhan had mentioned the connection with Eckhart to Bissell in a note to him earlier in 1960:

Now, from your point of view, it seems to me that some of these points directly concern the university. The principle, that at very high levels of information movement substitutability occurs, (…)28 applies to the studies of the university. When stress moves from product to process, all of the subjects in the university also become substitutable for one another. At the very high level of information movement in which to-day we are involved, we find ourselves less in a university of subjects [or disciplines] than in what Meister Eckhart called the university of being. For (…) method and creative insight [today] tends to bring each subject directly into the mode of contemplation of its relation to Being29. (May 6, 1960, Letters 273)

The day before this, May 5, 1960, McLuhan had broached these same ideas in a note to Muller-Thym himself:

In terms of the university as an area of subjects, the tendency of awareness of process [vs subjects or disciplines] is certainly to make one subject substitutable for another. And so by a commodius vicus of recirculation30 (…) we come back to Bernard, Eckhart, and the University of Being.  (Letters 271-272) 

It appears, indeed, that it was first of all to Muller-Thym that McLuhan described the key to his breakthrough in early 1960 regarding “a sensus communis for external senses”, aka “a more inclusive ecology than any previously envisaged”, aka “an outer consensus of technology and experience”, aka a new notion of ontological or external “center-margin interplay” or “equilibrium” or “substitutability” that would ground our internal regime of the senses (rather than vice versa), aka a vision for the contemporary global village world of a commodius vicus of recirculation as the “Uni-versity of Being“31:

The break-through in media study has come at last, and it can be stated as the principle of complementarity32: that the structural impact of any situation is subjectively completed as to the cycle of the senses. (McLuhan to Muller-Thym, February 19th, 1960)33

the [external] situation [today] closely resembles the activity of the [individual] sensus communis in translating one sense into another. (…) I am trying to get the systems-development people to work out flow charts which would enable us to chart and predict the effects of input through any one sense, as it affects the ratio of intensities in the other senses. (…) This is only to say that anything which affects one sense has a due effect on the others (…) With each of our senses becoming externalized electronically, we encounter the sensus communis in a collective form for the first time, and can and need to know very much more about the operations of the private sensus communis [in its similarity and difference from the collective one]. (McLuhan to Muller-Thym, May 5, 1960)34

The appeal to Bernard and Eckhart in this same letter (as cited above) might again suggest some sort of mysticism. It is clear from all these passages taken together, however, that McLuhan was contemplating something very much like chemistry and genetics, but for the always mediated phenomena of individual and collective experience:

A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build….some rational consensus for our externalized senses….the traditional function of the [individual] 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….an outer consensus of technology and experience (…) would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus….a more inclusive ecology than any previously envisaged (…) such equilibrium or interplay [would] be capable (…) of true freedom…Thus the human community would assume the same integral freedom and awareness as [with the sensus communis of] the private person….

Just as chemistry and genetics (and all the other physical sciences) have no national boundaries (as Lysenkoism demonstrated negatively), but instead have a kind of dynamic international consensus roughly defining at any given time what is known and unknown, so McLuhan proposed that something similar was both possible and necessary in the fields of human action and experience. Moreover, he agreed with Hegel that the only convincing proof of the possibility of such science would be its actuality. He therefore made suggestions along two paths at once.

On the one hand, he never stopped pointing to devices like the camera, radio, phonograph, television and computer, and to the astonishing success in the modern world of advertising, propaganda, popular entertainment and automation, as clear evidence that knowledge of an external sensus communis was already deployed all around us in highly effective (but frequently not beneficial) ways. This was happening without our having an understanding of the unfolding situation, however, such that we were (and are) utterly unfree in relation to it. Hence the great need for — understanding media. Such an understanding would function like chemistry and genetics as a study of effects and their causes which have always been in operation, and in fact could not not have been in operation, but which have remained fundamentally unknown until recent times. As McLuhan noted to Innis in his 1951 letter to him:

this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. (Letters, 221)

On the other hand, McLuhan proposed what had been necessary to the instigation of chemistry and genetics, namely, an intuition of the elementary structure of this new field:

The break-through in media study (…) can be stated as the principle of complementarity: that the structural impact of any situation is subjectively completed as to the cycle of the senses….[this] would enable us to (…) predict the effects of input through any one sense, as it affects the ratio of intensities in the other senses….a kind of alchemical foreknowledge of all the future effects of any new medium is possible.  Under electronic conditions, when all effects are accelerated in their mutual collision and emergence, such anticipation of consequence is basic need as well as new possibility….the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space [is a question] not [of] fixed but [of] ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness….all words [in which our individual and collective consciousnesses are constellated] at all times implicate35 all the senses, but in evershifting ratios… 

As McLuhan would continue to attempt to specify for the remaining 20 years of his life, the central notion here was that the elements of individual and social awareness are binary structures (like proton/electron in chemistry) that are marked by relative “intensities” (like dominant/recessive in genetics).  Taking his clue at once both from the long history of thought (dating at least to Aristotle) about the individual sensus communis36 and from the sensory mimesis of the new media like the telephone and television, McLuhan proposed that this structure be conceived as a variable dynamic relation between the senses of the eye and ear, with touch (along with smell and taste conflated to touch) as their modulating ratio. But these ‘senses’ were not to be confused with the physical senses or their sense data (although, in attempting to communicate the fundamental role of the senses by way of illustration, McLuhan often enough seemed to confuse them himself).37 Hence, for example, symphonic music was, McLuhan said, not aural but visual; television was not visual but tactile; and tactility was not touch but the variable inter-relation of eye and ear or the dynamic sensus communis itself:

Notice, sense of touch is not skin, not direct contact. It is rather the interplay of the senses.38

As he specified already in the 1956 ‘New Media in Arts Education’ (and repeated verbatim in the 1969 Counterblast):

It was to be a world in which the [1] eye listens, [2] the ear sees, and in which [3] all the senses assist each other in concert.39 

Then in the crucial 1958-1960 period, McLuhan made this point in regard to the newspaper in his 1959 essay, ‘Myth and Mass Media‘:

Since the telegraph (…) Western culture [has] been strongly shaped by (…) a field of awareness in which all the elements are practically simultaneous. It is this instantaneous character of the information field today, inseparable from electronic media, that confers the formal auditory character on the new culture. That is to say, for example, that the newspaper page, since the introduction of the telegraph, has had a formally auditory character and only incidentally a lineal, literary form.40

Just as physical materials may look closely alike but be composed of entirely different chemicals, so the newspaper looks like print to be read with the eyes, but is actually, according to McLuhan, something formally heard by the elementary ear. (As enlarged upon below, however, the elementary ear could never fully exclude the elementary eye since the two exist only together in variable relation or ratio. Exactly this was “the principle of complementarity” vouchsafed to Muller-Thym in February 1960.)

Instead of carrying a literal meaning, the ‘senses’ were to be understood as diverse configurations of space and time. As he already saw in 1951:

Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea, eye and ear. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process)

That is, “eye and ear” are not to be understood as physical organs or types of sense data, they are, essentially considered, different sorts of time-space configurations: “two kinds of labyrinth”.

In this way, the chemical and genetic model of defining a field by elementary structure was extended to include physics and relativity theory.41 The eye and its vision were to be understood as modes of contiguous horizontal space and linear time in which atomic units replaced one another in succession (like moments in time or places in space). The march of letters on a printed page, the assembly line and the railway were favorite images of McLuhan in describing such ‘visual’ time-space. In fundamental contrast, the ‘ear’ and its ‘hearing’ were to be understood as modes of discontinuous vertical space and simultaneous time in which multi-leveled complex units maintained themselves through dynamic homeostasis.  Here music, dance, sculpture and the vortex were favorite metaphors.

Whereas visual space is continuous, uniform, connected and static, the spaces created by all the other senses are discontinuous and dynamic. (McLuhan to Barbara Ward, February 9, 1973, Letters 466)

Like eye/ear, these time-spaces, too, according to McLuhan, exist only together in variable ratio.42

McLuhan often talked about these sensory modes and time-spaces in linear historical terms, of course — the preliterate ear giving way to the literate eye in Greece, the literate eye being gigantically reinforced by print with Gutenberg, and then this cyclopean print eye being subjected to catastrophic deformations by the return to the ear in new media like radio and the phonograph. But this perspective was itself visual, in his terms, and it was the essence of his proposal that all human experience is subject to “the principle of complementarity” — namely, that “any situation is subjectively completed as to the cycle of the senses” such that there is never any human consciousness that does not exemplify “ever new-made [eye/ear] ratios“.43 So it was that he always offset his linear story with other ones concerning “allatonceness” and the sort of instantaneous vertical descent described by Poe in the Maelstrom. Except through such complicating dynamics, indeed, how account for all the great art that did not conform to the predominant technologies of its time?44 Or even for all the tiny complications (“innumerable variants”) of everyday life (such as those McLuhan and his wife knew very well from their family life with six children)?45 

The tension between these linear and simultaneous takes may be seen in a further passage from ‘Myth and Mass Media‘:

The multilayered montage or “transparency,” with its abridgement of logical relationships, is as familiar in the cave painting as in cubism. Oral cultures are simultaneous in their modes of awareness. Today we come to the oral condition again via the electronic media, which abridge space and time and single-plane relationships, returning us to the confrontation of multiple relationships at the same moment.46 

When the logical relationships expressed in singular visual perspective are absent or suppressed “as [is] familiar in the cave painting as in cubism”, multiple orders are layered “at the same moment”.  Their presentation is “simultaneous”.  But at the same time McLuhan observed in this passage that “today we come to the oral condition again via the electronic media (…) returning us…” — where time, if indeed circular, is certainly not “simultaneous”. Such a return ‘takes time’. So two different modes of time were in play here and the question for McLuhan was, how can the two persist in coexistence? How is it that one or the other chronology (together with its implicated space) doesn’t swallow its rival? If “allatonceness” pertains, how can there be any genuine reality to chronological time? Or, conversely, if  chronological time is genuinely real, how can “allatonceness” obtain?47

The nub of McLuhan’s answer lay in the phrase “multilayered montage“.  Just as chemistry explicates materials in terms of their underlying elements and their properties, and just as genetics explicates hereditary characteristics in terms of their underlying genes and their properties, so would McLuhan explicate human experience in terms of its underlying media elements and their properties. Now the notion of such layers is very ancient.  Where changes are somehow predictable, it lies close at hand, it seems, to attribute this to ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’ or ‘humours’ or ‘forms’ of some sort, whose explanatory power derives from their existence in a different yet related order from that of the particulars of ordinary experience. (As Harold Innis appreciated, it was Eric Havelock’s genius to have seen that the question of when and where and how attributions of this sort arose, and with what results, was critical for investigations across the humanities and social sciences.) But it took many millennia to find a fruitful way to conceive these underlying elements in chemistry and genetics. And in the case of ‘psychological types’, despite countless suggestions over the 5000 years of the historical record, this has never yet been achieved.48 (This is not to say that great minds like Plato didn’t identify the required conceptualization.  Only that it was not developed in a collective discipline or disciplines — which is exactly the outstanding task to which McLuhan hoped to contribute. And where we today have the opportunity and obligation to contribute.)

The main reason for this general failure seems to be that the self-reference implicated in the study of human experience in human experience is more problematic than the self-reference implicated in the study of chemistry or genetics by humans composed of chemicals and genes. If human experience is grounded in formal types, potentially disabling difficulties seem to be implicated both as regards how consensus about them could ever be reached (a consensus that would be needed across such types) and as regards what would follow from any such consensus (seemingly some sort of unwelcome determinism).

McLuhan proffered several answers to the first of these questions. Namely, that the dis-coveries of sciences like chemistry and genetics amounted at the same time to a dis-covery of discovery itself. Here he followed and extended Whitehead. Further, that the new media amounted to externalizations of the senses and this enabled a new objectivity in regard to them  and their “consensus” — an objectivity that, in fact, was already at work in the new media and now needed only harvesting in the humanities and social sciences for their own purposes. Further yet, that the global village world had so conflated spaces and times that another sort of unprecedented objectivity was now before us in all the different cultures of the past and present.49 Then too, that the new criticism initiated by I.A. Richards had introduced a depth dimension to the study of poetic language and had shown that art since the eighteenth century had worked to uncover where science needed to go. Above all, that the simultaneity of the electric world enabled (or enforced) a startling compression of cause and effect through which both how we experience and what we experience are necessarily revolutionized. It followed that old arguments against the possibility of such a new science or sciences might no longer apply and that new possibilities for such a science or sciences might, and indeed would, appear.

The changing configurations of this massive structure inevitably alter the bias of [1] sight, [2] sound, and [3] sense [aka tactility] in each one of us, predisposing us now to one pattern of preference, and now to another. Today, via electronic means, the coexistence of cultures and of all phases of process in media development offers to mankind, for the first time, a means of liberation from the sensory enslavement of particular media in specialized phases of their development. (Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media, 1959)

As regards the second question, he had another: what will happen to us and to the planet absent such a consensus?

The essential thing for all of these scientific fields, McLuhan could see, was that their different “layers” could never be merged or conflated. Instead, in all of them it was exactly the persistent difference separating their two “layers” that enabled ongoing discoveries, aka new correlations between the two of them, now from one side of the coin, now from the other. Everything depended on a mediating “gap where the action is” — aka “tactility” or the “sensus communis“.

These two layers were called by McLuhan by many different names: concept and percept, message and medium, cliché and archetype, figure and ground, visual and acoustic space, diachronic and synchronic time.  All were isomorphic with his eye/ear media elements and all were essentially ratios such that one alone could not be, only the two together. An interesting result followed. In chemistry and genetics, and in McLuhan’s proposed general theory of communication, the sort of correlated binary relation characterizing their elementary structures also had to hold between the layers of what was to be explained (the explanandum) and what was to explain (the explanans). As will be further developed below, the critical implication was that the beginning of any science requires a kind of Rubik’s cube manipulation50 where the  explanandum and the explanans suddenly fall together with a certain notion of elementary structure and all are illuminated (though not without inevitable imprecision and error) — at once.

All history may be the demonstration of how difficult this movement is when we ourselves are the explanandum at stake. And yet must somehow conceive the explanans.

In the notes published posthumously in The Global Village, McLuhan described the ubiquity in human experience of “the principle of complementarity” aka of “the cycle of the senses“:

visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic. (55)

Hence:

every artifact of man [specifically including natural language]51 mirrors the shift between these two modes. (x)52

McLuhan characterized the “evershifting ratios” of the eye/ear elementary structure as reflecting differences in “preference” or “intensity” or “emphasis” or “stress” or “dominance” of one of them relative to the other. Via “the principle of complementarity”, more of one always entailed less of the other. This meant that the range of the co-variance of the nominator and denominator of these ratios could be imagined as forming what McLuhan called a “spectrum” or “axis”. The two ends of the spectrum would represent the greatest possible difference between the eye and the ear, one dominating at one end of the spectrum (while always remaining in ratio) and the other dominating at the other (ditto). Between these two “extreme” ends, all the possibilities of reduced antagonistic ratio between the eye and ear would be arrayed until, at the middle of the axis, the two would be in equal balance.

Another image of the range of forms could be represented along the same “spectrum” by tactility alone. A vertical line might represent the modulating function of touch at one end of the spectrum as 99% above the axis and 1% below. At the other end, the vertical line would be 99% below and 1% above. Between the two, the % of the line above and below the axis would gradually shift until at the middle it was 50% for both. The constant 100% at every point of the axis would express “the principle of complementarity” aka “the cycle of the senses” aka “interplay”, aka “equilibrium”, aka “substitutability”, aka “metaphor”, aka a commodius vicus of recirculation as the “Uni-versity of Being“.  The upper and lower ends of these vertical tactility lines would then be the eye and the ear (ie, the ‘eye’ and the ‘ear’).  The horizontal line of the spectrum would be the “keyboard” of “the whole of existence”.53

 Just as “the principle of complementarity” would structure every media element in McLuhan’s  explanans, so would it structure the relation of that explanans to the explanandum of all human experience (gen obj!). However, this implicated a problem of circularity that has bedeviled western thought at least since Plato (and surely for uncounted millennia before Plato). For where would knowledge of such a principle start? With the principle itself?  But haven’t we always started already (in very particular circumstances of language and historical era and social environment) and so inevitably come too late to make such a principled start? Or, if starting with a knowledge of such a principle is exactly what humans cannot do, if we are always beyond what is first (princeps), how find that which is first in or through the second, in or through what follows (secundus)? In this latter case, which is always the case, how get back to the start? 

The problem is unsolvable on Gutenbergian assumption. Where continuous linear sequence is assumed to be fundamental or, at least, where it is valorized such that interruption is taken as disabling54, a return to the beginning, or beginnings, can be nothing but illusory.  Jacques Derrida put the point against McLuhan as follows:

I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan’s discourse that I don’t agree with, because he’s an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that’s a very traditional myth which goes back to… let’s say Plato, Rousseau… And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense… I don’t mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we’re using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too.55

But what Derrida called “the overwhelming extension of writing” here was just what McLuhan called “the monarchy of print” aka “the Gutenberg galaxy”. 

Today the monarchy of print has ended and an oligarchy of new media has usurped most of the power of that 500-year-old monarchy. Each member of that oligarchy possesses as much power and message as print itself. l think that if we are to have a constitutional order and balance among these new oligarchs, we shall have to study their configurations, their psycho-dynamics and their long-term messages. To treat them as humble servants (audiovisual aids) of our established conventions would be as fatal as to use an x-ray unit as a space heater. The Western world has made this kind of mistake before. But now (…)  would be a very bad time to allow our own new media to liquidate the older media [on the monarchic model that we are supposedly overthrowing]. The message and form of electronic information pattern is the simultaneous. What is indicated for our time, then, is not succession of media and educational procedures, like a series of boxing champions, but coexistence based on awareness of the inherent powers and messages of each of these unique configurations. (Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media, 1959)

The dynamic “coexistence” at stake here was not only that of the eye and ear with their different time-spaces, but also that between an explanans of that first “complementarity” (gen subj!) and the explanandum of human being (gen obj!). Against Derrida’s assertion almost a quarter century later (and a few years after McLuhan’s death), McLuhan contended that “the overwhelming extension” of writing — “the monarchy of print” and of the eye — could never come loose, so to say, from speaking — from the ear and the voice providing “equilibrium” to the eye.  And, he continued, this correlation of the eye and ear was nothing less than the elementary structure which would enable, not merely (merely!) the rigorous investigation of all human experience, individual and collective, through a further “complementarity” of explanans and explanandum — it was also the only possible basis for the sort of exoteric consensus upon which human survival itself depended.

Derrida’s impression that McLuhan foresaw or desired “the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines” was itself a continuing gesture of the ghost of the Gutenberg galaxy whose haunting persistence to this day threatens to overwhelm us in a tsunami of exceptionalism (in Derrida’s case, that of writing).

All this was implicated in McLuhan’s capsule reference to:

This principle of a continuous dual structure56 for achieving order… (‘Spiral: Man as the Medium’, 1976, in Sorel Etrog: Images from the Film Spiral, 1987)

But already in 1960 he had come to see that:

it would be necessary to have a very complete knowledge of the new dynamics of our new technology in order to harmonize the twain. It is characteristic of the semi-aware products of print culture that they prefer to take a strong moral stand on one or another horn of a dilemma. They love dichotomies. (New Media and the New Education, 1960 = ‘Exhibit 1’ of Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

One peculiarity of center-margin relationships is that when freedom of interplay between these areas breaks down in any kind of structure, the tendency is for the center to impose itself upon the margin. In the field of attention which we call perception, when the center enlarges and the margin diminishes beyond a certain point, we are in that induced state called hypnosis.57 The dialogue has ended. (McLuhan to to Serge Chermayeff, December 19, 1960)

Exceptionalism was just a dichotomy where it was necessary to come down “on one or another horn of [the] dilemma” since the poles of the dichotomy were perceived not to be in “equilibrium” and dynamic correlation. But this was just to remain fixed in the “hypnosis” of “the Gutenberg galaxy” — an “hypnosis” which took itself to be ‘beyond relativity’ (“overwhelming”) when, in fact, it was just as relative (mediated) as any other human experience.58

The question remains of how McLuhan himself came to this insight.  Partly it was a matter of allowing the full complication of language to register, something he had learned above all from I.A. Richards:

let the artists of the last ten decades be our guide. The Romantics reacted strongly against the book as book, spotting it as the enemy of nature and of natural modes of learning. They insisted upon the creative imagination as the birthright of all, and began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image. This arduous search was taken up with great intensity by the Symbolists who realized that it could not be a merely visual image, but must include all the senses in a kind of dance. (New Media and the New Education, 1960 = ‘Exhibit 1’ of Report on Project in Understanding New Media)

He himself had taken up this “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” that he  described already in 1954 in these terms:

impressionism and symbolism alike insisted on attention to process in preference to personal self-expression. Self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded the discovery of the creative process59. Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practised the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

As had been the case with these poets and artists, this was not a matter for McLuhan of finding some objective (“merely visual”) “inclusive and integral image” that would simply constitute an  affirmation of the questing subject. Instead, such an image would necessarily include the subject as well as the object in a dynamic consensus “in a kind of dance”. As McLuhan put the great point in ‘Electronics and the Changing Role of Print’ (1959): “We simply have to (…) become contemporaries of ourselves.”  The required meth-od (from ‘odos) was ceaselessly to try out all the ways of not being “contemporaries of ourselves” in the unaccountable hope of finding an exit downwards and backwards60 to an “inclusive and integral image” capacious enough to embrace even and precisely all those modes of internal alienation and bifurcation:

to elicit the image of truth from past errors and to confirm the unity of man’s quest from the jarring discords of unremitting debate. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

McLuhan saw that this movement towards a sensus communis of all human experience was the underlying quest of the modern world:

It was my study of these men [Joyce, Pound, and Eliot] that made me aware that tracking backward from effects to hidden causes, to the reconstruction of mental states and motives, was a basic pattern of culture from Poe to Valéry.61

To participate in this “basic pattern” he had to exercise it on himself by internalizing “the jarring discords of unremitting debate” in an attempt to locate and define their “hidden causes”.  This was to seek:

to reamalgamerge, to use James Joyce’s term for this mysterious kind of retrograde metamorphosis.62

In an exercise of “prodigious experimentation” (‘Electronics and the Changing Role of Print’), “predisposing (…) now to one pattern of preference, and now to another” (ibid)63, this amounted to a self-vivisection of his own physical and psychological being:

it is precisely his fidelity to the vivisection of isolated moments that links Tennyson to the greatest work of his time and of ours. This concern with the spectrum of the emotional life was linked with Newton and with Gainsborough on one hand and with the best art and archaeology of the nineteenth century on the other. It is to be related to the tendency to abandon succession for simultaneity when our instruments of observation acquired speed and precision. Looking back from the nuclear age it is easy to recognize the pattern of ‘total field’ forming in the concern with totality of implication in the aesthetic moment, or spot of time. Lineal succession as a concept of order [aka “the overwhelming extension of writing”] cannot hold the same absolute position in our nuclear consciousness as it did in the great age of mechanism that stretches from Gutenberg to Darwin. (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)

How “easy to recognize” this was, may be judged from the concluding lines of McLuhan’s 1957 Coleridge essay (where Richards was constantly in his thoughts)64. Its description of such a “ceaseless quest” and “arduous search” amounted to a second sight or premonition of the oncoming stroke65 that would very nearly kill him:66

as with Rimbaud, the very magnitude of the change he [Coleridge] experienced in his own modes of thought and feeling (…) made (…) exhausting demands on mind and heart.67

 

 

  1. McLuhan attributed this insight, with which he evidently agreed, to his friend Peter F. Drucker, who “points out in his book Landmarks of Tomorrow that it is no longer feasible in decision-making to exercise delegated authority, but only the authority of knowledge.” ↩
  2. The Journal of Economic History, 20:4, December 1960. See previous note for McLuhan’s attribution of this contrast. ↩
  3. McLuhan: “why synesthesia is not only normal”… ↩
  4. McLuhan: “separation”. For McLuhan, ‘separation’ was not necessarily ‘imbalance’. Extreme separation was imbalance, while balance was complementary separation. ↩
  5. Re “the ratio among the components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely”, compare: “There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms.” (Take Today 22) ↩
  6. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that Gregor Mandel’s pioneering work in what would become genetics was rediscovered — four decades after his work studying pea plant generations and two decades after his death. ↩
  7. ‘Genes’ were unknown to Mandel — he proposed “Elementen”. ↩
  8. As T.S. Kuhn has shown, it is precisely the imperfection of science that opens a space for its successful investigation: “to be admirably successful is never, for a scientific theory, to be completely successful” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Sec. VII). ↩
  9. McLuhan felt that it was the high calling of Canada, as the counter-environment to the United States, to initiate such study: “Nature and history seem to have agreed to designate us in Canada for a corporate, artistic role. As the U.S.A. becomes a world environment through its resources, technology, and enterprises, Canada takes on the function of making that world environment perceptible (…) The ordinary procedures and environmental patterns of a society don’t become visible until the artist creates this counter-environment of art objects. This is a frontier problem that relates to Canada’s position as a frontier country, giving Canada a kind of world art role in making visible the vast, man-made American environment that is becoming a world environment. I don’t know whether that makes much sense at first, but as the United States becomes a world environment, some means is needed to make it visible and capable of appraisal, appreciation, and criticism — that, only the artist can do — and Canada is essentially in this artistic role.” (Canada, the Borderline Case, 1967) ↩
  10. McLuhan frequently used ‘indicate’ in its sense of ‘suggests the need for’. See, for example, the passage cited above from this same 1959 essay, ‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’: “What is indicated for our time, then, is not succession of media and educational procedures, like a series of boxing champions, but coexistence based on awareness of the inherent powers and messages of each of these unique configurations.” ↩
  11. Re “alchemical foreknowledge”, here is McLuhan the year before ‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’ in the 1958 ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’: “Kenneth Boulding’s The Image (1956) is an important event in advancing our knowledge of alchemical change in all types of structure. And we achieve this advance by seeing every kind of structure, from the botanical to the animal and human, as a knowledge structure subject to information in-put.” ↩
  12. See Understanding Me, 5 and 8. Here and throughout, emphasis has often been added to citations for emphasis. ↩
  13. This stroke is mentioned by Fitzgerald (97) and Coupland (132), but, strangely, not by Marchand or Gordon. From internal evidence in Report on Project in Understanding New Media, in which McLuhan describes his travels from June 1959 to June 1960, it seems to have happened in the second half of 1960 (although Carpenter remembered ‘1959’ in his account three decades later). Carpenter is cited in ‘Remembering McLuhan’ by Edward Ball in Art & Text 39, 1990, 51-53 as follows: “According to Ted Carpenter, in 1959 McLuhan suffered the first of many strokes, falling to the floor and flailing his arms in a seizure. ‘A priest at the hospital was called to deliver last rites’, said Carpenter, ‘but he recovered and eventually returned to teaching’.” Coupland: “Producing the book (Report on Project in Understanding New Media) came with a price. The two years spent making it were arguably the most exploration-rich of Marshall’s life. But the stress on his brain took a toll. In early (? more probably in the fall of) 1960 he suffered a stroke so severe that a priest was called in for last rites. Marshall survived but was forced to rest by his doctor. The medical event was kept under wraps, and in the fall of 1961, Marshall resumed teaching, with only a few people close to him aware of the intellectual and physical journey he’d been on.” Fitzgerald: “In a note attached to the Report, McLuhan reveals his health has broken under the stress of prolonged overwork on the project. (…) When McLuhan returns to teaching in the fall of 1960 (1961?), however, he cavalierly pretends he never suffered a stroke. But his family and close friends can clearly see the toll it’s taken: the man who was a robust and animated specimen has turned into an old man overnight. His nervous intensity’s more pronounced. He’s incapable of relaxing for more than five minutes at a stretch.”  McLuhan’s note (in a section of the Report called ‘Itinerary and Summary of Activities of the Consultant’): “(My) travel was amply rewarding in insight and friendship.  Unfortunately, it had adverse effects on my health, requiring hospitalization and a long period of rest, delaying the conclusion of these reports and the summarizing of the results of this project.” The Report is dated June 30, 1960 on its cover.  But this must have been the closing date of its research grant and not the date of its submission, since the Report includes references to events and publications later in 1960. ↩
  14. Compare Take Today (227): “The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis.” ↩
  15. As cited in full above, this phrase is from ‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’ (1959). ↩
  16. McLuhan’s letter to Chermayeff is described in Letters (277 note), but is not given there. It is in Chermayeff’s papers at Columbia. ↩
  17. McLuhan has the typo ‘is’ here. ↩
  18. See ‘Language itself‘ for further discussion. ↩
  19. McLuhan has ‘comprise’ here rather than ‘implicate’. His point is that language forms a system that is analogous to chemistry in that any word implicates a complete underlying system just as any material sample implicates not only the elements and properties comprising it, but also the whole of chemistry in which those  elements and properties have their place and meaning. Here he is from earlier in that same year of 1960: “The entire drama of conflict between individual and mass is most usefully studied under the aspect of the role of a poet in relation to his medium, because a language is a mass medium in all senses. Nobody in particular made it. Yet individuals have always to think and dream and feel in terms of this mass medium.” (Technology, the Media, and Culture) ↩
  20. Letters, 277-278 ↩
  21. Letters, 280 ↩
  22. McLuhan: “speak yet”. ↩
  23. ‘A Common Language Nonetheless’, Audio Visual Communication Review, 9:2, 1961, 147-148. The order of these two passages has been reversed. ↩
  24. McLuhan to Tyrwhitt as cited above from December 23, 1960. ↩
  25. See ‘What is the present?‘ for further discussion. ↩
  26. As Nietzsche demonstrated, such “fragmentation” inexorably precipitates nihilism — and  nihilism inexorably entails the loss of the “broken fragments” themselves: “With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!” ↩
  27. The two came to the department in the same year, 1946. ↩
  28. McLuhan has a bracketed note here: “this by the way applies also to our own sense lives in which each sense typically translates itself into each of the other five senses”. The faculty of such translation is the sensus communis. ↩
  29. Already in 1948 McLuhan had written to his friend Felix Giovanelli: “in an age like ours (…) every motion of the mind (individual) is seen to involve the whole mind (society) and its entire relation to Being.” This letter is not in Letters; it is in the Pound papers at Indiana. ↩
  30. The first sentence of Finnegans Wake, completing its last, is: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Back to Howth Castle and Environs = back to HCE = back to here comes everybody = back to human being = back to what human being is and what its calling is. ↩
  31. The “Uni-versity of Being” is a dual genitive, but first of all a subjective genitive! ↩
  32. Both I.A. Richards and McLuhan knew that McLuhan’s realization of this principle was in part due to Richards’ attention to it in his literary criticism. In his 1968 book, So Much Nearer, Richards wrote of the “Principle of Complementarity”: “This immensely important topic— publicized recently by Marshall McLuhan…”. But, as was not at all unusual for McLuhan, he extended the application of the principle far beyond what Richards contemplated. ↩
  33. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 313-314.  A few weeks before, McLuhan had written to Harry Skornia: “The last few days have seen a major breakthrough in media study. Working with the fact that each medium embodies one or more of the human senses, it struck me that we are impelled in perceiving each medium to complete the scale or spectrum of our sensorium. So that, radio impels us to provide a visual world moment by moment, and photography, which is so adequate in visual terms, compels us to complete the tactual and kinesthetic part of the sensorium. Thus the degree of sensuous completion is one way in which the lines of force in any medium are structured” (25 January 1960, cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding 399-400, n99). And the next month, on March 11, 1960, McLuhan wrote to John Wain: “As far as the project (of Understanding New Media) goes, rather large developments and discoveries have occurred in the last few weeks which will enable me to complete it in a very satisfactory manner while, at the same time, opening a new phase of media study…” (Letters 266). In Letters the editors identify this “project” as “the (Gutenberg) project”, but McLuhan was referring to Project 69. ↩
  34. Letters, 271. ↩
  35. McLuhan has ‘comprise’ here. ↩
  36. McLuhan was schooled in the topic by Muller-Thym in St Louis, especially via Muller-Thym’s paper ‘Common Sense, Perfection of the Order of Pure Sensibility’ in The Thomist 2:315–343, 1940.  His consideration of the topic was then reawakened in Toronto at the end of the decade by the attention paid to the eye and ear in historical and contemporary media by Havelock, Richards and Innis. Here Richards may have been the first to correlate Havelock’s theme of oral and literate mindsets with the ear and the eye in his BBC broadcast from October 5, 1947, ‘The Spoken and the Written Word’. Innis in particular then frequently recurred in his last few years to the topic of the eye and ear as media correlates and organizing principles of experience. By the early 1950s, then, McLuhan had the notions of the fundamental role of media in social and cultural change and of the correlation of such media with the senses.  And from Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound and Joyce he had the further notion of the reduplication in art of the process of the generation of experience via such media. But what he did not yet have, and would not have until the end of this further decade, was the idea of an elementary structure of the media and the senses that could serve to focus collective investigation in this new field or fields. Importantly, it was only with a such a notion of elementary structure that he could begin to know through it what the media and the senses are! ↩
  37. The great problem here was how to communicate about the essentials of communication in communication? Or, as this question might be put, how are the eye and ear, which we all know very well, at the same time the ‘eye’ and the ‘ear’ that we don’t appreciate at all? The same problem had to be solved on the way to chemistry where all sorts of seemingly well known materials like gold, silver, iron, tin, mercury, sulphur, etc, had to be appreciated also as elements.  Navigating to this ‘also’ is nothing less than the vocation of thinking. ↩
  38. ‘Prospect’, Canadian Art Magazine, # 81, 363-366, September/October, 1962. ↩
  39. In the same essay (‘New Media in Arts Education’): “The organization of experience here is orchestral or acoustic rather than visual. Yet the various units of experience are visualized.” Understanding Media reverts to this point repeatedly.  Eg: “the eye must act as hand” (29, cf 288 and 334); “The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory” (64); “touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind” (108); “much of our hearing takes place through the skin itself” (122); etc. ↩
  40. Compare: “the oral is accidentally the spoken but essentially the instantaneous. Because auditory spatial structure is a simultaneous field of relations.” (The Electronic Revolution in North America, 1958). “The instantaneous” = the tactile, the sensus communis. ↩
  41. Art as Survival in the Electric Age (1973): “Baudelaire translated Poe (…) and took on this idea of simultaneity that if you want to write a poem you have to start with the effect and then look around for the causes. And this became the awareness of acoustic space in which the beginning and the end are at the same time. This is the kind of space and time in which we live now. Einstein was only catching up with Poe in the twentieth century when he invented space-time or relativity theory.” ↩
  42. In formulating relativity theory, Einstein had no need to assemble all possible experiences of time-spaces. What he needed was a formula that covered all such experiences, no matter how they might unfold in particular (and even if they could not unfold in particular — like traveling at the speed of light!). In the same way, McLuhan was not interested in sampling (so to say) all the various modes of human experience but in the definable range of their possibility. ↩
  43. Global Village: “In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind.” (48) ↩
  44. This is a point methodically avoided by most McLuhan scholarship. ↩
  45. “Today we experience that kind of bewilderment that ensues when an individual and private culture begins to resume an involvement in the corporate and collective modes of awareness with all the depth and commitment that implies. Our most immediate experience of this takeover of individual culture by the corporate and collective vision of tribal man is in our own homes. The present generation gap between teenagers and their parents is a major manifestation of a technological gap between the mechanical and the electric cultures.” (‘Canada, the Borderline Case’, 1967) ↩
  46. McLuhan’s use of the term ‘abridgement’/’abridge’ here is intentionally strange.  He employs it in the sense of shortening to the extent of annulling — as if ‘a-bridgement’ might be taken as an example of an alpha privative (like a-moral) to designate ‘not-bridging’ or even an active ‘gapping’.  This was what he had long called “sudden juxtaposition without copula” (eg, in the 1949 ‘Eliot’s Historical Decorum’). ↩
  47. In the world of 2018, linear time has swallowed synchronic time.  But that such swallowing is possible is a key consideration for any attempt at ‘understanding media’. As McLuhan explicitly noted: “It seems necessary to postulate a profound motivation for such universal somnambulism.” (Take Today, 192, emphasis added.) Ultimately, this topic implicates “the main question“. ↩
  48. T.S. Kuhn: “History suggests that the road to a firm research
    consensus is extraordinarily arduous.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Sec. I) ↩
  49. See note 16 above. ↩
  50. In one of his many 1960 writings, McLuhan referred to the need for “a sort of intellectual judo” (Technology, the Media, and Culture). ↩
  51. “English is itself a mass medium, as is any language employed by any society.” (Myth and Mass Media, 1959) ↩
  52. Further statements along these lines in The Global Village include: “Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary (…) a foot, as it were, in both visual and acoustic space” (45); “No matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres” (62); “Within each of man’s inventions (extensions of himself) left- and right-hemisphere modes of thought struggle for dominance” (102). ↩
  53. See ‘The keyboards of existence‘. ↩
  54. Derrida: “The book on grammatology is not a book for grammatology; it’s also a book which insists on the limits of grammatology.” Reference in the following note. ↩
  55.  Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview, with Paul Brennan, On the Beach, 1, 1983. ↩
  56.  Compare a story told about Eric Voegelin: “At his first lecture (at the University of Florida in the mid 70s), he was confronted by the Dean of Graduate Studies regarding ‘this thing you call the two poles of human existence’. Voegelin went on to elaborate but the Dean became exacerbated by what he was hearing. He responded, somewhat irritably, ‘I don’t know how you can stand there and claim that there are only two poles to human existence. Why not five or six?’ Voegelin paused a moment, adjusted his glasses, and said in a very low voice: ‘I am sorry to disappoint you’.” ↩
  57. Hence McLuhan’s denial that “monism is a resolution of Cartesian dualism” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 247). ↩
  58. Precise note should be made of the essential difference between how such exceptionalism understands itself (as “overwhelming”, that is, as situated outside or beyond the relativity of eye/ear time-spaces) and how it would be understood in McLuhan’s proposed analysis as necessarily situated within that spectrum of relativity (aka, that spectrum of modes of media-tion). The potential power of McLuhan’s suggestion lies in the fact that any such exceptionalism may be combated indirectly by the demonstration that analysis based on the spectrum returns expanding consensual results, like chemistry or genetics, whereas the attempt to proceed aside from the spectrum, like speculation about physical materials aside from chemistry or about heredity aside from genetics, gets nowhere. But ‘nowhere’ is, of course, just our current situation in the humanities and social sciences: if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. ↩
  59. “Attention to process” and “discovery of the creative process” point to McLuhan’s later discussions of process cited above in, eg, his May 1960 letter to Claude Bissell: “When stress moves from product to process, all of the subjects in the university also become substitutable for one another. At the very high level of information movement in which to-day we are involved, we find ourselves less in a university of subjects than in what Meister Eckhart called the university of being.” (Letters 273). ↩
  60. “The neolithic man (who came) after the age of the (mesolithic) hunter has suddenly (today after 8 millennia or so) dropped aside or dropped back, and we are back once more in the age of the hunter, only this time the hunter is a fact-finder and a researcher…” (Towards an Inclusive Consciousness, 1967). ↩
  61. McLuhan to Etienne Gilson, January 19, 1971, Letters 421. ↩
  62. The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation, 1961. ↩
  63. The full passage from ‘Electronics and the Changing Role of Print’ is cited above. ↩
  64. See McLuhan’s letter to Richards from July 12, 1968 (Letters 355) where the two, Richards and Coleridge, are virtually identified: “I owe you an enormous debt since Cambridge days. I also owe a great deal to S.T.C.” Richards published Coleridge on Imagination in 1934, McLuhan’s first year in Cambridge. ↩
  65. To compare, on September 28, 1967, two months before undergoing an emergency brain operation on November 26, McLuhan gave his inaugural lecture at Fordham that was titled ‘Open-Mind Surgery’. ↩
  66. Twenty years later, of course, another such stroke would kill him. ↩
  67. On the immediate other side of his stroke, in 1962 — perhaps reflecting his own now diminished physical and mental capacity and/or the state of a world where an external sensus communis was being put to work everywhere but in unknown and unconstrained ways — McLuhan wrote these rather chilling lines in his ‘Prospect’ piece in Arts Canada: “Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him his only possibility of survival and sanity. 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. (…) When you put the nervous system outside (as an external sensus communis), fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. (…) 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 fear (McLuhan has ‘dread’ here) that animal, that famine, and so on, but (you dread) this condition. (…) Man lives in total anxiety in the age of electricity. Anxiety means utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare“. See note 37 above for the full reference. It may be guessed that McLuhan’s inside knowledge of “these terrible shocks” and this “dread” and this “total anxiety” derived from the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” on which he had been engaged since the late 1940s and which amounted to his ‘second conversion‘. This had been a decade and more of “utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened (and at the same time deep, ‘odos ano kato) kind of existence”. ↩

Havelock, McLuhan & the history of education

Just a note about the Thomas Nashe dissertation. Studying Nashe’s style led me to look at the rhetorical education of his day.  I soon got on to the history of this form of symbolic action. Having tracked it back to 5th Century Athens, I moved forward, relating the rhetorical program to the dialetical studies, and especially, to the grammatical studies.  (…) Philologists since the Renaissance have pooh-poohed this inclusive approach [of the trivium and particularly of grammar], but it lasted until the time of Bishop Sprat [1635-1713] and got going again with the Symbolists. (McLuhan to Tom Wolfe, October 25, 1965, Letters 326)1

Homer knows nothing about private identity: his world is that of the acoustic epic, the tribal encyclopedia of memorized wisdom which Eric Havelock reported so ably in his Preface to Plato. The Homeric epics were part of this acoustic wisdom that preceded literacy and were phased out by literacy. Homer was wiped out by literacy, even though he had been the educational establishment of the Greeks for centuries. (…) Along came the phonetic alphabet, and Plato seized on it and said: “Let us abandon Homer and go for rational education.” Plato’s war on the poets was not a war on poetry but a war on the oral tradition of education. (McLuhan, ‘Living in an Acoustic World‘, 1974.)

Although scholars regularly attribute Havelock’s influence on McLuhan to his 1963 Preface to Plato, there are many indications in McLuhan’s writings that he was already clear about Havelock’s main points in that monograph years before its appearance. Here he is, for example, in the 1960 ‘New Media and the New Education’, whose importance to McLuhan may be seen in the fact that he published this essay repeatedly with different titles and small changes and even included it as an ‘Exhibit’ in his Report on Project in Understanding New Media from that same year of 1960:

oblivion of the structure of the page, and of print itself, extends to writing in the ancient world as well. For the alphabetic translation of the audible into the visible had huge consequences such as mark off Greece and Rome from all other societies which lacked phonetic means of codifying and translating experience into analytic, visible terms. 

McLuhan continued this passage in ‘New Media and the New Education’ with reference to education after Gutenberg, but there are many parallels in his description to Havelock’s longtime investigation into changes in Greek education following the introduction of literacy:

Let us suppose for a moment that a team of present-day [educational] 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 [tale]2 and its formidable extension in oral exegesis and group disputation? Since we know that [literacy]3 wiped out the educational procedures of the preceding centuries, we can say that the testers would have been quite wrong in asking whether the new could compete with the old when the new had only one mode of procedure, namely to erase and to brainwash the older culture. Our testers today are still geared to the static assumptions of the print form and ignore the structural dynamics of the electronic form. In 1500, as in 1960, they could report variations in the facility with which educational skills in a wide range of subjects are achieved by print or by educational television. But they have no regard for the new patterns of perception and sensibility which are subliminally imposed on us all by new structures for codifying and moving information. For the new structures modify our means of apprehending past and present. They recreate our sense of space and time, of teaching and learning.4

In sum, as the same essay concluded:

any new structure for codifying experience and of moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives, even without benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance. That is what I’ve always meant by “the medium is the message“.

Havelock had been investigating along these lines for decades.  He had, for example, published ‘Evidence For The Teaching Of Socrates’ in 1934 and ‘The Significance of the Greek Sophist’ in 1938. A lecture before the APA in 1940 was titled ‘The Professional Technique of the Sophists’. While he was not yet focused then on the fundamental role of literacy in educational changes dating to around 400 BC, he was already clear in the 1930s that a teaching system in which memorization and family apprenticeship were key features of education was giving way in the late 5th century in Athens to a new professional system of instruction associated with the sophists. He sensed that profound changes in social and individual identity were precipitated by these changes and that Plato and Aristotle might be read against this background as theoreticians and practitioners (in the Academy and Lyceum) of a revolution in education that was then affecting all aspects of Greek life and culture.

When McLuhan arrived in Toronto in 1946 he did so as an expert in the history of education in western civilization.  As he described in his note to Tom Wolfe given above, he had written his 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis on the “quarrel” of the disciplines in the educational trivium only a few years before and earlier in that year of 1946 he had brought this history from his thesis (which had terminated with Thomas Nashe in 1600) into the present day with an essay published in the Classical Journal, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’.5

Surely McLuhan would have been greatly interested to learn that a young (only 8 years older than himself) professor of classics at Toronto was concentrating his research on education changes leading up to the point in time and place from which McLuhan’s Nashe thesis took its start. Havelock was, in effect, working on the prolegomena to McLuhan’s study of the trivium. (When McLuhan finally finished The Gutenberg Galaxy for publication in 1962, it was exactly with this prolegomena that it took its beginning. For discussion see ‘Parry and Lord in McLuhan‘.) Although by 1946 Havelock was already beginning to focus on oral vs literate information storage as a key to such educational and social changes, it was almost certainly the broader topic of the history of education which first interested McLuhan in his work. 

In the 1940s Havelock modulated his research in the directions of media research and of literary analysis, particularly of Virgil.  Both of these would profoundly influence McLuhan.  But it seems that it was the history of education which provided the common background between Havelock and McLuhan upon which these influences would have their effect.

 

  1. McLuhan’s 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis was nominally on Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), but was mostly a history of the trivium over the two millennia from 400 BC to 1600. ↩
  2. McLuhan has ‘manuscript’ here, not ‘tale’, since he is describing the transition from the middle ages to the renaissance following the introduction of printing. ‘Tale’ has been substituted to highlight the parallels with Havelock’s research into the earlier transition in Greece from orality to the literary. ↩
  3. McLuhan has ‘printing’ here, not ‘literacy’. See the prior note for the reasoning behind this substitution. ↩
  4. Since McLuhan had been thinking and publishing along these lines throughout the 1950s, it is conceivable that the influence between his work and Preface to Plato may have run, in some yet to be determined part, in the other direction from what is usually supposed. ↩
  5. ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ was originally a lecture given in St Louis in late 1944. ↩

The keyboards of existence

If there is a “keyboard” of existence, who plays it?1

1951
The point here is that this kind of single-level awareness [in Dos Passos] is not possible to anybody seriously manipulating the multiple keyboards of Joyce’s art. (Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility )

1952
The beloved detective story will serve as an example of a supposedly non-cultural type of expression. Built around the character of an omniscient and omni-competent sleuth whose lineage stretches backwards from Holmes to Da Vinci it manages to be popular poetry about the modern city. The sleuth is a master of every facet of the city. With the skill of an organist at a five-keyboard instrument, he can touch any note or level of metropolitan life. He is familiar with all the dives and clubs. He knows the whole range of drinks, foods, clothes, perfumes, as well as every intricacy of transportation routes and schedules. Anybody in the future who wished to acquaint himself with the full range and texture of the modern big town would not be able to find in reputable novels anything comparable to the poetic reportage of the detective story. The raw mechanical power that is imparted to the ordinary metropolitan citizen by his milieu is found in the gestures and idiom of the sleuth. (Technology and Political Change)

1954
Joyce has shown us is how to do for the whole of existence what the sleuth does with the keyboard of the city. Today we are compelled by the quantity of available social and political facts to learn a new (…) language for swiftly mastering the inner dynamics [through]2 the outer carapace of facts. (New Media as Political Forms)

1964
the press opened up the “human interest” keyboard after the telegraph had restructured the press medium (Understanding Media, 52)

  1. In Un Coup de Dés, Mallarmé writes of a “childlike shade”, of an “immemorial ulterior demon”, and of a “corpse”, exposed to “the virgin index” of possibilities — “in sight of all non-existent human outcomes”. ↩
  2. McLuhan has ‘by’. ↩

McLuhan reading Havelock’s Crucifixion

McLuhan referenced Eric Havelock’s Crucifixion of Intellectual Man1 in his 1954 speech to the Catholic Renascence Society, ‘Eliot and the Manichean Myth’:

Today many thoughtful people are torn between the claims of time and space, and speak even of The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man as he is mentally torn in these opposite directions.

From an unpublished review written in 1952 or 1953 it seems that McLuhan had read Havelock’s book immediately after it appeared. For the second half of Havelock’s book has his translation of Prometheus by Aeschylus and in the first part much discussion is given to Zeus in the play as an evil god. In ‘The Heart Of Darkness’, a review of Melville’s Quarrel With God (1952) by Lawrence Thompson, McLuhan observes:

The condition of men in this [split] world [of Melville] is that of a Prometheus betrayed by a devil-god.

  1. Published in 1950 in the UK and in 1951 in the US. ↩

How it is

1952
the academic world suffers from excessive humility. It is characterized by the conviction that its thoughts and pursuits are as insignificant as the Chamber of Commerce would like to think. Accepting this evaluation of itself, the academic world cannot be bothered to assume social responsibility or to talk seriously about its own pursuits even to itself.1 Perhaps there would be fewer specialist meetings and conferences if men of letters were sufficiently expert in literature to be interested in modern physics. And physicists would want to know much more about letters if they were aware that poetic method was always at least a decade ahead of laboratory method. (Review of Auden: An Introductory Essay)

  1. See the similar sentiments expressed by Harold Innis in the mid 1930s as cited in Innis and McLuhan in 1936. ↩

Human being: navigator between worlds

a new concept of the nature of thought (Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another?)1

In ‘The Implications of Cultural Uniformity’2 McLuhan offers the following:

William Empson has described the role of the semiconscious navigator between worlds, in his ‘Arachne’ [1928] which opens:

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth’s vast hot iron, cold space’s empty waves:

King spider, walks the velvet roof of streams:
Must bird and fish, must god and beast avoid:
Dance, like nine angels, on pin-point extremes.

His gleaming bubble between void and void,
Tribe-membrane, that by mutual tension stands,
Earth’s surface film, is at a breath destroyed.3 

“Worlds” for McLuhan are structured by variable binary relations between the oral and the literate or the auditory and the visual or the ear and eye.4 This is an elementary5 structure that, as Empson says, “by mutual tension stands“. All human experience and identity is grounded in this ear/eye structure:

every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes (Global Village, x)6

The spectrum of these elementary forms stretches from an extreme emphasis on the eye at one end of its range to extreme emphasis on the ear at the other. All the degrees of reduced antagonism between the two are arrayed along the axis between these opposed poles. Starting from one end of the spectrum, the eye pole, say, “extreme” emphasis on it as against the ear gradually diminishes toward the centre of the range; at the centre the emphasis on both the eye and the ear is in balance, favoring neither one of the two; from the centre in the other direction, stress on the ear as against the eye gradually increases until it reaches its “extreme” emphasis at the other end. As Take Today has it: 

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the (…) eye and ear… (22)

Another text from this same period in the early 1970s, ‘The Medieval Environment’7 from 1974, has this:

there are two great principles of organization present in Western culture, the acoustic and the visual, and (…) these principles have enlarged and reversed themselves at various time in the past 2500 years of Western development (…) the culture of the eye and [of] the ear, of the outer-directioned rational man, on one hand, and the inner-directed intuitive man, on the other hand, are antithetic and incompatible. The other possibility, of course, is that they may be (…) complementary [ie, at the centre of the range of their possible relations where the emphasis on both the eye and the ear is in balance, favoring neither one of the two relative to the other].8

In this same essay, McLuhan turns to the question of time as times in the work of Saussaure:

Structural linguists, following the lead of Ferdinand de Saussure, have divided the approaches of their studies into diachronic and synchronic modes. The diachronic approach is chronological or developmental or sequential, and is familiar to most students of Western history and language and institutions.  The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied.  Another way of putting it is to say that the diachronic approach adopts a visual point of view, while the synchronic method prefers the simultaneity of the acoustic method.9 If the diachronic offers a point of view and continuous, rational exposition, the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities. The visual faculty (…) offers a world of continuity and homogeneity (…) whereas the acoustic world (…) offers a world that is discontinuous and multi-locational…

On the one hand, McLuhan explicitly correlates the diachronic/synchronic relation with the eye/ear relation so that the “variants” of diachronic/synchronic emphasis, like those of eye/ear, may be taken to define the range or spectrum of possible worlds. But, on the other hand, the diachronic/synchronic relation has an additional application which is essential to the proposed analysis. Here, diachronic/synchronic is not isomorphic with the eye/ear as the “two basic extreme forms” of the spectrum of worlds, but with “antithetic”/”complementary” where “antithetic” names both “extreme” ends of the spectrum of forms (all the “innumerable variants” of eye versus ear and of ear versus eye) while “complementary” names the middle of that spectrum (where eye and ear are balanced). Now it is this middle (“Medieval”) or  “synchronic approach” to any situation which first and only gives access to the spectrum of world forms from which the structure of that situation derives:10

The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied (…) the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities.

Compare chemistry. It, too, “regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied” (namely, Mendeleev’s table and its associated laws and properties defining the chemical field) and it is “multi-locational” in vertical perspective since chemistry sees through any and every physical sample to the structures and laws exemplified by it. Notably, it is essential to chemistry that (a) the samples it studies and (b) its principles do not merge on a single level, but remain “multi-leveled”, each forever different from the other and, in their different ways, each forever subject to further specification.11

Ordinary experience proceeds (or, at least, takes it that it proceeds) diachronically from moment to moment, continuous and unbroken. It is like the mariners’ ship in Poe’s story sailing on the surface of the sea. The synchronic cuts across this sailing12, like the Maelstrom, which operates to wrench the mariners’ vessel out of its horizontal bearing into a catastrophic vertical descent (where the mariner or “navigator” is exposed to other ‘vessels’ and to the question of which one to ‘ride’). The synchronic in its relation to the diachronic is therefore not only a mode of characterizing possible worlds (where the relations of the two are isomorphic with those of ear and eye); it is also the one and only way in which access to the spectrum of elementary forms is to be gained. To repeat:

The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied (…) the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities.

For McLuhan there is a synchronic gap (where the action is) in every moment of human experience (where each is necessarily structured by some eye/ear relation):

The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space (Global Village, 4)13

It is in this “invisible” gap “between visual and acoustic space” — the “common sense” or “tactility” which both links and differentiates them14 — that a vertical motion is enacted through which the spectrum of elementary experiential forms are exposed and ‘marked’ (or ‘re-marked’) in some way. “Consciousness is also a multileveled event” (From Cliché to Archetype, 117) and in its synchronic aspect, perpetually cutting across its diachronic bearing, this “multileveled event” unfolds as the essential exposure to “the full range of the matters” at stake, namely, “worlds”. This exposure is what McLuhan repeatedly termed the “drama of cognition“.

In this way, access to the array of possible worlds always has been gained in every present “moment or each facet of any situation” — but this process is nearly always subject to blackout. The scientific investigation of ‘worlds’ therefore only does consciously what unconsciously takes place in every moment in the synchronic generation of experience. Hence “the link between the stages of apprehension [in every moment of all experience] and the creative process [of scientists and artists]”.15

What happens in this perpetual exposure is that certain possibilities along the spectrum of the formal possibilities (the “sensory ground rules”16) receive “emphasis” such that a kind of melody is constellated. Such a ‘melody’ played on the harmonium of the forms of worlds is identity (individual and social) as a “pattern” of experience. The great question is: if identity results from this synchronic process — who plays it?

McLuhan names the agent in this process — an agency that is human being — as “the semiconscious navigator between worlds”.17 These worlds, between which human being perpetually navigates, are the worlds of lived experience and the array of forms beneath it as its ground:

To say that we live mythically today while continuing to think conventionally may help to draw attention to the technological18 gap in our ordinary experience. (Environment As Programmed Happening)

Since this ‘mythical’ ground of forms is the range of possible worlds19, ‘here’, too, the human being is a “navigator between worlds”.

So it is that human being is always actively navigating “between worlds” in three different ‘time-spaces’ at once: the figured world of lived experience (which varies between macro-worlds like east and west and between micro-worlds like the different individualities of each one of us); the grounding spectrum of ‘worlds’ where the possibilities of world structure are constantly in the process of re-view and improvised activation; and the ano-kato vortex between these two such that the latter are encountered below and the former are generated above.

  1. In McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967). ↩
  2. Published in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, ed C.W.E. Bigsby, 1975, 43-56. ↩
  3. Empson’s poem is discussed in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) by F.R. Leavis. McLuhan was an enthusiastic Leavisite for more than a decade after encountering the man and his work at Cambridge. He mentions Leavis’ book in ‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis’ (1944) as “assessing the precise changes in the poetic climate which have occurred in consequence of the impact of Yeats, Eliot, Hopkins, and Pound on our language”. Hugh Kenner wrote to Philip Marchand of the time in 1946 after he met McLuhan: “He pushed at me T.S. Eliot, who’d been the type of unintelligibility to my Toronto profs. And he had me read Richards’ Practical Criticism, Leavis’ New Bearings in English Poetry, and (eventually) the entire file of Scrutiny. He kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I’d never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years I’d lived half a mile away from him…. So many windows opened! (Hugh Kenner to Philip Marchand, March 18, 1987, cited in Marchand’s bio of McLuhan, 102). Empson was in Toronto and had dinner with McLuhan and Frye in 1973. This could have been the motivation behind McLuhan looking into Empson again and citing his poem in his 1975 essay. Further, McLuhan’s citation may be a hint of what first set him on his life’s work during his time in Cambridge from 1934 to 1936: Leavis, Eliot and the question of what is tradition, continuity and — communication? “Tribe-membrane, that by mutual tension stands”… ↩
  4. “All rational propositions can be reduced to binomial terms” (Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another? 1967). ↩
  5. “Every medium is in some sense a universal” (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954). ↩
  6. In chemistry, to compare, every material sample “mirrors the shift between these two modes“ of the proton and electron. The Global Village reverts over and over again to the notion that the eye and ear in their formal sense exist only in relation and therefore must always be understood structurally: “Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable (…) yet, at the same time, as complementary — a foot, as it were, in both visual and acoustic space” (45); “In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind” (48). ↩
  7. The full title of this essay is ‘The Medieval Environment’: Yesterday or Today?’. ‘Today’ points to the treatment of the synchronic in this essay as cited in this post above. It is because ‘the Medieval Environment’ is a present synchronic possibility that McLuhan observes as a hint to us now: “a time when such a process of using both the visual and the acoustic, the rational and the intuitive, in some sort of equilibrium, however shifting, such is the time we have learned to call the ‘Medieval Period’.” McLuhan considered modern art and science, if not his age itself, as deploying in such a “‘Medieval period”. ↩
  8. See note 6 above. ↩
  9. Re “the simultaneity of the acoustic method”, see ‘We need a new picture of knowledge’ (1963): “It is important to observe that the quality of the new ‘structural’, as opposed to the old lineal, sequential and mechanical, is the quality of the simultaneous. It is the simultaneous ‘field’ of multitudinous events in equipoise or interplay that constitutes the awareness of causality that is present in ecological and nuclear models of perception today. Our electric mode of shaping the new patterns of culture and information movement is not mechanical but biological.” Also McLuhan to Ralph Cohen regarding Saussure: “His celebrated distinction between ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’ is quite basically the contrast between the world of the eye and the world of the ear, between sequential and simultaneous. La langue is natural, simultaneous, total and hidden, while la parole is obvious and conscious.” (July 11, 1974) ↩
  10. The synchronic is both a formal world possibility and the realization of that possibility in the world of lived experience.  The difficult knot of communication implicated here lies in the fact that access to the former is obtained only through the latter, but awareness in the latter necessarily originates only in the former. As Eliot says in Four Quartets (Burnt Norton), the instigation of such awareness comes “before the beginning and after the end”. ↩
  11. In Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan writes of “the world of space and time in the art of Chaucer (as) discontinuous and multileveled”, of “a multileveled exegesis” and “a multileveled approach” (all on 49); of the “multidimensional” and of the “many spaces in multileveled time” (55); of the “multispatial” (229). Again in From Cliché to Archetype on the “grammatical method”: it is “multi-leveled exegesis”, a “multi-leveled literary approach” that therefore is able to investigate “the multi-leveled phenomena of the world” (all on 128). ↩
  12. Cf, Socrates’ ‘second sailing’ (τὸν δεύτερον πλοῦν, Phaedo 99c-d). ↩
  13. Not only between but also within each of the “two great principles” there is a corresponding gap: “The sounds we utter are structured in acoustic space by noise spaced in silence. What silence is to acoustic space, darkness is to visual space” (Counterblast, 1969, 117). ↩
  14. See ‘The humble ditch‘. ↩
  15. Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951. ↩
  16. Environment As Programmed Happening (1968). ↩
  17. See the discussion of the ‘rider’ in Vortex atoms in 19th century physics. ↩
  18. For McLuhan, the archetypal technology is language and there is no human being without language. Hence, there is no human being without such a “technological gap”. ↩
  19. See Archetypes as inherently plural. ↩

Virtual coinage

1972
PROMISES PROMISES PROMISES — People of promise, and promising enterprises, like promissory notes, have become inseparable from the promises of promotion and advertising itself. Money in turn is a promise to pay promises, and the plausible con man has returned as the stand-in for the traditional gentleman.
Inflation Is Pollution: The Dilution of Promises — Inflation is a tribute levied by those who know on those who don’t. As W. C. Fields saw it, “Never give a sucker an even break.” In a world of promises and con men only the sucker will take valuable time to acquire socially useful skills, such as carpentry or plumbing or “keeping” the books. (Take Today, 79)

1974
Like our money, which is a ‘promise to pay’, our advertising and P.R. only promise to pay promises.  (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

The world too much with us

1974
When Sputnik put the entire planet inside a man-made environment of information, the world may have seemed to become much smaller, but it also became much more obsessive and demanding. The power of the world to invade every feature of our personal lives has been given a kind of medieval Morality Play treatment (…) It is almost as if we had revived “for real” [for real!] the popular medieval narratives (…) As the world manifests its credentials and rewards in ever more theatrical terms, it becomes ever more difficult for some to resist the world (…) Even theatrically speaking, the drama of the world has become more and more a mockery of merely human satisfactions, when it is quite evident that the richest people in the world have to become “hotel hermits” for security reasons, and when the most powerful people in the world lead lives of frantic uncertainty. (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

Present depicted 60 years ago

1959
since [the advent of] printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, press, telegraph, photograph, movie, radio, and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media has led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. Whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance  awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development. (Electronics and the Changing Role of Print)

 

 

Eliot on Scylla and Charybdis

In 1952 Eliot gave a lecture titled ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. It was not published until 19851 and may have been unknown to McLuhan.  But he was publishing on Eliot at the time and was part of a loose group of figures, including Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis themselves, who were often longtime friends (Eliot, Pound and Lewis had known each other by then for over 40 years) and who were publishing poetry and essays on literary  and social matters in journals like The Sewanee Review and Shenandoah.  Eliot, Pound and Lewis all contributed to both these journals and McLuhan published more than a dozen essays and reviews in them in the 1940s and 50s. He was in correspondence with Pound and Lewis, while friends of his like Felix Giovanelli and Hugh Kenner were in touch with Eliot. Within this loose network much more was known about the activities of its various members than what found its way into print. So McLuhan may well have heard of Eliot’s lecture, if not seen it in samizdat.

However that may be, there are themes in the lecture which echoed Eliot’s past work and were of under active investigation by McLuhan at just that time.

The myth [of Scylla and Charybdis] belongs to that Mediterranean world from which our culture springs; it refers to a well-known episode in Mediterranean pre-history; like other myths in the story of Ulysses it is what I believe Professor Jung would call a universal archetype of human experience. It responds to some of the deepest desires, and terrors of all human beings: it is the experience of life itself. It is applicable to almost any subject one can discuss. (6)

The considerations I have been discussing are not, of course, equally applicable to every type of poetry, nor are they equally important in every poem of the same type. They are applicable to the degree in which philosophical ideas have contributed to forming the poet’s mind and have been digested into (we might say composted into) that profound couche of experience which constitutes the soil in which the germs of his poetry are nourished. They are peculiarly applicable when the matter of a poem, rich with philosophical ingredients, is organised into a structural design. (18)

Valéry’s poem has what I call the philosophic structure: an organisation, not merely of successive responses to the situation, but of further responses to his own responses. He has put more of himself into the poem — to that point at which the surrendering of the maximum of one’s being to the poem ends by arriving at the maximum of impersonality.  (19-20)

Eliot puts forward the view that the work of the individual poet is isomorphic with the work of western civilization (“that Mediterranean world from which our culture springs”) and even of “life itself”. All are founded in “that profound couche (…) which constitutes the soil in which the germs (…) are nourished”. It is the job of the poet (or at least of some poets) to reconnoiter the pathways to and from this seedbed and to formulate for us how it stands with it. 

Here is McLuhan in essays from this same time (some predating Eliot’s lecture):

1949
Mallarmé (…) saw that a poetry of effect was impersonal. The author effaced himself above all in not assigning causes or explanations as transitional devices of a novelistic and a pseudo-rationalistic type between the parts of the poem. Poetry could free itself at last from rhetoric and the novel. Insofar as a rationale of poetry was needed it is to be found naturally in the analogical drama of the very action of the intellect itself in making poetry. (Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum)

1951
the business of the artist in this context is that of an impersonal agent, humble before the laws of things, as well as before his own artistic activity as revealer. He must strip himself of all but his mere agency… (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process)

1953
the artist, in order that he may perform his katharsis-purgative function, must mime all things. (…) He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself. Strictly within the bounds of classical decorum Joyce saw that, unlike the orator, the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice. The ultimate artist can have no style of his own but must be an “outlex” through which the multiple aspects of reality can utter themselves. That the artist should intrude his personal idiom between thing and reader is literally impertinence. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1953
“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 (…) For his view of the poet was that he should read, not forge, the signatures of things. As he explains in Stephen Hero, this involves the poet in a perpetual activity of retracing and reconstructing the ways of human apprehension.(James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1954
it was Mallarmé who formulated the lessons of the press as a guide for the new impersonal poetry of suggestion and implication. He saw that the scale of modern reportage and of the mechanical multiplication of messages made personal rhetoric impossible. Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)

1954
Mallarmé regarded the press as this ultimate encyclopedic book in its most rudimentary form. The almost superhuman range of awareness of the press now awaits only the full analogical sense of exact orchestration to perfect its present juxtaposition of items and themes. And this implies the complete self-effacement of the writer for “this book does not admit of any signature.” The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence. But he can only put these in order by discovering the orchestral analogies in things themselves. (…) All those pseudo-rationalisms, the forged links and fraudulent intelligibility which official literature has imposed on existence must be abandoned. And this initial step the press has already taken in its style of impersonal juxtaposition which conveys such riches to the writer. (…)  Mallarmé sees this impersonal art of juxtaposition as revolutionary (…) It is the rhyming and orchestrating of things themselves which releases the maximum intelligibility and attunes the ears of men once more to the music of the spheres. We are finished, he says, with that custom of an official literary decorum by which poets sang in chorus, obliterating with their personal forgeries the actual signatures of things. In fact, the new poet will take as much care to avoid a style that is not in things themselves as literary men have in the past sought to achieve and impose one.  (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)

In this view (which was far from being only McLuhan’s) humans are “amphibians” (as McLuhan cited Lewis from Snooty Baronet) who constantly move between the surface of life, language and consciousness and their motivating “germs” in an underlying seedbed. The great questions of the time, even in cybernetics, concerned this general picture and the ways in which it might be specified, investigated and communicated. McLuhan’s turn to media, which began to unfold at this time in the early 1950s, was his answer to these questions.

  1. T.S. Eliot, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (Lecture in Nice, March 29, 1952), Agenda, ed W Cookson and P Dale, 23:1-2, 1985, 5-19. ↩

Scylla and Charybdis 1

In a startling example of second sight, McLuhan’s short Manitoba M.A. thesis on George Meredith (1934) cited one passage from Meredith no less than four separate times:

speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creating of certain nobler races now very dimly imagined1… (Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, chapter 37, cited by McLuhan, George Meredith as a Poet and Dramatic Novelist, at pages 39, 48, 63 and 82)2

The whirlpool or worldpool or vortex or Maelstrom would become, of course, a central theme and image in McLuhan’s whole enterprise. But, twenty and thirty years after his Manitoba M.A. thesis, he also specifically discussed “Scylla and Charybdis, rock and whirlpool”, themselves:

1953
Joyce underlines the skill of Bloom’s social decorum in a peculiarly witty way. Homer’s Odysseus learns from Circe that after passing the Sirens there were two courses open to him. One is by way of the Wandering Rocks, which Jason alone had passed in the Argo. The other is the way of Scylla and Charybdis, rock and whirlpool. Odysseus avoids the labyrinth of the Wandering Rocks. But Bloom navigates both labyrinths safely, thus excelling Odysseus. The Rocks are citizens and society seen in abstraction as mindless, Martian mechanisms. The “stone” men are children of the sun, denizens of space, exempt from time (…) Opposed to them are “The Dead” (see last story in Dubliners) children of the moon, the Celtic twilight (“cultic twalette”), moving in the aquacities of time, memory, and sentiment. On these dual labyrinths of stone and water Joyce has built almost every line he has written. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1962
What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy? He is behaving like Poe’s sailor in the Maelstrom who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives. May not it be our job in the new electronic age to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures? (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 77)

While Meredith’s “creating of certain nobler races” might strikes us today as dubious and potentially dangerous, McLuhan’s larger (if less grandiose) goal could certainly be thought to have concerned human and even biological survival “now very dimly imagined”.

 

  1. At the end of his thesis at 117, McLuhan cited a part of this passage for a fifth (!) time: “certain nobler races now very dimly imagined”. ↩
  2. A trace of this early citation and its unusual use of ‘compact’ may be found in McLuhan’s remark 30 years later: “The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university.” (‘Notes on Burroughs’, 1964) ↩

Blackout

In 1936, McLuhan’s last undergraduate year at Cambridge, his friend there1 and later unofficial adviser on his PhD thesis, Muriel Bradbrook (1909-1993), published The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Ralegh.2  Influenced or not by Bradbrook’s study, which he certainly knew3, McLuhan adverted to blackout (and associated themes like obscurity and somnambulism) throughout his career and did so both positively and negatively. Negatively, black signaled an omission, a failure of perception, a gap in awareness. Positively, the gap strangely designated by such obscurity was, as McLuhan would insist over and over and over again, ‘where the action is’. So black covered something up which needed to be discovered  — and so functioned as a signpost and means to what required recovery.

1944
As excessive activity [has] starved the other needs of man and sharpened the spirit of gain and commercialism [such that] an unofficial blackout [has been] ordained over the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature. (Dagwood’s America)

1953
THE ADS ARE A FORM OF MAGIC WHICH HAVE COME TO DOMINATE A NEW CIVILIZATION  Most people must by now have seen the original advertisement featuring a Clifton Webb sort of gentleman wearing a white shirt and having a black patch over one eye. This advertisement sold a million Hathaway shirts in a few weeks, but few ever found out why. The ad was a piece of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism… (The Age of Advertising)

As illustarted below, McLuhan reverted again and again to the Hathaway man.  Not seeing that it was remarkable (let alone what was remarkable about it) seemed to capture for him not-seeing in general. The Gutenberg galaxy formula illustrated by the ad was: seeing can be blind.4 As McLuhan noted in testimony before the US Congress: “Opposites are often very similar. They’re complementary. Affluence creates poverty, public creates privacy, white creates black, learning creates ignorance.5

1953
The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. But the poet by exact rhythmic adjustment can flood our consciousness with this knowledge. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

1954
like symbolist art, [advertising] is created to produce an effect rather than to argue or discuss the merits of a product. The Baron Wrangel, the man in the Hathaway shirt — white shirt and black eye-patch: what did it mean? Out of the millions who bought Hathaway shirts, how many could say what the ad meant? It was a piece of magic: irrational, meaningless. But it had a definite effect. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1956
The manuscript page with pictures, colors, and correlation between symbol and space, gave way to uniform type, the black-and-white page, read silently, alone. (The New Languages, [McLuhan and Carpenter])

Gutenbergian visual emphasis fixes black and white on the same horizontal level in strictly sequential order. This is how print looks and how print functions. “The print reader is subjected to a black and white flicker that is regular and even. Print presents arrested moments of [just this] mental posture [and no other]” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 158). By contrast, the acoustic allows the black to cut through the white, and the white to cut through the black, vertically. Only so can there be something like figure and ground. And if no figure and ground, then no ground and only figure — and if only figure, ultimately no figure either.6

1959
because of its static aspect, the written word inspires the human mind with doubt. This is the habit of the eye. This is the habit of the eye inspecting writing: black-white … yes-no … maybe yes-maybe no. Scepticism is the very form of written culture. (Communications and the Word of God)

1962
“She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
(…)
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.”
This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake. (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 263/298)

These are the concluding lines (before its final short section, or appendix, on ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’) of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

1965
There is a subplot in the famous Hathaway shirt advertisement of the baron with the black patch on his eye. The main plot is simply Hathaway shirts. The subplot, the one that really includes the whole audience, is the black patch which bespeaks the world of aristocratic intrigue, hunts for hidden treasure, and many other mysterious dimensions, all expressed instantaneously by the black patch. The subplot world, the sub-environment, is really that which includes the audience, and it is the power to effect this kind of inclusion that is the mystery… (Address at Vision 65)

1968
Black Is Not A Color (Dew-Line #1)

1970
White is all colors at once, but black is not in the spectrum. It is a gap. (…) The spectrum gap that is black (…) is not a color but an interval (Culture is our Business, 220, 226)

1970
When the separated or specialized senses are heavily over­loaded, one tends to black out, to merge. (From Cliché to Archetype, 196)

1972
You cannot have a written tradition of white markets (…) without an oral tradition of black markets… (Take Today, 171)

1972
The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today, 22)

 

  1. McLuhan mentions being “at tea” in Bradbrook’s rooms with her tutor and a group of others in a letter to his family from May, 1935 (Letters 67). His calling her “Miss B” in this letter from his first year in Cambridge would indicate that he had mentioned her before, perhaps frequently. ↩
  2. Republished by CUP in 2011; often cited with Bradbrook’s Ralegh changed to Raleigh. ↩
  3. Introducing her theme, Bradbrook notes that “there has been a growing interest in the literary activities of Ralegh, and in particular in the society founded by him, and known now by Shakespeare’s nickname ‘The School of Night’. There appears to have been a kind of literary ‘war’ between this school and the faction of Essex, not unlike the dramatists’ ‘war’ of 1598-9, or the earlier one between Harvey and Nashe” (7, emphasis added). The last chapter of the book is titled ‘Shakespeare, the School (of Night), and Nashe‘. McLuhan’s PhD thesis, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time was completed 7 years later and would be an extended examination of the history of just such ‘wars’ over the two millennia from 400 BC to Shakespeare with special reference to Nashe. The background questions, to which McLuhan would dedicate his intellectual life, were: what is it about human life that such ‘wars’ are recurrent? how do they manifest themselves? how is it that tradition and communication nonetheless continue? ↩
  4. Conversely, as repeatedly noted by McLuhan, ancient seers were often blind. ↩
  5. ‘The Hardware/Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?’, Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, H.R. 4916, Sept 13, 1972. ↩
  6. See Nietzsche, ‘How the “true world” finally became a fable‘. ↩

What is the present?

Present: adj, c. 1300, “existing at the time”, from Old French present “evident, at hand, within reach”; as a noun, “the present time” (11c., Modern French présent) and directly from Latin praesentem (nominative   praesens) “present, at hand, in sight; immediate; prompt, instant; contemporary”, from present participle of praeesse “be before (someone or something [in space]), be at hand”, from prae– “before” (see pre-) + esse “to be” (from PIE root *es- “to be”). Meaning “being there” is from mid-14c. in English. As a grammatical tense, recorded from late 14c. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing.
Life is the Past and the Future.
The Present is Art.
(Wyndham Lewis, ‘Long Live the Vortex!’, Blast 1, 1914)

the artist, as Wyndham Lewis said to me, “is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is aware of the unused potential of the present.” (Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1959)1

We simply have to (…) become contemporaries of ourselves. (Electronics and the Changing Role of Print, 1959)

Only those who have learned to perceive the present can predict the future. (…) For the future of the future is the present. (Take Today, 134)

*

McLuhan’s notion that most people don’t perceive the present is well known. Here are some typical examples:

1954
NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.
(‘Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed The Breath’, 1954 Counterblast)

1967
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. (The Medium is the Massage, 74-75)

1967
When a new environment forms, we see [only] the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. (…) Much learning theory still accepts this illusion (…) that we must learn by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend… (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest)

1967
People have always, in all ages, been terrified of the present. The only people that seem to have enough gumption, or nerve, to look at what is happening right under their nose are artists. They are specialists in sensory life. (…) But most people simply expect, when they look at the present, to be turned to stone, as by the gorgon’s spell, and they are terrified. Therefore they prefer the rear-view mirror. (McLuhan Interview on CBC ‘Our World’)

1968
The habit of avoiding the present or the new (…) has been immemorial human tradition… (Environment As Programmed Happening)

1968
Ordinary human instinct causes people (…) to rely on the rear-view mirror as a kind of repeat or ricorso of the preceding environment, thus insuring total disorientation at all times. It is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one. (Through the Vanishing Point, xxiii)

But what is the present and why is it fearsome? The vague general idea seems to be that most people prefer the old to the new because they don’t want to make the effort to accommodate themselves to changed circumstance. While this is doubtless true, even of you and me, this answer does little more than restate the question — namely, what is the ‘effort to accommodate’ and why should it be fearsome?

McLuhan’s answer to these questions was that the process of accommodation is always going on — in “every moment of cognition” (Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry), “in every instant of perception” (CHML), “in every moment of human awareness” (CHML), in “the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth” (From Cliché to Archetype) —  but that we fear (or are otherwise discouraged2) to live it consciously and awake. That is, we don’t fear something that we don’t know, but something we ‘know’ all too well — something that is, however, unconscious and “hidden”, subject to blackout.3

McLuhan’s notion here was close to that of the psychoanalytic ‘unconscious’: there are processes in all human life which are constantly active that are yet not admitted to conscious awareness. And, like the psychoanalysts, McLuhan pointed to dreams as revealing these active yet largely unknown processes:

1967
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams reveals the amazing power that all people have in their dream life of invention and poetic discovery; that the most ordinary person in his dream life is a tremendous poet. Most Freudians are concerned with the subject-matter of this poetry. That never interested me. I was always fascinated by the amazing ingenuity, symmetry, and inventiveness of the dreamer. We all have these tremendous unused powers which we use surreptitiously. We are afraid to use them in our waking lives. Except the artist. The artist uses in his waking life the powers an ordinary person would use in his dream life. The creative man has his dream life while awake. (…) The dream is a way of processing waking experiences in a pattern which is non-lineal, but multi-leveled. (McLuhan interview with  Gerald Stearn, McLuhan Hot & Cool)

“The subject-matter (…) never interested me”: the medium is the message.

Again like the psychoanalysts, McLuhan saw these processes at work not only in dreams, but in every aspect of “everyday life” without exception. Not only now and then, but all the time. In this way, the present was conceived by McLuhan as including all those hidden processes through which we experience what we experience:

1951
The poetic process he [Joyce] discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of (gen subj!) ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry)

1953
The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. (Culture Without Literacy)

1954
the creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1954
The rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters) 

1954
the poetic process (…) is involved in ordinary cognition (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1970
Stephen’s surname is (…) “Dedalus,” i.e., “dead all us.” Joyce’s last story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” and the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the dead; “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex­perience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con­science of my race.” This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth (…) is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition. (From Cliché to Archetype, 148-149)

1972
The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that blacks out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today, 22)

1972
sensations and concepts [entail] (…) the continual transformation of sensory inputs into outputs of quite different kinds. Food for the mind is like food for the body; the inputs are never the same as the outputs! This pattern of non-lineality is evident in every human activity. (Take Today, 137)

McLuhan’s take on the present was that it implicated a synchronic descent into the formal possibilities of experience and that this descent had two chief modes.  It could be made perceptively or conceptually.4 The former might be imagined in terms of Poe’s mariner who saved himself in the Maelstrom by learning to understand how it functioned.  This involved a distance not only from his ship, but also from himself, since the possible vehicles in the flotsam and jetsam of the Maelstrom (as a representation of the possibilities ‘present’ in each recurrent moment of experience) were modalities of identity and awareness.  Their plurality could be investigated only by letting go of his own supposed singularity and its associated world. Since there is no world between worlds, he was able to save himself only by becoming nobody. But this is a kind of death and extinction and is feared as nothing else is.

In fundamental contrast to the mariner, the conceptual encounter with the present might be imagined in terms of the mariner’s brother, who was not able to ‘let go’ of the ship’s ‘ring’ and to ‘abandon ship’. Transfixed by fear, he could not learn what the vortex had to teach of the present — of what is ‘before’ us at every instant. He thereby, and therefore, went to his doom.

 

 

  1. McLuhan used this passage frequently.  It appears, sometimes with light variations, in at least a dozen different papers and books in the 1960s and 1970s. As early as 1953 in a review entitled ‘Symbolist Communication’ he noted, without mentioning Lewis, “art is a record of the future in so far as it is an expression of the unlived possibilities of the present”. This was clearly a highly important insight for him. ↩
  2. In McLuhan’s take, mass media are grounded in our cognitive processes and attempt, with staggering success, to manipulate them. Part of his turn to media was the thought: if media are successful in manipulating how human beings live, they must do so on the basis of some genuine foundation, regardless if this is known or unknown to them. Therefore they are key to the investigation of what human being is and how it functions. ↩
  3. All of the quotations in this paragraph come from passages given in full elsewhere in this post. ↩
  4. Percept and concept align with synchronic and diachronic in time and with acoustic and visual in sensory emphasis. ↩

Jung

1943
To the modern mind, schooled in Jung and Freud, ancient myth is once more alive and lancing, and able to stir the poetic imagination radically and polysemously. (The Classical Trivium, 157)

1944
Anthropology and psychology together have also revindicated the traditional ‘magical’ view of language fusing the seemingly distinct activities of the brothers Grimm, on the one hand, as philologists, and on the other, as students of folk-lore, so that we are once more in a position to adopt a sympathetic view of the divine Logos of late antiquity. Quite incidental to the radical readjustments in awareness we can relax where Francis Bacon is concerned. We can take him in our stride, as it were, nodding at him as a useful landmark in a great literary tradition whose representatives today are Jung and Count Korzybski. (Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum)1

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 to-day. (McLuhan to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, December 23, 1944, Letters 166)

1946
But 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.”  (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, citing Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933)

1947
But it is clear enough to me that the abiding achievement of the past century has been in analytic psychology and as such the Catholic mind has yet to ingest let alone digest that achievement. (McLuhan to Walter Ong, December 1947, Letters 191)

1948
My little book on “books to read” comes along simply and quickly without effort on my part. (..) Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology is on because it provides simultaneously an introduction to medieval allegory (Dante) and the French symbolists and Jung. Jung is on not for his own sake but as an approach to myth and Joyce.  (McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli, Aug 1948)

1950
Immediately associated with this notion of speech is the sense of a collective human consciousness which is not merely psychological (Joyce and Eliot have always been sharply critical of Freud and Jung for this reason among others), but in the nature of a common drama of the race. (T S Eliot [review of 11 books])

1952
As Father White wrote concerning “Jung and the Supernatural” (Commonweal, March 14, 1952, p. 561):  “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.”  In other words, the symbols of our environment, commercial and artistic, are not just signs whose reference has to be understood for them to be efficacious. That is Cartesian and Lockean theory of communication which never fitted the facts. But Catholics today still hold to that theory of communication, and it hands them over bound and helpless to the consciously manipulated pagan rituals of art, literature and commerce. (‘Heart of Darkness’, unpublished review of Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel With God)

1953
As Father Victor White wrote concerning “Jung and the Supernatural”: “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.”  (…) 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)

1962
Any phonetic alphabet culture can easily slip into the habit of putting one thing under or in another, since there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that the written code carries for the reader the experience of the “content” which is speech. But there is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. Thus natives, when asked Freudian questions about the symbolism of their thoughts or dreams, insist that all the meanings are right there in the verbal statement. The work of Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms… (Gutenberg Galaxy, 72)

1964
Freud and Jung built their observations on the interpretation of the languages of both individual and collective postures and gestures with respect to dreams and to the ordinary acts of everyday life. The physical and psychic gestalts, or “still” shots, with which they worked were much owing to the posture world revealed by the photograph. The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture. (Understanding Media, 193-194) 

1964
the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph. By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private. This fact can be gleaned from any magazine or movie of fifteen years back. It is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer posture is affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures and the dialogue with ourselves. The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes.  (Understanding Media, 197) 

1970
The cliché (…) is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive; other archetypes’ residues 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 consciousness, we also “quote” the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others “the archetypal unconscious.”
(From Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)

1970
As we meditate upon the ancient cliches or sacro-breakthroughs, the literal man is inclined to consider them as “archetypes.” For example, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism defines archetype as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experi­ence as a whole.” Of course this particular definition is most un-­Jungian in suggesting that archetypes are human artifacts produced by much repetition — in other words, a form of cliche. For the literary archetypalist there is always a problem of whether Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience in the South Sea Islands as in Toronto. With the new means of plenary cultural retrieval, ancient cliches are taking their place as transcendental or archetypal forms.
(From Cliché to Archetype, 118)

1971
The simple process by which the unconscious was pushed up into con­sciousness with the help of electricity, Freud and Jung is one of the big dramas of our time. And it’s true that the private identity, the private individual has been swept away by this huge surge of the unconscious up into consciousness. (Theatre and the Visual Arts)

Posthumous
The archetype, which depends on an overarching comprehension of the past (the mythic milieu), is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché. (The Global Village, 16)

Posthumous
Jung is careful to remind literary critics to consider the archetype as a primordial symbol: The archetypes are by no means useless archaic survivals or relics. They are living entities, (…) numinous ideas or dominant representations. (The Global Village, 17)

 

 

  1. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 380n8. McLuhan retouched and retitled this Bacon essay at least 4 times between 1942 and 1944. It was originally announced as a lecture for a 1942 MLA meeting that was cancelled on account of the war and ultimately given as a lecture in a later meeting of the MLA in 1944. See, eg, ‘Francis Bacon’s Patristic  Inheritance’, McLuhan  Studies I (1991) and ‘Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum‘, EME, 6:3,  2007. An abstract for the 1944 lecture was published in the MLA conference program: “The art of grammar in Greek and Roman times was, in its etymological and analogical functions,  inseparable from physics, cosmogony and the interpretation of phenomena, or the book of nature. Philo of Alexandria adapted the art with its four levels of interpretation, to scriptural exegesis. Patristic theology took over his methods and the encyclopedic tradition in education it implied. Until the time of Abelard grammatical theology and science were supreme. Its temporary eclipse did not effect a breach in continuity. St Bonaventure was its greatest exponent. Erasmus was the key figure for his contemporaries because he restored grammatical theology while struggling against decadent dialectical theology. Bacon’s significance is best understood in this tradition and against this background. His conception of the problem of interpreting of nature is primarily, though not finally, grammatical.” ↩

Archetypes as inherently plural

1946
But 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.”  (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, citing Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933)

1970
The cliché (…) is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive; other archetypes’ residues 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 consciousness, we also “quote” the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes1 has been called by Freud, Jung, and others “the archetypal unconscious.” (From  Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)

  1. Such “quotation of excluded archetypes” might be called “the living inter-relational current of forms”. Cf, ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’, 1958: “Massive achievements like Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture or his Mechanization Takes Command offer as it were a vivisectional awareness of the living inter-relational current of forms and information.” Hence, in a letter from McLuhan to J. G. Keogh, July 6, 1972: “my approach to media is metaphysical rather than sociological or dialectical (…) I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” (Letters, 412,) ↩

X-ray awareness, the inside story

the inside story (…) is typical of X-ray photographs, boudoir journalism, and cubist painting alike. (The Mechanical Bride, 49-50)

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. Man is no longer monad but nomad. (Have with You to Madison Avenue or The Flush-Profile of Literature, 1957)1

Already, new “sex symbols” poke fun at the super female. Notable among them is the boyish and gentle young model known as Twiggy. Sophia Loren, for example, is to Twiggy as a Rubens painting is to an X-ray. And what does an X-ray of a woman reveal? Not a realistic picture, but a deep, involving image. Not a specialized female, but a human being. (The Future of Sex, 1967)

The kids have grown up in an x-ray world. The TV camera does a perpetual job of x-ray on them and they take this for granted. X-ray means depth, x-ray means participation in depth in whatever they are doing, and calls for a totally new kind of commitment to everything they are doing. That is why when they encounter situations in which they are merely classified entities as in the school room, they don’t feel wanted, they don’t feel needed, they just drop out. Now, this strange, new all-at-once situation in which everybody experiences everything all at once creates this kind of x-ray mosaic of involvement and participation for which people are just not prepared. They have lived through centuries of detachment, of non-involvement, Suddenly they are involved. So it’s a big surprise, and for many people a kind of exhilaration. Wonderful! (McLuhan on CBC ‘Our World’, 1967)

TV demands sophistication — that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer. (All of the Candidates are Asleep, 1968)

The same speed of access to many kinds of data has given us the power to X-ray all the cultures and subcultures in the world. We no longer approach them from any point of view or for the purpose of taking a picture of them. The new approach is the X-ray approach of penetration in depth to achieve awareness on many levels at once. (…) The habit of avoiding the present or the new which has been immemorial human tradition tends to yield to this X-ray approach of the structures that shape and surround human perception. (Environment As Programmed Happening, 1968)

The mechanical proceeds by fragmentation of all processes, including the process of perception. The mechanical enthroned the “point of view,” the static position, with its vanishing point. The electric age favors a total field approach, a kind of X-ray in depth which not only avoids a point of view but avoids looking at situations from any single level. (Environment As Programmed Happening, 1968)

TV (…) is a kind of X-ray. (…) The viewer is in the situation of being X-rayed by the image. (Through the Vanishing Point, 241)

the tension between inner and outer is a merely visual guideline, and in the age of the X-ray inner and outer are simultaneous events.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

One equivalent of psychoanalysis might be x-ray photography. Psychology without walls, on one hand; biology without walls, on the other. (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956; also Counterblast, 1969, 123)

Even the new instruments of sensory measurement draw attention to the iconic aspects of visual perception, An X-ray radiologist looks at his images as if he were handling them. (Cliche to Archetype, 100)

The cathode-ray tube is an x-ray. The audience is involved in depth. The TV image is not a picture but an icon. The TV camera has no shutter. (Culture is our Business, 36)

the X-ray vision of all processes renders invention an easy consequence of perceiving causes in action. (Take Today, 104)

ESP Is Old Hat When Effects Precede Causes: The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. (…) Now involvement is so mandatory and loyalties so corporate that (…) means and goals merge in process (…) these patterns and processes thus become perceptible. (Take Today, 193-194)

television does not present a visual image, but an X-ray icon which penetrates our entire organism. Joyce called it “the charge of the light barricade” — part of the Crimean war against mankind. Stained-glass images are not visual either, since they are defined by light through, as in Rouault paintings. The structure of these images is audile-tactile, as in abstract art, both of Symbolist and Cubist kind. (McLuhan to Barbara Ward, Feb 9 1973, Letters, 465-468)

  1.  Unpublished review of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. ↩

Vatican Council as politics and business

Take Today, 194

At the Second Vatican Council, the participants paid no attention to the causes of their problems in their new policies and prescriptions. Whether politics and business have always been conducted with the same total obliviousness to causes may be left an open question. It seems necessary to postulate a profound motivation for such universal somnambulism. People in general seem to have a built-in intuition of the safe limits of their human awareness at any given time. Until this century, the limits have been set well below the threshold of rational control of the total environment. At electric speeds it is quite futile to set limits of awareness at that level.

Vivisection

Following Joyce in Stephen Hero, McLuhan used the term ‘vivisection’ between 1951 and 1960 to designate what he elsewhere called “percept”, “x-ray awareness”, “insight” and “retracing”.  It is the action of mind whereby it dis-covers the vertical descent and ascent it itself makes every moment in de-ciding the structure of its experience and action from out of the full spectrum of their formal possibilities:

this figure [of the labyrinth] is (…) traced and retraced by the mind many times in the course of a single [Thomistic] article. Perhaps this fact helps to explain the power of Thomas to communicate a great deal even before he is much understood. It certainly suggests why he can provide rich esthetic satisfactions by the very dance of his mind — a dance in which we participate as we follow him. His “articles” can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act.  (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

the conjunction of landscape and labyrinth provided Joyce with [a] vivisection of the stages of esthetic apprehension (…). As much, therefore, as the ancient Daedalus who made the labyrinth in Crete, Joyce had the right to name his hero “Stephen Dedalus” (the French form of the word). But it is not only the labyrinth of cognition in which Joyce made himself at home, tracing and retracing with delicate precision. The labyrinthine structure of the eye it is that gives such salience in his work to the figure of the Cyclops. Most of all he was at home in the labyrinth of the inner ear where he met Persse O’Reilly, who is per se, son of the Real. 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. Ulysses is reared on the labyrinth landscape of the human body as the body politic; and Finnegans Wake whispers throughout with the voice of the river of human blood and immemorial racial consciousness. Joyce was at home in all labyrinths because of his original conquest of the stages of apprehension, of the mind in act. (…) [As Joyce writes in Stephen Hero:] “The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure.1 The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.”2 (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

For Mallarmé, as for Joyce, the minutest, as well as the most esoteric, features of the alphabet itself were charged with dramatic significance, so that he used the word and the printed page as do the Chinese, for whom landscape painting is a branch of writing.  Mallarmé had been led to this technique by an aesthetic analysis of the modern newspaper, with its static inclusiveness of the entire community of men. But the newspaper, not so much as a cross section as a vivisection of human interests, stands (…) behind Ulysses, with its date-line Thursday, June 16, 1904.(…) What Mallarmé and Joyce exploit in landscape technique is its power of rendering an inclusive consciousness in a single instant of perception. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

Often noted from Montaigne onward is the growing interest in the anatomy of states of mind which in Giambattista Vico reached the point of stress on the importance of reconstructing by vivisection the inner history of one’s own mind. A century separates Vico’s Autobiography and Wordsworth’s Prelude, but they are products of the same impulse. Another century, and Joyce’s Portrait carries the same enterprise a stage further. Vico generalized the process as a means of reconstructing the stages of human culture by the vivisection and contemplation of language itself. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

For his [Joyce’s] view of the poet was that he should read, not forge, the signatures of things. As he explains in Stephen Hero, this involves the poet in a perpetual activity of retracing and reconstructing the ways of human apprehension. A poem is a vivisection of the mind and senses in action, an anagenesis or retracing, begetting anagnorosis or recognition. This is the key to the theme of memory and history embodied in Anna Livia of the Wake. She runs forward but “ana” is Greek for backwards, and speIls the same both ways. Anna Livia is also the Liffey nourishing the Guinnesses (anagenesis) of all things. It is the business of grammarian and poet to see this cyclic process of emanation and return as the origin and term of all words and creatures. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

Massive achievements like Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture or his Mechanization Takes Command offer as it were a vivisectional awareness of the living inter-relational current of forms and information. (Media Alchemy in Art and Society, 1958)

it is precisely his fidelity to the vivisection of isolated moments that links Tennyson to the greatest work of his time and of ours. This concern with the spectrum of the emotional life was linked with Newton and with Gainsborough on one hand and with the best art and archaeology of the nineteenth century on the other.  It is to be related to the tendency to abandon succession for simultaneity when our instruments of observation acquired speed and precision. Looking back from the nuclear age it is easy to recognize the pattern of ‘total field’ forming in the concern with totality of implication in the aesthetic moment, or spot of time. (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)

  1. One can imagine a light-bulb moment for McLuhan reading this sentence from Stephen Hero sometime in the late 1940s. If media as studied by Mallarmé, Innis and Havelock might be taken as “lanterns” with “magical properties” that both “transform and disfigure”, this sentence would bring together (a) the media insights from these three (a poet, an economist and a classicist), (b) Joyce and (c) the New Criticism he had learned especially from Richards where the “magical properties” of language, past and present, was a frequent topic. McLuhan’s whole subsequent career would be woven from these threads. Hence, for example, the title of his 1958 essay, ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’. ↩
  2. This text from Stephen Hero was repeatedly cited by McLuhan. “The light of day” may be taken as implicating both the full spectrum of the different colors of the magical media “lanterns” as if through a prism and their study in “the light of day”. This reading of Joyce’s sentence was given 15 years later by McLuhan as follows: “If man, by his ingenious extensions of himself, creates new dimensions and new environments, he also has another creative power for making himself aware of these new forms, and of giving himself cognizance of their effect upon him.” (Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965) ↩

The spectrum of forms

If man, by his ingenious extensions of himself, creates new dimensions and new environments, he also has another creative power for making himself aware of these new forms, and of giving himself cognizance of their effect upon him. (Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965)1

Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment.2 (Take Today, 14)

Perception as such is a proportion among proportions apprehended in our sensory life. (Take Today, 137)

In his PhD thesis on Thomas Nashe, written in 1941-42, McLuhan, just entering his 30s, began a life-long attempt to further the project to which he had been introduced by his undergraduate teachers at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge: the specification of the “forms of human organization”. Like Wright and Lodge (and through them going back via John Watson, 1847–1939, and Edward Caird, 1835–1908, to Hegel, 1770-1832), McLuhan saw the working of these forms throughout all the theoretical and practical realms of human life and society — not only in the intellectual disciplines of the arts and sciences, but in the everyday activities of practical politics, business, education and religion as well. Hegel had seen philosophy as inherently ‘encyclopedic’ and Lodge, McLuhan’s teacher in philosophy, published books on logic, on Plato and on “the great thinkers”, but also on Philosophy of Education (1937), Philosophy of Business (1945) and Applied Philosophy (1951). Wright, comparatively, published widely in philosophy and psychology, but also on politics and religion: Faith Justified by Progress (1916), The Moral Standards of Democracy (1925) — a book heavily annotated by McLuhan — and The Religious Response: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1929).

But McLuhan’s work increasingly differed from such prior attempts to define the “forms of human organization” and this in a number of decisive ways. 

By the late 1940s, his interest in Wyndham Lewis, the poetics of the symbolists and futurists, and the work of his new colleague in Toronto, Harold Innis, led him to the realization that ‘mental activity’ could not be supposed to be confined within the skulls of human beings, individually or collectively.3  Instead, as the nascent fields of computer science and cybernetics were already demonstrating with real life devices,  intelligence exceeded humans and needed to be investigated more on the model of ecology than logic (although logic, too, was now subject to a broader understanding). Humans existed first of all in environments which were both material and intelligent (however little the latter was understood). This fitted with McLuhan’s longtime interest in the environment as a teaching machine which had been fostered (if not implanted) by Wright and Lodge in Winnipeg and then amplified in different ways by Chesterton and Leavis in the 1930s and by Lewis and Giedion in the 1940s.4

If whole environments might be conceived as mediating human identities, individual and collective, the radiating effects of particular media like books and newspapers and radio might be investigated both as models of environmental forms and as important, arguably the most important, components of such wider forms. Lewis, Innis, Havelock and even Richards were already thinking along these lines in the 1940s and McLuhan seems to have differed from them above all in his consternation at the difference between the enormous social effects of media — not just historically, but right here, right now — and the little or no notice taken of them. Modern humans were children playing with loaded guns.

In the 1950s McLuhan came in these ways to the idea that specification of the “forms of human organization” might be achieved, or at any rate decisively furthered, through intense focus on communications media.  But investigation of media would at the same time need to start aside from any notion of accepted differences between human and machine, high and low culture, past and future time, and individual and mass identity. Certainly none of these could be conflated; but at the same time no notions about such oppositions could be presupposed at the outset and all would need to be investigated as a critical part of the new science or sciences.

Against this background, it is noteworthy that McLuhan, from the start and continuing throughout his career, perceived the “forms of human organization” as arrayed in a “spectrum” or “axis” or “total field of relations”5 somewhat akin to Mendeleev’s table of chemical elements. In the citations given below, McLuhan characterized the “forms of human organization” in terms of many different relations (male/female, visual/auditory, mechanical/organic, above/below, light/dark, etc); but what is common to them all is the notion that such forms are based on variable binary structures arrayed along a “spectrum” or “axis” according to the degree of opposition of each one between its numerator and denominator (along with rules for establishing these). This spectrum was therefore the rule-governed series of all the possible instances of such formal structures — “the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties”. To compare, Mendeleev’s table similarly displays the chemical elements in terms of the possible relationships of electrons/protons set out along a spectrum ranging from the most simple to the most complex. Importantly, in the case of both proposals, each single form must be understood as an instance of the single elementary structure arrayed along the spectrum of its possible configurations.[For an important implication, see Archetypes as inherently plural.]

George McManus [Bringing Up Father cartoonist] was just as pro-Jiggs as Chic Young [Blondie cartoonist] is pro-Blondie. This is another way of saying that America has swung very far toward the feminine pole of the axis in recent years. (Dagwood’s America, 1944)

Baudelaire whose spectrum analysis of states of mind has sufficed poetry ever since as a base of operation. (…) What these poets effected after Baudelaire was that plenary elucidation of verbal landscape, psychological with Laforgue, metaphysical in Rimbaud. (T. S. Eliot [review of eleven books on Eliot], 1950)

For them [Joyce, Pound, Eliot] the aesthetic moment was, like the band of the spectrum, an affair of zoning. As Mallarmé stated the matter: “The poetic act consists in seeing suddenly that an idea fractions itself into a number of motifs equal in value, and in grouping them, they rhyme6.” (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry 1951)

The poetic process he [Joyce] discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. Dante implies all this in the Beatrician moment of the Vita Nuova, but the pre-Raphaelites had accepted it at the relatively banal level of psychological impressionism. The Beatrician, or sacramental, moment when analyzed as a spectrum band yields the entire zoning of the hierarchized scenes and landscapes of the Commedia (…). As the eighteenth century recovered some of the techniques of the Middle Ages through their own development of the picturesque, so Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry 1951)

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.7 (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951)

The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. But the poet by exact rhythmic8 adjustment can flood our consciousness with this knowledge. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

Joyce employs (…) the lore associated with the ancient conception of the auditory side of the external world as an Aeolian harp. His color symbolism employs the complementary conception of the visual aspect of creation as the harp of Memnon9. With the development of the spectroscope in the eighteenth century both these ancient images became popular again. The color chord of the spectrum suggested that there exists a rapport between the outer world and the inner world of our faculties which developed into the symbolist doctrine of “correspondences”. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

using poetry as a means of exploring the spectrum of mental states (Introduction to Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955)

Both these idylls represent two extremes of demonic possession. “The Holy Grail” concerns the invasion of unprepared minds by “mania from above”. “Merlin and Vivien,” like “Lucretius,” presents the struggle and fall of the merely intellectual man when invaded by “mania from below“. (…) The reader of Tennyson’s poems will find everywhere in his landscapes the symbolic struggle of light and darkness as the drama of the divine and the demonic. Many of his most characteristically poignant effects, as in “Tears, Idle Tears,” the seventh elegy of “In Memoriam,” “Morte d’Arthur,” and “Crossing the Bar,” are rendered by means of twilight and the poise of opposite powers.  (‘Introduction’ to Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955)

Is not the artist one who lives perpetually on this borderland (…) between technology and experience, between mechanical and organic form? And when a time or a culture is similarly poised between the new technology and traditional experience is not that the moment of maximal creativity for that culture? (…) In this respect, one might say that [Northrop] Frye’s world is simply the slapping down of the poised balance on the visual side of the scale. (McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, October 8, 1959)

it is precisely his fidelity to the vivisection of isolated moments that links Tennyson to the greatest work of his time and of ours. This concern with the spectrum of the emotional life was linked with Newton and with Gainsborough on one hand and with the best art and archaeology of the nineteenth century on the other.  (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)

The various structures of knowledge that have been devised by the numerous languages, arts and technologies of mankind can be revolved or inspected almost at the speed of motion picture frames. At such speed would not the unity of human culture and experience become manifest as a single spectrum? (We need a new picture of knowledge, 1963)10

In India the idea of darshan — of the mystical experience of being in very large gatherings—stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Western idea of conscious values [in the individual]. (UM, 110)

Where before there had been a narrow selection from periods and composers, the tape recorder, combined with LPs, gave a full musical spectrum that made the sixteenth century as available as the nineteenth, and Chinese folk song as accessible as the Hungarian. (UM, 283)

Newton’s Optics had an extraordinary influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and painting alike. His revelation of the natural power of the eye to refract the visual world encouraged artists to select outer landscapes that isolated a particular mood or feeling from the emotional spectrum. (Through the Vanishing Point, 22) 

The low visual definition of the environment [of the Russian peasant] favored a high degree of tactile and acoustic stress. At this end of the sensory spectrum individuality is created by the interval of tactile involvement. At the other end of the sensory spectrum we encounter the familiar mode of individuality based on visual stress and fragmentary separateness. (Through the Vanishing Point, 222)

black is not a color. White is all colors at once, but black is not in the spectrum. It is a gap [in the spectrum]. (…) The spectrum gap that is black creates great involvement for all parties.  (…) black is not a color but an interval (Culture is our Business, 220, 226)

When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment.  (Take Today, 14)

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. (…) They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. (…) The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear)…(Take Today, 22)11

The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.12 (Take Today, 22)

City planners seem to be incapable of understanding figure-ground relationships. They want uniformity. Everything [in their estimation] must become figure, or everything must become ground. The interface or interplay of figure and ground necessary to community, or social dialogue and diversity, are alien to their uniform concepts and blueprints.  (Take Today, 33)

Montaigne was the first to discover the meaning of the printed book: “I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public.” At the other end of the spectrum is J. P. Morgan, proclaiming “I owe the public nothing.”  (Take Today, 207)

While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

T S. Eliot pointed (…) out in regard to Dante, that a great poet or serious artist should be able to perceive or distinguish more clearly than ordinary men the forms and objects within the range of ordinary experience and be able to make men see and hear more at each end of the spectrum of their sensibility than they could ever notice without his help. (Laws of Media, 5)

  1.  Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, p 73 ↩
  2. Many readers of McLuhan take it that “the extension of consciousness itself as an environment” is something mystical, a kind of oceanic fog emanating good vibes. But it is, on the contrary, simply (simply!) the extension of scientific understanding to all human experience and action. ↩
  3. “If a person is speaking into a P.A. system or into a radio microphone, etc., the who and the what are profoundly transformed.” (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, ‘What I Learned on the Project’) ↩
  4. The notion that environments had a mental element and could be studied scientifically led McLuhan in seemingly contradictory directions  On the one hand, low culture like comics might be investigated as readily as high culture like poetry.  To compare, what chemist would reject experiments with tin, say, as unworthy of the discipline? Perhaps tin could reveal more that silver — and similarly with low culture compared to high? On the other hand, a culture in which comics were used to manipulate children might well be judged harshly.  Readers of McLuhan have often failed to grasp the compatibility of these different approaches. ↩
  5.  Environment As Programmed Happening (1968). ↩
  6. “Rhyme” is used here as meaning something like ‘having a common origin’ — namely in “the band of the spectrum” of the “forms of human organization”. It is because this ‘aesthetic’ idea is applicable to all human experience and actions that McLuhan recommended it in his March 1951 letter to Innis as the basis for a new school of communication studies. ↩
  7. Just as every physical material is ‘chemical’, so is every manifestation of culture, however “sordid and evil”, ‘formal’. To show the inherent exposure of humans to the formal elements of their experience and actions is itself transformative: “if the external world is attuned to the mind of man, then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridger between the two worlds. He conducts the symphony of mind and nature. (…) The poet here is exercising his priestly powers of purifying the wells of existence, exerting his primary imagination which is the agent of all perception, not the secondary imagination which brings art into existence as an echo of the functions of perception.” (Coleridge As Artist, 1957) ↩
  8. See note 4 above. ↩
  9. Pausanias: “In Egyptian Thebes, on crossing the Nile to the so-called Pipes, I saw a statue, still sitting, which gave out a sound. The many call it Memnon, who they say from Aethiopia overran Egypt (…) This statue was broken in two by Cambyses, and at the present day from head to middle it is thrown down; but the rest is seated, and every day at the rising of the sun it makes a noise, and the sound one could best liken to that of a harp…” ↩
  10. See TT 193: “The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural.” ↩
  11. The bracketed insertion of “eye and ear” is McLuhan’s. These “extreme forms” characterize the reversible nominator/denominator fractions of the spectrum of forms and its two sides (depending on which is stressed relative to the other): “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (Global Village, 55). ↩
  12. “The usual but hidden processes of the present” are the moment to moment retreat to the spectrum of basic forms or “percepts” and the de-cision there to align with one of them. These processes constitute a labyrinthine knot in time since ‘light on’ this spectrum can come only from it. ↩

2017 foreseen in 1965

A prime sector for the development of the Cyborg idea is that of the military. Here the Buck Rogers world of supermen and super-soldiers is taken quite seriously. It is not only weapons that could be controlled remotely by a mere flick of the eye or turn of thought. This is the field of “systems” development and controls that increasingly occurs in the entire (…) operation of our world. (‘Alarums in a Brave New World’, Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, 73)

When is ‘before’?

Here is a puzzling passage in ‘Art as Survival in the Electric Age’ (1973)1:

Poe hit upon the key to the electric age, programming from effects in order to anticipate causes. The effects come before causes in all situations. The ground comes before the figure in all situations. So that when any new innovation occurs, people are always able to say, “The time is ripe,” meaning the ground and the effects have come long before the causes. The effects come first, and the fact of the effects coming first indicates that the study of environmental action, or the action of the strom, must begin with the effects rather than with a theoretic pursuit of causes. (212-213)

The puzzles in this passage turn the meaning of the word ‘before’ — or on its meanings, plural.  For if “effects come before causes in all situations”, this cannot be the same ‘before’ as in “ground comes before the figure in all situations”.  Effects come before causes in our experience such that causes must be induced.2 But so little does ground “come before the figure” in our experience that McLuhan continually employed the phrase “hidden ground” and frequently characterized phenomena or whole ages as lacking perception of ground.  Eg:

Integrity concerns figure without ground (…). When the ground itself becomes Protean or bewildering in its multiplicity of changes, then the ordinary psyche abandons all hope of relating thereto and retreats to the ivory tower of integrity. (Take Today, 285-286)

The plays of Ibsen are a familiar example: groups of human figures are starkly presented to the audience minus any social ground or human community. This, in a word, is abstract art: figures without ground. Speed-up pushes all work and living towards specialism that is the dissolution of community. (…) What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprise, namely, a world environment of electric information. (University of Alberta Convocation Address, 1971)

If “ground comes before the figure in all situations” it plainly does not do so in our experience. Or, more precisely, if any figure comes to light, as we say, only over against some prior ground, it is not the case that that ground is necessarily, or even usually, perceived. Indeed, McLuhan sometimes maintained that it was not possible to know present grounds at all, only past3 ones — as figures on unknown present ones.

When it is said here that “ground comes before the figure in all situations”, McLuhan is not talking about a ‘before’ in our experience — but about a ‘before’ to our experience.

In the order of things, ground comes first. The figures arrive later. Coming events cast their shadows before them. (The Global Village, 6)

“In the order of things, ground comes first.”  But in our experience, effects come first and, insofar as figures may be said to be the effects of grounds, so do figures and not grounds.

The great problem is to understand these knotted senses of ‘before’ and the knotted times associated with them. Humans are related to “the order of things” only indirectly and, so to say, later.  However, it is somehow given to humans to understand “the order of things” that is before exactly in and through their remove from it.  Call it ‘communication’.

  1. Included in Understanding Me, 206-224 ↩
  2. See ‘Effect before cause in Gilson‘. ↩
  3. But ‘past’ is subject to the same ambiguities as ‘before’.  In one sense, the only way to know a present ground is to know it as vertically past. ↩

Knowing effects before they occur

In a review which originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, McLuhan specified:

One of the results of accelerated change and innovation has been the recognition of the need for study of effects. As our environment tends to be more and more constituted by information everything has an effect on everything without delay. The entire social web becomes as sensitive and nervous as the stock-market, or the front page. The result is that it becomes necessary to know effects before they occur. This, in turn, requires a new kind of study of whatever is going on. (‘Alarums in a Brave New World’, Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, 73)

But when “everything has an effect on everything without delay” another sense of time emerges that cuts across clock time and its “before”. In this other simultaneous sense of time, the synchronic, the understanding of causes emerges as a “new possibility”:

1959
Survival indicates that we grasp by anticipation the inherent causes (…) of the electronic media in all their cultural configurations and make a fully conscious choice of strategy in education accordingly. (…) We need prescience of the full causal powers latent in our new media (…). A kind of alchemical foreknowledge of all the future effects of any new medium is possible. Under electronic conditions, when all effects are accelerated in their mutual collision and emergence, such anticipation of consequence is basic need as well as new possibility. (‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’, Understanding Me, 5, 8)

1964
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement. (Understanding Media, 26)

1972
ESP Is Old Hat When Effects Precede Causes. The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. (Take Today, 193)

Déjà vu

Because time is plural for McLuhan as times, and because everything is double, or at least double, words and phrases like ‘the past’, ‘history’, ‘déjà vu‘, ‘obsolescence’, ‘the old’, etc, carry complex meanings in his work. Passages like the following must therefore be read slowly and, so to say, both vertically and horizontally. A vertical reading of these words and phrases points to “another existence” in the realm of the spectrum of sensory thresholds from which synchronic ‘past’ or ‘déjà vu‘ we have come to our present experience.

When a new environment forms, we see the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. This was, of course, Plato’s theory of knowledge, that it was a form of recognition of that which we had known in another existence.  Much learning theory still accepts this illusion as a warranty that we must learn by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend in any period or culture. It was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake who demonstrated that the way to overcome the fear of the present, and of innovation in general, is to make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society. Failure to make this inventory results in the use of the present as a nostalgic mirror of the past. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest, 1967)

Strangely running them together, McLuhan discusses déjà vu in this passage in the two radically different ways of the vertical and the horizontal. He first mentions Plato’s theory of recollection according to which learning is achieved through the activation of the forgotten memory of what has been known before. But this is not a ‘before’ in chronological time or chronological sequence. It is not, like the second sort of déjà vu, an “illusion” which merely replicates the past horizontally and makes “the present almost impossible to apprehend” and could never result in the creation or recognition of “innovation”. Instead, this sort of Platonic déjà vu is exactly what enables innovation, and the apprehension of innovation, through a questioning of the assumptions of the present.  Assumptions are active in the present, but are not constant; questioning them requires a vertical descent into the time and space of “another existence” where assumptions are arrayed, decided, maintained and rejected.1 This sort of déjà vu, so far from translating the new into the old, and the unfamiliar into the familiar, effects the transformation or rebirth of experience through which, alone, innovation can come to light.

McLuhan touched on this sort of rebirth experience that gives access to the “totally different” in his 1972 interview with L’Express:

the key is that they [the young] return to a primitive existence, in which life is reduced to nothing, and they no longer have any kind of identity. They reject their own identity, and become no-one. (…) It is liberation, but when it is total liberation, it is like death. We all know the reincarnation thesis: we are freed from our own body; we can disappear right now and come back totally different next time. This is what we have reached.

In passages from this same time, McLuhan emphasized the first, vertical or “deep”, sense of déjà vu and again brought reincarnation into this context:

Is the déjà vu phenomenon, i.e. ‘I’ve been here before’, exotic with the ‘man of letters’, and normal and un-noticed by non-literate man?  If so it could account for the deep, reincarnational or déjà vu sense of the non-literate societies. The sensation itself may result from situations of deep sensuous involvement, natural in highly tactual cultures and environments. Ergo normal in childhood. May this not be the source of the abiding sense of reincarnation in non-literate societies and explain the lack of such sensation in literate societies? (Counterblast, 1969, 26)

oral culture is easily led to feel that something has been left out. Per­haps this is the origin of our feeling of déjà vu, the sense of having been “here” before. (Cliche to Archetype, 1970, 68)

  1. If assumptions were decided in chronological or clock time, experience would be mediate, not immediate.  Before taking in the world, or our own minds, we would have to go about the business of deciding what approach to take to them. This might raise the further question of what approach to take to our approaches.  And so on. Experience in this case might never start. As McLuhan noted in his review of Cyborg: “The goal-oriented man must defer involvement and participation in his world until he has acquired certain specialist skills.” But to “acquire certain specialist skills” might require “certain specialist skills” of their own. Hence the concluding note of this same review: “As we move our nerves outward into the environment of electric information, we all tend to become investigators, hunters, fact gatherers, somewhat on the ‘007’ pattern. This is the exact opposite of man the specialist, and points to the onset of a new human culture of unspecialized existence.” ↩

The sensory thresholds of our being

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens onto psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via [that other 2-fold of] nuclear fission [F1] and fusion [F2]. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian [F1] remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno [F1]. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition [F2] shows us the way either to the earthly paradise [F2] or to complete madness [F1]. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory [F2] or the abyss [F1]. (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, 1954, in The Medium and the Light, 160)

We are engaged in Toronto in carrying out a unique experiment — it is far too big for us — we need a lot of help and a lot of collaboration. We are carrying out an experiment to establish what are the sensory thresholds of the entire population of Toronto. That is, we are attempting to measure, quantitatively, the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactile, visceral, and other senses as a matter of daily use and preference — how much light, how much heat, how much sound, how much movement — as a threshold level. Anything that alters a sensory threshold alters the outlook and experience of a whole society. The sensory thresholds change without warning or indications to the users thereof, for it is new technological environments that shift these levels. We are concerned with what shifts occur in a sensory threshold when some new form comes in. What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car, or radio? (Address at Vision 65, 1965)

We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation. (Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment 1966)

New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expectations. The need of our time is for the means of measuring sensory thresholds and of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology. With such knowledge in hand it would be possible to program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. Such knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostatic control for room temperatures. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being.  (Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment 1966; also Through the Vanishing Point, 253)

modern painting does not allow for the single point of view or the dispassionate survey. The modern painter offers an opportunity for dialogue within the parameters inherent in (…) the total world of man’s sensory involvement.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 261) 

Until this century, the limits have been set well below the threshold of rational control of the total environment. At electric speeds it is quite futile to set limits of awareness at that level. (Take Today, 192-193)

 

 

Marchand on McLuhan on the Maelstrom

The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. (Notes on Burroughs, 1964)

in the age of the X-ray inner and outer are simultaneous events.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

According to Philip Marchand in his bio of McLuhan, The Medium and the Messenger:

In ‘Footprints in the Sands of Crime’ McLuhan (…) articulated a theme that would remain his until the end of his career — the theme of Poe’s story “The Maelstrom.” In that story, a sailor caught in a giant whirlpool eventually saves himself from drowning through detached observation of the vortex. For McLuhan, the sailor’s action became a symbol, along with the sleuth, of his own work — of his freeing himself from the vortex of threatening social change through the process of understanding it. (McLuhan never mentioned that the hero of the story was broken in mind and body after the experience.)1

Marchand’s description here goes fundamentally awry. For, in the first place, McLuhan did indeed see “that the hero of [Poe’s] story was broken in mind and body” — to the point of “vanishing”:

Managing The ‘Ascent’ from the Maelstrom2 today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point. (Take Today, 13)3

More importantly, Marchand’s take on McLuhan’s appeal to the Maelstrom is that it concerns a “hero” who “saves himself (…) through detached observation” of “the vortex of threatening social change”. But such a stable heroic identity, however broken it might become, with an objective perspective on an exclusively external social environment, is possible only within the parameters of the Gutenberg galaxy!  As McLuhan repeatedly maintained:

From the development of phonetic script until the invention of the electric telegraph human technology had tended strongly towards the furtherance of detachment and objectivity, detribalization and individuality. Electric circuitry has quite the contrary effect. It involves in depth. It merges the individual and the mass environment. (…) The awareness and opposition of the individual are in these circumstances as irrelevant as they are futile.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 244)

In contrast to Marchand’s take, McLuhan started from ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy Reconfigured’4 and pointed to an “anti-hero” whose heroism has not only been broken but “has gone through the vanishing  point”:

The anti-hero became a theme in art and literature as early as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the “novel without a hero.” (…) The heroism of New England’s Pilgrim Fathers has gone through the vanishing point. (Take Today, 207)

“The vanishing point” is the utter extinction of the hero because the hero cannot survive the “vanishing” of his or her external — and associated internal — ‘landscape’. Where Marchand writes of “the vortex of threatening social change”, McLuhan was clear that the twin aspects of the “psychic and social environment” (Through the Vanishing Point, 12) rise and fall only together:

the slightest shift in the level of visual intensity produces a subtle modulation in our sense of ourselves, both private and corporate. (Through the Vanishing Point, 238)

As the Western world goes Oriental on its inner trip with electric circuitry (…) the whole nature of self-identity enters a state of crisis. (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

The new hero is a corporate rather than a private individual figure.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 260)

Marchand’s “hero” is able to take “detached observation of the vortex”. But for McLuhan:

[only] the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

For him, a collapsing environment collapsed such objectivity along with it:

Their [observers like Marchand] hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity,” whether “materialist” or “idealist.” They also ignored the acoustic “message of the birds” — the output of any process, biological or psychic, always differs qualitatively from the input. There are no “through-puts” or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces for “keeping in touch” with “where the action is.” (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

In his ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ the mariner is just such a processing of (gen obj!) his own self!5 The “output” of himself “differs qualitatively from the input” of himself.  His own being —  he himself — is what is at stake in this knotted (and notted) process of trans-formation!  Between his input ‘down’ state (‘Descent into the Maelstrom’) and his output ‘up’ state (‘Ascent from the Maelstrom’) “there are no ‘through-puts’ or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces”.

Such a transitive gap in identity via “vanishing” is what Poe calls “the incomprehensible mechanism” and this is the one starting point or “threshold“, among the plurality or spectrum of possible thresholds, from which any fitting consideration of McLuhan’s work must make its start:

New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expectations. The need of our time is for a means of measuring sensory thresholds and a means of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds (Through the Vanishing Point, 253) 

Thresholds have us, not we them.6 Their spectrum constitutes a kind of psychological and ontological Maelstrom whose navigation “demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point.”

 

  1. Philip Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger, 76. The last sentence stems from Marchand. It is bracketed, apparently, to signal a change of level in his report: here is what McLuhan said, but here is what I have remarked about what he said. ↩
  2. Similarly in his letter to The Listener, October 8, 1971: “Poe provided clues for ascending from The Maelstrom” (Letters 443). ↩
  3.  Similarly in Take Today, 207 (cited above): “The heroism of New England’s Pilgrim Fathers has gone through the vanishing  point.” ↩
  4. ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy Reconfigured’ is the concluding section of The Gutenberg Galaxy. ↩
  5. McLuhan to Father Shook, June 20, 1972: “the individual private psyche, the human ‘self’, is itself an artifact.” ↩
  6. See  Percepts of existence. The etymology of ‘threshold’ is obscure but may be taken to have come from ‘thresh‘, in the sense of ‘to tread’, and from ‘hold‘, in the sense of a ‘refuge’ or ‘keep’ (household, hold of a ship, etc).  So: ‘a step into or from a protected place’, a ‘doorstep’. ↩

Effects before causes

Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger:

There were times when McLuhan felt proud that he had been an intellectual pioneer, almost the first person in the West since Plato, as he sometimes put it, to study effects rather than to talk about causes. (278)

McLuhan was overstating the case, of course.  Gilson and Muller-Tyme had taught him how important this method was to Augustine and to Christian philosophy generally. But the claim gives good measure of the importance within McLuhan’s work of this sort of investigation. In the sciences it is comparable to a chemist recommending close attention to the workings of particular material reactions in order to illuminate the table of elements. Or to a physicist attempting to define a law through concrete observations of, say, the path of a planet. But in the humanities, far more consequentially, it is the one way around nihilism.

Added April 30, 2023: In the 1940s McLuhan had the idea from Poe and Eliot that the artist must start with the effect she wants to achieve with an artwork and then figure out the steps leading to that effect. Those steps would be the artwork as an intro-duction to the desired effect. Or of the sparking of it. Later he realized that this idea could be turned around with the aim of achieving another effect rather than the starting one. For example, if nihilism were taken as an effect, or war, or social discord, or despair, figuring out the steps leading to that effect could expose how to avoid it by changing those steps. This notion that all problems are achieved effects that are avoidable once they are investigated as effects is one of the important aspects of of McLuhan’s faith:

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility. (McLuhan to Martin Esslin, September 23, 1971, Letters 440)

 

 

 

The incomprehensible mechanism

Poe’s story (if that is what it is), ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844), rehearses the action of ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) in another medium, earth rather than sea:

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

just where and when (“a certain period”) are “the boundaries which divide Life from Death”? And what occurs to the soul, ‘there’ and ‘then’, between identities, or between identity and its annihilation? Poe’s wonderfully formulated suggestion is that such trans-formation is the working of an “incomprehensible mechanism”:

some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken.

This process of metamorphosis is the precondition of rebirth, psychological or otherwise.  ‘The Premature Burial’ concludes:

My soul acquired tone — acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. “Buchan” I burned.1 I read no “Night Thoughts” — no fustian [speech] about churchyards — no bugaboo tales —such as this2.  In short, I became a new man, and lived a man’s life.

 

 

  1.  “Buchan” has not definitively been identified. Candidates include William Buchan (1729-1805), author of a popular medical book, and Peter Buchan (1790-1854), a collector of dark tales. See The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Night Thoughts is the famous book of Edward Young (1683-1765). ↩
  2.  Poe’s genial self-reference within his own “bugaboo tale” — “such as this” — also functions to describe the metamorphosis at stake in it as an “incomprehensible” flip in awareness. ↩

The humble ditch

The humble ditch gleams brighter than a hoard. (Vincent van Gogh citing a Jules Breton poem)1

Breton’s sentence, particularly as cited in 1884 by van Gogh (1853-1890), captures a number of McLuhan’s themes at once: the gap where the action is, the hidden processes of the present, the unperceived transitive water or footbridge, the function of artistic creation, the dialogue of the light and dark, “light through” toward us rather than “light on” from us, etc.

  1. Van Gogh in a March 1884 letter to Anthon van Rappard. Cf, van Gogh’s drawings and paintings, The Ditch (1873), Footbridge Across a Ditch (1883), The Ditch (1884), Garden of the Asylum (1889). ↩

The family predicament

McLuhan talking in ‘A Matter of Faith‘, a 1972 interview with Fr Patrick Peyton:

It’s perfectly obvious that the family has been ripped off, as it were. In our kind of world the extreme mobility of the hardware components of the world around it have destroyed the  community in which the family normally is embedded. The matrix of the family, the  community, has been ripped off by new instruments of transportation which simply eliminate the neighborliness and the natural rapport that men have with one another by proximity and daily dialogue and familiarity. It is the daily dialogue and familiarity that has been ripped off by rapid transport so that people now go as quickly to Berlin (…) or to Moscow (…) as formerly they made a short journey (…) Now this has temporarily, at least, destroyed what we call community and so the family is left isolated — the nuclear family [today is] stark naked, unsupported by community. Now a family in which you have no [surrounding] community is naturally one that is put under a terrible stress. If only the members of the family are there to constitute community and neighborliness this is surely [only the] bare bones [of  community] and it’s a pretty stark situation.

And in 1974:

In a world of perpetual motion and high mobility there can be no meaningful community, since by definition, all we really have in common is the mobility; and the one thing we depend upon is change. The mobility itself is inseparable from our new affluent technologies which demand that we become their servo-mechanisms.  (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

Lionizing and de-lionizing McLuhan

In the mid 1960s, when McLuhan began to be lionized in the US (giving license to Canadians to do so in train), the understanding was that he was a conservative capitalist who provided highfalutin thoughts on the great virtues of modern technology.  Television and electric media generally were — the new God.    

But then it turned out that McLuhan saw capitalism as the private rip-off of public goods and the new media as potentially enslaving and as certainly destructive of individual and social identity.1 

Once this other side of McLuhan’s thought became known, he had to be exposed as a fraud and an idiot.2 Even worse, as a Catholic even! The press and the academy were duly organized to this end and the required result was soon obtained, first in the US and then, ever taking its cue, in Canada as well.  McLuhan became an embarrassment.

McLuhan is usually considered as a student of the media.  But his career may as usefully be  studied as an object of manipulation3 by that rabid merger of media and intelligentsia that has torn off its mask today to reveal its monstrous power and terrible intent. 

 

  1. Cf, Take Today, 41: “From tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood — Benjamin Nelson, Idea of Usury; 59-60: “Brooks Adams in 1896 produced his classic study of the effect of acceleration on social institutions: ‘Nothing so portentous overhangs humanity as this mysterious and relentless acceleration of movement, which changes methods of competition and alters paths of trade; for by it countless millions of men and women are foredoomed to happiness or misery, as certainly as the beasts and trees, which have flourished in the wilderness, are destined to vanish when the soil is subdued by man.’ — The Law of Civilization and Decay” ↩
  2. This effort continues unabated to this day. The bite of McLuhan’s insight into the modern world is such that there continues to be a good market for its discounting.  ‘How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan‘ by Jefferson Pooley (associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College) is an outstanding contemporary example of such exposure: McLuhan as a media creation, McLuhan as a reactionary, McLuhan as “Panglossian seer”, McLuhan as “pious agrarian”, McLuhan as “media mystagogue”, McLuhan as “cultural pessimist”, McLuhan as self-contradictory, McLuhan as nostalgic for tribalism, McLuhan as pentacostal, McLuhan as “truth-indifferent”, McLuhan as “schizophrenic”, etc etc. There is little Pooley fails to throw against the wall to see what will stick. ↩
  3. Pooley notes with some truth: “In some ways, though, McLuhan was more a product of the media culture than its student.”  But what Pooley thinks we find in this “product of the media culture” is, somehow, “the man” himself!  More, this is the man himself as a media manipulator! Pooley is able to reach this bizarre conclusion because he holds, as a convinced Gutenbergian, directly contra McLuhan (and contra all the great moderns championed by McLuhan from Poe to Joyce), that the media environment is subject to individual control. McLuhan as a “product of the media culture” is immediately thereafter said to have “seduced Esquire and the ad men (and later Wired) because what he had to say resonated with Americans already primed for the good news about technology.” And exactly therefore (as Pooley ends his screed another sentence later): “the man (…) is more instructive than his books.” Where McLuhan, like Poe’s mariner in the Maelstrom, investigated the depths of the media sea to learn how it was that Americans are “already primed”, Pooley would direct our interest to the hero with a thousand faces making his way over that sea’s surface — a sort of Captain Cook of the media. ↩

Percepts of existence

if the external world is attuned to the mind of man, then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridger between the two worlds. He conducts the symphony of mind and nature. (…) The poet here is exercising his priestly powers of purifying the wells of existence, exerting his primary imagination which is the agent of all perception, not the secondary imagination which brings art into existence as an echo of the functions of perception.1 (Coleridge As Artist, 1957)

I am myself quite aware that there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the “death of Christianity” or the “death of God” occurs the moment they [Christianity/God] become concept. As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive. (Electric Consciousness and The Church, 1970)

The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.2 (Take Today, 1972. 22)

Percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of nature. (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)3

Effects Are Perceived Whereas Causes Are Conceived (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)4  

The effects come first, and the fact of the effects coming first indicates that the study of environmental action, or the action of the [Mael]strom, must begin with the effects rather than with a theoretic pursuit of causes. The effects are percepts, and the causes tend to be concepts. (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

“Percepts of existence” is a subjective genitive5 (where percepts belong first of all to existence), not an objective genitive (where existence would belong to percepts as their achieved/assembled/certified/manipulated/conceptualized object).

Hence, since existence is our ground, and since existence is originally fractured as6 primordial percepts, we belong first of all to percepts, not them to us.

The qualification “first of all” is required because the mystery (“the main question“) lies in the fact that the subjective genitive in “percepts of existence” comes to be an objective genitive. The subjectivity of existence (gen. subj.) comes to be taken over by an objectivity.  And this objectivity seems to belong to us, not to it — since it, existence, comes to be the object of our conceptualization.

But what if even, or especially, this hand-over belonged (and indeed belongs) first of all to it? To an “incomprehensible” kenosis?

 

  1. “Primary” here must be taken in terms of rank (ie, of fundamentality), but also in terms of time. For a sound comes first or is “primary” and its “echo” is “secondary”.  So in experience, perception is always first (although this is usually blacked out and unknown) and what we make on this basis, from conceptions to bed-frames to artworks, always second. ↩
  2. “Dialogue” is both one percept on the spectrum of percepts and the prerequisite for consciousness of the katabasis that perpetually recurs to that spectrum. What comes first and what comes second here is knotted: “dialogue” must be known in order to come to know “dialogue”. This knot in time constitutes a labyrinth which must be threaded as the initial step into the terra incognita McLuhan attempted to introduce and explore. ↩
  3. This passage in ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ continues: ‘Their hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity,” whether “materialist” or “idealist.” They also ignored the acoustic “message of the birds” — the output of any process, biological or psychic, always differs qualitatively from the input. There are no “through-puts” or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces for “keeping in touch” with “where the action is.” When the “play” between the wheel and the axle ends, so does the wheel. While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.” The ideal of the rationalist philosophers still persists: to achieve an inclusive “science of the sciences.” But such a “science” would be a monster of preconceived figures minus un-perceived grounds. No “objective” dialectics of Nature or of science as visually ex-plainable can stand up to a resonant interface with the existential. For “testing the truth” is not merely matching by congruence or classification; it is making sense out of the totality of experience — a process of pattern re-cognition that requires not only concepts but active perception by all the senses. Today, as “hardware” is transmuted into pure information by the process of “etherealization,” the “inner” and the “outer” merge — thinking becomes doing.’ ↩
  4. This further passage in ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ continues: ‘Unable to explore actual processes perceptually from every side, the conceptual man apprehends only visual goals. For example, the conventional ideas of “evolution” and “technology” are illusions engendered by the visual bias of literate cultures. Such cultures translated the “chain of being” metaphor from the astral to the biological plane. For the use of the missing link” idea we are indebted to a missing inventor. So far nobody has appeared as originator of this phrase. The gap created by the “missing link” has sparked more exploration and discovery than the established links in “connected” science. Conceptual choices, like “natural selection,” can come only after the fact. The “origins” of all species vanish in rear-view perspectives, while the music goes round and round.’ ↩
  5.  A subjective genitive like ‘the ball of the boy’. An objective genitive, in contrast, may be seen in ‘the boy’s ball’. ↩
  6. ‘As’ not ‘into’, since ‘into’ might be taken to imply a chronological sequence of, first, existence, and then, sometime later, its fracture into percepts. Instead, existence is primordially fractured and these fractions may be called percepts. ↩

A sense of reality

Camp is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay1 of their lives. (…) People need old lives2 to make their young lives real…3

  1. McLuhan often emphasized the importance of “replay” as “recognition” and “retrieval”.  Here it has the opposite value of preventing “recognition” and “retrieval”.  The differences between these values turn on the presence or absence of “dialogue as a process of creating the new” that does not “merely reflect or repeat the old” (Take Today, 22). ↩
  2. “Old lives” as giving “a sense of reality” provides an interesting ontological twist to the “rear-view mirror”. ↩
  3. Linda Sandler, ‘Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women’,Miss Chatelaine magazine, September 3, 1974). Some further observations from the same interview: “Escaping into another time or space is a form of indulgence — like licking a candy bar. I’m not sure there should be any law against it. I don’t think people should be deep and profound — my gosh!  who wants even to hear such people?”; “Men (as opposed to women) have no imagination (…) (they have taken) early retirement for sagging psyches”. ↩

The Maelstrom in Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés

The Symbolists long ago, and Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot in this century, spent their entire lives expounding the aesthetics of the resonant intervals of acoustic space. The same resonant intervals have become the basis of modern quantum mechanics.The major factor is that the interval is where the action is. (McLuhan to Barbara Ward, February 8, 1973, Letters 466, emphasis in the original)

When McLuhan came to read Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés (1897) in the late 1940s, he must have been struck to find that one prism in its assemblage of prisms reflected, or refracted, Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841).1 For McLuhan had been deeply engaged with Poe at least since 1943 (but he had begun to read Poe’s stories a full decade before this on his way to England with Tom Easterbrook in 1932) and had published an essay on ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ in 1944. Then in 1946 he began that series of descriptions and prescriptions of the Maelstrom that he would continue unabated for the rest of his life:

The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape. (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, 1946)

Mallarmé’s poem (if that is what it is) situates itself (if situation is even possible in “this region of vagueness, in which all reality dissolves”)2 in the abyss of a shipwreck at the moment of “detached” (McLuhan) “vertigo” (Mallarmé) when its “master” (Poe’s mariner) is between “vessels” (“the man without a vessel”). This is “the moment of striking”, like the striking of a spark, through which some or other particular form of experience is to be actualized out of the “original foam” or spectrum array of its possibilities. Hence it is a moment “beyond former calculations” (defining “the old man”) but that is “not yet some [further] account”. 

This is a time aside from chronological time that unaccountably “hesitates” and so provides a kind of freeze-frame portrait of “THE ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE” of the exposure of the master’s “childlike3 shade” or “immemorial ulterior demon” to “the virgin index” of possibilities (“in sight of all non-existent human outcomes”, the “non-existent regions” of “AS IF” constituting the un-decided “neutrality of [the] abyss”). These formal seeds may be imagined as the flotsam and jetsam circling within the Maelstrom’s “worldpool”, some one of which Mallarmé’s “master”, like Poe’s mariner and his brother (and, indeed, everyone) must forever, over and over again, ‘select’, or somehow originate, as the momentary “vessel” of their eternally forthcoming experience.4

This is the ‘story’ (although exactly not a chronological one, not linear ‘history’) of “the memorable crisis where the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes“. But this singular “event” is one that is “accomplished” over and over again in (or to) all human experience such that it is the “ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE” by which precisely “NOTHING (…) WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE (…) BUT THE PLACE”.  That is, nothing itself, the synchronic gap or interval between particular vessels of experience, as an original creative force before experience, unaccountably activates itself (or ‘takes place’) and the result is — some “place”, some “CONSTELLATION”, some orientation, like “North”. In the midst of this synchronic way humans eternally reenact the original creation where, too, “NOTHING (…) WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE (…) BUT THE PLACE”.

THE ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE OF A SHIPWRECK’S DEPTH (…) the Abyss raging (…) beneath the desperately sloping incline (…) falling (…) the surges, gathered far within the shadow buried deep by (…) its yawning depth (…) rocked from side to side (…) THE MASTER, beyond former calculations, where the lost manoeuvre (…) that formerly (…) grasped the helm (…) hesitates, a corpse pushed back by the arm from the secret5, rather than taking sides6, a hoary madman, on behalf of the waves: one [wave] overwhelms the head, flows through the submissive beard (…) of the man without a vessel, empty (…) a legacy, in vanishing, to someone ambiguous, the immemorial ulterior demon having, from non-existent regions, led the old man towards this ultimate meeting with probability, this his childlike shade caressed and smoothed and rendered supple by the wave (…) the sea through the old man or the old man against the sea, making a vain attempt, an Engagement whose dread the veil of illusion rejected, as the phantom of a gesture will tremble, collapse, madness, WILL NEVER ABOLISH (…) AS IF
A simple insinuation into silence (…) the mystery hurled, howled, in some close swirl (…) whirls round the abyss without scattering or dispersing and cradles the virgin index there [of] AS IF (…) that IF the lucid and lordly crest of vertigo on the invisible brow sparkles, then shades, a slim dark tallness, upright in its siren coiling, at the moment of striking, through impatient ultimate scales (…) that imposed limits on the infinite (…) rhythmic suspense of the disaster, to bury itself in the original foam, from which its delirium formerly leapt to the summit faded by the same neutrality of abyss (…) NOTHING of the memorable crisis [gen subj!] where the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes, WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE a commonplace elevation pours out [of] absence BUT THE PLACE some lapping below, as if to scatter the empty act abruptly, that otherwise by its falsity would have plumbed perdition, in this region of vagueness, in which all reality dissolves (…)7

These excerpts comprise over half of the text. Another substantial prism-theme has to do with what occurs at this juncture of “un Coup de Dés“. A de-cision is made (such as Poe’s mariner’s decision to abandon ship and entrust himself to a barrel) that is at once uncertain as regards its provenance (the mariner’s brother can’t understand it) and its viability, but also certain as regards its specific shape: “that imposed limits on the infinite”. The “throw of the dice” is such a “meeting with probability” that cannot hope to “abolish hazard” or “chance”; but at the same time occasions some “unique Number which cannot be another”, “a final account in formation”, “A CONSTELLATION”:

EXCEPT at the altitude PERHAPS, as far as a place fuses with, beyond, outside (…) through such declination8 of fire (…) towards what must be the Wain also North A CONSTELLATION (…) a final account in formation (…) stopping at some last point that (…) expresses a Throw of the Dice [Un Coup de Dés].

As Gilson noted in his 1930 Augustine essay: “by the very act of choosing the way he considered best he precluded himself from at the same time following another”.9 Similarly in McLuhan’s Nashe thesis: “the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among [the three arts] for ascendancy” such that “in any study of the history of the trivium it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts”.

Human beings always act and experience on the basis of some orientation (“the Wain also North A CONSTELLATION”), but an orientation singular is not given.  Instead there are orientations, plural, and both the art and science of the 20th century came to interrogate how de-cision is made between them (or has always already been made between them), at the prior level of AS IF possibility (although to the normal mode or “vessel” of experience such questioning could only seem to be a shipwreck). And the great question was, and is, how such achieved singularity out of pluripotent ground might or might not be compatible with meaning.

 

  1. Following Baudelaire’s intense engagement with Poe, Mallarmé published his sonnet, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe, in 1876, and his translations of Poe’s collected poems (Les Poèmes d’Edgar Poe) in 1888. ↩
  2. Quotations from Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés in this and the following two paragraphs come from the extensive excerpt from the poem given immediately after them. ↩
  3. “Childlike” because ‘hesitating’ before possibilities yet to be actualized (or not): “someone ambiguous”. ↩
  4. McLuhan’s unpublished manuscript on ‘The Little Epic’ from the later 1950s: “Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies.  And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names. In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’.” ↩
  5. “A corpse pushed back by the arm (of the vortex) from the secret”: a “corpse” because “a legacy, in vanishing” and not yet some “final account in formation” that would expose “the secret” of either the “plumbed perdition” below or the “commonplace elevation” above. ↩
  6. Ditto. ↩
  7. Translation by A.S. Kline (underlining emphasis added). ↩
  8. Regarding altitude/declination, see note 4 above. McLuhan doubtless read Coup de Dés against the background of Eliot’s Four Quartets, one of whose epigrams is Heraclitus’ ‘odos ano kato… ↩
  9. ‘The Future Of Augustinian Metaphysics’, A Monument To Saint Augustine, 1930, 287-315. ↩

Effect before cause in Gilson

Mallarmé (…) saw that a poetry of effects was impersonal. The author effaced himself above all in not assigning causes or explanations as transitional devices of a novelistic and a pseudo-rationalistic type between the parts of a poem. (Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum, 1949) 

When a new environment forms, we see the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. (…) Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend in any period or culture. It was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake who demonstrated that the way to overcome the fear of the present, and of innovation in general, is to make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest, 1967)

It was the symbolist poets who began the study of effects minus causes. This is a technique indispensable to the developing of perception and the by-passing of concepts. (McLuhan to Jim Davey, March 22, 1971)

the discovery of the “technique of discovery” (…) is [to learn how] to trace a process backward from its ultimate effect to the point at which to begin to produce that effect, i.e., to invent the market before the product. This was the discovery of Poe in detective fiction, and Baudelaire in poetry. (Take Today, 195)

This putting the effect before the cause is what we do typically and ordinarily in the electric time.  In 1844, at about the same time that [Georg Cantor, 1845-1918],1 the mathematician, invented set theory by separating the mathematical operations from mathematical quantities, Edgar Allan Poe, the great innovator in the arts, separated the poetic process from poetry. This was his great breakthrough, and it was of instant effect on the French symbolists and the French poetic activity of the period. Baudelaire translated Poe (…) and took on this idea of simultaneity that if you want to write a poem you have to start with the effect and then look around for the causes. And this became the awareness of acoustic space in which the beginning and the end are at the same time. This is the kind of space and time in which we live now. Einstein was only catching up with Poe in the twentieth century when he invented space-time or relativity theory. The poets and the artists are usually fifty years ahead of the physical scientists in devising models of perception. The job of the artist is to devise means of perceiving that are relevant to the situation in which you exist. This is the gap between biology and technology… (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

Poe hit upon the key to the electric age, programming from effects in order to anticipate causes. (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

I begin with effects and work round to the causes, whereas the conventional pattern is to start with a somewhat arbitrary selection of ‘causes’ and then try to match these with some of the effects. It is this haphazard matching process that leads to fragmentary
superficiality. (McLuhan to Franklin R Gannon, June 12, 1973, Letters 478)

converts come in through the back door of the church. Coming in through the back door is coming in through the effects of the church, and not through its teachings. (McLuhan to Nina Sutton, 1975)

In the late 1940s a series of influences suddenly coalesced for McLuhan into a position he would continue to articulate for the remaining thirty years of his life.  This coalescence amounted to his second conversion. The central notion was that everything experienced in human life and culture is contingent effect, never cause — but that contingent effect indirectly suggests cause (via induction and making, not deduction and matching).

In the order of their work on (working over) McLuhan, these influences were: T.S. Eliot’s lectures and essays and especially his Four Quartets which appeared sequentially in the late 1930s and early 1940s; the many books and essays of Etienne Gilson from the 1920s and 1930s2; the work of Sigfried Giedion and Wyndham Lewis, both of whom McLuhan met in 1943; Edgar Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) and ‘Philosophy of Composition’ (1846); Cleanth Brooks’ poem on the Maelstrom explicitly correlating it with times plural (written in 1944 and published in 1946)3; the poems and essays of Stéphane  Mallarmé (1842-1898); the essays and poetry of Ezra Pound; and the novels of James Joyce (which McLuhan reread in the late 1940s).4

When in 1938 Bernard Muller-Thym returned with his PhD from the University of Toronto to St Louis University to teach in the philosophy department, he and McLuhan rapidly became close friends. Muller-Thym would be the best man at McLuhan’s marriage in 1939 and the Godfather of McLuhan’s first two children, Eric (b 1942) and Mary (b 1944 with twin Teri). In Toronto Muller-Thym had been Etienne Gilson’s favorite student and in turn passed on his knowledge of Gilson’s work to McLuhan. The years Muller-Thym and McLuhan spent together in St Louis (before Muller-Thym enlisted in the navy in 1942) amounted in this way to a master class in Gilson’s thought conducted by Muller-Thym for McLuhan. As is especially evident once the editor’s additions to McLuhan’s own bibliography are discounted, Gilson would became by far the most cited reference in McLuhan’s PhD thesis on Nashe, which was submitted and approved in 1943. 

Gilson’s teaching on the chronological5 and phenomenological precedence of effect to cause is especially treated in his 1930 essay, ‘The Future Of Augustinian Metaphysics’:6 

The fact on which [Augustine] fastened as the witness in ourselves of the existence of God was the true judgement. His analysis, often repeated, of the characteristics (…) which formally define truth as such, is well known; the antinomy between the contingency of the subject as the vehicle of truth on the one side, and the necessity of truth itself, whatever  its object, on the other, can only be solved by the admission of a subsistent truth [or medium] (297)

For the Augustinian proof to have its full effect, it is necessary that, somehow or other, the human intellect, which conceives the truth [in the sciences, but also in everyday understanding of language and the environment], should not be the immediate sufficient cause of its truth;7 if it is, there is no necessity for it to affirm the existence of God as cause, and then the way opening [to God] through thought is blocked at the very entrance. Doubtless there would remain the search for God in the order of causality, as cause of the intellect itself (which Albert the Great was to attempt), but St. Augustine does not even try this, because the only operation of the intellect which requires the affirmation of God as its sufficient reason is the [existence]8 of truth. He has, therefore, always to come back to the true judgement, or, what comes to the same thing, the intellect, so far as it is capable of conceiving truth. (298)

if (…) this is the point on which his proof rests, it must necessarily follow that Divine illumination (to give it its traditional name) must reach thought directly [as productive cause, but known as direct cause only indirectly through effect]. For either it reaches it directly and in that case we grasp at the same time the sufficient reason of truth and God who is its foundation; or it reaches it indirectly, and in that case we are equally incapable of attaining to the existence of God and of accounting for truth [since in this case these would depend from the recognition bestowed upon them by our contingency]. (298-299)

To say that “we know in God”, or that we see His hidden light,9 is this not tantamount to inviting the metaphysician in search of a mystical intuitionism to treat God as the very light of our thought, as the natural and first object of this thought, so that, instead of knowing Him through things, we know things through Him? This deviation begins from the end of the twelfth century onwards, under the influence of Arabic neo-Platonism, and especially of Avicenna; [although] dammed in by the efforts of St, Bonaventura and of St. Thomas Aquinas, it spreads in the seventeenth century with Malebranche, thanks to the influence
of Cartesian idealism, and reaches its height in the nineteenth century under the impulse of German idealism. (299)

In proportion as the teaching of St. Augustine aimed at being a metaphysic, it is a metaphysic based upon a psychological empiricism, or, if preferred, a metaphysic of inner experience. Hence its extreme suppleness, its power of rebirth, and the very incompleteness which left a permanent possibility of progress open before it. (302-303)

The important point before all else is to understand that the two philosophies [Augustinian and Cartesian] have no essential relation (…) What is, for the French philosopher, but the initial step in a regulated order of thoughts is for St. Augustine a concrete and painful experience, an illness from which he has suffered and of which he has cured himself.(…) si fallor sum (301, 303)

Assuming (…) St. Augustine’s method is as we have described it, what do we find as the necessary starting-point of our search? Facts, and nothing but facts. These facts may be, and often are, facts of inner experience, they may be ideas — but ideas taken not as principles of deduction, but as the basis of induction. The problem of the existence of God enjoys no privileged position in his teaching. It is, indeed, a unique case in respect of the reality at stake and consequently  also in respect of the nature of the datum which allows us to attain to it, but this datum differs from other data only in content, not in nature. Like being, like life, like sensation, like thought, truth is a fact; like other facts, it is presented to our empirical observation; like other empirical  observations, it demands of metaphysics the discovery of its sufficient reason; and if God alone can furnish its sufficient reason, we shall have proved the existence of God. Nothing here ever leaves the strictly philosophical order to pass over into mystical intuition and to substitute it for philosophical thought. (305-306)

Every ontological interpretation of St. Augustine presupposes, then, a more or less complete misunderstanding of his radical empiricism. (…) The primum cognitum of St. Augustine is not God; it is man within the universe, and, within this universe and this man, the experience of a true judgement. But it must be added that this primum cognitum is not (…) the primum reale; on the contrary, it [the primum cognitum] becomes intelligible only on condition of finding its sufficient reason in a transcendent fact which provides its explanation.  (306)

St. Augustine starts from a complex cognitum in which he distinguishes by analysis an order of reality which postulates in its turn that of the First Being. Once this Being is apprehended and posited, it becomes possible to set off into an order which is not that of deduction, but rather of production; and even then it must be remembered that the start is taken not from a principle, but from the consequence, since we ourselves are only a consequence (…) the doctrine of divine illumination is not the vision of the First Cause, but the induction of the First Cause, starting from an effect, namely [the fact of our knowledge of] truth. (306-307)

The congenital impotence of our intellectual light to apprehend truth, a correlative impotence of our will to compass the good until truth and goodness are accepted as the gifts of God, instead of being conquered like the spoils of the victor, had been St. Augustine’s experience…10 (307)

to be Christian qua philosophy, a philosophy must be Augustinian or nothing. His metaphysic of nature completes a metaphysic of grace, because nature is given to the Christian in grace, which, working in him inwardly, manifests itself there in the manner of a cause
revealed by its effects. (308)

It is in no case possible for man to start from God to deduce from Him the creature; on the contrary, he must mount from the creature to God. The course recommended by St. Augustine — and herein lies his personal contribution to the treasure of tradition — is the path to God, leading through this particular creature which is man, and in man, thought, and in thought, truth. But this means, quite beyond  speculations about the nature of truth and its metaphysical  conditions, a sort of moral dialectic that, taking as object of its search the search itself by man of God, endeavours to show the presence in the heart of man of a contingency… (312)

that secret door behind which God stands. (313)

a renewed Augustinianism (…) would have to become assimilative and creative (…) it will so become, once it realizes that its function is to do well what has been badly done by modern idealism, to re-establish it on the foundations of a psychological realism which is its natural basis…  (314)

In a word11, “that secret door behind which God stands” is the utter finitude and contingency of everything human — a finitude and contingency that is yet somehow capable of communication and of learning truth.  These capabilities taken as effects or contingencies are, once intensely interrogated, revelatory of what is before them as cause — and so makes them possible in a kind of knotted feedback-feedforward action.

This is, of course, circular — from what is later, what is earlier is induced.  But being subject to this circularity is just what human being is.

  1. McLuhan has ‘Gould’ here, but it was Cantor who “invented set theory”. Perhaps McLuhan had discussed Cantor with his friend Glenn Gould at some point? Slips like this were common in McLuhan’s work but he rarely bothered to correct them. ↩
  2. In a strange and humorous reversal of roles, McLuhan undertook, 30 years later, to instruct Gilson on effects: “Symbolism starts with effects and goes sleuthing after causes” (McLuhan to Gilson, January 19, 1971, Letters 420). ↩
  3. Since Brooks and McLuhan were in close contact at this time, it may well be that McLuhan knew of the poem before it was published. ↩
  4. Of course, many of these influences had been greatly influenced themselves by some of the others: Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound and Brooks by Poe; Eliot, Pound and Joyce by Mallarmé. ↩
  5. But what is ‘the’ chronological? See McLuhan’s times. ↩
  6. In A Monument To Saint Augustine, 1930, 287-315. All emphasis in the citations has been added. ↩
  7. A fundamental problem with most discussions of McLuhan and art is that this insight is ignored. The ground of an artwork cannot be the artist without raising the question of the ground of the artist. As Nietzsche pointed out, abolishing the ‘true world’ abolishes the ‘apparent world’ along with it. ↩
  8. Gilson’s translated text here has ‘conception’, which is not false, but which introduces unnecessary complications. As Gilson says in the very next sentence: “(Augustine) has, therefore, always to come back to the true judgement, or, what comes to the same thing, the intellect, so far as it is capable of conceiving  truth.” ↩
  9. Gilson frequently recurs to “Divine illumination” and “the very light of our thought” in these passages. In McLuhan this notion is often termed ‘light through’ toward us as opposed to ‘light on’ from us. ↩
  10. See note 7 above. ↩
  11. ‘In a word’ — as McLuhan sometimes said, following Muller-Thym’s frequent habit. ↩

Easterbrook in Toronto

W.T. (Tom) Easterbrook graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1933, the same year as McLuhan. He then went on to graduate school at UT in political economics where he obtained his MA in 1935 and his PhD in 1938.  He began teaching at Brandon that same year. In 1941, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and spent the year of 1942 studying, presumably at UT. In 1943 he came back to Manitoba, but not to Brandon College — he taught at the University of Manitoba until 1946.

In 1947 he returned to UT where he eventually became the head of the political economy department like his teacher, thesis adviser, colleague and friend, Harold Innis.

In 1941 his career to that point was recorded in the Guggenheim Foundation’s Report for 1941–42 as follows:

Appointed from Canada:
EASTERBROOK, WILLIAM THOMAS:  Appointed for studies in the economic history of the Pacific Northwest; tenure, twelve months from July 1, 1941.
Born December 4, 1907, at Winnipeg, Canada.  Education:  University of Manitoba, B.A., 1933; University of Toronto, M.A., 1935, Ph.D., 1938 (Royal Bank Economics Fellow, 1933–34; Alexander Mackenzie Fellow, 1934–35; Maurice Cody Fellow, 1935–36); Harvard University, 1936–37 (Harvard University Fellow).
Assistant in Economics, 1937–38, University of Toronto.
Lecturer in Economics, 1938–40, Assistant Professor, 1940—, Brandon College of the University of Manitoba.
Publications:  Farm Credit in Canada1, 1938.
Articles in Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Encyclopedia of Canada.

In the decade between his graduate work at UT and the beginning of his teaching career there, Easterbrook returned as a visiting lecturer for a year in the early 1940’s in connection with his Guggenheim:

Innis supported [Henry] Cody‘s2 program of developing graduate studies at Toronto with a proposal of his own. He was anxious to bring young professors in the social sciences from other Canadian universities to Toronto on one- or two-year stints. He argued that many of them had been struggling during the Depression with large classes and low salaries. They would benefit by a “relaxed” period (with a light teaching load) at Toronto. After becoming familiar with the Toronto system, they would return home and organize their classes along the lines of Toronto’s, using the same textbooks. In due course they would be sending graduate students to Toronto. Cody approved of the proposal and the result was a series of visits from young professors from western universities: W.T. Easterbrook (…) and others. (Donald Campbell Masters, Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life, 1995, 208)

 

  1. This was Easterbrook’s PhD Thesis.  Innis arranged its publication by UTP and wrote an introduction to it. ↩
  2. Canon Henry J Cody was the president of the University of Toronto from 1932 to 1945 and its chancellor from 1944 to 1947. ↩

Echoes of Joyce

the way of escape from the dangers of excessive spiritual isolation was through wholehearted participation in the great stream of human experience and endeavor. (‘Introduction’, Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955, vii)

He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation [to join the jesuit order] he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. (…) He crossed the bridge over the stream… (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 4)

Perhaps because he was not a cradle Catholic and because Canada was not a Catholic country like Ireland, McLuhan did not feel the same tension between freedom and catholicism that Joyce did. However, five of his six children did.  And McLuhan understood this, both in Joyce and in his kids. His resolution of the tension was, while respecting the forms of contemporary catholicism (as only partially true like all things finite, but yet partially and importantly true), to criticize the Gutenbergian heritage of the church and the Gutenbergian assumptions of many of its parishioners and clerisy.  But, at the same time, to contribute to a scientific understanding of human experience in which the possibility of belief and the possibility of the need for a small-c catholic church were exposed and weighed against the full spectrum of rival possibilities. McLuhan’s faith was that the result of this open assessment would be definitively favorable to the religious life:

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 is present in the foreground. 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. (The Mechanical Bride, 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 (gen subj!) the new media. (Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954)

The distinction at stake may be seen in McLuhan’s use of “citadel” in these passages (itself deriving from Joyce)1. Joyce differentiated “the citadel of his soul” from its “sanctuary”, their difference consisting in “his freedom”:

he wondered at (…) the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom.

McLuhan, on the other hand, in a move going back to John Watson, saw “the citadel of his soul” and its “sanctuary” as harmonious (not to say identical) given “analytical2 awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition”.

Whereas Joyce “crossed (…) over the stream” in the name of freedom, McLuhan opted in the same name for “wholehearted participation in the great stream of human experience and endeavor” — a stream which included religion and its concrete tradition in the past of McLuhan’s particular civilization. 

  1. See “The very citadel of civilized awareness”. ↩
  2.  McLuhan used “ana-lytical” both in its etymological and Kantian sense as ‘differentiated’ and as opposed to ‘syn-thetic’ (as a different kind of differentiation). In Bellum-Pax-Bellum McLuhan is cited treating this distinction as that of ‘fission’ vs ‘fusion’. ↩

The very citadel of civilized awareness

The very frequency and violence of temptations showed him at last the truth of what he had heard about the trials of the saints. Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen… (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

McLuhan was evidently struck by Joyce’s formulation here of “the citadel of the soul” since he repeatedly used variations of the phrase in the 1950s:

The Mechanical Bride, vi:
criticism is free to point to the various means employed [in art works] to get the[ir] effect, as well as to decide whether the effect was worth attempting. As such, with regard to the modern state1, it can be a citadel of inclusive awareness amid the dim dreams of collective consciousness.

The Mechanical Bride, 87:
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 is present in the foreground. 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.

Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954
What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. 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.

Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956:
And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.2

Printing and Social Change, 1959:
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 of civilized awareness.

Characteristic for McLuhan was the attempt to bring together a way of describing art (derived especially from Pound) in terms of “individual consciousness” as the “citadel of inclusive awareness”, “vivid awareness” and “civilized awareness” — with science: “For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media.” Both art and science, separately, had come to develop an “analytical3 awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition”. Now was the time in which the two needed to be brought together explicitly in order to harness “the power of applied science for social purposes”.

Just this was already the message of McLuhan’s programmatic letter to Innis early in 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction. The technique which Edgar Poe first put to work in his detective stories. In the arts this discovery has had all those astonishing results which have seemed to separate the ordinary public from what it regards as esoteric magic. From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. [Similarly] the whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising, or in the high arts is toward participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. (…) As mechanical media have popularized and enforced the presence of the arts on all people it becomes more and more necessary to make studies of the function and effect of communication on society. (…) [However] the fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener [cybernetics] approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. (…)  There is a real, living unity [of art and science] in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

  1. This phrase (“the modern state”) may be an indication that McLuhan was reading Innis’ 1946 Political Economy in the Modern State as he was composing The Mechanical Bride in the late 1940s. ↩
  2. These same two sentences were reused by McLuhan in the 1969 Counterblast, 135). ↩
  3. McLuhan uses “ana-lytical” here in its etymological and Kantian sense as ‘differentiated’ and as opposed to ‘syn-thetic’. In Bellum-Pax-Bellum McLuhan is cited treating this distinction as that of ‘fission’ vs ‘fusion’. ↩

John Watson’s heritage in political economics and communications

During an invited lecture given at the University of Toronto in 1938, [W.A.] Mackintosh paid homage to his fellow economist, Harold Innis: “If we ever come to the time when Who’s Who includes the intellectual pedigrees of scholars, there will appear an item: ‘Innis, H.A., by [Thorstein] Veblen, out of [Adam] Shortt‘.” In this spirit, a second entry would surely read: ‘Mackintosh, W.A., by [O.D.] Skelton, out of Shortt’. The teaching of political economy in Canada began in 1878, when John Watson lectured on the topic as part of the moral philosophy curriculum at Queen’s. (…) Nonetheless, it was not until [Watson’s pupil and colleague] Adam Shortt was appointed as lecturer at Queen’s in 1887 that the subject received systematic treatment. (Hugh Grant, W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist, 2015, p 6)

Innis (b 1894) at UT, and Mackintosh (b 1895) at Queen’s, 160 miles east of Toronto, were close contemporaries and were responsible for the introduction of the ‘staples thesis’ into Canadian economics and political theory. Mackintosh broached the topic explicitly in his 1923 article ‘Economic Factors in Canadian History’.1

As described by Hugh Grant in the head citation above, both were influenced in their broad view of political economics by Adam Shortt.  And Shortt, in turn, was a student and later colleague of Watson at Queen’s.

While attention (often of dubious quality however) has been paid to Watson’s lasting influence on philosophy in Canada, especially on George Grant and Charles Taylor, little to no attention has been paid to Watson’s influence on Innis, through Shortt, and on McLuhan, through Innis. Moreover, McLuhan’s most influential teachers when he was an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, were two of the contributors (out of 11) to the Festschrift volume he received on the occasion of his 50th anniversary (1872-1922) teaching at Queen’s: Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson.  Further still, another of the contributors was Fr Henry Carr whose indirect influence on McLuhan (especially by bringing Bernard Phelan and Etienne Gilson to St Michael’s) was massive.

In short, Watson’s influence on Canadian life and thought, through his students and through further generations of students beyond them, was far greater than is generally known. Many of these like Shortt and Skelton eventually left the academy for work in the public service in Ottawa. And others, while still in the academy, like Carr or McLuhan, were active in areas and subjects far afield from Watson’s.  But what all received from Watson, directly or (mostly) indirectly, was the notion — now largely lost — that human reason, while ineluctably finite, can and does know truth in any domain to which it freely applies itself.

 

 

  1.  Canadian Historical Review, March 1923, 12-25. ↩

Henry Carr

In 2012 Father Henry Carr was designated as a person of national historic significance by the government of Canada. A press release (no longer available at the government of Canada website) gave the following backgrounder:

FATHER HENRY CARR (1880-1963)

A pioneering figure in the history of Catholic higher education in Canada, Father Carr played a key role in the evolution of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, from its origins as a small Catholic college focused on preparation for the priesthood, to a full arts college federated in 1910 with the University of Toronto. While at St. Michael’s, he promoted excellence in Catholic higher education, bringing well known Catholic scholars to the college and founding the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (1929), a world-renowned research institute located on the grounds of St. Michael’s College. Father Carr went on to be an advocate for the creation of Catholic colleges within secular universities, bringing the St. Michael’s model of federation to other universities and heading Catholic colleges at the Universities of Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

Henry Carr was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1880, the eldest of nine children in an Irish-immigrant family. He was educated first in the local separate school run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, and then at the Oshawa Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1897 with the gold medal for the top student. In the summer of 1897, while working in a Toronto lithographing shop, Carr learned of a teaching opportunity at St. Michael’s College, a Roman Catholic college in downtown Toronto run by the Basilian Fathers: in return for teaching beginner German at the high school level, Carr would be offered room and board at St. Michael’s, as well as enrollment in the college’s post-secondary classical course. Following a successful first year of teaching, Carr was given responsibility for teaching the “Varsity Class”, a small group of boys preparing for the university entrance examination. In 1899, while continuing his teaching duties, he enrolled in an honours course in Classics at the University of Toronto.

Carr entered St. Basil’s Novitiate in 1900. He was permitted to continue his university studies, and received his Honours B. A. in Classics in 1903. From 1903 until December 1904 he attended Assumption College in Windsor before returning to St. Michael’s College in 1905, when he was ordained. Father Carr played a critical role in the college’s federation with the University of Toronto in 1910 and was a central figure in its subsequent evolution, acting as superior and president from 1915 to 1925. Federation broke the long period of isolation from the mainstream of Canadian university life, and made St. Michael’s College one of the earliest English-Canadian Roman Catholic colleges to provide higher education in partnership with a secular institution. Father Carr attracted outstanding scholars to St. Michael’s and was instrumental in the establishment in 1929 of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies as a centre for scholarly research and publication. The Institute became an international centre of Thomistic studies, that is, the study of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. It attracted graduate students and scholars from around the world, including the prominent Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Father Carr served as superior general of the Basilian Congregation from 1930 to 1942. Later, he was the superior and principal at St. Thomas More College (1942-49) in Saskatchewan and at St. Mark’s College at the University of British Columbia (1956-61). At each of these institutions, he was directly involved in their federation with the university, viewing federation as the best solution for Catholic colleges in an age of increasing secularization, and never advocated for the stand-alone Catholic university, which was the dominant model in the United States. Father Carr retired in 1961 and died in 1963.

The government backgrounder does not mention Carr’s tremendous influence on athletics at St Michael’s and, indeed, nationally.  St. Michael’s College: 100 Years of Pucks and Prayers describes how:

In 1906, Father Henry Carr initiated a hockey program at [St Mike’s]. (…) It did not take long for the school to attain championship success, claiming the Allan Cup senior hockey title in 1910. Under the guidance of Father Carr and later Father David Bauer, the institution evolved into the top breeding ground for junior hockey players in preparation for the National Hockey League. On four occasions between 1934 and 1961, St. Michael’s captured four Memorial Cup titles as the nation’s best team in junior hockey.

Carr was equally successful in football:

after its inaugural season in 1897, Fr. Henry Carr, C.S.B. led the [football] team in 1909 to a Canadian [Junior Football League, CJFL] Championship. Coach Carr (…) introduced both hockey and football to St. Michael’s as a way to integrate the Irish Catholic College and community into the fabric of the city. Luckily, Carr found two willing partners for his unique brand of ecumenism in the principals of Upper Canada College and St. Andrew’s College. Thus two new rivalries on the ice and field were born. Carr strongly believed that athletics were an excellent way to instill discipline and knowledge into young men, and he hoped to create a reputation for athletic excellence that would establish St. Michael’s name across the country. Carr’s exploits as a coach were legendary and beyond leading teams to  championships, he was a true football innovator, with many crediting Carr and other Basilian coaches for introducing the forward pass into the Canadian game in the 1920’s. (St Mike Blue Banner, 2009, p 22-23)

In philosophy, however, Carr was of international, not only national, importance.  He was able to attract Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson to St Michael’s Mediaeval Institute at a time when Maritain was arguably the most influential Catholic intellectual in the world and when Gilson had been offered a chair at Harvard.

At the heart of Carr’s vision was the determination that neither Catholics nor Canadians needed to fear competition from any quarter. Instead, their calling was to immerse themselves in the widest possible world of their contemporaries — but without giving up their identity as Catholics or Canadians or, indeed, as Catholic Canadians.  This was exactly the position described by McLuhan as one Catholic Canadian in the year before he came to St Michael’s:

My increasing awareness has been 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. But this cannot be done by any Catholic group, nor by Catholic individuals, trained in the vocabularies and attitudes which make our [usual] education the feeble simulacrum of the world which it is. It seems obvious that we must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations, and, with its own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic. There is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian. This job must be conducted on every front — every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics. Of course, points of reference must always be made. That is, the examples of real art and prudence must be seized, when available, as paradigms of future effort. (…) These can serve to educate a huge public, both Catholic and non-Catholic, to resist that swift obliteration of the person which is going on [today]. (McLuhan to Clement McNaspy, SJ, Christmas 1945, Letters 180)

 

Bellum-Pax-Bellum

The only extended word for word citation in Finnegans Wake is the following:

Aujourd’hui, comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle, la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance; et, pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de nom, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et se sont succédé jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme au jour des batailles. (FW 281)

Today, as in the days of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with one another and shattered, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages, and have come up to us, one following the other, fresh and cheerful as on the days of the battles.

Joyce was quoting the French historian Edgar Quinet (1803-75), from Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité (1857), via the naturalist, Léon Metchnikoff (1838-1888),  who cited Quinet in his La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques (1889). Joyce read Metchnikoff’s book in 1924. As nicely set out in the From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay blog from which the above translation is taken, Joyce used the Quinet text over and over again in FW and was known to cite it by heart in his conversation. Peter Chrisp, the Swerve of Shore blogger, describes how:

Joyce summed up the [Edgar Quinet] sentence in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: ‘E.Q. says that the wild flowers on the ruins of Carthage, Numancia etc have survived the political rises and falls of Empires’ (L1: 295).  Quinet uses classical Rome as the example of empire. Pliny the Elder and Columella were the great Roman writers on nature: Pliny wrote a massive Natural History and Columella wrote books on Agriculture and Trees. Numantia was a city in Spain whose inhabitants committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Illyria in the western Balkans and Gaul (France) were also conquered by Rome.
Joyce said he ‘felt at home’ in this sentence. He shared Quinet’s detached view of history, eternally repeating the same events. (…). In later life, says [Richard] Ellmann [in his biography of Joyce], [Samuel] Beckett ‘thought this ability to contemplate with telescopic eye Joyce’s most impressive characteristic, and quoted four lines from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ to illustrate:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms of systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.’  (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, 709)

The same Quinet citation is treated in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-chapter Genetic Guide, ed Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (2007), where it is seen as central to the involuted structure of the entire book:

the turning point for [the FW character] Shaun [the post], and indeed for Finnegans Wake [as a whole], came when Joyce read a book by Leon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques. Metchnikoff describes Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theories of corsi and ricorsi as the underlying dynamic for historical progress. Joyce had already been interested in Vico, but this book seemed to have energized his thoughts on the matter and especially on how he could deal with Shaun. The delivery of the letter is no longer a single episode in the saga of HCE but rather a repetition and recapitulation, “by a commodious vicus of recirculation” (FW: 003.02), of that saga into a different register. Shaun’s delivery of the letter replays HCE’s downfall, which is what is recorded, somehow, in the letter itself. The discovery of Shaun’s role could thus be seen as the final nail in the coffin of Wakean narrative as “goahead plot” (LIII: 146).  With Book III Wakean narrative turns back on itself to repeat “the seim anew” (FW: 215.23). If Book I could be said to move forward in the explication of HCE’s fate, then Book III moves backward. As Joyce explained to Weaver, the first part of Book III “is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through events already narrated. It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but is actually only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey” (LI: 214). What Joyce had been experimenting with at the local level with the textual reverberations emanating from the [post-Ulysses] sketches (…) has now, with the invention of Shaun, become the organizing structural principle for the work as a whole.
Another element Joyce derived from Metchnikoff’s book is a quotation from the French philosopher of history Edgar Quinet’s book Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité  (…). It is clear that Joyce derived the quote from Metchnikoff, since he reproduces Metchnikoff’s errors. The sentence describes the effects of temporal change, and Joyce described it as “beautiful” (LI: 295). The sentence was ultimately to take on a kind of nodal resonance as it wound up being incorporated into the [FW] text six times with varying degrees of Wakean distortion. (‘Introduction’, 19-20)

“Temporal change” at the end of this passage is a surprising singular, since the central point of the Quinet sentence would seem to be the contrasting times in the lives of cities and whole civilisations compared to that of flowers. The chapter of FW, in which the Quinet citation appears in its word for word form, features marginal notes from Joyce.  Next to the citation appears:

THE PART PLAYED BY BELLETRISTICKS IN THE BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM.
MUTUOMORPHOMUTATION. (FW 281)

The time of the mutuomorphomutation of cities, empires and civilizations — and, indeed, of “belletristicks” like Shem’s and Joyce’s own efforts — is not the time of flowers nor that of mutuomorphomutation itself. The latter times, although not without their own dynamic rhythms, are synchronic (always in play, always about to bloom again and again, regenerating themselves in and through death), while the former are diachronic and definitively subject to death.  Identity in the former infolds ‘passing away’; in the latter ‘passing away’ is — ‘passing away’.

These contrasting times are particularly focused in Joyce’s note: BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM. On the one hand, this could be taken in the “register” of “goahead plot” or diachronic law: this is time’s arrow to which cities, empires and civilizations, along with belletristicks, are subject. On the other, BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM could be read as the synchronic spectrum of being itself, a triple form which human beings have always already witnessed (although nearly always in “blackout” mode) traversing their perpetual ano-kato pathway in the genesis of experience.

Now McLuhan imagined this synchronic process in terms of Poe’s Maelstrom.  On this model, human beings are at every moment subject to a katabasis into a “worldpool” of warring forms — BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM — from which they emerge, or have always already emerged, into their momentary experience, like Poe’s mariner riding a “barrel” to the surface of the sea out of the Maelstrom whirlpool.

Consideration of this process led to McLuhan’s stipulation in Take Today:

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear): the Cromwellian specialist and the Celtic involved. Only the civilized form is fragmented in action…(22; the bracketed insertion of “eye and ear” is from McLuhan)

Compare Joyce in conversation with Georges Borach fifty years before in 1918:

There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world literature. Then there is an enormous number of combinations of these themes.1

The advance from “two basic extreme forms” (eye/ear) to three, BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM (aka eye-ear-eye), occurs through the fact that BELLUM, as the word itself indicates, and as its doubling (Dublin) in BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM makes explicit, is “fragmented in action”. Its warring sides each claim fundamental priority and exactly therefore eternally battle against the other in an endless attempt to establish a singular priority for themselves alone. Considered synchronistically, where “all is always now”, such a war of archetypal forms can have no end. Both of its sides must be equally original and, therefore, unknown to themselves, behind their backs so to say, subject to a kind of PAX as their mutual right to be a part (or “station”) of the archetypal order. To wage their endless war, they must be double, but with a common standing.

The further advance from 2 and 3 to “hardly more than a dozen” is generated through the fact that BELLAM, as a contesting power that is “fragmented in action”, is subject to degree. The opposition between the belligerent sides ranges along the archetypal spectrum from the avowed obliteration of the other at the extremes of their mutual antagonism to the PAX of mutual recognition where the two meet in the middle of the range. 

In short, the archetypal powers are arrayed in along a spectrum whose double ends (Dublin) tend toward the maximum antagonism of the warring sides (BELLUM-BELLUM) and whose middle represents their PAX. The Gutenberg Galaxy would tell the tale of the diachronic ascendancy of BELLUM over PAX over the last 500 years and begin the exposition in its concluding section of ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’ in the ‘electric age’ today.2

Considering the perpetual exposure to the forms of being in the genesis of human experience, McLuhan wrote to Innis early in 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences… (Letters 221)

“The learning process” requires a resetting of experience. What the symbolists dis-covered according to McLuhan (citing especially Whitehead in this connection, but the general notion was vaguely in the air in the mid 20th century, hence the sudden appearance of cybernetics at that time) was that human experience is constituted, or perpetually reconstituted, through nothing else than such “learning”. Unlike physical materials whose being can be reset only through extremes of temperature and pressure, the notion here was that the being of human experience is continually reset via a momentary or synchronic katabasis into “a labyrinth of the senses and faculties”. This was to characterize the archetypal forms in terms of what was affected and, indeed, effected, by exposure to them: the variable shapes of “the senses and faculties”. There was no fixed orientation of the senses or faculties (the attachment to which defined the Gutenberg Galaxy); there was only a kaleidoscope of different configurations of these which became set through the synchronic process of ‘descent into the Maelstrom‘.

Exactly therefore, the “innumerable variants or ‘parti-colored’ forms” and “enormous number of combinations” of human experience. The ‘molecules’ and ‘compounds’ and ‘mixtures’ of experience resulted not only from diachronic interactions, like physical materials, but also, and above (or below) all, from moment to moment exposure to the entire range of experiential possibilities or forms and the resulting changes from this exposure. Human beings are exactly that type of being that is uniquely exposed to both these times at once.

As illustrated already by the 1918 observation of Joyce, itself doubtless related to Jung’s work at the time, and that to Freud and Frazer, modernity was the time when a resetting of experience was “learning” to focus on this resetting process of learning itself.  And it was doing so through a “retracing” of what had always already been retraced. 

Starting in the late 1940s, McLuhan began using Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” as a figure of this synchronic process. At around the same time, he seems3 to have encountered Havelock’s two essays ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ (1946-1947) and ‘The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land’ (1949), in which a synchronic katabasis under the sea or into the underground is detailed in the literary environment of Virgil. At this time, too, he met Ezra Pound with Hugh Kenner and began an intense correspondence with Pound that lasted a full decade.  And, also with Kenner, he reread Eliot, again, especially Four Quartets, Pound, especially the Cantos, and Lewis (again) and Joyce (ditto). 

On other fronts, he continued his immersion in French symbolism (as Sigfried Gideon had recommended in 1944) resulting in his considerable unpublished manuscript ‘Prelude to Prufrock’. And, here prompted and assisted by his old Winnipeg buddy, Tom Easterbrook, he began as well his Auseinandersetzung with the work of Harold Innis and especially with his 1942 observation:

The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time. (‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946)

The upshot of this vast and as yet inchoate complex of interests and influences was his developing notion of experience as a constant retracing of its principles or forms through a katabasis into their “worldpool”. Experience was always the result or effect of some selection out of that “worldpool” that McLuhan imagined in terms of the decision of Poe’s mariner in the Maelstrom to abandon his ship and to entrust himself, instead, to a “barrel”.

Now, rereading Joyce around 1950, this was exactly what he found in FW:

With Book III Wakean narrative turns back on itself to repeat “the seim anew” (FW: 215.23). If Book I could be said to move forward in the explication of HCE’s fate, then Book III moves backward. As Joyce explained to Weaver, the first part of Book III “is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through events already narrated. It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but is actually only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey”

FW research has paid some attention to Poe, both on account of his short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), and on account of his influence on the symbolists via Baudelaire. But it may not have considered if Joyce’s “barrel rolling down the river Liffey” is Poe’s barrel in the Maelstrom. In any case, regardless of whether Joyce himself intended this connection, the vertical motion of Poe’s barrel reveals how Joyce’s horizontal “barrel rolling down the river” must be understood. Because time is “travelling backwards” here into the night of consciousness, and because it thereby revisits all “events already narrated” in their possibility (hence the need to abandon the language of actuality), such a barrel cannot be taken to disport itself in any fixed sense of “down”.  Instead, the coordinates of human action and experiences are here exposed as being just as relative as those of physical materials whose orientation depends entirely on the momentary perspective taken on them. (Hence the importance to relativity theory of Einstein’s thought experiments where, eg, clocks travel at the speed of light.)

What McLuhan discovered in Joyce4 at this time around 1950 was what he already knew from Mallarmé and Eliot and Pound.

Mallarmé discovered that the aesthetic moment of arrested cognition can be split up into numerous fractions which can be orchestrated in many discontinuous ways. (…) Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo [of Dante] through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. And this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes [aka, of the genesis of experience] in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery for the technique of fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

“The technique of fission” here was study of that synchronic “via crucis of 14 stations” through which experience is generated — ie, just what cybernetics was investigating at MIT (initially for the military) and what corporations were investigating for management training and marketing and what advertising agencies were investigating in their consumer research.

From his first years as a university student around 1930, McLuhan had been interested both in theory (aesthetics, epistemology and ontology) and in the practical world around him of education, entertainment, business and politics. Now, 20 years later around 1950, he found a way to bring these concerns together in the investigation of “the stages of cognition”:

Mallarmé wrote his most difficult poem, Un Coup de Dés, in newspaper format. He saw, like Joyce, that the basic forms of communication — whether speech, writing, print, press, telegraph, or photography — necessarily were fashioned in close accord with man’s cognitive activity. And the more extensive the mass medium the closer it must approximate to our cognitive faculties. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

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. (Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954)

  1. Borach, ‘Conversations with James Joyce’, College English, March 1954, 325-327. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s faith might be said to be the perception that even BELLUM implicates PAX.  This is ‘the main question‘. ↩
  3. “Seems”, because the evidence so far is only indirect. ↩
  4.  McLuhan’s re-engagement with Joyce in the early 1950s was marked by three substantial essays: ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951); ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953); ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press’ (1954). ↩

The bubble of life in Joyce’s Portrait

His very brain was sick and powerless (…) He seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship (…) retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own state… (Chapter 2)

He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. (…) listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain… ( (Chapter 2, Chapter 5)

A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man [Daedalus] whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.  (Chapter 5)

the cry of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur (…) then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and baffled; then stopped. The heart’s cry was broken.  (Chapter 5)

Voices in Dubliners and A Portrait

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms (…) he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms.

As described in The Put-on, McLuhan’s life from the time of his boyhood onward was filled with contending voices. This ultimately raised the questions for him of the validity of any one of these voices and of what to make of their multiplicity.

In the Portrait passage above, Joyce described some of the voices Stephen Dedalus heard about him as he grew. Meanwhile, he described their collective murmur in the Dubliners:

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. (Two Gallants)

His investigation of voices would be continued in Ulysses, while the murmur of language itself, embracing all these voices, indeed all possible voices, would be treated in Finnegans Wake.

Occultation of human thought

McLuhan wrote to Ezra Pound on December 21, 1948 about American ignorance of “the ideogram principle” aka of “the inclusive image“:

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A. I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind. (Letters 207)

Re the ” deep occultation of nearly all human thought”, see Dagwood and the ineradicable roots of our being (1944):

As excessive activity starved the other needs of man and sharpened the spirit of gain and commercialism, an unofficial blackout was ordained over the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature.

Given this “occultation” or “blackout”, art, religion and philosophy — “the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature” — were now surface phenomena serving only for manipulation:

The press, the pulps, the slicks, and Hollywood — it is a great nursery world of sensations, thrills, and wide-eyed child-like myopia. (Dagwood)

The result was that Americans aka the modern world

can never discover nourishment for these roots in popular art and literature.

The Gorgon

It presents a hair-raising difficulty. Or rather a hair-removing difficulty – it makes my hair fall out, to think about it! (‘Love’, Saturday Night Magazine, 25-28, February, 1967)

I’m quite helpless. Its a real humming, buzzing confusion. (Interview on CBC ‘Our World’ , June 24, 1967)

For McLuhan, mythology was not something from the old days or some kind of vague rival to religion and philosophy. In a world of “allatonceness”, it was here now, in all its power.

Nihilism has flooded the planet and, just as Nietzsche described it would, it has eviscerated our community and with it our morality, our traditions and our fellow feeling for the creatures of the earth (including any sort of different creatures of our own kind). McLuhan saw that, without our notice, we had been turned to stone by the Gorgon — the hydra-headed monster whose mere glance paralyses. It followed that we could not cure ourselves and heal our world without somehow confronting, like Perseus, “the Gorgon of the present”.  But this was a Gorgon inside us who had taken over our very selves! A Gorgon in our “in learning and knowing”!

Myth and Mass Media (1959):
Languages as human artifacts, collective products of human skill and need, can easily be regarded as “mass media,” but many find it difficult to consider the newer media deriving from these languages as new “languages.” Writing, in its several modes, can be regarded technologically as the development of new languages. For to translate the audible into the visible by phonetic means is to institute a dynamic process that reshapes every aspect of thought, language, and society. To record the extended operation of such a process in a Gorgon or Cadmus myth is to reduce a complex historical affair to an inclusive timeless image. Can we, perhaps, say that in the case of a single word, myth is present as a single snapshot of a complex process, and that in the case of a narrative myth with its peripety, a complex process is recorded in a single inclusive image? The multilayered montage or “transparency,” with its abridgement of logical relationships, is as familiar in the cave painting as in cubism. (…) Is the Gorgon myth an account of the effects of literacy in arresting the modes of knowledge? Certainly the Cadmus myth about letters as the dragon’s teeth that sprang up [as] armed men is an image of the dynamics of literacy in creating empires.  H. A. Innis in his Empire and Communications has given us a full exegesis of the Cadmus myth. But the Gorgon myth is in much greater need of exegesis, since it concerns the role of media in learning and knowing. 

McLuhan Interview on CBC ‘Our World’ (1967):
people have always, in all ages, been terrified of the present. The only people that seem to have enough gumption, or nerve, to look at what is happening right under their nose are artists. They are specialists in sensory life. They just deliberately look at the present, you know, as if they dared it to ruin, or do something to them. They are like Perseus and the Gorgon. The artist looks into the mirror of art and says, the heck with the gorgon’s image, I’m not terrified. But most people simply expect, when they look at the present, to be turned to stone, as by the gorgon’s spell, and they are terrified. Therefore they prefer the rear-view mirror.

The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion (1967):
You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly; but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking at the Gorgon in the mirror of art. You have to perceive the consequences of the new environment on the old environment before you know what the new environment is. You cannot tell what it is until you have seen it do things to the old one.

Understanding Canada and Sundry Other Matters  (1967):
But one thing I have been working on lately and I haven’t solved: the go-go girl and the discotheque. They’ve been around in the environment, and I didn’t pay any heed at all until I suddenly said to myself, shucks, anything like that must have some relevance, some meaning for people; otherwise, they wouldn’t tolerate it. Because in itself it is just hideous and it’s a nice example of the Gorgon of the present; the horrible thing that nobody can look at without being turned to stone.1

Cliche to Archetype (1970):
Throughout the entire discussion of Fiction and the Reading Public Mrs. [Q.D.] Leavis makes the assumption of a “higher code” which it is the function of literature to make accessible. Entree via this code is presumed sufficient to enable the reader to “place” the products and activities of any culture at all. Mrs. Leavis is making the familiar literary assumption that matching, rather than making, is the function of literary training. In a world of rapid innovation and environmental development the “finer code” permits the classi­fication of novelties and the rejection of vulgarity, but for the creation of new codes from new cultural materials, the finer code, as a mere matching or checking device, is quite ineffectual. Indeed, the “finer code” that Mrs. Leavis finds so adequately manifested in the homogeneous tonalities of eighteenth-century prose is an interesting example of the environmental form being moved up to nostalgic archetypal status by a nineteenth-century mind. It is the nineteenth century that discovers rich cultural values in the ritual gestures and corporate decorum of eighteenth-century discourse. The twentieth century, on the other hand, has discovered many new values in the popular art and literature of the nineteenth century. (…) What appears to elude the Leavis approach is the role of ­new art and literature in creating new perception for new environ­ments. Such environments are invisible and invincible except as they are raised to consciousness by new artistic styles and probes. With the advent of new styles or instruments of perception, the effect of the new environment is to mirror the image of the old one. The industrial nineteenth century developed a considerable empathy for anthropology and the study of nonliterate societies. [But] industrial and print technology have a profoundly fragmenting effect on human sensibilities. It was not, therefore, very realistic to use nonliterate societies as a “mirror of Perseus” in which to observe the hated face of the industrial Gorgon.  (174-175)

Take Today, ‘Polemics Right And Left Thrive By Hardening Of The Categories’ (1972):
What Marx called “the process of producing surplus value” is the nineteenth-century version of usury. Whereas Aristotle saw Nature as the ground against which appeared the gargoyle of usury, Marx saw the market as the ground from which stared the Gorgon of surplus value. Let an entrepreneur buy materials and “labor power” on the market and combine them in a production process to create a buggy. Let him sell the buggy in a free market. The difference between his investment and his take is his profit or loss. Marx assumes a continuing operation backed by a whole social superstructure of services. He would define as “accident” a single transaction. “Surplus value” results from the private use of the entire superstructure of social services. The basic figure is the material “production process” looked at against the ground of the social “superstructure.” Access to this corporate superstructure is via the new fragmentation of the market process. The ancient political principle of “divide and rule” had now permeated the entire social fabric. All the human institutions that had been built to serve the common good could now be channeled into private pockets.

Take Today, ‘The Recognition Of Process As Prior To Classification Is The Key To Relevant Decision‘ (1972):
New instant speed of data processing reverses the order of organizing any structure or procedure. Whereas mere headings were once specialist, mechanical catchalls, they now become the avenues of insight into complex organic processes. An obvious example is pollution. It has always been a major feature of any environment. At high information speeds it presents a Gorgon-like and intolerable visage. It is no longer a category or nuisance, but a process that turns [whole] societies to stone.  (106)

McLuhan to Joe Keogh, April 11, 1973:
Apropos dialogue, it is done with mirrors, of course, only you hold the mirror up to the public. Was it not Perseus who thus beheaded Gorgon by looking at it in a mirror of art, as it were? By holding the mirror up to the public you literally confront the Gorgon of tangled impressions and biases. You ‘put them on’ this way, as well, and you can sort through their problems at will.

Laws of Media (1988):
The ground that envelops the user of any new technological word completely massages and reshapes both user and culture. In this way too these words (extensions) have all the transforming power of the primal logos. Westerners’ only escape or antidote has hitherto been by means of artistic enterprise. All serious art, to use Pound’s phrase, functions satirically as a mirror or counter-environment to exempt the user from tyranny by his self-imposed environment, just as Perseus’s shield enabled him to escape stupefaction by the Gorgon. The art historian has long puzzled over the question: at what point do primitive cultures develop arts? Evidently the Balinese had not yet confronted the problem when they answered, ‘We have no art; we do everything as well as possible’. Art is a response to a situation that has reached a certain intensity (…) or paralysis… (226)

 

  1. McLuhan continued in this interview to note that “the go-go girl, as the Gorgon of the present, has this wonderful built-in past environment, the cage.” At around this same time in a CBC program, McLuhan riffed on go-go girls once again: “They (the young) still think in the old patterns, 19th-century patterns, but they live mythically. They live surrounded by mythic monsters like go-go girls. (…) The go-go girls ordinarily have a cage (…) so the go-go girls, (each) locked up each in her little world, represents a kind of theatre of the absurd, in which all communication has broken down. In fact, no attempt is really made to communicate. Each puts on her own show in her own little straitjacket.” (‘The McLuhan is the Message’, Telescope, CBC Television, 20 July 1967. See ‘Marshall McLuhan on go-go dancers‘ and ‘Flip-side Overlap’: The Medium Is The Music‘.) ↩

Monstrosity

Understanding Media (1964):
What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man’s birthright. That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this. In fact, the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial giant. (294-295)

Address at Vision 65 (1965):
The 16th Century created the public as a new environment. This completely altered politics and altered all social arrangements in education, in work, and in every other area. Electric circuitry did not [continue to] create the public; it created the mass, meaning an environment of information that involved everybody in everybody. Now, to a man brought up in the environment of the public, the mass audience is a horror, it is a mess. In the same way, the public was a many-headed monster to a feudal aristocrat.

The Hardware/Software Mergers (1969):
When figure and ground merge you have the monster.  

Further Thoughts on Icons (1970):
The TV camera is a Cyclops, a one-eyed monster, which merges the gestalt of figure and ground and turns the viewer into a kind of hunter.

Advice for Universities of the Future (1971):
In the big universities of today the community of the university itself has become as big as a city, as a big city. Universities of 20 to 30 thousand students no longer represent universities at all but represent cities. The modern university, big metropolitan universities, have merged figure and ground — university and community — in what is in effect a monstrous situation. When you merge the figure and ground you have a monster. King Kong is the image of modern man’s service environments stretching out to such size that they crush him. King Kong is our own man-made environment stepping on us.

McLuhan letter to Jim Davey Sept 29, 1971:
The really devastating programming [in the formation of modern society] is the destruction of perception and sensitivity by the creation of vast environments far exceeding human scale. The King Kong fantasies are direct expressions of the feeling most people have in their environments which have become monsters. Yet, the best intentioned bureaucrats in all governments are busily engaged in creating bigger and blacker King Kongs every day of the week. (Letters 441)

Take Today, ‘From Piles of Refuse to Monolithic Slums’  (1972):
When “order” is pushed to extremes (…) [it] becomes ordure. (…) The engulfing of the human scale in providing living accommodation by high-rise creates the hardware monolith where figure and ground grind each other to numerical bits. (…) This is the antisocial monster. The slum is the reverse, but more tolerable. Multiple families crowded in single dwellings turn the environmental ground into figure. This is the social monster. The social monster of the swarming slum has many values of diversity and great powers of endurance [aka ordurance]. Its antisocial opposite, the high-rise “slum”, has no [such] power of survival [via ordurance] (28-29)

Take Today, ‘Gigantism: the nemesis of classical elegance’  (1972):
Gigantism is compelled to grow until collapse. Adaptability is absent. Survival demands an “unthinkable” reversal of scale and pattern. At least, this megalithic monster of moreness tells us we are in the domain of Lord Kelvin, where everything can be said in numbers. It happens that Kelvin spent his life striving to reach absolute zero: the giant omission. Little did Kelvin realize how the numbers racket would be developed in economics and in the studies of the psychologists. His dream of absolute zero has been realized many times in the social sciences but remains a mirage for the physicist. (108)

Take Today, ‘Market-Anti-Market Merger’ (1972):
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. What has happened to war and market in today’s new “software” age is that both involve total commitment in contrast to the specialist “hardware” world of the nineteenth century. The contrast can be observed in the figure-ground relations of the slave market compared with the labor market. Labor is one thing; man as a commodity is another. Today, modes of business and warfare alike tend to blur these distinctions. (211)

Take Today, ‘The Capsized Organization Chart’ (1972):
nature itself performs a figure/ground merger, an OUROBOROS monster, uniting earth and air. (The worm OUROBOROS, which ate its own tail, is the ancient mythic symbol of a world that survives by endlessly devouring itself.)  (254)

The Argument: Causality in the Electric World (1973):
“This music [of Marx and Engels] is worse than it sounds”, for it is played literally by eye without ear. Although its epistemology is dialectical, its ontology still rests on abstract Greek Nature. Marx and Engels saw conflicts of old figures as creating [revolutionary] grounds (…) while they remained oblivious of the new information surround that had [already] transformed their assumptions. They were attempting to match [!] the concepts of an earlier age to the experience newly visible in the “rear-view-mirror” of the 19th century. They were unaware that percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of Nature. Their hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity” [and “subjectivity”], whether “materialist” or “idealist.” (…) While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  The ideal [goal] of the rationalist philosophers still persists [on both sides]: to achieve an inclusive “science of the sciences.” But such a “science” would be a monster of preconceived figures minus un-perceived grounds.

Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women (1974):
Horror shows are just a record of what people think has already happened to themselves. Exorcism is a picture of what they feel they have been through.

On the Evils of TV (1977):
[TV is] literally a tribal monster like the Minotaur from Greek mythology trapped in a maze of sensation. This Bull-man monster swallowed humans lost in the maze. And that’s exactly what TV does (…) our young are fed to the Minotaur…1

  1. For further McLuhan takes on the minotaur, see Minotaur. ↩

From the unconscious to the conscious to consciousness of the unconscious

1960
In the present age of all-at-onceness, we have discovered that it is impossible — personally, collectively, technologically — to live with the subliminal. Paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man. For him there was no subliminal factor in experience; his mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time. (‘Introduction’ to Explorations in Communication)

1960
The all-­at-once, many-leveled awareness of the electronic age discourages continuation of the unexamined subliminal back-log of literate man. (The Medium is the Message)

1964
Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, following the track of the old Finn, but wide awake this time as we re-enter the tribal night. It is like our contemporary consciousness of the Unconscious. (Understand Media, 35)

1964 
Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness… (Understand Media, 351)

1969
With Gutenberg the first mechanization of a handicraft was by segmentation of the scribal processes, demonstrating the powers of rapid repetition to create mass production. Gutenberg wiped out scholasticism and scribal culture almost overnight. In the same manner that TV uses movies, Gutenberg used the old medieval content as his programming. Soon his technology created a new environment that altered the human sensorium drastically, providing the presses with individual authors eager to express fragmented opinions, or what we later began to call “private points of view”. Just as there was nobody in the ancient classical world to notice the effects of the phonetic alphabet and papyrus on the human psyche and social organization, so there was nobody at the Council of Trent who noted that it was the form of printing that imposed a totally new formal causality on human consciousness. (McLuhan to MM to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 385 = M&L 90)

1970
We put the unconscious outside in the environment by simply putting everything outside at once without connections. The unconscious has everything, but it has no connections. Our new electric environment has everything but no connections. It is simultaneous but not connected. This is the unconscious, so for most people it looks like crazy, mixed-up energy. Just like the unconscious itself. We have created the unconscious outside ourselves as an environment. (Education in the Electronic Age, 1967/1970) 

1970
we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time. (Electric Consciousness and The Church, 1970)

Since the unconscious as the complete spectrum of “formal causality” already “has everything”, it never has anything new. But human consciousness is new all the time and therefore varies, not only between each individual and all others, and not only over every individual’s lifetime, but also between different historical ages and in particular between different technological eras. These bring possibilities to consciousness which were always present but which were largely dormant because unconscious and not perceived as capabilities that might be developed.  

The parallel with chemistry is exact.  The chemical elements were always the foundation of physical materials and were always the same.  In this perspective, chemistry can be said to be timeless. But chemistry also has a history and this in two senses (leaving aside the history of the cosmic formation of matter).  First, our ways of understanding the physical world vary over time and are subject to qualitative leaps, like the one that took place in the nineteenth century culminating in Mendeleev’s Table of the elements.  Second, experimentation (particularly following the specification of the elements in the nineteenth century, but to some degree active throughout human history) leads to discoveries regarding how physical materials can be heated or mixed or otherwise manipulated to produce something new.  Of course the possibility of such innovation always existed, synchronically; but its dis-covery and applied use occurs only in historical time, diachronically.

As an example, the discovery of bronze was both something new in human history and something “ancient” — “ancient” because the potential for bronze always existed.  Once discovered, the process of bronze-making could be refined indefinitely, but the achievement could also be applied to other materials like iron.  It was, of course, exactly experimentation of this type, prior to the discoveries in the nineteenth century that eventually gave birth to modern chemistry.  A kind of proto-chemistry was practised, one of whose driving (though not necessarily explicitly posed) questions was: how does this work?

Such innovations are explosive in human history because they inexorably lead to further ones and, in the process, alter or revolutionize existing social relations. And, as McLuhan insisted, existing images of individual identity are at the same time explosively altered along with them. A kind of back and forth is initiated between objective discoveries and subjective ones, each being cause and effect of the other in turn, that progressively exposes, in small or large steps, the principles of both.

McLuhan’s proposal was just that the interior landscape be considered in similar fashion to the external one.  Here too the possibilities of human experience are timeless, “ancient”, just as the chemical elements are “ancient”. But, again like chemistry, the relation of these ancient possibilities to human consciousness is anything but clear in the beginning and can gradually become so only through an extended historical dynamic. Further, in both domains, truth is not a matter of coming to know everything there is to know in some lightening bolt moment of inspiration, it is a matter of continuous work on questions which are known to be problematic — and this in a process which has no end.

However, human beings, fundamentally unlike physical materials, are momentarily (also epochally) subject to changes in the structure of their experience depending on individual circumstances like health, mood, age, genius, etc, and on environmental circumstances like war, weather events, economic changes, etc.  It may therefore be said that human possibilities contest or quarrel in ways that chemical elements do not.

According to McLuhan, all human experience has always been generated out of this quarrel. But just which possibilities are developed out of the quarrel’s full spectrum, and what is known of this process of development, these not only vary in history, they are history! 

The electric age offers unique opportunities (and duties) to research and to shape history1 on an on-going basis. But the necessary condition of this research is recognition of the knot of synchronic and diachronic times in the genesis of human consciousness.

  1. ‘Shaping history’ in McLuhan’s sense does not entail some sort of God-like take-over or hi-jacking of being itself in the way bad readings of Hegel sometimes assert. Instead, ‘shaping history’ implies the responsibility of a creature to use its unique powers of thought and communication to order the world and itself in accord with the intrinsic dignity of that world and of all its beings. For McLuhan’s thoughts on hijacking see The hijacked world. ↩

Espionage as the total human activity

From a Maclean’s interview in 1972 with Peter Newman:

The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance. CIA-style espionage is now the total human activity. Whether you call it audience rating, consumer surveys and so on — all men are now engaged as hunters of espionage. (…) The biggest job in the world will be espionage. Around the world, people are spending more and more of their time watching the other guy. Espionage at the speed of light will become the biggest business in the world. But the CIA and the FBI are really old hat using old hardware by comparison to what’s coming, in which everybody earns pocket money by watching his own mom and dad or his brothers and sisters. (…) The possibilities of espionage are unlimited.

Anybody who followed McLuhan’s advice here to invest in Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook would be a billionaire.

Twenty years before his Maclean’s interview in his ‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan had characterized “audience rating [and] consumer surveys” as follows:

It is observable that the more illusion and falsehood needed to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood. Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. (vi)

The hijacked world

From a March 8, 1971 McLuhan letter to Jim Davey in the Prime Minister’s Office:

Realizing that the very nature of hi-jacking is related to new services and environments. I asked a New York tycoon whether there were any parallels to hi-jacking in business. He replied at once that the bigger the business, the easier it is to hi-jack it. He said that the biggest banks in the world today are being sued by their own share-holders for misallocation of funds [ie, for allowing themselves to be hi-jacked like Wells Fargo at this very moment in 2017]. The Penn Central [RR] discovered that its entire funds had been appropriated for non-transportation uses. This is done in the bookkeeping division of the firm, unbeknownst to the rest of the operation. It is almost impossible to check. Hence, the larger the operation, the less it knows about whether it is going “to land” [at its intended destination]. Cities are hi-jacked every day by developers who simply pressure the bureaucracy into “landing” in areas favorable to the developers. Countries can be hi-jacked as readily as a big business.
(…) This raises the problem of swinging blocks of votes as a form of hi-jacking. Historically, the creation of the CPR could be considered under the aspect of hi-jacking our country. Pollution is another form of taking over an entire service environment, whether of land, water or air, perverting its uses. If some private enterprise in fact uses land, water or air [for its own profit, like a billboard], it is that enterprise that becomes the content of the environment in question, just as the hold-up man on the plane, by assuming the use of the plane for himself, becomes the content of the plane by usurping the role of all the other passengers.
Since the user as content is not a figure of speech but a basic dynamic (…) I suggest that it can be the basis of a complete restatement of political and economic realities in the information age of the wired planet. (Letters 428)1

A contemporary article took up the same theme:

The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and ‘owners’. (‘The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth’, Explorations [insert in University of Toronto’s Varsity Graduate], Number 30, p.110, Spring, 1971)

McLuhan saw 50 years ago what is happening today in spades — but with little enough notice. We have all been hi-jacked, but fail to register that the various components of our ‘identity’ — ‘world-order’, ‘country’, ‘tradition’, ‘individuality’, ‘privacy’ and so on — have all been taken over for uses we don’t know, never approved and certainly don’t control.

In a further letter to Davey six months later (Sept 29, 1971), McLuhan commented on this general obliviousness:

What has happened is a complete collapse of community awareness via specialism of function. As long as an operation or process is divided into sufficiently small [isolated] segments [such as ‘departments’ in government or business], nobody feels any responsibility for anything. Communal awareness has no chance to come into play. (…) The really devastating programming is the destruction of perception and sensitivity by the creation of vast environments far exceeding human scale. The King Kong fantasies are direct expressions of the feeling most people have in their environments which have become monsters. Yet, the best intentioned bureaucrats in all governments are busily engaged in creating bigger and blacker King Kongs every day of the week. (Letters 441)

30 years before in The Mechanical Bride he had already commented on this phenomenon:

One unintended effect of trying to dragoon everybody into a single monster book club has been to splinter the public into numerous fragments. Each club trying to corner the whole public has, by its particular bill of fare, witlessly caused an anti-club segment to be formed. And the more the clubs have tried telepathically to find and control the window to the public subconscious, the more they have created blind spots and indifference. (26)

  1. In a letter two weeks later, again to Davey, McLuhan suggested that “you may be specially interested in my letter on hijacking a city, a business, a country, etc. Hijacking is a process made possible by high speed travel or high speed information movement. Conglomerates are probably a form of hijacking” (McLuhan to J.M. Davey, March 22, 1971). ↩

The show biz world

And now in the twentieth century (…) nature has been abolished by art and engineering,  (…) government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government… (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

Pop Art is an indication that as the whole planet goes inside a new satellite-and-information environment made by man, we can no longer afford to deal with the human habitat as something given to us by Nature. We have now to accept the fact and responsibility that the entire human environment is an artifact, an art form, something that can be staged and manipulated like show biz. (Great Changeovers for You, 1966)

That the entire planet should become show business on a twenty-four-hour basis is not only inevitable now, but it creates “challenges” for all levels of the establishment on a scale that will gradually obliterate consciousness. (McLuhan to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 386 = M&L 91)

Show business is taking over, and the guy who can present the best image will be the boss. This means role-playing (…) Until now, it has been private identity and ego trips. Today the new thing is to get rid of you and become whatever the situation demands. In the TV age everybody has to get rid of the self to have a job at all, whether as a teacher or a performer — you have to ditch the old private ego and start role playing. (‘An Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women’, Linda Sandler. Miss Chatelaine, September 3, 1974, pp. 58-59, 83-87, 90-91)

The New Criticism and plural times

Back in the 1920’s there used to be much concern about the “meaning of meaning.” At that time the discovery that the meaning was not [narrative or linear] statement so much as the simultaneous interaction of many things came as an exciting surprise. (Great Change-overs for You, 1966)1

Structuralism in all its forms is necessarily acoustic, ie, simultaneous and multi-levelled. The followers of Ferdinand Saussure divided [time]2 into diachrony and synchrony. Diachrony is the conventional historical form of scholarship and synchrony is structural analysis based on the fact that all acoustic structures have every part of them in any part at all. Personally, I acquired this synchrony through Joyce, Pound, Eliot and the new criticism, and in turn applied it to the new media. (McLuhan to Ray di Lorenzo, April 5, 1974, cited in Escape into Understanding, 432 n101)

  1. ‘Great Change-overs for You’, Vogue 148:1, 60-63, 114-115, 117, July 1966 = ‘The All At Once World Of Marshall McLuhan’, British Vogue, August 1966. With  different titles, this article, in whole and in part, with and without changes, was republished repeatedly by McLuhan between 1966 and 1970. ↩
  2. McLuhan wrote (ie, dictated) that “Saussure divided the acoustic into diachrony and synchrony”, which, of course, makes little sense when he had just equated the “acoustic” with the “simultaneous and multi-levelled”, ie, with the synchronic. He meant to say that Saussure divided time in this way. ↩

Predicting the present 65 years ago

Perfection of the means of communication has meant instantaneity. Such an instantaneous network of communication is the body-mind unity of each of us. When a city or a society achieves a diversity and equilibrium of awareness analogous to the body-mind network, it has what we tend to regard as a high culture. But the instantaneity of communication makes free speech and thought difficult if not impossible, and for many reasons. Radio extends the range of the casual speaking voice, but it forbids that many should speak. And when what is said has such range of control, it is forbidden to speak any but the most acceptable words and notions. Power and control are in all cases paid for by loss of freedom and flexibility. (‘Culture Without Literacy’, Explorations 1, 1953)

McLuhan on 2017 in 1970

From an interview with Edward Fitzgerald on the CBC in 1970:1

The new electric technology has destroyed the American image of itself. The country is falling apart, physically and politically, because of the speed of information. The American bureaucracy, politics and education were set up for the very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds nothing in the U.S.A. makes sense. Early America smashed the mediaeval hierarchies of [corporate] loyalties and set up the individualist — the isolated man — as the material from which to construct the state. America began with the printed word and with the latest technology — the assembly line in industry and in education. With electricity all that ends. The American image of itself, American goals, American directions, have been scrapped by electric speeds. I am not making value judgments. I am simply observing that if you accelerate any structure beyond a certain speed it collapses.  Our postal systems have collapsed because of the telephone and telex. Our bureaucracies have become police states. The most benign political democracy becomes a police state as soon as you improve the speed of communication. Everybody then comes under surveillance, everybody is put into a data bank.2 There is [then] no freedom left.

  1. Excerpted in Ekistics as ‘The Gobal Theatre’, 32:190, 181-183, Sept 1971. ↩
  2. “As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self, and what remains of community will disappear.” (‘Living at the Speed of Light’, Maclean’s, Jan 7, 1980) ↩

Carpenter on McLuhan’s poetic conversation

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience. (William James)1

I call this the “rear-view mirror” habit of always looking for change in the rear-view mirror; of always carefully inspecting the old situation for evidence of change. (McLuhan, ‘Education in the Electric Age’, 1967)2

He could turn a phrase and it was amazing — the capacity! He was basically a poet and he could simplify things — you’d be stunned by the brevity with which he could summarize something and I used to think, oh my god I’ve got to go write that down, and then he’d go onto the next one and the next one and soon you’d forgotten all of these. It was amazing conversation. (Ted Carpenter on McLuhan)3

Thinking proceeds along the bottom of very deep, very narrow, canyons.  A new idea in one’s own mind, or in someone else’s, may be very close by — but always at the bottom of a different canyon. So some kind of leap is required from one canyon to another over a wall of rock; and the deeper these are, the more difficult the way up, and over, and and down.

McLuhan’s talent lay in accomplishing leaps of this sort in his own mind and in the variety of ways he attempted to communicate his ancient message to others.  Understanding the man implicates the renewal of these attempts at leaping communication to, and so from, the oldest of the old.

  1. ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, 1891. ↩
  2. Presented as ‘Education in the Electric Age’ on January 19, 1967 to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario. Printed as ‘Education in the Electronic Age’ in Interchange, 1:4, 1-12, 1970; also in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, eds, Hugh A. Stevenson, Robert M. Stamp, and J. Donald Wilson, 1970. ↩
  3. ‘Edmund Ted Carpenter 2011 —  On Marshall McLuhan and Explorations’, Interview on YouTube at 6:43ff. ↩

The question of the “objective correlative”

In a previous post, McLuhan’s goal and the means to that goal were set out as a continuation of the symbolist attempt to specify “art conditions for art emotion” in an “inclusive image”1:

the central difference between romantic or picturesque poetry and modern symbolist poetry was that whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulating an external environment as a means of evoking art emotion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the symbolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of controlling art emotion or of exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolution — from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

As McLuhan was fully aware, his account of the transition from romantic to symbolic poetry grew out of Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” from his 1919 Hamlet essay:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (T.S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, 1919)

In McLuhan’s view, the Romantics had followed the Newtonian specification of “the external facts” absent consideration of the subjective conditions needed to reach it.  This objective definition, however, then “evoked” (or so the intention was) the “experience” of the subject that the artist intended.  The advance of the Symbolists was to take subjective conditions into explicit account.

Here is McLuhan in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ from 1951 (the same year as his ‘Aesthetic Moment’ essay cited above):

At the end of the epoch of picturesque [or Romantic] experiment and exploration there is Cezanne in painting, and Rimbaud in poetry. That is, 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. The early Romantics ransacked nature, as the Pre-Raphaelites did literature and history, for situations which would provide moments of intense perception. The Symbolists went to work more methodically. As A.N. Whitehead showed, the great discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that fact about nature, but the discovery of the technique of invention so that modern science can now discover whatever it needs to discover. And Rimbaud and Mallarmé, following the lead of Edgar Poe’s aesthetic, made the same advance in poetic technique that Whitehead pointed out in the physical sciences. The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect to the objective correlative or poetic means of evoking that precise effect, just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the formula which will produce it. Mr. Eliot states this discovery, which has guided his own poetic activity since 1910 or so, in his essay on Hamlet: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”2

Beyond the Eliot “objective correlative” quotation here in the context of McLuhan’s take on the history of post-Newtonian art and science, note should be made of a critical ambiguity in this passage. McLuhan writes of “the objective correlative or poetic means of evoking (…) precise effect” and compares this to a chemical “formula which will produce” some particular material or “end product”. But while the latter goal is exactly not subjective and may therefore be used in mechanized production, the former is avowedly subjective: it is, as McLuhan follows Eliot in expressing, the evocation of a certain “emotion”. However, “poetic means” or “poetic activity” is then explicitly equated with “the objective correlative” (“the objective correlative or poetic means”) which, according to Eliot, consists in “a set of objects” and even of “the external facts” evidenced by the poet.

It seems that the poet uses objective means to achieve a subjective goal, while the chemist uses subjective means (chemical theory) to achieve an objective goal.  The intention is, however, precisely to deny this sort of raw distinction between the objective and the subjective in the direction of an “inclusive image” of their interrelation. Indeed, it is just for this reason that Whitehead’s description of “the discovery of the technique of invention (…) in the physical sciences” was seen by McLuhan to apply equally to “the same advance in poetic technique” made by Rimbaud and Mallarmé. 

Central to this ambiguous account is what McLuhan calls “poetic means” and what Eliot calls “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art”. These phrases may be translated as “poetic technique” and as “the only technique of expressing emotion in the form of art” in order to illuminate the relation of McLuhan’s account in this Tennyson essay to a passage in a letter he wrote to Pound shortly thereafter:

I know exactly what you mean . But I found out the hard way. Too late. Your own tips are always exact. But they are of little help to the uninitiated. Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different. But somehow the bugbear of content forbids that anybody be interested in technique as content.3

McLuhan made a series of points here which were to define his work for the next 30 years:

  • content always implicates some means or technique or medium which has enabled it to be what it is
  • the medium is therefore “the key in communication” of any sort: artistic, scientific, or, indeed, simply linguistic — oral, written or otherwise signaled
  • since human beings are defined among living things by their distinctive ability to communicate, the whole history of the human species may be said to turn on media
  • but the study of media is rendered difficult (and, so far, impossible) by “the bugbear of content” which somehow obscures the very technique (or means or medium) that has enabled it
  • Part of the difficulty implicated in such study is its self-reference: the question arises what medium must be engaged to enable the investigation of media?
  • the symbolist quest to define “the inclusive and integral image” must therefore be continued as the only way to enable perception of content and medium together and so enable their investigation together in a new domain, or domains, of scientific investigation

These points, in turn, suggested certain problems McLuhan had to address together with some potential answers to those problems:

  • how to point out (un-obscure) what required study: how illuminate “technique as content“? Potential answer: use obvious ‘media’ (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc etc) as analogues to the foundational media that are the elementary “key in communication”  
  • how to specify such foundational media? Potential answer: use co-variant binary relations as Einstein had done in physics4
  • how to seed awareness of this way to augment human self-knowledge as a survival tool?  Potential answer: use the obvious ‘media’ of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to propagate the possibility5

 

  1. “The Romantics (…) insisted upon the creative imagination as the birthright of all, and began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image. This arduous search was taken up with great intensity by the Symbolists who realized that it could not be a merely visual image, but must include all the senses in a kind of dance. En route to this discovery, Hopkins and Browning, Poe and Baudelaire, ended the print-fostered dichotomy between author and reader, producer and consumer and swept mostly unwilling audiences up into participation in the creative act. After Poe, and since Cezanne, poets and painters devised ever new modes of speaking not to their readers and viewers, but through them. (…) Such is the meaning of the abstract art and the do-it-yourself kits which artists have for a hundred years been carefully preparing for this affronted public.” (New Media and the New Education, 1960) ↩
  2. McLuhan cites this same passage from Eliot in ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’ (1958), ‘The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion’ (1962), and The Gutenberg Galaxy, 277. ↩
  3. McLuhan to Pound,  July 16, 1952, Letters 231. Emphases in the original. ↩
  4. “The victory over the concept of absolute space or over that of the inertial system (fixed frame of reference) became possible only because the concept of the material object was gradually replaced as the fundamental concept of physics by that of the field. Under the influence of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell the notion developed that the whole of physical reality could perhaps be represented as a field whose components depend on four space-time parameters. If the laws of this field are in general covariant, that is, are not dependent on a particular choice of coordinate system, then the introduction of an independent (absolute) space is no longer necessary. That which constitutes the spatial character of reality is then simply the four-dimensionality of the field.” (Einstein, ‘Foreword’ to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, cited in Laws of Media, 41) ↩
  5. This accorded with McLuhan’s understanding of the education process that he had reached already in Winnipeg (age 22): “It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day.” (‘Public School Education’, The Manitoban, Oct 17,1933) ↩

Patterson: “no interest in biases of space and time”

McLuhan research is full of inaccuracies and ridiculous claims.  Even such a thoughtful writer as Graeme Patterson (1934-1993) blithely made observations which were simply ludicrous.  Here he is in History and Communications (1990):

Outside of his introductions to Innis’s work, [McLuhan] took no interest in biases of space and time. (122)

 A good argument could be made that McLuhan never thought about anything else.

McLuhan to Overduin on water and fish

In an undocumented quotation, but apparently from a 1971 letter to Henry Overduin1 which was excerpted at length on the preceding page, Graeme Patterson cites McLuhan as follows:

In such surrounds, or all-enveloping situations, most people see the “content” or the figure rather than the ground in which the figure is placed. A fish may see other other fish but never see water.2

  1. Hendrik (Henry) Overduin (1942-2008) was a Canadian who had been head of the Department of Mass Communication at McNeese State University in Louisiana before retiring back in London (ON) where he continued teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Western Ontario. ↩
  2. Graeme Patterson, History and Communications, 1990, 120, apparently from a November 1, 1971 letter to Henry Overduin in the McLuhan papers in the Ottawa archive. Cf Patterson, p234, n20. ↩

William James on the “free water of consciousness”

From Psychology: Briefer Course (1892):

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.  Mr. [Francis] Galton and Prof. [T.H.] Huxley have (…) made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in ‘states of consciousness’, relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it.

 

Language and experience

The reason that Joyce considered Vico’s new science so important for his own linguistic probes, was that Vico was the first to point out that a total history of human culture and sensibility is embedded in the changing structural forms of language. (McLuhan to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 384; also, Medium and the Light 89)

McLuhan took it, along with a long tradition, that language is what distinguishes human beings from other beings. It followed that if we want to know what human being is, we must learn what language is. But if language and human experience were interrelated from the start (“the first stage of apprehension is already poetic” as McLuhan wrote Pound already in 1951, Letters 229), the analysis of experience as an analogous mode of investigation to linguistic analysis lay close at hand.

Now the exercise of language may be analyzed as presupposing choices among available ‘contesting’ sounds and grammatical markers.  But these ‘choices’ are, of course, neither conscious, in the main, nor situated in normal time and space.  When we speak, these choices have always already been made — but when and where and by whom they have been made remains utterly obscure.

McLuhan studied human experience in a comparable way:

it is impossible that there could ever be a scientific concept that is not embedded in the vernacular tongue of the scientist, and that has not been embedded there for many centuries. You cannot conceive a form of scientific hypothesis which is not part of your own language, implicit in that language. All the mathematics in the world are externalizations of certain linguistic patterns. What the poets were saying — now more widely appreciated — was that the language itself embodies the greatest body of scientific intuition possible. The proportionalities in things, and between things and our senses, and so embodied in language itself, are inexhaustible. The particular technology of a time releases some of that inexhaustible store of analogical intuition and experience which IS language. So television releases within language a whole body of resources which has been bound up there for centuries. But this does not depend upon concepts. It has to do with sensibility and observation — analogical perception, right in the structure of language itself. ‘Communications and the Word of God’, 1959)1

All of man’s artifacts are structurally linguistic and metaphoric. This discovery, unknown to anybody in any culture, would justify a book without any other factors whatever. Remember the [James] Watson autobiography of his discovery of the double helix in the DNA particle? Literally speaking, this breakthrough about the linguistic structure of all human artifacts is incomparably larger and deeper-going. I am, myself, unable to grasp the implications. Certainly it means that the unity of the family of man can be seen, not as biological, but as intellectual and spiritual. (McLuhan to Barbara Rowes, April 29, 1976)2

The model of explanation at work here is that of experiential phenomena as figures overlying their ground (just as chemistry, say, envisions physical materials as figures overlying the chemical elements as their ground). This is already a two-fold structure. But just as chemical elements, in turn, have further structure of their own (the ratio of protons and electrons, say), so McLuhan imagined that the grounding elements of language and experience are themselves structured:

Structuralism as a term (…) [designates] inclusive synesthesia, an interplay of many levels and facets in a two-dimensional mosaic. (GG, 230)

This, he said, was the

principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order. (Spiral — Man as the Medium, 1976, 126)

“Continuous” in this context is multi-dimensional:

  • there are no experiential phenomena which lack ground — that is, everything experienced is a figure for which grounding is always in place, ‘continually’…
  • the structure of ground is ‘continuous’ in another sense, as, for example. a sample of pure gold, although having a single elementary structure, is not one atom but a great many atoms, each with the same ‘continuous’ structure…
  • if such material is to cohere, as a pure gold nugget (say), or as a compound lump or mixture of many elements, there must be a further structure ‘continually’ holding these repeated atomic structures together…

The explanatory structure of experience McLuhan had in mind was therefore dynamic in many ways: between figure and ground, between the poles (eg, eye and ear or space and time) of the experiential elements, and between the experiential elements themselves. Any of these might be flipped at any time.  The key was exposed, as McLuhan wrote in the very first words of his very first paper in January 1936, “when it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything…” (‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’).

 

 

 

  1. Address at St. Michael’s College, August 1959, in the Medium and the Light, 33-44. ↩
  2. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 224. ↩

Dagwood and the ineradicable roots of our being

it will be interesting to ask a few questions and to offer some answers to those questions which will illuminate our daily lives. (Dagwood’s America, 1944)

Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. The little self-conscious (…) 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 to-day. (McLuhan to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, Christmas 1944, Letters 166)

[In the] retroactive not yet (…) every moment is radically new only to the extent that it is utterly ancient. (…) Hence, what comes to be is what has always been, the same difference that perpetually recurs as differently the same. (Elliot Wolfson)1

After finishing his PhD thesis in 1943, McLuhan turned to consider the practical ramifications of its suggestion that there are three forms of being and of knowing, which three forms “contest” or “quarrel” in all human experience.2 In his thesis, the history of these forms over the two thousand year period between classical Greece and Elizabethan England had been treated in terms of the trivium (dialectic-grammar-rhetoric). The hypothesis was that all possibilities of being and of knowing are inherent in language and that these possibilities may be grouped into the three genera of the trivium — like proton-neutron-electron or solid-liquid-gas or mineral-animal-vegetable in the natural world.

On the one hand, investigation of the practical implications of the quarreling forms could work to clarify and to demonstrate this hypothesis and potentially help to ameliorate individual and social problems in a novel way. On the other, human freedom and self-knowledge could be promoted, quite aside from any practical ramifications, by illuminating how momentary ‘choices’ or ‘identifications’ or ‘preferences’ are always being made regarding the perpetual contest of forms, deciding it now in this way and now in that. On this understanding, humans ‘create’ identity, not out of nothing, but by associating themselves with pre-existing forms which they activate in various ways — like playing a piano to fashion a melody, not of sound, but of identity3:

Every human being is incessantly engaged in creating an image of identity for himself4

These were ‘choices’ which were left in obscurity for the most part and were therefore made only unconsciously and mechanically.  McLuhan would attempt to lift this obscurity. In 1944 his almost 10 year voyage to The Mechanical Bride (1951) — like his later 10 year voyages to The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and to Take Today (1972) — was underway.

The title of his 1944 talk, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (published at the start of 1946) named the project upon which he was then embarked: the study of the contemporary world through the lens of this threefold contest of forms. His 1944 paper, ‘Dagwood’s America’,5 was one of his first attempts to bring forward this investigation:

Dagwood, our Mr Everyman, is the residual legatee of a century during which the masculine ideal of noble being has been systematically destroyed by the base ideal of endless doing. Men are now increasingly aware of their plight [or, at least, increasingly collide with their plight] because endless doing has involved them in unsolvable frustrations. For the accumulated heritage of unrestrained tycoons and predatory power-gluttons has led us into a vast suburban swamp [not to speak of the planetary swamp of the then raging WW2] from which few can ever emerge sane and whole. The map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp is the image of his lost masculine ego. That image he can now recover only by taking thought. He could, of course, find It quickest of all in healthy and fructifying work, but unfortunately he must wait to invent this work until after he has rediscovered the ineradicable roots of his own being. But he can never discover nourishment for these roots in popular art and literature6 

Life with a strong wife and four daughters would soon enough cure McLuhan of expressing himself in terms of “the masculine ideal of noble being”. But the fundamental idea at stake here (one he thought men were chiefly responsible for bringing about and must therefore be chiefly responsible for repairing)7 was that modern humans, not ‘only’ men, had become fragmented to the point of insanity: they were neither “whole” nor “sane”. The cause of this fragmentation, in turn, was their not “taking thought” concerning “the ineradicable roots of [their] own being”. Hence, “an unofficial blackout” now prevailed “over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” —  “areas” which ought to be concerned with such “roots of [our] being” but, in the event, have been left unattended and vacant. Human beings had thereby become “alienated from the entire framework” both of their own selves and of life in general. Further, having in this way lost “the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”, they had been left “totally without the means of locating the cause or cure of [their]  disturbances and frustrations.”

Since “means” = “medium”, and since rediscovery of the missing “means of locating the cause or cure of [their] disturbances and frustrations” entailed, first of all, learning to access and accord with such “means”, McLuhan was already at work on “understanding media”. The book of that title would be published a full 20 years later.

The male chauvinism all too easily found in McLuhan’s article indicates that McLuhan was unclear at this time (and perhaps never gained decisive clarity) about how to describe the relation of human individual and social existence with its roots.8 The result was that he jumped between talk of ‘men’ as sorry creatures in everyday family life and ‘man’ as an “image”, as an “ideal”, as a “form”, as a type of “ego”, as a “role”, and even as a kind of experienced “world”: Dagwood and his fellow characters in the comics were said by McLuhan to be “poised between two worlds — between a masculine and a feminine world”.

But that such an image or form or ego type or role or world can dominate a woman as much as it can a man is clear from McLuhan’s description of Blondie:

Blondie is efficiently masculine, purposive, ego­tistical and hard, just as Dagwood is ineffectually feminine, altruistic and sensitive. She has assumed, superficially, the masculine role just in proportion as he has lost it. (…) How did this come about? How did Dagwood forfeit his masculine ego and thereby force Blondie to take up the social slack by herself becoming masculine? For justice forces us to recognize that American women are not to blame for the collapse of the masculine role in society. They are eager to resume the feminine role… 

Finding a way to describe elementary roots in themselves and in their relation to the everyday world was a fundamental problem (and today remains a problem) which McLuhan’s project needed to clarify and solve. In a comparable way, chemistry once needed to learn the difference between gold, silver, iron, mercury, tin, copper, sulfur, etc, as elements and as familiar physical materials. Same name — but completely different ‘stuff’! The latter can be pointed out just like a tree or a house; the former are ideal and function in an explanatory economy whose beginning and further advance depend upon creative insight and whose practical application requires special training.

At the same time as it was learning to isolate its elements, chemistry also had to demonstrate itself through practical applications (like all the new manufacturing techniques invented through it in the nineteenth century, such as those for paint and gunpowder). As McLuhan commented regarding the relation of cartoons to “American life” (with emphasis added):

Somehow the [ideal] patterns of behavior in Dagwood’s home [in the funnies] reflect the interests and experiences of millions of readers. This reflection may or may not be direct.

This admittedly problematic “reflection” derived from the fact that Dagwood exactly as a popular cartoon character was an ideal form or archetype. McLuhan called him “our Mr Everyman” (anticipating — or reflecting even at this early date? — his study of HCE in Finnegans Wake). Dagwood, he said, is a “basic fascination of millions of readers”:

The uninterrupted popularity of Dagwood’s miseries since 1930 entitles him to be considered as a nationally appointed symbol of something in our lives. Somehow the patterns of behavior in Dagwood’s home reflect the interests and experiences of millions of readers. 

nobody would read Chic Young [the Dagwood cartoonist] unless his comic strip portrayed some basic pattern or conflict of American life.

Dagwood is Mr Everyman in America today.

But that we have no idea how to relate such an archetype to our living is exactly the central point of McLuhan’s article.

Part of the problem is that we fail to perceive such “basic patterns” as “basic patterns” . They are too big and too dominant in our lives even to register:

a form so huge that it can no longer be taken in9

Further, this “blackout” prevailing “over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” entailed that the very idea of such principles working as “basic pattern” in our experience was unimaginable. Even what they might mean in our lives remained utterly obscure.

To “be taken in”, such forms needed to be illuminated and studied.  This was just what McLuhan proposed:

it will be interesting to ask a few questions [about Dagwood and the comics in general] and to offer some answers to those questions which will illuminate our daily lives.

But the presupposition of such illumination and study was, according to McLuhan, “the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”. “Detached”, “autonomous” and “critical” here name a reason that studies the “roots of [our] own being” in themselves — without distorting admixture from the ordinary world (aka from the rear-view mirror). Hence, as touched on above, the task he faced was very much like that of chemists throughout the nineteenth century when the chemical elements needed to be extricated from an admixture of ordinary materials (so, for example, air, water, fire and earth had to be shown to be complex mixtures and not elements).  But how was this to be possible?  How study the roots of human being on their own?10 Further, since an important part of the required demonstration would lie in practical applications of a clarified notion of elementary roots in the ordinary world, how differentiate the former purification from the latter application to what is always mixed and impure?

One of the keys to McLuhan’s reflections on Dagwood lies in the phrase, ‘ineradicable roots’. Since ‘radix’ is ‘root’ in Latin11, ‘in-e-radic-able roots’ means ‘un-up-root-able roots’. The roots, plural, of human being are always present and cannot be uprooted or, even less, eradicated. An implicated question of enormous import follows: how it is possible for modern humans to be “alienated from the entire framework” of both their own selves and of life in general (a condition that, recognized or unrecognized, has increasingly prevailed for centuries) if they are always rooted?  How can utter rootlessness somehow at the same time be rooted?

How can the world be consumed as it is by nihilism — and yet remain grounded in “the ineradicable roots of [its] being”?

McLuhan’s answer to this question may be found in the context of his contention that the comics, as a kind of contemporary mythology, presented characters “poised between two worlds — between a masculine and a feminine world”. Characters from the comics, this was to say, were situated along an “axis” or spectrum of “worlds” (forms”, “ideals”, “ego” types, “roles”, etc) — worlds which could be described in terms of ‘gender’, but also in many other ways. (‘Gender’ in the realm of forms is fundamentally different from gender in everyday life. That we have lost the ability to perceive this difference is an index of the nihilism in which we are ensnared.)

Dagwood, as decidedly feminine and childish12 in the archetypal sense of these, and as “a nationally appointed symbol”, revealed at once that, as a whole nation, in fact as a global civilization, “America has swung very far toward the feminine pole of the axis“. 

This “axis” of forms/roles/ideals/worlds was McLuhan’s lifelong topic. His contention was that all individual and social experience derives from these forms just as language derives from phonemes or physical materials from chemical elements.  Now each position along this axis is a binary structure: the very first words of McLuhan’s very first paper were: “When it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything…”.13 Since such a binary structure of “two principal sides” characterizes the principles themselves,14 everything we experience in the ordinary world and also the relation between principles and the ordinary world are binary as well. But it is all important to realize (possible in regard to principles only through the exercise of “autonomous reason” which has “detached” itself from any particular principle) that binary structures deploy themselves in a complex set (or “axis”) of expressions. Set out in terms of gender15, the range of these expressions may be put as follows:

male/female……(male-female or female-male)……female/male

The denominator here (underlined) indicates dominance, emphasis, stress, preference. The middle position where there is no denominator or where both are denominators (male-female or female-male) indicates a balance of the two in what in contemporary physics is called a ‘superposition’. One-sided emphasis and dominance increases in both directions from the middle position towards the two ends of the axis, over an indeterminate (or at least undetermined) number of forms, such that the denominator in each case tends to overwhelm the numerator. The two sides therefore tend to merge to become all female and all male monisms:

male/female => female alone

female/male => male alone

Structurally these fundamentally opposed sides show the same tendency to monism and it is exactly this monistic tendency of both of the ends of the axis of ideal forms that allowed McLuhan to trace rootlessness and nihilism to — fundamental roots. Monism of any sort is first of all a principial or fundamental determination.

In this way, nihilism exactly as nihilism, as a ‘world’ fundamentally cut off from God, truth, meaning and from any and all traditions, may be perceived to express — “the ineradicable roots of [its] being“. In so doing, nihilism as the utter extreme of rootlessness, in which even the “apparent world” has been abolished (as Nietzsche showed), equally reflects the foundational grounding of the world in its “roots” at all times and all places. For if the utterly alienated and undifferentiated extremes are grounded in “ineradicable roots“, how not all less extreme positions?

A decade after ‘Dagwood’, McLuhan in ‘Nihilism Exposed‘ (a review of Hugh Kenner’s monograph, Wyndham Lewis) had advanced his thinking about the “axis” or “spectrum” of ideal forms to the following:

it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (…)  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“. This pagan unworldliness carried to its ultimate mystical point is what makes the work of Lewis so intense and his evaluation so fearless.

Instead of the gender typology in the Dagwood article, McLuhan here put forward several different characterizations of the “axis” or “spectrum” of ideal forms:

superhuman/non-human……human……non-human/superhuman

abstraction/sensuality……human dimension……sensuality/abstraction

In other contexts he submitted many other characterizations like:

dialectic/rhetoric……grammar…… rhetoric/dialectic
 (Nashe thesis)

archetype/cliché……cliché-archetype interplay……cliché/archetype (From Cliché to Archetype)

In all cases, the extremes tend to monism.  But the middle position of dynamic interplay (eg, sensuality and abstraction together, the human dimension, grammar, etc) does not.  The middle position therefore has no impulse to obliterate the extreme poles of these axes: it represents a relaxation of their opposition into a differentiated harmony. Although fundamentally opposed to those poles, the middle position just as much finds peace with them despite their aggressive difference from it and from each other. Of course, what these oppositions are at peace is fundamentally different from what they are at war. But it is the very essence of the middle position that fundamental difference can at the same time be harmonious.

This is another reason that McLuhan was able to perceive the modern world engulfed as it is in nihilism — as yet grounded. This is the the secret of inequality or ‘the main question‘.

It follows that McLuhan’s account of Dagwood as the story of the genesis of the modern world may be told as follows:

  • Dagwood has “somehow” come to identify himself with the ‘female’ archetypal organizing principle of matter, sensuality and rhetoric16
  • in fact, he has identified himself so strongly with this archetype (= advanced so far out from the centre of the archetypal spectrum towards this pole) that monism as the “logical point of the extinction” of any rival archetype, and, indeed, of the whole archetypal level of existence, has come to structure his entire experience
  • this monism has so merged the everyday world and its archetypal roots that these roots as a whole (including his identification ‘there’ with the ‘female’ pole) have become subject to “blackout”
  • at the archetypal level, this monism has cut him off from all the contesting principles along its axis, and especially from the ‘male’ pole of abstraction at its other end that alone might ground and motivate “the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”
  • but were Dagwood to ‘flip’ to identify with the extreme end of the male pole as the mirror image of his existing ‘female’ position, he would still be subject to the same “endless” monism — a monism that IS his problem — but now dominated by endless fixation, instead of “endless doing”
  • it is this monism of both ends of the archetypal spectrum that has effected the “unofficial blackout (…) over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” — “areas” which are concerned with nothing else but the various “root” positions along the archetypal spectrum
  • in this way, Dagwood’s “blackout” has “alienated [him] from the entire framework” — an “entire framework” that includes the practical everyday level with the archetypal level together (in their fundamental difference) and, along the archetypal axis, with the entire range of its positions all together (in their fundamental difference from each other)
  • as a result, Dagwood “has no rational purpose in life” and “no directing principle of order and creative activity in him” — for “purpose”, “directing principle of order” and “creative activity” derive (like anything else) only from the archetypal level and to this he has lost all access
  • he has been left “totally without the means of locating the cause or cure of his disturbances and frustrations” which lies in his unknown (subject to “blackout”) original identification made on the archetypal level with the extreme end of the sensuality segment of its “axis”
  • his problem is how to “emerge sane and whole” again. Sane — in touch also with his “autonomous reason”. Whole — in touch not merely with the practical world of “unlimited doing”, but also with the complete spectrum of the archetypal axis where, alone, his “autonomous reason” is both grounded and potentially motivated
  • Dagwood is thus subject to the aporia of the “hermeneutical circle” where what he most needs to do (get back in touch with his roots) presupposes action that is already rooted: “the map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp is the image of his lost masculine ego”
  • both the difficulty and the solution to Dagwood’s problem (and therefore to his regaining his sanity and integrity) lie in the event which has been subject to “blackout”: his extreme monistic ‘choice’ on the spectrum of archetypal roots that fundamentally excludes him from being in touch with that spectrum and, therefore, with any possibility along that spectrum — even the one he has identified himself with!
  • therefore, and all importantly, interrogation of this “blackout” itself provides the only “map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp”
  • expressed in terms of time, Dagwood needs to take a future action into his past in order to unveil the possibilities of a new present he already witnessed ‘there’ in making his existing ‘choice’ — but in “blackout” mode
  • McLuhan’s constant attack on the rear-view mirror may in this way be seen as principled and similarly with his “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” — the former is a mechanical and unconsciousness attachment to an uncritical archetypal ‘choice’ and the latter is a new ‘choice’ at the middle of the archetypal spectrum giving access, for the first time, to the archetypal and everyday worlds together

Over the next 15 years, McLuhan would describe the “retracing” of the labyrinthine “stages of cognition” over and over again in an attempt to illuminate the knots of time and space at stake here. And over the next 35 years he would recur over and over again to the mariner in Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom as an exemplar of “every human being (…) incessantly engaged in creating an image of identity for himself”, or herself, through a moment-to-moment katabasis into the “worldpool” of the genesis of cognition. Becoming conscious of this process was, he thought, a matter of survival:

The artist’s insights or perceptions seem to have been given to mankind as a providential means of bridging the gap between evolution and technology. The artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives us a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity. The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival. (Man and Media, 1975)17

Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” has structurally much in common with the vortices of the Cantos. [Pound’s] “Sargasso Sea” is a vortex that attracts multitudinous objects but which also tosses things up again in recognizable patterns which serve for survival. Survival for Poe’s sailor had meant attaching himself to one of the recurring objects in the whirlpool. The same strategy applies to Pound’s readers who need to be alert to the resonance of recurring themes. (Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land, 1979)

These were some of McLuhan’s last reflections on the maelstrom. The outstanding question was (and remains today) whether consciousness of this “providential means of bridging the gap” can be brought about (if at all) through any other way than the shock and horror it took in the mariner’s case “to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves”.

 

 

  1.  Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality, in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, ed Brian Ogren, 2015 ↩
  2. Being and knowing: ‘knowing’ in some way is, while being is in some way known. But how to understand the relation of being to knowing and of knowing to being is the circular riddle defining the modern world — to mention only the modern world. ↩
  3. Of course, just ‘who’ it is playing this piano before identity is a question which on no account can be left unposed! ↩
  4. McLuhan letter to R.J. Leuver, July 30, 1969, Letters 386. To repeat, ‘who’ performs such identity creation is a difficult and mysterious matter – along with its ‘when’ and ‘where’ and ‘how’. ↩
  5. ‘Dagwood’s America’, Columbia Magazine, January 1944, pp 3 & 22. ↩
  6. This and all citations below without attribution are from ‘Dagwood’s America’. ↩
  7. “If, however, any ‘blame’ is owing for this grotesque family pattern, it is Dagwood’s. It is he who has collapsed, not Blondie. (…) Dagwood made (modern America), and Dagwood alone can restore balance to a completely, lop-sided social life…” ↩
  8. The effort to get clear about the relation between phenomena and their underlying determinants (eg, elements in chemistry, laws in physics, DNA structure in genetics, etc) is exactly what leads to the birth of a new science through the specification of its domain. ↩
  9. So the Dagwood essay; but similarly McLuhan 25 years later in a letter to R.J. Leuver: “When a new problem becomes greater than the human scale can cope with, the mind instinctively shrinks and sleeps” (July 30, 1969, Letters 386). ↩
  10. The ‘fly in the fly-bottle’ problem here (the idea that we can never get out of subjective factors in order to relate to objects ‘purely’), may be seen, in McLuhan’s terms, as a symptom of Dagwood’s loss of “the detached use of autonomous reason”: “Dagwood, our Mr Everyman, is the residual legatee of a century during which the masculine ideal of noble being has been systematically destroyed by the base ideal of endless doing.” Later he would further trace the problem to a related and equally unconsidered preference for ‘matching’ over ‘making’, hence to a general failure to conceive of communication between finitude (aka, a limitation to making) and truth, hence to nihilism. ↩
  11. Cf English words like ‘radical’ and ‘radish’. ↩
  12. “In Dagwood we see not only defeat but docility and oblivion, He seems not to have any recollection of what constitutes a man’s’ world or masculine interests. He lives in a vacuum, isolated from all contact with men, save men of his own kind. In his world Blondie and her children are supreme. Nothing else exists. Totally deprived of the prerogatives of a father, not aware of the need or even the possibility of impersonal masculine authority in the home, he has become hungry for affection and understanding; and in order to obtain these there is no pose of childish irresponsibility and petulance which he fails to assume.” The Dagwood paper sees masculine childishness as extending to the whole culture: “The press, the pulps, the slicks, and Hollywood — it is a great nursery world of sensations, thrills, and wide-eyed child-like myopia.” ↩
  13. ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’, 1936. ↩
  14. One of the variations on ‘Giants’ in FW is ‘Joynts’ (FW 15.7). ↩
  15. As observed above, it is essential to differentiate ‘gender’ (or anything else) as describing beings “in the world” from specifications using the same names for archetypal structures below or before the world. This differentiation is exactly the cervical path that every science takes on the way to its birth. ↩
  16. McLuhan would come to address the question of this ‘somehow’ in terms of the triumph of “visual space” or “acoustic space” over their superposition of both together. The former implicated exclusive binary oppositions and exclusive binary oppositions implicated monistic preference for one of the two. Matter, sensuality and rhetoric had become the usual governing monism in modern America and, by extension, in the modern world. But previously, the rival monism of “sheer abstraction” had often held sway and still held sway in pockets of the modern world. Swinging between opposing monistic dominants in this way was exactly the signature of the Gutenberg galaxy. ↩
  17. This lecture appears in Understanding Me, but is is mistakenly attributed there to 1979. ↩

Patterson on McLuhan’s acquaintance with Innis

Like nearly all researchers of the Toronto school, Graeme Patterson took McLuhan at his word that he

began to read the late work [of Innis] only after he was made curious by learning that The Mechanical Bride had been placed on the reading list of one of Innis’ courses in political economy. (History and Communications,1990, 29)

Patterson relies here on McLuhan’s mistaken recollection of events going back 30 years, which he made when he appeared with Eric Havelock in October 1978 at a memorial for Innis held at the University of Toronto in Innis College. The publication of Havelock’s address from that occasion, Harold A Innis: A Memoir (1982), has a short preface by McLuhan (‘The Fecund Interval’) in which he says:

My own acquaintance with Innis began when I heard that he had put my book, The Mechanical Bride, on his course reading list. It intrigued me to know what sort of academic would take an interest in this book, I read his Bias of Communication and became a follower of Harold innis from that time. (10)

None of this makes sense. McLuhan described his acquaintance with Innis as beginning with his reading The Bias of Communication (which would have been sometime in 1951 at the earliest, since the book was first issued that year).  But before this, Innis would hardly have had the time to read The Mechanical Bride (which itself was issued early in 1951) and to assign it for one of his courses. Moreover, as Patterson was well aware, McLuhan’s letter to Innis from early that year (if not from the end of 1950)1 already discusses Innis’ 1950 Empire and Communications — so McLuhan’s “acquaintance with Innis” certainly did not begin with his reading Innis’ Bias of Communication. 

Further, McLuhan had participated with Innis in a seminar in 1949 and Tom Easterbrook had brought the two of them together for a meal (and for further unattested discussions?) in 1948.2

 From McLuhan’s mistaken memory Patterson deduced that:

Long before encountering Innis [McLuhan] had written [in the Preface to The Mechanical Bride]: “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.” (History and Communications, 34) 

While some of The Mechanical Bride may indeed have been written before McLuhan came to know Innis in 1948 (or already in 1947 when his old friend Easterbrook returned to teach with Innis in the UT political economy department), its ‘Preface’ was almost certainly written after.

  1. The published letter from McLuhan to Innis from March 1951 was a “rewrite”.  Innis’ answer to the original letter was dated February 26, 1951, and apologizes for a delayed response. ↩
  2. For discussion of the 1949 ‘values seminar’ see ‘The ‘Values Discussion Group’ of 1949′ (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2013/09/values-discussion-group-1949/); for the 1948 meal, see McLuhan to Lewis Mumford, December 28, 1948, Letters 208. ↩

Easterbrook to Innis on the “juxtaposition of unlikes”

Graeme Patterson‘s excellent History and Communications (1990) records a late exchange between McLuhan’s old Winnipeg buddy1 Tom Easterbrook, and Easterbrook’s mentor, colleague and close friend at UT, Harold Innis:

In the spring of 1952, when [Innis] was dying of cancer, the economist W.T. Easterbrook wrote to him about his own “current preoccupation with McLuhan’s ‘juxtaposition of unlikes’ (…) It is a method not at all uncommon in your own writings, but it is only recently that I have begun to see its possibilities.It is the only way I know out of the dilemma of narrative vs ‘scientific’ history.”
“I agree with you”, replied Innis, “about the importance of juxtaposition along the lines suggested by McLuhan. It seems to offer the only prospect of escape from the obsession with one’s own culture, but of course needs to be carefully considered since, while one’s own views of one’s culture change as a result of looking at other cultures, nevertheless the problem of objectivity always seems to emerge.” (28, with notes 8 and 9 to this passage on  p 229)

As described in ‘Innis and McLuhan in 1936’2 Innis had long been ambiguous about the prospects of scientific rigor in the social sciences.  He seems to have remained so until his death. But Easterbrook, at least, could see that the simultaneous double perspective or juxtaposition method that McLuhan was advocating (mainly from his reading of Eliot and Pound) did offer such a prospect — but exactly not by extricating itself (per impossibile) from finitude, either in the performance of the subject or in the knowledge of the object. Instead, finitude might be perceived and exercised as itself juxtaposed with truth — however ‘unlikely’ such an “inclusive image” might seem in some perspectives. But how else could we have all the sciences that we do? Or, indeed, how else could we have all the routine familiarity we have in going about our everyday lives?

Later in History and Communications, Patterson tied Innis’ reply to Easterbrook to his reading of the following passage from The Mechanical Bride:

The cultural patterns of several societies, quite unrelated to one another or to our own, are abruptly overlayered [in contemporary anthropology like that of Margaret Mead] in cubist or Picasso style to provide a greatly enriched image of human potentialities. By this method the greatest possible detachment from our own immediate problems is achieved. The voice of reason is audible only to the detached observer. (3)

Patterson commented:

It was this method of achieving “the greatest possible detachment”, it would appear, that Innis had in mind in making his strange reply to Easterbrook. (35)

“Detachment” was  certainly one of “the conditions of freedom of thought” sought by Innis.  But what Innis did not live long enough to understand in McLuhan (let alone to affirm with McLuhan) was the compatibility of “unlikes” even when their “juxtaposition” were taken to the extreme of “the greatest possible detachment”.  This extreme compatibility of “unlikes” was at the heart of McLuhan’s “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image” and of his Catholic persuasion.

 

 

  1. Like most scholars of the Toronto school, Patterson either did not know of McLuhan’s long-standing intimate friendship with Easterbrook — or he ignored it.  But this friendship was a central factor in the Innis-McLuhan relationship and, of course, in the whole Culture and Communication seminar project where Easterbrook was one of the five faculty leaders (three from Winnipeg!). An acknowledgement to The Mechanical Bride (1951) reads: “To Professor W. T. Easterbrook I owe many enlightening conversations on the problems of bureaucracy and enterprise.” By 1951, these had been on-going, irregularly, for almost 25 years. Easterbrook’s relationship with Innis was not as long-standing as with McLuhan, but it did go back 15 years and had developed into a very close friendship itself. Innis’ ‘Preface’ to Empire and Communications (1950) acknowledges Easterbrook’s help reading the manuscript. ↩
  2.  http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2016/09/innis-and-mcluhan-in-1936/ ↩

McLuhan’s realism 10: Pound on the ideograph

The “New Learning” under the ideogram of the mortar1 can imply whatever men of my generation can offer our successors as means to (…) comprehension. (Guide to Kulchur)

ABC of Reading:

Fenollosa’s essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language. The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows: In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘colour ‘. If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.
(…)
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry’, as distinct from that of ‘philosophic discussion ‘, and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing.
(…)
In tables showing primitive Chinese characters in one column and the present ‘conventionalized’ signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or ‘was simplified from’, or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise.
Thus:

But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that
isn’t painted in red paint? He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated
pictures of

ROSE                    CHERRY
IRON RUST          FLAMINGO

(…)
The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (19-22)

*****

Guide to Kulchur:

The week before last one of the brighter scholars still professed ignorance of the meaning of “ideogramic”. I must try once again to define that term (…) Ernest Fenollosa attacked, quite rightly, a great weakness in western ratiocination. He pointed out that the material sciences, biology, chemistry, examined collections of fact, phenomena, specimens, and gathered general equations of real knowledge from them, even though the observed data had no syllogistic connection one with another. (…) The first knowledge is direct, (…) it affects every perception…
Coming even closer to things (…)
And herein is clue to Confucius’ reiterated commendation of such of his students as studied the Odes. He demanded or commended a type of perception, a kind of transmission of knowledge obtainable only from such concrete manifestation. Not without reason. The whole tone, disposition, Anschauung of Confucius recommending the Odes, of Confucius speaking of music, differs fundamentally (…) from the way the unfortunate (…) occidental usually supposes… (27-29)

The ideogramic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.(…) To put it yet another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or [rather] the [plural] processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant. (50-51)

CIVILIZATION (…): to define it ideogramicly we may start with the “Listening to Incense”. This displays a high state of civilization. In the Imperial Court of Nippon the companions burnt incense, they burnt now one perfume, and now another, or a mixture of perfumes, and the accomplishment was both to recognize what had gone materially into the perfume and to cite apposite poems. The interest is in the blend of perception [hear/smell] and of association [physical/mental]. It is a pastime neither for clods nor for illiterates. (79)

*****

For Pound (and the same would be true of McLuhan), human beings are directly in touch with the things in their environment. We KNOW things perfectly well.  But among the things we KNOW is the fact that the surface of things is not all there is to them. The same sort of direct communication we have with things also holds between their surface and their depth. This is why we can have something like science or why some have what is called ‘deep insight’ into social or historical events.

Understanding the world for Pound and McLuhan presupposed the exercise of both of these kinds of realism.

  1. The Chinese character for learning. ↩

Writing and the Alphabet in Innis and McLuhan

McLuhan’s ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ (1951) was reprinted in The Interior Landscape, indicating McLuhan’s evaluation of its importance along his pathway. Here is to be found:

With Joyce words syntactically ordered to statement yielded to words as pantomime, as ballet, and especially as static landscape. Mallarmé, in his Coup de Des, had preceded Joyce in establishing the printed page as a symbolist landscape able to evoke the most ephemeral incident and, simultaneously, the most remote cycles of time. For Mallarmé, as for Joyce, the minutest, as well as the most esoteric, features of the alphabet itself were charged with dramatic significance, so that he used the word and the printed page as do the Chinese, for whom landscape painting is a branch of writing.1

This was an understanding of print and of time and of their interrelation that would occupy him for the remaining three decades of his life. The printed page as “syntactically ordered (…) statement” could be taken not — or not only! — as the continuous ABCDE unfolding of a lineal message, but also as an ABCEDminded2 “static landscape”, or snapshot, in which time itself was figured in it from “the most ephemeral3 incident” to “the most remote cycles of time” and its ground, “simultaneously”. The emerging idea was that print, exactly in its multiple (and by no means only negative) limitations (arbitrarily isolated atomic units configured in serial order and all that this implied for history and consciousness) could be perceived as revealing at the same time an entirely different time-space order (“words as pantomime, as ballet (…) charged with dramatic significance”).

McLuhan had been thinking about the implications of particularity for decades4, but now he began to sense, in what amounted to a second conversion, that incarnation had no limit. There was nothing that could not also be beheld as expressing an entirely different order and this relationship between orders was precisely that “inclusive and integral image” to whose specification he had been elected.5 Reflecting back to this time around 1951 in his Playboy interview, he recalled:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually (…) I 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 [the new media and popular culture] 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. (Playboy Interview)

Remarkably, this “totally new approach” did not represent an exclusive break with the past, but a revolutionary accommodation with it that was inclusive. The “totally new” was a reversion or, as McLuhan often put it, a “retracing”, that accorded itself to the light coming through all things including “environmental technology”, “the Industrial Revolution”, “mass media” and  “modern life” in general. In a word, he adopted in regard to the universe of human experience the posture of a proto-chemist who determined to begin studying all materials across all their manifestations and interactions.

A footnote to the passage cited above from ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ and concluding with “landscape painting is a branch of writing”, referred to:

A.C. Moorhouse, Writing and the Alphabet, London, 1946, p. 59.

Presumably McLuhan had found this reference the year before reading Innis’ Empire and Communications .  It appears in a footnote to p 10 of its ‘Introduction’:

See C. L. Becker, Progress and Power (Stanford University, 1936); see also A. C. Moorhouse, Writing and the Alphabet (London, 1946).6

Now the year 1951 was of great significance to McLuhan: he turned 40; The Mechanical Bride was finally published; his turn to Joyce was completed as defined that year in his ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’; his correspondence with Ezra Pound (backed by his study of the Cantos and of Pound’s critical writings) was flourishing; his relationship with Innis was taking off (only to be cut short by Innis’ early death in 1952); he was beginning to investigate the roles of media in culture as reflected in his letter to Innis from March that year and as detailed in his advanced summary of “the end of the Gutenberg era” in his letter to Pound7 in July 1952 (reflecting ideas he had come to, in the main, in 1951).

Moorhouse’s book with its chapter on the Chinese may have been an important marker in this context. Its page 59 referenced by  McLuhan has this extended passage (going over to page 60):

Calligraphy has always been held in the highest esteem in China : indeed, landscape-painting is really to be regarded as a branch of writing, and landscapes often include written texts from poems on account of the beauty of the script as much as for literary reasons. Our alphabet has in comparison a plain and matter-of-fact appearance. But there are more practical reasons [for comparing the two]. The Chinaman who has learnt to read is equally at home with a government notice of to-day and with the literature that reaches back for over three thousand years. The writing is materially the same, though the language is not. Now this is a most peculiar situation. Contrast what happens with a phonetic system of writing. In ancient Greek there is a period of only five or six centuries between Homer and Aristotle, [not the three thousand of the Chinese,] yet the language changed considerably in that time. The student who knew only the Greek of Aristotle would find himself at once in difficulties with that of Homer, in respect of the vocabulary, the sounds and the grammatical forms. His difficulties would all arise out of distinctions in the spoken form of the language: and since the writing is based on the spoken form, and simply reproduces all the distinctions, it can do nothing to remove them. Admittedly Greek is an extreme example, because of its great diversity. We can, however, see a similar result in English. It is impossible for us, without special training, to read and understand Beowulf, or even Chaucer: their language is different, and therefore so is the written form [reflective] of it. The Chinese language [as represented in its script], on the other hand, has not undergone such striking changes (…) [even though] the process of sound change has created a number of modern Chinese dialects, which are sufficiently unlike to prevent the speakers of one of them from readily understanding the others, or the ancient texts, when spoken aloud. This is where the value of Chinese writing makes itself felt, by transcending the speech barriers. Thus the writing allows the Chinaman (if he can read at all) to enjoy the knowledge of his ancient texts — a knowledge which has [practical] significance in Chinese life that is not easy for us to estimate.

Moorhouse brings together writing as “landscape-painting” (script and art), different time dimensions determined by the translucence (or not) of script and art, east and west and the importance of “transcending the speech barriers” to the appropriation of (or by!) culture. All of these (though of course not deriving only from Moorhouse) would be critical to McLuhan in the coming decade (and, in fact, for the rest of his life).

On the same page of Empire and Communications just above his note referencing Moorhouse, Innis formulated one of the most important passages in his book:

The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the [different] media [employed by it, on the one hand, and by us, on the other], and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media. A change in the type of medium implies a change in the type of appraisal and hence makes it difficult for one civilization to understand another. (…) The difficulties of appraisal will be evident, particularly in the consideration of time. With the dominance of arithmetic (…)  modern students have accepted the linear measure of time. The dangers of applying this procrustean device in the appraisal of civilizations in which it did not exist illustrate one of numerous problems. The difficulties will be illustrated in part in these six lectures in which time becomes a crucial factor in the organization of material and in which a lecture is [used self-consciously as] a standardized and relatively inefficient method of communication with an emphasis on dogmatic answers rather than eternal questions. I have attempted to meet these problems by using the concept of empire as an indication of the efficiency of communication. It will reflect to an important extent the efficiency of particular media of communication and its possibilities in creating conditions favourable to creative thought. (10)

Here, too, media are brought together with different time dimensions and “type[s] of appraisal”. These, in turn, are seen to give access to, or to block access to, “eternal questions” and “creative thought.” Innis then goes beyond Moorhouse in noting how these considerations reflect back on his own lectures and on the “appraisal” that is possible in them for himself and through them for his audience.

What Innis did not see in Moorhouse, however, was the importance of the introduction into this context of “landscape-painting”. It was precisely this point that McLuhan would emphasize in his programmatic letter to Innis early in 1951:

it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language [understood in Moorhouse’s broad sense as including script and, therefore, art], such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. (…) The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items (…) created, [Mallarmé] saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (…) The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. Eisenstein’s Film Forum and Film Technique explores the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology. (…) From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered [like Innis’ “dogmatic answers”], but a direct participation in an experience [of “creative thought” about “eternal questions”]. (…) The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener [cybernetics] approach [shared by Innis?] is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type[s] of all human communication. (…) Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return. For example the actual techniques of [McLuhan’s proposed] common study today [between, eg, the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities and artists] seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa.

Problems of communication, aka of “understanding media”, were implicated, this was to say, both in the best modern art works and in any attempt to restore harmony in the universe of human thought and action.

 

  1. Compare: “Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types the more metaphysical world of the Wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. It is a nightworld and, literally, as Joyce reiterates, is “abcedminded.” Letters (“every letter is a godsend”), the frozen, formalized gestures of remote ages of collective experience, move before us in solemn morrice (dance). They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953) ↩
  2. See note above. For discussion see ‘Abcedmindedness’ http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2016/10/abcedmindedness/). ↩
  3. Etymologically, ‘eph-emeral’ = ‘of a day’. ↩
  4. See ‘McLuhan’s realism 4’: Meredith and “mystical materialism” (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/06/mcluhans-realism-4/). ↩
  5. See McLuhan and the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image”: http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/07/mcluhan-and-the-ceaseless-quest-for-the-inclusive-image/. ↩
  6. Footnote 16 to p 10 of the 1950 edition of Empire and Communications. Carl Becker, 1873-1945, was professor of politics at Minnesota and Cornell. Alfred Charles Moorhouse, 1910-2000, was professor of Greek at University College, Swansea. ↩
  7. McLuhan to Pound, July 16, 1952, Letters 231-232. ↩

McLuhan’s times

Tradition (…) cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves in the first place the historical sense (…) which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together (…) And it is at the same time [at the same time!] what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. (Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919, frequently cited by McLuhan beginning with ‘Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic’ in 1947)1

‘Change’ is (…) generally believed a single-gauge track. It is not a single-gauge track at all. It is a multitudinous field of tracks… (Lewis, Paleface, 1929, 122)

*

Loose note found in McLuhan’s copy of the University of Toronto Quarterly, 19:2, January 1950:

We can only correct the bias of the present time by coming to know it is a time, not the time.2

*

‘The Analogical Mirrors’, 1944:

He must overcome and be overcome at the same instant — at every instant.3

‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry‘, 1951:

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time4, of intellectual emotion for which in their poems they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment. 

‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’, 1951:

The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time’s covenant, and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinths are always overcome.

‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’, 1953

“The world of the ‘pure Present’ of the Classical Ages is obviously the world that is born and dies every moment.”5

‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’, 1954:6

That manipulation of a continuous parallel between modern Dublin and ancient Ithaca which Mr. Eliot has noted as the major resource of Ulysses was a transfer to the time dimension of a “double-plot”…

‘Space, Time, and Poetry,  Explorations 4, 1955:

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 begins:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Here the “time of year” (…) is visualized swiftly in three different ways in the second line and then a fourth and fifth time in the third and fourth lines.7 

‘New Media in Arts Education’, 1956, on Rimbaud’s poem “Dimanche”:

The organization of experience here is orchestral or acoustic rather than visual. Yet the various units of experience are visualized. There is a landscape, but it includes more than one space in its space and more than one time in its time. It is a simultaneous order such as music readily offers. A merely visual landscape, however, can offer only one space at one time.

Coleridge as Artist, 1957

Yet if the artistic process must always be the same, the conditions of art and the artist are always changing.

Coleridge as Artist, 1957

The Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically. 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.

The Little Epic, late 1950s:8

Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies.  And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names. In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’. 

Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960:

Looking back from the nuclear age it is easy to recognize the pattern of ‘total field’ forming in the concern with totality of implication in the aesthetic moment, or spot of time.

Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960:

Digression is the principal artistic device by which little epic exists. The reason for this is quite simple. To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 14 (citing Georges Poulet):

“For the man of the Middle Ages, then, there was not one duration only. There were durations, ranked one above another, and not only in the universality of the exterior world but within himself, in his own nature, in his own human existence.”9

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 249-250:

James Joyce certainly thought he had found in Vico a philosopher who had some better cultural awareness than those moved by the “Cartesian spring.” And Vico, like Heidegger, is a philologist among philosophers. His time theory of “ricorsi” has been interpreted by lineal minds to imply “recurrence.” A recent study of him brushes this notion aside.10 Vico conceives the time-structure of history as “not linear, but contrapuntal. It must be traced along a number of lines of development“. For Vico all history is contemporary or simultaneous, a fact given, Joyce would add, by virtue of language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience. And in Vico, the concept of recurrence cannot “be admitted at the level of the course of the nations through time”: “The establishment of providence establishes universal history, the total presence of the human spirit to itself in idea. In this principle, the supreme `ricorso’ is achieved by the human spirit in idea, and it possesses itself, past, present, and future, in an act which is wholly consonant with its own historicity.” 11

Understanding Media, 1964, p 152:

plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time

The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p 63:

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness12. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening.

‘Education in the Electronic Age’, 1967:

Everything happens at once. In the new painting and the new art and the new literature, it is a happening. A happening is an all-at-once situation. There is no story line. We are all engaged in a happening; everything happening at once. That is what a happening is. It is not one thing at a time but everything at once.13

Retrieval-Retribal in the Electronic Age, 196714

this phrase that I wrote on the board, ‘the heliotropical (k)not time’, refers to the TV image as a sun radiating at the viewer, helio tropical, turning us all toward the eastern sun; (k)not time, meaning all times are simultaneous now. All cultures are simultaneous. There is no time that fills our focus. Many times, all times, just as in a dream, at night, nighttime. All that we ever were, collectively, is now simultaneous. There is no longer an historical time, there is only a (k)not time left to mankind or a nighttime or a dream world. The old visual time, like clock time, is fragmented and segmented into little bits. That is what we call time, time marches on — but [now we perceive time as] also backwards, sideways, up and down. But to the print man, time simply matches on, there isn’t any other direction possible for the print man. But for the ear man, time moves in all directions simultaneously.15

Through the Vanishing Point, 1968, p 55:

If the three-dimensional illusion of depth [in Western European art] has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional [in Eastern art] features many spaces in multileveled time.

Through the Vanishing Point, p 103:

The Shakespearean moment (“that time of year”)16 includes several times at once…

Through the Vanishing Point, p 195:

[Dylan] Thomas’ poetry is a chamber simultaneously echoing with many times.

Through the Vanishing Point, p 221:

In an electronic world where all-at-onceness is inevitable and normal, we have rediscovered an affinity for the discontinuity of Oriental art and expression17

Counterblast, 1969

the omnipresent ear and moving eye

‘Electric Consciousness and The Church’, 1970:

we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time.

‘Theatre and the Visual Arts’, 1971:

Without static you have no continuity.

Culture is our Business, 1972 Introduction:

The climate of advertising responds instantly to any social change, making ads in themselves an invaluable means of knowing “where it’s at”. The phrase [“where it’s at”] not only concerns a focal image, but expresses a kind of “consensuality” of persons, places, and things in a single instant of awareness. Invented in the age of rock music to indicate areas of relevance and aliveness, the phrase conveys a resonant and acoustic kind of awareness quite alien to anything like “clock time”.18  

Spiral — Man as the Medium, 1976:

Chronological time yields to time as spaced-out moments of [simultaneous] intensity.

Global Village, posthumous, p 10:

time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground.

Global Village, p 45:

Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary…a foot, as it were, in both…

 

 

  1. ‘Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic’ was never published. The same passage from Eliot was cited by McLuhan over 30 years later in ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’ (1979). ↩
  2. Transcribed by Andrew McLuhan in his inscriptorium blog. Emphasis added here. The tone and date of this note point in the direction of Harold Innis.  Already in 1942 Innis had written: “The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time” (Journal of Economic History, December 1942, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946, p 34). And in 1948: “The Chinese concept of time (…) as plural (…) reflects their social organization with its interest in hierarchy and relative stability” (The Press: a neglected factor in the economic history of the twentieth century, 1948, reprinted in Changing Concepts of Time, 1952, p 94), emphasis added. Finally in 1951: “I was particularly interested in the discussion of the problem of time since I have been wrestling with this subject over a considerable period and I was very much struck by your suggestion that it was linked with the problem of power” (Innis to Eric Havelock, 8 December 1951, cited in Liss Jeffrey’s thesis, 208.). For “not the time”, compare McLuhan in his 1947 proposal for Robert Hutchins: “Every age has its reigning analogy in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this analogy. To be “ahead of the time” is to be critically aware of the analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy.” ↩
  3. Compare to Counterblast 25 years later in 1969: “the omnipresent ear and moving eye”. ↩
  4. “A moment in and out of time”: unmarked quotation from Eliot’s Four Quartets, iii: ‘The  Dry Salvages’. ↩
  5. Citation from Lewis, Time and Western Man, 1927. Lewis continues: “It is not the time-world (…) but the space-world… ↩
  6. Published in The Sewanee Review in 1954, but first submitted to it in 1951. ↩
  7. See Through the Vanishing Point, p 103 (in this post above). ↩
  8. Unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive. ↩
  9. The same Poulet passage is quoted in Through the Vanishing Point. ↩
  10. A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico, 1953. ↩
  11. Time and Idea, p. 142 ↩
  12. ‘All-at-onceness’ (McLuhan’s usual spelling) implicates plural times. This is seldom or never understood and yet is foundational to his intentions. See the passage above from Through the Vanishing Point, p 221. ↩
  13. However, “everything at once” of course implicates “one thing at a time” as well. ↩
  14. Seminar at Fordham University in November 1967. ↩
  15. Compare Frank Budgen on Joyce’s Wake: “Finnegans Wake is going nowhere in all directions on an every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below. On every page Joyce insists upon this all-time dream-time.” (‘Joyce’s Chapters on Going Forth by Day’, Horizon, September 1941.) McLuhan frequently cited this passage from Budgen, with and without attribution. ↩
  16. See the citation from ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’ above. ↩
  17. “All-at-onceness” and “discontinuity” (of, eg, times) belong together because a plural “all” requires the differentiation of its components. ↩
  18. “Clock time”: “the evolutionary metaphor that haunts the mind” (McLuhan to Ted Carpenter, January 26, 1972, Letters 450.) ↩

McLuhan and the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image”

In ‘New Media and the New Education’ (1960) McLuhan submitted that “the Romantics (…) began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image”. He himself was heir to this same quest.  For there was no other way than in and through such an “inclusive and integral image” to understand the complications of a world where all spaces and all times were simultaneously present. And where, above all, there was no other way than through such an “inclusive and integral image” to reawaken and renew a consciousness of God.

Already in 1951 he had described “symbolic vision” or “inclusive consciousness” as “the juxtaposition without copula of diverse and even paradoxical situations or states of mind” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951). But what could be more “paradoxical” than a world consumed by nihilism that made sense, not through transformation into something else, but in the utter extreme of its dislocation exactly as it was?

Beyond (or before) the revolutionary bent of a simultaneous electric world, McLuhan recognized a “human craving for an inclusive auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences”1 that was timeless — or, at least, that was subject to multiple times and therefore that was not only chronological: “a moment in and out of time” (as McLuhan cited Eliot). Without such a “craving”, like the stag for the running stream as Psalm 42 has it, how else could God ever have been known and worshipped in a world that was at no time without its small and large tragedies or lacking in recurrent overwhelming senselessnesses?

Thus it was that McLuhan took the symbolists as continuing the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” of the romantics and his own task within this tradition as being the further unfolding of its insights and aims:

the central difference between romantic or picturesque poetry and modern symbolist poetry was that whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulating an external environment as a means of evoking art emotion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the symbolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of controlling art emotion or of exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolution — from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time2, of intellectual emotion for which in their poems they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951)

The Romantics (…) insisted upon the creative imagination as the birthright of all, and began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image. This arduous search was taken up with great intensity by the Symbolists who realized that it could not be a merely visual image, but must include all the senses in a kind of dance. En route to this discovery, Hopkins and Browning, Poe and Baudelaire, ended the print-fostered dichotomy between author and reader, producer and consumer and swept mostly unwilling audiences up into participation in the creative act. After Poe, and since Cezanne, poets and painters devised ever new modes of speaking not to their readers and viewers, but through them. (…) Such is the meaning of the abstract art and the do-it-yourself kits which artists have for a hundred years been carefully preparing for this affronted public. (New Media and the New Education, 1960)

Like the symbolists in their transformation of the romantic quest, McLuhan’s goal was to set out a kind of prolegomena to the apprehension of an “inclusive and integral image” through which that image might again be dis-covered and beheld – and applied. What he called “the art formula”. Audience participation was required, not only because this image was necessarily not that of any individual perspective (not that of the artist nor that of any of the artist’s consumers), but above all because the goal was to communicate the means through which perception of “the inclusive and integral image” might be enabled. And this required complex transformation in the audience just as it had first of all required complex transformation in the artist attempting its specification.

[Romantic] poetry, too, [like science following Newton], succeeded in achieving a new visual order based on the correspondence between the inner faculties and the natural scene outside. But this new order was exclusive rather than inclusive in its very nature. It had to deal with one emotion at a time and one level of experience at a time. It could not include erudition and accumulated past experience in the single perspectives of visual space that were devised in order to isolate and to control single emotions. But, above all, it could not fulfill the human craving for an inclusive auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences. (Review of The Romantic Assertion, 1960)

the electronic mode of shaping situations reveals its bias towards field structure. But even “field”, preferred by physicists, can mislead by suggesting a flat, single plane. But a multi-dimensional field is intended, an ”everyway roundabout with intrusions from above and below”. Thus, for example, point-of-view, if inevitable in print culture, is alien to electronic ‘field’ and the affiliates of such [a] ‘field’. (New Media and the New Education, 1960)3

Sense might be made of the world, once again, and in particular of the Christian tradition, but only through a revolution in our understanding of sense in the “every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below” of its shape(s).4

  1. ‘Review of The Romantic Assertion‘,1960 ↩
  2. Without attribution, McLuhan cites Eliot here from The Four Quartets (The  Dry Salvages). ↩
  3. New Media and the New Education, 1960, citing (without attribution) Frank Budgen, ‘Joyce’s Chapters on Going Forth by Day’, Horizon, September 1941. McLuhan cited this same passage more extensively a decade before in 1951 in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’: “The worst (difficulty) of writing about Finnegans Wake (said Budgen) is that all our words are wrong. Story is wrong, of course, for a story is one thing happening after another along a one-way time street, coming from and going to some place, whereas Finnegans Wake is going nowhere in all directions on an every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below. On every page Joyce insists upon this all-time dream-time by every device of suggestion and allusion and by a continual modification and cancellation of all-time words.” Where McLuhan consistently has ‘intrusions’, Budgen has ‘infiltrations’. ↩
  4. The great problem implicated in “a revolution in our understanding of sense” was, of course, that “understanding” for McLuhan was already a certain configuration of sense. There could be no such revolution unless it had already occurred! This knot in time of a ‘future past’ was therefore both a central feature of the sought “inclusive and integral image” and its pre-liminary precondition — that which first had to be in place for it first to be. ↩

McLuhan’s Google Doodle

On McLuhan’s birthday July 21 (2017) he got a Google Doodle:

The doodle images symbolize the acoustic age, the written age, mass production (Fordism), McLuhan television appearance, the Global Village and the electronic age.

https://www.google.com/doodles/marshall-mcluhans-106th-birthday

Marshall McLuhan’s 106th Birthday

Long before we started looking to our screens for all the answers, Marshall McLuhan saw the internet coming — and predicted just how much impact it would have. A Canadian philosopher and professor who specialized in media theory, McLuhan came to prominence in the 1960s, just as TV was becoming part of everyday life. At the center of his thinking was the idea that society is shaped by technology and the way information is shared.

Today’s Doodle, which celebrates the visionary’s 106th birthday, illustrates this theory by showing how McLuhan viewed human history. He saw it through the lens of 4 distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age. His first major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), popularized the term “global village” — the idea that technology brings people together and allows everyone the same access to information.

In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan further examined the transformative effects of technology and coined his famous phrase “The medium is the message.” He believed that the way in which someone receives information is more influential than the information itself. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, McLuhan made frequent TV appearances to share his theories with both followers and skeptics.

Decades later, we honor the man whose prophetic vision of the “computer as a research and communication instrument” has undeniably become a reality.

 

 

 

On Lewis and Technology 1944

our lives are so (…) involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in [their] terms. (Lemuel in Lilliput, 1944)1

[Lewis’] concern for the order of Western civilization has led him to contemplate the contemporary situation minutely and in its entirety. (Ibid)

In the middle 1940s, McLuhan began to turn his attention to the relation of technology and culture.  This had much to do with his exposure to the work of two major European intellectuals both of whom he met personally in 1943: Sigfried Giedion, who came to St Louis to further his research on its riverfront, and Wyndham Lewis, who was discovered living in Windsor by McLuhan’s mother. McLuhan immediately read everything he could find from both.

Giedion emphasized the growing influence of technology on architecture and all the arts in Space, Time and Architecture (1941, originally lectures at Harvard in 1938) and had begun to publish the research which would eventuate in Mechanization Takes Command (1948).2

McLuhan had read Lewis’ Time and Western Man (1927) in Cambridge.  Now he scrambled to catch up with the rest of his remarkable output. His 1944 ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’ represented the first of his lifelong attempts3 to come to terms with Lewis and began by stipulating:

I propose to consider here only three or four of the thirty-odd volumes of Wyndham Lewis. This means neglecting the fact that he is the only serious painter England has had in the past fifty years, and that he is one of the half-dozen great painters of Europe in the same period. This, perhaps his most important side in the long run, must be put out of the present discussion. Similarly, as the author of Tarr, The Apes of God and The Childermass, he takes his place in the literature of prose satire as a classic. (…) Works of this scope and importance must be reserved for separate treatment, especially since they are little read in America. Instead, something will be said about another side of his work — the pamphleteering. This is the side from which both the novels and the painting of Lewis are most readily approached. 

In the pamphlets, especially The Art of Being Ruled (1926), what particularly attracted McLuhan’s attention was Lewis’ treatment of the affect of technology on culture — aka “the war on the intellect”:

  • we hear on every hand [McLuhan was writing in 1944]: “This isn’t a war, it’s a revolution.” “We live in an age of transition.” “Things will be different after this war.” “This won’t be the last war.” Whether spoken by the responsible or the moronic, these remarks, and countless others like them, have no meaning. They are spoken in a trance of inattention while the reason is in permanent abeyance. They are typical of men who no longer understand the world they have made and which, as robots, they operate day by day. Such is the situation into which Lewis shot his pamphlet breezily entitled ‘The Art of Being Ruled’.
  • To read the “pamphlets” of Lewis is to become aware not only of the scope of the forces arrayed against reason and art, but it is to have anatomized before one’s eyes every segment of the contemporary scene of glamorized commerce and advertising, and, above all, of the bogus science, philosophy, art, and literature which has been the main instrument in producing universal stupefaction.
  • The dehumanization of life [proceeds] by means of centralized methods of “communication”, and by the lethal abstractionizing of the machine (…) The life of free intelligence has never (…) encountered such anonymous and universal hostility.
  • The rulers of modern society are increasingly identified with these technicians who control “scientifically” [via] educational experiment and the Gallup poll: “In reality they are another genus of puppets, a genus of homicidal puppets” [citing ‘The Art of Being Ruled’].
  • Lewis presents a massive documentation and analysis of the art and science and philosophy which manufacture the Zeitgeist — the Zeitgeist being the force which manipulates the puppets who govern [ie, manipulate] us.4
  • the modern state is necessarily an educationalist state owing to the huge impassivity of the urban masses on the one hand and to the closely centralized control of all agencies of communication on the other.

“In a word”, said McLuhan, using a mannerism he had picked up from Bernie Muller-Thym, his close friend and colleague at SLU, “not only was modern society hostile to art, but to life and reason also.”

McLuhan had no ideas yet just how — through what means of transformation — technology and communication were able to affect culture. But he was clear that, in modern times at least, their result was to consolidate into a undifferentiated fog (as in the opening scene of Fellini’s 8½):

  • the fabric of modern life is woven without a seam.
  • as a thousand different activities mystically coalesce in response to the religion of merging, or mesmeric engulfing (…) the Dagwoods and the billionaire power-gluttons are equally rushing to the suicide of total immersion in the chaos5 of matter (…) the exploited and the exploiter coalesce.
  • Modern man, philosophically committed and conditioned to sensation and its twin, action, is automatically manifesting the fruits of that philosophy in a multitude of ways. Fanatically wedded to matter (…) all his acts will uniformly possess a character of accelerated imbecility.
  • Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into prescribed tracks, in what can be called a sort of trance of action. Hurrying, without any significant reason, from spot to spot at the maximum speed obtainable…
  • how is the typical individual of this epoch to do some detached thinking for himself? All his life is disposed with a view to banishing reflection.
  • the rulers of the modern world are not detached or critical. They do not reflect. They do not consider ends. They are wholly immersed in the matter which they utilize without understanding its character.
  • the pathological blindness of the modern world to anything but itself: “It is naturally, for itself, the best that has ever been — it is for it that the earth has laboured for so long (…) “The Heir of all the Ages….”

Ten years later, in ‘Nihilism Exposed’, a 1955 review6 of Wyndham Lewis by Hugh Kenner, McLuhan retained this assessment:

it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (…)  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“. This pagan unworldliness carried to its ultimate mystical point is what makes the work of Lewis so intense and his evaluation so fearless.

What gave Lewis “such importance in the new age of technology” was his specification of the background structural dynamics through which analysis in the humanities and social sciences had to be made. This was the core of McLuhan’s lifetime work and he had glimpsed it already in this 1944 essay:

Where everything is in question, and where all traditional values are repudiated, the everyday problems have become, necessarily, identical with [problems of] the abstractions from which all [perceptions of] concrete things in the first place come. And the everyday life is too much affected by the speculative activities that are (…) trans-valuing our world for it to be able to survive in ignorance of those speculations…

It is (…) a matter of the utmost concern for us to know from what sources and by what means the rulers of the modern world determine what they will do next.  How do they determine the ends for which, as means, they employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement? Lewis gives the answer that “art and science are the very material out of which the law is made. They are the suggestion; out of them are cut the beliefs by which men are governed” [citing ‘The Art of Being Ruled’].

Hence, because “art and science are the very material out of which the law is made”:

All question of the artistic value of Joyce and Picasso apart, the man whose sensibility and judgment cannot cope with them easily and naturally, has not the equipment to consider the world he lives in.

Defining “the equipment” of “sensibility and judgment” needed “to consider the world” was McLuhan’s aim. The object was not the world as the complex of physical things, but the world as the redoubled complex of experienced things, the world(s) we live in. Great questions remained, however. What was the means through which technology was able to affect culture? Prior to that, just what was technology, especially if language could be considered the first art and the first technology, one enabling culture (not disabling it as it does at present)? And if “speculative activities” might be thought to be the source “from which all concrete things in the first place come”, how was this different from Lodge’s “Platonist” comparative method where “philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities”? Key to this question, in turn, was the further question (as, indeed, Plato had been well aware) of the nature of ‘identity’ where “everyday problems have become, necessarily, identical with the abstractions from which all concrete things in the first place come”? And just what was implicated with this “first place”? What eventuated ‘there’? And when? And, finally, how was communication about all these questions to be initiated such that collective investigation could be made, at last, into them?

McLuhan would gradually begin to probe all these questions. For now he was clear that an important aspect of Lewis’ work lay in the fact that had faced the communication problem and attempted to answer it:

Lewis (…) sets out to create an audience for himself: “A book of this description is not written for an audience that is already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle (…) It must of necessity make its own audience” [citing The Art of Being Ruled].

This “stretching of the receptacle” was conceived by Lewis as enabling, or forcing, the “toil of detachment” (The Art of Being Ruled):

  • As a preparation for intelligent action, Lewis advocates self-extrication from the ideologic machine by an arduous course of detachment…
  • Lewis pleases nobody because he is like an intruder at a feast who quietly explains that dinner must be temporarily abandoned since the food has been poisoned and the guests must be detached from their dinners by means of a stomach pump.
  • the modern man has long lost the use of his eyes. (…) The particular means by which Lewis has extricated himself from the ideologic machine of our epoch (…) is that of the painter’s eye…
  • the lethal abstractionizing of the machine (…) has left only a hole-and-corner existence for the serious artist. No great artist ever fought so furiously to maintain a tiny milieu for art as Lewis has done.

From now on, McLuhan’s work would move along two parallel tracks “in theory and in practice”. On the one hand he would attempt a kind of phenomenology of American life that would culminate in The Mechanical Bride.  In the 1944 Lewis essay he could already adroitly specify:

The destruction of family life, in theory and in practice, the flight from adulthood, the obliteration of masculine and feminine has all gone ahead — by means of a glorification of those things. Never was sex so much glorified, children and motherhood so idolized and advertised in theory as at this present hour when the arrangements for their internment have been completed.

On the other hand, he would attempt to demonstrate how “Catholicity of mind”, attained neither abstractly in transcendent “grace”, nor through “immersing ourselves” in the particularities of world, might offer itself as the only exit from the cul-de-sac of nihilism:

let us not suppose for one instant that Catholicity of mind is conferred by grace or that we are freed from “the world’s slow stain” [Shelley, ‘Adonais’, 1821] by immersing ourselves in the best sellers of yesteryear. (…)7 Certainly there can be no Catholic action at the educated level until this equipment [of combined “sensibility and judgment”] is acquired and mastered — a fact which explains why the Catholic mind never has to be seriously considered by the non-Catholic mind in England and America today. This situation can be illustrated by an exception such as [Jacques] Maritain. Maritain is perfectly at home amidst modern art and letters. He has a contemporary sensibility. This in turn has energized and directed his philosophical activity, and given a precise, contemporary relevance to the philosophia perennis. He is therefore a force to be reckoned with by non-Catholic philosophers. He can mesh with the modern mind, such as it is. He can impinge. For the English speaking Catholic who would do likewise but who knows not how to begin (and his formal education will not be of any assistance in this matter), let him pore upon the works of Wyndham Lewis, let him read by day and meditate by night.

 *****

  1. ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’, Key thinkers and Modern Thought (St. Louis University studies in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas), Volume 2, 1944, 58-72; reprinted in The Medium and the Light 178-197. All citations below, including all of the the bullet-points, are taken from this essay (unless otherwise identified). ↩
  2. ‘A Complicated Craft Is Mechanized (Development of the Pin-Tumbler Cylinder Lock by Linus Yale, Jr.)’, The Technology Review, 46(1), 1944, 2–9. ↩
  3. Aside from brief treatments throughout his books and essays, McLuhan wrote the following essays specifically on Lewis: ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’, 1944; ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’, Shenandoah, 4(2/3), 1953; ‘My Friend, Wyndham Lewis’, The Atlantic Monthly, June 1969;  ‘The Lewis Vortex: Art and Politics as Masks of Power’, Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura, ed Giovanni Cianci, 1982 (written in 1970-1); ‘Lewis’ Prose Style’, in Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, ed Jeffrey Meyers, 1980. He also did several interviews on Lewis such as ‘Lewis in St Louis’, a flexidisk recording included in arts/canada, #114, November 1967, and ‘The Global Lewis’ in the Lewisletter, 5:2, 1976. McLuhan reviews of Lewis books included his important ‘Nihilism Exposed‘ (review of Wyndham Lewis by Hugh Kenner) in Renascence 8:2, 1955 and ‘A Critical Discipline’ (review of Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy by Geoffrey Wagner) in Renascence 12:2, 1960. ↩
  4. ‘Govern’ = ‘manipulate’: “the rulers of the modern world (…) employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement”. ↩
  5. In ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’ (1948), the word ‘chaos’ is used over and over again to describe the contemporary situation. See http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/07/mcluhans-realism-9-where-chesterton-comes-in/ ↩
  6. ‘Nihilism Exposed‘, Renascence 8:2, 1955. ↩
  7. The sentence omitted here is cited above: “All question of the artistic value of Joyce and Picasso apart, the man whose sensibility and judgment cannot cope with them easily and naturally, has not the equipment to consider the world he lives in.” ↩

The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge

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At the end of 1935, coming up to the last months of his undergraduate career at Cambridge and in search of a teaching job, McLuhan wrote to E.K. Brown, the new chairman of the English Department back at the University of Manitoba. Describing his own experience there from 1929 to 1934, McLuhan wrote that although he majored in English, he had come to direct his major “energies to philosophy, and did [his] best work for Professor [Rupert Clendon] Lodge.” (Dec 12, 1935, Letters 79)1

Lodge took a “comparative” approach to philosophy in which the first task in addressing any problem or issue was to consider how it would appear in three fundamentally different types of experience, “three well-defined channels”.2

Lodge described this method in a programmatic essay published in Manitoba Essays3, a volume he edited in 1937 “in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the University of Manitoba by members of the teaching staffs of the university and its affiliated colleges”. Lodge’s essay, concluding the volume, was called ‘The Comparative Method in Philosophy’:

How many philosophical alternatives are there? Theoretically it looks as though the number of -isms [realism, idealism, etc] might be infinite. (…) The history of such speculation, however, (…) indicates that philosophical theorizings (…) flow in one of three well-defined channels. (…) Realism interprets experience as a kind of being, idealism as a kind of knowing. It is easy to see that, as indicated, both realism and idealism are one-sided. Experience has been split up into two aspects, and then the whole has been interpreted exclusively in terms of one of its aspects. It is all nature, or all mind. The extreme forms of these views have always invited criticism. To interpret the whole in terms of one of its parts, whichever part we take as fundamental, can hardly be sound. Obviously the only sound method is to interpret the whole in terms of the whole. Consequently a third type of philosophy has tended to develop: a philosophy which tries to be true to experience, and to avoid all abstract and one-sided theorizings. This attempt at interpretation has taken many forms. One of the best known is called “pragmatism”.
(…)
Here, then, we have three typical directions in which philosophers move when they attempt to master experience: the realist, the idealist, and the pragmatist direction. In the nature of the case, these directions are divergent. To take one pathway, of itself precludes taking either of the others. If any one pathway is right, then the others are certainly wrong.4 So much is clear. But is any pathway right, and, if so, which? How are we to tell?
(…)
Where the differences express, in the end, not merely divergent temperaments but divergent lives, ways of living whose whole background and outlook are diverse, there is no cheap and easy method of deciding between such schools. Each declares with equal sincerity and regard for truth that its own view is and must be accepted as the best. Judged in the light of experience as a whole, each works well.
(…)
Is there any way in which this method [of following one’s “own view”] could be improved? I think there is one way and one way only: namely, by completely reversing the usual procedure. (…) In studying any problem as philosophers, I suggest that we should approach it (1) from the realist, (2) from the idealist, and (3) from the pragmatist standpoint, so as to view it from all three angles. Not that these views can, by some dialectical hocus-pocus, be combined into a single picture. They cannot. As theoretical alternatives each definitely excludes the other two.
 (…)
We conclude that, for theoretical philosophers, a many-sided comparative study is of greater importance than adherence to a single view; and that (…) any single view may well be regarded with suspicion.
(…)
If philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities, I must study those alternative possibilities, and must not, in my enthusiasm for realism (or idealism or pragmatism) close my eyes to alternative possibilities. In so far as any one alternative (eg, realism) refuses to be regarded as one alternative amongst others, and claims to be in exclusive possession of the whole truth, I must be sceptical of its claims. In fact, in so far as it ceases to be sceptical about its own claims, and becomes convinced realism (or convinced idealism or convinced pragmatism), it loses its open-mindedness and is really ceasing to be truly speculative and philosophical. ln a word, it is precisely such one-sided philosophizing which is anti-philosophical, and not comparative philosophy, with its scepticism directed against one-sidedness. As the speculative construction of interpretations which essentially admit of alternatives, philosophy is necessarily sceptical of one-sided claims; and its proper method of study is necessarily comparative.

 McLuhan came to criticize this method severely when he was in Cambridge:

Lodge is a decided Platonist and I learned [to think] that way as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion. Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Xian doctrine.  (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice  McLuhan, February 1935, Letters 53)

It is all important to consider what McLuhan was criticizing in Lodge here — and also what he was not.5 What McLuhan considered “sterile” in “trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion” was the stipulation that “for theoretical philosophers, a many-sided comparative study is of greater importance than adherence to a single view” such that “any single view may well be regarded with suspicion” and “and it is quite possible that all (…) are (…) fallacious”. But to regard Christianity suspiciously as merely one cultural option among many, one that could well be “fallacious”, was, of course, exactly not to be Christian and to distance oneself, at a stroke, from a two-thousand year history6 and from (in McLuhan’s case) the faith and social forms of one’s own family for generations stretching back beyond memory.

Put in the terms of Harold Innis, such an option was situated at the extreme ‘space’ end of the time-space spectrum.  Only so could it be oblivious to the violence done to its own roots and to the dangers it might be generating for the future. To be oblivious in these ways was for Innis exactly not to think. Hence the association he proffered between particular time-space assumptions and the “conditions of freedom of thought”.7

Further the “suspicion” exercised by such “comparative study” was itself “a single view” and so fell before the critique made by Lodge himself of all such singularities: “experience has been split up into two aspects [here “the comparative method” and everything else], and then the whole has been interpreted exclusively in terms of one of its aspects.” But by what right did “the comparative method” assume this prerogative?  Lodge’s silence on this issue and on its associated assumption that abstract(ed) thought was higher and more valuable than the particulars considered by it lay behind McLuhan’s charge that he was “a decided Platonist”. Indeed, Lodge himself insisted that “philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities”.

Moreover, the “comparative method” was utterly abstract in a series of other ways as well.  It had no way of accounting for the relation between its analysis and the objects it claimed to understand.  Nor did it consider its context in a particular time and space. Nor did it have an explanation for the fact that it and its practitioners were utterly finite and yet seemed capable of true perception — how was this communication possible?

As a result of considerations like these (but also, of course, from many others, especially from his deepening knowledge of modern English authors from Hopkins to Eliot, Pound and Joyce), McLuhan took on the task of trying to formulate a discipline that would evade the problems of Lodge’s “comparative method” — but that would preserve certain features of that method, especially the recourse to “well-defined” types in the analysis of human history and society. This quest would find its first fruit in McLuhan’s PhD thesis almost a decade later (1943) in which the three arts of the trivium would be used both as a subject in the history of Europe for two thousand years (roughly 400 BC to 1600 AD) and as a background “dispute” in the works of Thomas Nashe. The next year McLuhan gave a lecture in St Louis bringing the terms of his thesis into the present: ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (published in 1946 and later included in The Interior Landscape). And his whole career thereafter would be dedicated to such questions as: How to define the fundamental structures (plural) at work in individual and social history?  Just how do these structures work, in terms of their genesis, their interactions with one another and their “penetration” of mind and society?  And how might a collective study of these matters be initiated?

All of these questions went back to Lodge’s “comparative method”.

 

 

  1. According to Marchand (p 28), Lodge called McLuhan his “most outstanding” student in a recommendation included in his application to Cambridge. The McLuhan Papers in Ottawa retain correspondence between McLuhan and Lodge from 1944-1945, so the two remained in touch at least until  this time. ↩
  2. This and all citations below, unless otherwise noted, come from Lodge’s ‘The Comparative Method in Philosophy’, in Manitoba Essays, ed Lodge, 1937, 405-432. ↩
  3. https://books.google.com/books?id=KFADAAAAMAAJ. ↩
  4. Lodge in this same essay: “As (…) opposed interpretations, systems of thought based upon principles logically incompatible with one another (…) cannot possibly all be true; and it is quite possible that all such alternative -isms are, to an undetermined degree, fallacious.” ↩
  5. The “comparative method” advocated by Lodge (and the somewhat similar procedure of his colleague, Henry Wright) gave McLuhan a series of topics for life-long consideration. Its central contention was that the medium is the message — any issue or problem can be construed (epistemologically? ontologically?) in at least three fundamentally different ways and the first business for thought was to consider the spectrum of those possible ways. Implicated with this contention was the idea that the gap is where the action is since the borders or gaps between such possibilities must be navigable if a “comparative method” in Lodge’s sense were to be possible at all.  So the “comparative method” could be said to be an exercise in making oneself at home in the ‘gaps between’ fundamental possibilities as the only way of considering them in their plurality. These gaps as the means or medium of this comparative consideration would ultimately be the medium that is the message. ↩
  6. A tradition is not the possession of all answers to all problems.  It is a continuing commitment to consider new problems in relation to solutions that have been found to old ones in the past. This sort of commitment is an immediate casualty of the loss of what Innis called “time sense”. ↩
  7. See Innis and “the conditions of freedom of thought”. ↩

McNaspy remembers McLuhan

In his posthumously published memoir, Play On! (1996), Clement J. McNaspy, S.J. (1915-1995), a colleague of McLuhan at St Louis University and a frequent correspondent of his in the 1940s, records “the growth of my friendship with a young professor at St. Louis (…) H. Marshall McLuhan” (39).  The two became acquainted in SLU in 1937 (or 1938?1):

While I was never a member of the English department at St. Louis University, either as student or faculty member, my activity as director of the chorus of scholastics helped me get to know several teachers there. Principal among them at the time was Father [William] McCabe [S.J., the head of the English department]. One day, shortly after he had employed McLuhan, a Canadian recently graduated from Cambridge University in England, Father [McCabe] met me in the hall and mentioned that Marshall McLuhan was interested in getting to know someone interested in music. We met in Father’s office and quickly discovered interests in common. My ignorance of modern English poetry at the time was no less than monumental, since our English teachers at Grand Coteau (Jesuit Novitiate) treated the subject as though it had ended in the early nineteenth century. So, the idea of at last learning something about modern English poetry was thrilling, to say the least. In return, I was happy to introduce Marshall to some of the delights of music and to help deepen his knowledge of Virgil and Dante, both of whom were then and continue to be special enthusiasms of mine. Marshall was astonished to discover that I knew nothing whatsoever about Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the late nineteenth century. We started with several of the “Terrible Sonnets,” which proved a revelation to me. (39)

A further memory of McNaspy recalls the time in the summer of 1938 when McLuhan met Corinne Lewis, whom he would marry a year later. McNaspy conflates their meeting and marriage into “some weeks” (but he was writing almost 60 years after the events):

Shortly before taking my final exams in philosophy and in classics, I recall a very pleasant drive over into Illinois with Marshall McLuhan. We visited several Native American mounds and discussed all manner of personal issues. “Do you plan to get married?” I asked. “I don’t think so,” replied Marshall.”I plan to be wedded to my work.” A few months later when I was at Spring Hill College, I recall receiving a letter from Marshall announcing, “I’ve just met a marvelous person named Corinne. She is large and has masses of hair and is from Dallas.” I saw the handwriting [on the wall], and my thoughts were confirmed some weeks later when another letter announced, “Just married Corinne. We’re very happy!” From then on I looked forward to meeting the marvelous Corinne. (42)

  1. McNaspy says that this meeting took place “shortly after (William McCabe, head of the English department) had employed McLuhan” and that McLuhan was “a Canadian recently graduated from Cambridge University in England”. Both of these point to 1937, McLuhan’s first year at SLU, rather than 1938. But in 1938 Bernard Muller-Thym returned to SLU from Toronto and began to write a column on ‘Music’ in the SLU magazine, Fleur de Lis. McLuhan and Muller-Thym rapidly became best friends. It may be that McLuhan’s sudden interest in music relates to this 1938 event rather than to 1937. ↩

McLuhan’s realism 9: Where Chesterton Comes In

‘Where Chesterton Comes In’,1 McLuhan’s 1948 introduction to Hugh Kenner’s Paradox in Chesterton, presented him with an opportunity to update the evaluation he had made in his first published paper in 1936:  ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’.

The new Chesterton piece took up where the previous one concluded: “the meaning and effect of Mr. Chesterton”, he had said then, lay in his “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism”. Similarly, more than a decade later, but with “fashion and fatalism” now advanced to “chaos” after the intervening WW2:

The specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in the service of the search for moral and political order in the current chaos.

He (…) directed his intellectual gaze not to the schoolmen [of the middle ages] but to the heart of the chaos of our time.

That is where Chesterton comes in. His unfailing sense of relevance and of the location of the heart of the contemporary chaos carried him at all times to attack the problem of morals and psychology (…) the most confused issues of our age.

But McLuhan’s interest extended now to the question of how this chaos in psychology and in the moral and political order had come about. His broached this answer:

By the early seventeenth century Descartes could rally enthusiastic support for the proposition that since no philosopher had ever been convinced by the dialectical or metaphysical proofs of other philosophers for the truth of anything, therefore the time had come to introduce a kind of proof which which all men could accept — namely, mathematical proof. What Descartes really did was to make explicit the fact which had been prepared by centuries of decadent scholastic rationalism: the fact that a complete divorce had been achieved between abstract intellectual and specifically psychological order.  Henceforth men would seek intellectually only for the kind of order they could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes [application to or even the idea of] a human and psychological order.2

As a result of this “rationalistic” turn, McLuhan conceded, “a high degree of abstract mechanical order has been achieved” and “great discoveries (…) made”. At the same time, however:

human moral, psychological, and political chaos has steadily developed, with its concurrent crop of fear and anger and hate. The rational efforts of men have been wholly diverted from the ordering of appetite and emotion, so that any effort to introduce or to discover order in man’s psychological life has been left entirely to the artist.

In England, even most artists, including “the Toby-jug Chesterton of a particular literary epoch”, had participated in this drift away from the desperate need to establish “order in man’s psychological  life”. There had been “an evasion of that world of adult horror into which [European artists like] Baudelaire gazed with intense suffering and humility”.

It was the distinction of Wyndham Lewis (as McLuhan had already begun to specify in his 1944 essay ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’) that he had seen this horror early on and had been probing its forms and causes for four decades already — mostly in an uncomprehending obscurity.3 

But again: how had this state of society and of the individual soul come about with such catastrophic consequence? How had an entire civilization become so enamoured with a certain kind of fateful certainty that it was willing, even eager, to destroy itself for it? What could account for the mass transformation of human beings into suicidal lemmings and murderous monsters?

McLuhan did not have an answer to this question which might be stated in so many words — an ambition that would in any case be self-contradictory since reflecting the very “abstract mechanical order” that demanded investigation and not merely, as would be represented by such a facile answer, the further replication of itself.  But what he did have was the recommendation made at the end of his ‘Ancient Quarrel’ essay from 1946 (originally a talk from 1944) and even initiated to some extent in his 1943 Nashe thesis (written in 1941 and 1942): “knowledge of the history of the present dispute would serve to diminish the fog and the passions aroused at present, and would substitute some light for much heat”. If, this was to say, “the kind of order [we humans] could readily achieve by rationalistic means” but “which precludes a human and psychological order”, if this kind of “mechanistic” order is not the only option for our thought and action, what other options for rival orders are open to us such that they might be said to be in a “dispute” or “quarrel” with it?

At this point in 1948 there were many aspects of this question McLuhan had yet to consider: when does this “dispute” take place if it is always ongoing between these perennial options for order?  if this “present ” time is not the same time as that of “the [chronological] history of the (…) dispute”, what is the relation of these times?  how do media relate to these times, both as deriving from them (like everything human) and as fostering this or that (necessarily temporary) advantage of one option over the others? and how do perception and art relate to this “dispute” of options and of times, both as a matter of the genesis of perception and art, and of their potential contributions to investigations in this new field (or fields)?

All these questions lay in the future.  But what McLuhan could already see clearly, and was able to specify here in his second Chesterton essay, was that a potential solution to “the chaos of our time” lay in a realist position that yet recognized “every kind of reasonableness” in its inevitable multiplicity.  A peculiar kind of idealistic realism was envisioned:

Catholics have failed to understand or utilize Vico. Vico’s great discovery of a psychological method for interpreting historical periods and cultural patterns is rooted in his perception that the condition of man is never the same but his nature is unchanging. (…) Vico was not a Thomist, and so he has been abandoned to the sceptics; but he invented an instrument of historical and cultural analysis of the utmost use for the discovery of psychological and moral unity in the practical order.

McLuhan’s realism was focused on moral and political order as against a merely intellectual order. He rejected out of hand the sort of response to “the present chaos” that he had found in Catholic universities like SLU and Assumption and now again at St Michael’s at UT:

The Catholic teaching of philosophy and the arts tends to be catechetical. It seeks precisely that Cartesian pseudo-certitude which it officially deplores, and divorces itself from the complex life of philosophy and the arts. This is only to say that the Catholic colleges are just like non-Catholic colleges.

But he yet saw the foundation of moral and political order as lying in a “psychological method” that was able to investigate the varying conditions of humans (which are “never the same”) within a unified theory. Central to this idea was that our “connatural” realistic access to the world is not restricted to things in the exterior landscape, but includes as well the full panorama of “the interior landscape”. This sort of ‘interior realism’ was the key to McLuhan’s whole contribution because no one then or now would deny the potential value of the scientific study of human options — if only such study were possible! But the whole world has staked literally everything on the certainty of its impossibility!

In McLuhan’s analysis, we continue to “seek intellectually only for the kind of order [we] could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes [application to or even the idea of] a human and psychological order”. A certain kind of certainty dominates us and the only way out of the cul de sac is to recognize the existing “dispute” or “quarrel” concerning such certainty in “the interior landscape” — and then to investigate it as we do all things in the exterior one. Only this could provide, once more, “a human and psychological order”.

The basis of McLuhan’s idea was that this sort of research is not only not impossible, but that it is so possible (so to speak) that it is actually always taking place already — or always has taken place already — in our every perception.  Even perception, “the first stage of apprehension”4  takes place only insofar as the interior “dispute” has been witnessed and decided in favor of one of its possibilities. The great need is therefore for us to remember or to “retrace” (as McLuhan usually has it) what we are already witnessing and deciding in this way at every moment, but somehow leave in utter obscurity.  And how is this? The reason seems to be that it takes place in the interior landscape, not the external one, and our natural realistic access to things is not believed to extend to the former as it does to the latter. We are only exterior realists.

McLuhan saw comparable potential to Vico’s “psychological method for interpreting historical periods and cultural patterns” in

Chesterton’s powerful intrusion into every kind of confused moral and psychological issue of our time. For he seems never to have reached any position by dialectic or doctrine, but to have enjoyed a kind of connaturality with every kind of reasonableness.

Here was McLuhan’s ‘interior realism’ in a nutshell.  He was fundamentally against “reach[ing] any position by dialectic or doctrine”. A “catechetical” understanding of life was of no interest to him whatsoever. For this would implicate an “evasion” of the communication we always already have with the world around us and within us “connaturally”. A kind of “rationalistic” detour would be taken in an attempt to get where we already are.5 Decisively, however, that world to which we have such natural access included for McLuhan different kinds of understanding (aka, different kinds of “reasonableness”) in different people (especially considered over widely separated times and spaces), as well as the different options for our own understanding, all of which are always in “dispute” in each one of us in every moment. (It is the resources of the latter interior panoply, of course, that offers potential understanding of the former anthropological one.)

It was in this context that McLuhan staked his claim to be a true Thomist:

whereas St. Thomas was a great abstract synthesizer facing a unified psychological world, the modern Thomist has an abstract synthesis of human knowledge with which to face a psychological chaos. Who then is the true Thomist? The man who contemplates an already achieved intellectual synthesis, or the man who, sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos?

 

  1. All citations below, unless otherwise noted, come from ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’, McLuhan’s introduction to Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 1948. Kenner’s book was developed out of his M.A. thesis at UT, for which his adviser was Fr Gerald Phelan — McLuhan’s friend and spiritual counsel. ↩
  2. McLuhan probably took this reading of Descartes from Etienne Gilson.  In his essay, ‘The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics’, in A Monument to Augustine (1930), Gilson writes: “Descartes is essentially a man who attempted and carried through an experiment on the following notion: What happens to metaphysics, if we apply to it the mathematical method? In our opinion, what happens to it is that you destroy it. Descartes did not hold that view; on the contrary, he believed himself to be the first to save it (…) But as soon as he universalizes his method and decides to apply it to the totality of reality, Descartes entangles himself in singular difficulties. To start with, he wagers, without a shadow of possible justification, that there is nothing (…) that escapes mathematical method; then, bound to model reality on his ideas, instead of modeling his ideas on reality, he is driven to recover things only through concepts and to have no other starting point but thought.” The translation here of ‘things’, doubtless for ‘les choses’, is too literal.  What Gilson had in mind “that escapes mathematical method” was exactly not bare ‘things’ but, as McLuhan put it, things of the “human and psychological order”. ↩
  3. The obscurity in which Lewis had long worked despite the outpouring of his energy in multiple media was perfectly symbolized by his exile in Toronto during WW2. And if Toronto was already obscurity, what was Lewis’ obscurity within Toronto? Kenner in a letter (March 18, 1987) to Philip Marchand: “He (McLuhan) kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I’d never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years (in Toronto) I’d lived half a mile away from him.” ↩
  4. McLuhan to Pound, July 24, 1951, Letters 228. ↩
  5. “For first principles are not sought, since they are present and to hand; and if what is present is sought for, it becomes hidden and lost.” (al Ghazali, Deliverance from Error, ca 1108, §ii) ↩

McLuhan’s realism 8: Chesterton as practical mystic

The first lines of McLuhan’s first published academic article, ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ (1936), are extraordinary.  For they name in Chesterton, and anticipate in McLuhan’s own career over the next 45 years, their common response to the fact that “there are two principal sides to everything”:

When it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything, a practical and a mystical, (…) the meaning and effect of Mr. Chesterton can become clear (…) That tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism, which has characterized him for more than thirty years, clearly depends upon his loyalty to a great vision: “His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test, that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.”1

What is at stake in these sentences is the fact that we humans are directly and to some extent infallibly related to the real world around us — but the detailed understanding and significance of our experience can and, in fact usually, eludes us. We know truly, but always partially. Therefore the demand that we continually revision and reconsider — that is, learn — based on our real perception of the real, but going on from what we understand of it to probe it more deeply and more comprehensively (and sometimes revolutionarily).

Almost 40 years later, in conversation with an old University of Manitoba classmate from the early 1930s, Kaye Rowe, McLuhan would observe: “You must remember that I began as an engineer [and then] switched to philosophy and English. Structural operations were always at the core of my pursuit whether in philosophy, modern poetry or in [the analysis of] management…” (Intimate look at Marshall McLuhan). “Structural operations were always at the core of [his] pursuit” exactly because “there are two principal sides to everything” and this challenges Christians, indeed those with “loyalty to a great vision” of whatever sort, or, in fact, those who would actually think at all, continually to reassess how the sides of the oppositions they encounter relate to one another. (Precisely therefore, as the beginning of Take Today has it, “the meaning of meaning is relationship.”)

There can be no respite from such oppositional encounters (inside us, outside us and between our inside and outside) exactly because “sides” are engendered in principle.  And the response to this perpetual dynamic must be “tireless” exactly because the desire to rest content with some ‘one-sided’ determination, ignoring or suppressing the omnipresent (in principle!) other side, constitutes the secret heart of nihilism. In his 1955 ‘Nihilism Exposed’ McLuhan gave voice to this temptation as “Let us rejoin the One“. This is Prufrock’s need for an “overwhelming question” that would reduce the plural oppositions we everywhere experience to some forced singularity.

McLuhan cites a part of Chesterton’s description of Hilaire Belloc as applying to Chesterton himself. He could well have cited the full passage:

It was no small part of the irony in the man that different things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against another. The unique attitude (…) was summed up in him supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love the contemporary world, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but that he hated as heartily what the contemporary world seemed trying to become. Out of this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous observers; something that occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing.2

As cited above from the start of his essay, McLuhan emphasized Chesterton’s “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism”. And he, too, would perplex and irritate his commentators by continually reverting to the all too obvious facts of everyday life — facts that, in their view, either required no explanation or had long ago received all they required of it. In fact, this sort of reversion to “the face of reality” is exactly what McLuhan’s Chesterton essay celebrates and prescribes!

Mr. Chesterton himself is full of that child-like surprise and enjoyment which a sophisticated age supposes to be able to exist only in children. And it is to this more than ordinary awareness and freshness of perception that we may attribute his extraordinarily strong sense of fact. (…) This profound humility in the face of reality is the very condition of honest art and all philosophy (…) most of all does his strong sense of fact account for the recurrence of seeming paradoxes in his writings (…) The most ordinary things become eerily and portentously real. Bodily gestures are stiff with spiritual significance, as in the old pageantry. And the deeps of the subconscious are entered, and monstrous facts from the borderland of the brain impress themselves upon us. As the modern jargon puts it, Mr. Chesterton has achieved an objective correlative for his thought and feeling.

Throughout the emphasis is on the “child-like surprise” and “wonder” of “honest” encounter with the ever-changing “face of reality”.  Humans have their acknowledged or unacknowledged home in this “borderland” between the old and the new.

The only way to maintain “loyalty to a great vision” in this situation is “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion”.  Respect for such a vision demands that nothing be held away from it no matter what “paradoxes” may seem to ensue. It is because modern humans have given up such “vigilance” that they have no “great vision”. But we excuse our infidelities with the opposite idiocy that we lack any “great vision” and therefore have no call to practice “vigilance” of it.

Nietzsche:  Irrtum der Verwechslung von Ursache und Folge. – Es gibt keinen gefährlicheren Irrtum, als die Folge mit der Ursache zu verwechseln: ich heiße ihn die eigentliche Verderbnis der Vernunft. (Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Die vier großen Irrtümer’)3

  1. These are the first two sentences of ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ citing Chesterton’s 1912 Manalive. All citations below unless otherwise noted are from McLuhan’s Chesterton essay which first appeared in The Dalhousie Review for January 1936. ↩
  2. “The contemporary world” has been substituted twice in this passage for “England” and “observers” once for “Englishmen”.  McLuhan cites only the portion of it that runs, “a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen”. The description is from Chesterton’s introduction to Hilaire Belloc: the man and his work, by Creighton Mandell & Edward Shanks, 1916. ↩
  3. Twilight of the Idols, ‘The four great Errors’, 1888. Kaufmann translates: “The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more insidious error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason.” ↩

Encountering Poe

In the summer of 1932 (when McLuhan turned 21) he and Tom Easterbrook worked their way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat.1 In a letter written on the boat McLuhan described his first encounter with Poe:

The little blue books [Oxford World Classics] have been doing the rounds of the cabin [of the boat]. I have read only one of them — Poe’s Tales. I find them amusing, interesting curiosities, anything but exciting or absorbing. It must be remembered [however] that he practically created the short story and the detective story at one stroke. (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, June 17-18, 1932, Letters 13-14)

  1. “We get up at 4.30 A.M. water all the cattle by pail then haul up 20 or so bales of hay from the hold, then 20 or 30 sacks of feed. After which we feed the hay then go up and wait for breakfast which comes along at 7. We are divided up into groups of 3 and each have 1/4 of the cattle to feed. After breakfast (8 AM) we clean up all the alley ways and troughs then bed the cattle, then give them each a pail of oats. This takes till 9.30 Then we are finished until 2 PM. At 2 we water and feed and then are free for the day.” (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, June 17-18, 1932, Letters 12) ↩

Remembering Edmonton very vividly

In a letter from April 30, 1970, to Maisie Hewlett (1887-1974), McLuhan recalled his family’s time in Alberta:

I am really grateful to Elizabeth (Trott) Cera for suggesting that you send your quite memorable memoir1 to me. The scenes and the events coincide with the life of my parents in the West before [World] War I. After homesteading [in Mannville, Alberta, 100 miles east of Edmonton,] they went to Edmonton [early in 1911]. My father was in a real estate firm until he joined the army in 1914. I left Edmonton [for Winnipeg] when I was four [in 1915], but remember much of it very vividly. (Letters 405)

Here is a picture of McLuhan with his parents in 1911, age six months, taking in the Edmonton scene that he will long recollect vividly:

  1. A Too Short Yesterday (1970). One of Kaye Rowe’s ‘People Watching’ columns in the Brandon Sun (May 28, 1970, p 12) shows that her friend Elizabeth (Trott) Cera must have suggested to Hewlett that a copy go to Rowe as well as to McLuhan: “Cannington Manor, a magnet for legends on the Prairies, has housed since its beginning in the 1880s, assorted people with a touch of epic. The current official recorder is a bright-eyed lady who remains in proper Victorian fashion behind a trio of initials — A.E.M. Hewlett — author of a spritely sequence of 14 years of farming on the acres originally turned by the Cannington Manor squires and 14 years of farm-wife life under its leaking Mansard roof. The title of A Too Short Yesterday (published by The Western Producer Press at Saskatoon) is abstracted from a slender poem in which the lines occur: “Lord, I am too little for a grand eternity. I would hear children’s voices, a spoon beating upon a table; mine I would the way I travelled, loved and lost in a too short yesterday.” One day a few years ago when widowed and her sons grown tall, and with families of their own, she went back the few miles from Carlyle Sask., where she chooses to live in summer, to the Manor and up to the attic. Despite the fact that the house had been used for grain-storage for years, the attic and its contents had remained undisturbed. She found the old wooden trunk, metal-bound, painted and initialled, that she had purchased for 10 shillings in Charing Cross Road in 1911. It had carried her clothing and books when, under the aegis of the British Women’s Emigration Society, she decided to teach in Canada. “You will regret it!” the headmaster of the Yorkshire school where she had taught for three years had warned. Nonsense! The English girl met the incredible challenges of semi-pioneering life, eventually wrote a column for 20 years for The Saskatchewan Farmer under the title, ‘Down On The Farm’. She became, in effect, the (Manitoba journalist) Amy Roe of her province. The only child of a chemist’s widow, leaving mother was the major wrench. But each week she wrote faithfully; the letters were lovingly saved, bundled as to dates and years. Decades later when her mother died the letters were returned with other effects she requested. Every page of the letters is a mirror of the ups and downs of one family in a life difficult to be imagined by her grandchildren. For them — 12 in all plus one great-grandchild — she recaptures the everyday living on a prairie farm, admittedly, no ordinary farm. Earlier assignments by the University of Saskatchewan to Mrs. Hewlett involved (recording) tales based on information collected from over 50 of the early participants of Cannington Manor’s exotic settlement. It began in 1882 with Capt. Edward Mitchell Pierce and associates, a group of upper middle-class English who resolved to re-establish in Saskatchewan’s broad acres the same kind of life they had lived in England. They bred horses, rode to hounds, dressed for dinner on festive occasions and imported younger sons of friends and associates as “apprentices to agriculture” to learn farming from the ground up. Their experiment dwindled and died under the impact of the First World War when the members scattered and Mrs. Hewlett and her husband (designated as “Richard Land”), a ship-board acquaintance but one of the 1890 Cannington inhabitants, took up residence in the manor house. The letters give the record a lively sense of immediacy whether the excitement of the day is the arrival of her wedding gown or a listing of the callers and impromptu dinner guests (anyone passing by, from “Mountie” to horse- trader). Mrs. Hewlett writes with verve and color, the same qualities she manages to impart to her water colors. As a practising artist at 83 she continues to merit one-man shows in the province of her adoption. Her water colors have also hung in the art gallery at Laguna Beach, the artists’ colony resort where she spends several months every winter. Last year when friend Mrs. Duncan Campbell called on the author-painter at the Seas Motel, she discovered the lady clothes-pegging her morning’s sketches on the line to dry. The book bursts with the vitality of elements familiar to our region, with horses and crops and financial worries, with children growing and neighborliness and the hum of cream separator, sewing machine or reaper. She splashes on the colors of skies and spring burgeoning and mauve shadowings on sculptured snow. It makes fascinating reading, a too-short 161 pages in recall of A Too Short Yesterday.” ↩

Kaye Rowe’s “Intimate look at Marshall McLuhan”

Kaye Moreland (1910-1995) was an English department classmate of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Manitoba.  She relocated to Brandon with her husband G R Rowe and began a career in Journalism as Kaye Rowe with the Winnipeg Free Press and (especially) the Brandon Sun. Her 1974 portrait of Marshall McLuhan is online and supplies interesting details of his life in Winnipeg, Cambridge, St Louis and Toronto. The fact that he took part in an unofficial Monday night seminar in Winnipeg in the early 1930s, long before his famous Monday night seminar in Toronto (also unofficial), is a further indication of his enduring attachment to his early two decades in the Manitoba capital.

Rowe’s style is wonderfully western Canadian, both depreciating and sharp: “The Grand Guru of our culture, at once its couch and its analyst…”

An intimate look at Marshall McLuhan by Kaye Rowe1

Brandon Sun – February 02, 1974 – Page 3

Most controversial intellect of the century stamped Made-in-Canada

The Grand Guru of our culture, at once its couch and its analyst

TORONTO: The name — McLuhan — threw its own meteor into the English language; a “McLuhanism” for the book-and-thought diggers carries a reference as specific as does the word, “Kafkaesque.” An aeon or two ago we shared a small honors English seminar with Marshall McLuhan. The course spanned a survey of the Giants of World Literature beginning with the Greek tragedies and moving through the Norse legends, the two Fausts, Don Quixote and other mighty tomes. Five of us decided to trample more wine from the rich grapes with preparation prior to each lecture. We met every Monday evening at Stewart Robb’s2 father’s apartment. The quartet consisted of Eileen Hemphill, who married Dr. Joe Downey of Brandon; Judith Evelyn, who became a Broadway star; Stewart Robb, an academic and the world’s leading authority on Nostradamus; your Brandon Sun writer; and the man who keeps throwing grit into the gears of commercialism — Marshall McLuhan.

Unofficially the Thinker-in-Residence of the University of Toronto, his bailiwick is the Centre for Culture and Technology on campus. Located some 50 yards back of a Queen’s Park Crescent mansion, the stone building is a converted coach-house. The main room holds in semi-circular arrangements a class of 18 evening students, mainly young people on post-graduate courses. Eager and quick, they hang on his utterances, laugh at his witticisms on the last word of a line, knowing the shape of an idea a second before the last word is thrust into place. Spare-framed, six-foot-one, the face is creased in the ruts of a million thought-routes a year. He talks easily, relaxed in his play with ideas and concepts, with words and allusions that rove across the globe, push through the thickets of the centuries. Ten minutes of McLuhan sets the synapses crackling. Everyone sits alertly, no slump, no yawns! He rises and pulls a drawstring on a curtained area. The action reveals a wall painting six feet by five feet. In cool neutrals the busy teaser reveals masses of snarled pipes, gesticulating humanoids and a rectangular central frame. (The painting is by René Cera, originally of Provence, France, a dead-ringer for Picasso at 65; almond-eyed, skin like tight parchment over a well-shaped head, almost Yul Brynner dome-shine. The artist is the husband of our friend Elizabeth Hay3, originally of Virden.) “René Cera calls it, Pied Pipers All4,” Dr. McLuhan says. “It’s the boob-tube as the trap for our children. Exposure to its allure for 10 years saps the mental pith. Children are easily influenced. I’m reminded of the Children’s Crusade . . . the first activists’ group! Thousands of them decided they wanted to do their part in winning back the Holy Land from the Infidel. They marched across Europe, became an instant legend. They were pounced upon by the Moslems, sold into slavery, never heard of again.”

Before the class breaks at 10:10 p.m. he takes care to introduce his guests. We lift the dropped jaw back into place as he announces, “She’s a journalist and a speed skater … I remember chasing her around the rink at United College . . .she was wearing a green tam and a green scarf. . . .” All these years Marshall McLuhan has a memory picture with the wrong name attached. We never skated on the United rink; never owned a green tam. It was Katie Taplitsky he was chasing and never caught. But that’s an old story with many memories! We remain silent. He will never know the mixed identities.

An invitation is extended to come upstairs to his office for something warm. The office is triple locked. Souvenir hunters, he discovered, had begun to denude the premises. It is his son Eric who unlocks the door, attends to the tea kettle, clears chairs of books. At 31 Eric, former college lecturer, competent actor, is father’s right-hand man. He serves as chauffeur, looks after the audiovisual materials for lectures and discussion groups, splices, cleans and supervises screenings. Clear-eyed, efficient, his dedication to his father’s work and purposes is a rare and impressive servitude. We wrap chilled hands around the warm cup. Despite the carpeted floors, the old coach-house is full of mean drafts on an early January night. Eric announces a new taping that father might like to hear, an opera with words and music by Ezra Pound done in Gregorian chant technique, the words in French. Reverential listening for 10 minutes until Marshall McLuhan notices that the moon is full. “Do you realize that all human activity doubles at full moon time! More crime, more hospital emergencies, more creativity! I’ve always been pleased that I’m a moon child, [born] on the cusp of July 21, between Leo and Cancer. . . .”

He takes a pill vial from his coat pocket, uncaps and proffers it. “Snuff!” he says. “They tell me it tends to ward off colds. . . .” He uses the 18th century technique for a pinch of snuff, begins to talk about the influences on McLuhan. “My first influence was Jacques Maritain, contemporary French philosopher. At Cambridge I discovered the mysticism and the structuralism of the Jacobeans. John Donne, ‘No man is an island.’ I did my doctorate on Thomas Nashe who traced the dialectic method — this is structure, too — back to 5th century Athens, then on to the rhetorical-historical aspects of the Renaissance. All of which led me to James Joyce, prime example of a structuralist. . . . When I came to Toronto, my great influence was Harold Innis. The economists revered his research into the staples of the Canadian economy: his history of the fur trade, cod fishing, the CPR, pulp and paper. But I was the first to pursue Innis’ communication studies through pulp and paper which led directly to the newspaper as communication. . . . Innis’ focus on forms of communication and their effects on people began with clay tablets and papyrus, the effect of the medium in delivering the message. I used his approach: the effects of media on people. . . .”

St. Louis, Mo., his second university experience after graduation (the first was Madison and the U. of Wisconsin, Dr. Lloyd Wheeler’s alma mater)5 that brought him into contact with several intellectuals whose impact had lasting effect on McLuhan’s thinking. He named Sigfried Giedion and Bernard Muller-Thym. The latter was a lecturer in philosophy and latterly in management. A violinist and a symphony conductor, Muller-Thym turned McLuhan’s mind to the structural aspects of management. The Missouri years also brought close association with two creative people: T.S. Eliot, who drew him into the structuralism of modern poetry, and Percy Wyndham Lewis, artist and war-time Toronto refugee. At McLuhan’s invitation, the Wyndham [and Froanna] Lewis couple found more congenial reception [in St Louis] than parochial Toronto and its disinterest in an original artist who happened to be a stranger. “You must remember that I began as an engineer, switched to philosophy and English. Structural operations were always at the core of my pursuit whether in philosophy, modern poetry or in management. . . .”

A shining brass plaque sits topside of a filing cabinet, safe in its massiveness from the light-fingered souvenir-hunter. Freshly-etched as of November, 1973, is the legend of preservation: “The United States and Canadian Education Association’s award to Marshall McLuhan for his exceptional contribution to communication.”

  1. Rowe’s spelling of many of the names in her report has been silently corrected. ↩
  2. Robb became an IODE scholar in England like McLuhan, but at Oxford, not Cambridge. In his McLuhan bio, Escape into Understanding, Gordon notes that “McLuhan remained in Cambridge until the end of June 1935, meeting then with his Winnipeg friend Stewart Robb, a student at Oxford, and sailing (with him) from Harwich for Belgium” (58). For details see Stewart Robb. ↩
  3. In her column for the Brandon Sun, ‘People Watching’, for April 3, 1976 (p 12), Rowe wrote of Elizabeth Hay (Betty Trott / Liz Cera):
    New name Liz Cera blinked as in neon lights from the masthead of Maclean’s magazine when the year was a babe. Editor of Crafts, Elizabeth Hay Cera was born and grew to her university age at Virden, Man. where father was town clerk. Her sister, the late Lillian Hay, despite the semi-invalidism occasioned by a drug-prescription error, was the most brilliant of book reviewers in the history of the Winnipeg Free Press. During Liz Trott’s (first marriage name) Toronto years, she taught English and art in assorted high schools and raced the pavements doing stories for a financial magazine. Married to art display director, René Cera, of Eaton’s Toronto for the past decade, they had retired to his Lenox, Mass. home in the heart of the Tanglewood-Birkshires country. Every Toronto social occasion of recent years when Liz Cera appeared, she carried a tote containing knitting, crocheting, macrame-knotting. Her page in Maclean’s, by curious coincidence, contains directions for fancy knitting, crocheting and macrame-knots. From around the world, Liz Cera has sent her spontaneous combustion poems written in the contemporary idiom with apologies to Japanese Haiku. One that grows wistful over her Prairie beginnings is:
    FLAT VERSE curious how i had forgotten this need for the full bowl of the sky ↩
  4. Strangely, it emerges from a letter McLuhan wrote his mother on January 22, 1952 (Letters 230) that Kaye Rowe’s friend, Elizabeth Hay (Betty Trott) was the person who introduced him to René Cera long before she and Cera were married in 1966: “Cera just left. (…) Betty Trott, his friend who introduced us, came to supper. She has just left too. The children love her. So does Corinne.” ↩
  5. Rowe and McLuhan knew Wheeler from the UM English department.  In 1936 it was Wheeler who helped McLuhan get his first job at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. See his memory of Wheeler in Speaking of Winnipeg. ↩

McLuhan’s realism 7: “training in moral sensibility”

As discussed in McLuhan’s realism 6: dialectics and erudition not enough, at Christmas 1945 McLuhan wrote to his Jesuit friend from their SLU days, Clement McNaspy, as follows:

Hutchins and Adler have part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates. Dialectics and erudition are needed, but, without the sharp focusing of training in moral sensibility, futile. (Letters 180)

By “moral sensibility” McLuhan had in mind the myriad practical matters undertaken aside from academic “erudition”. He had long been clear that learning takes place, and is expressed, mostly beyond the “schoolroom”. As he already specified as a 22 year-old back in Winnipeg:

It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day. (‘Public School Education’, The Manitoban, Oct 17,1933)

But just because he was talking with McNaspy about life beyond “dialectics and erudition” did not mean that he was not also making a series of points in principle.  These were:

  • dialectic has no right to consider itself as the sole first principle of things — just as little as does the ‘rhetorical’ or prudential consideration of momentary practicality
  • dialectic alone, indeed also rhetoric alone, is therefore “futile”: both together are implicated in all aspects of life
  • a third principle must thus be observed, namely that of the plurality and communal integrity of first principles
  • such a third principle of both together would contradict itself, however, if it strove to be singular and alone
  • it is essential to this third principle, therefore, to be at peace with rival principles that, in their striving to be singular and alone, desire only its destruction
  • this fundamental in-equality is what Jackson Knight termed “the main question” and McLuhan called by a great number of names like ‘grammar’, ‘complementarity’, ‘allatonceness’, ‘uttering/outering’, and so on
  • its most important name, however, was ‘communication’ since it is the unaccountable harmony of what is unequal that characterizes language (and all other media) as the made relation of sound (or other material) and meaning
  • such fundamental communication of the unequal is what enables the relation of human beings to God and the development of all the arts and sciences that humans invent on its basis
  • and it is this medium (of communication of the unequal) that above all else is the message

These points went back to McLuhan’s Nashe thesis which traced the history of the three disciplines of the trivium from pre-socratic Greece to 1600 (a good title of the thesis might have been ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Elizabethan England’).  The thesis, in turn, went back to McLuhan’s work at the University of Manitoba with Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, both of whom in neo-Hegelian manner saw the working of three alternate first principles at work behind or below all human thought, action and experience. Two millennia before that, Plato had envisioned such a knotted ontology of three principles in the gigantomachia of the Sophist. And two millennia even before that, the Egyptians had contemplated such a complex interaction of first principles in the contendings and reconciliations of Horus and Seth.1

The fundamental factor at stake is God’s lack of jealousy.  Hegel (for whom McLuhan’s Meredith M.A. thesis shows an exceptional feel)2 put the crux of the matter as follows:

Plato and Aristotle teach that God is not jealous and does not withhold from human beings knowledge of God’s self and of the truth. What would it be but jealousy for God to deny to consciousness the knowledge of God? In so doing God would have denied to consciousness all truth, for God alone is the truth. Whatever else would be true and might seem somehow to exist in no connection to the divine, is only true to the extent that it is grounded in God and known from God; in other respects it is a disappearing [zeitliche] appearance. The cognition of God and of truth is the only thing that raises human beings above animals, that distinguishes them and makes them happy, or far rather, according to Plato and Aristotle as much as Christian doctrine, blessed. (‘Foreword’ to F.W. Hinrich, Religion in its Inner Relation to Science, 1822])3

McLuhan saw very early, in his early twenties, that the third principle of the harmony of rival first principles had gradually gone into eclipse over the last half millennium or so until it came to be generally believed either that truth existed only in singular isolation from the hubbub of the world or that it existed (if it existed at all) only in, or indeed only as, that hubbub itself. The great need was, therefore, to attempt to show, once again, how truth and hubbub, dialectic and rhetoric, idealism and realism, theory and action, word and thing, God and human beings — could belong together in their radical difference and insuperable inequality.

  1. The Egyptian elaboration of ontology as ontologies, situated at the very dawn of recorded history, points back into prehistory as if the matter had been contemplated forever. For discussion of the gigantomachia of ontologies in early Egyptian mythology see Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 2) and Assmann on the battle between Horus and Seth. ↩
  2. “Hegel develops a most convincing thesis that we can understand reality only by taking it in all its concreteness. Reason is not an external criterion but exists only as embodied in the phenomena of experience. We have only to observe the facts of experience as they unfold, and detect, if we can, the laws involved in them. (…) His principal effort was aimed to show that truth was embodied in the actual and that, between thought and reality, between the ideal and the real, there is no separation.” (Meredith thesis, p72-73) “No separation” — but also no equality! ↩
  3. “Platon und Aristoteles lehren, daß Gott nicht neidisch ist und die Erkenntnis seiner und der Wahrheit den Menschen nicht vorenthält. Was wäre es denn anders als Neid, wenn Gott das Wissen von Gott dem Bewußtsein versagte; er hätte demselben somit alle Wahrheit versagt, denn Gott ist allein das Wahre; was sonst wahr ist und etwa kein göttlicher Inhalt zu sein scheint, ist nur wahr, insofern es in ihm gegründet ist und aus ihm erkannt wird; das übrige daran ist zeitliche Erscheinung. Die Erkenntnis Gottes, der Wahrheit, ist allein das den Menschen über das Tier Erhebende, ihn Auszeichnende und ihn Beglückende oder vielmehr Beseligende, nach Platon und Aristoteles wie nach der christlichen Lehre.” (Hegel, ‘Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie‘ = Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrich, Die Religion in inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft, 1822) ↩

McLuhan: ‘The Global Lewis’

McLuhan’s short contribution to the Lewisletter (original series #5, October 1976) is available online at the excellent Wyndham Lewis Society website.

The Global Lewis

Marshall McLuhan has written very kindly of the Lewisletter and suggested as a theme for an issue “Windy at Rugby” — or Lewis’s schoolboy adventures. “He was exceedingly proսd of having been the rare recipient of the sixth licking, i.e. in one day he received six separate lickings. He said that having received the fifth, he suddenly realized he was near immortality, and hastened round to the prefect’s door to smash his tennis ball against it until he qualified for the sixth licking.”

McLuhan has a number of interesting anecdotes of Lewis in America: “Once, when I was recording his voice in St. Louis on a little home recorder, he was amazed to hear his voice: ‘I sound like a bloody Englishman, and thought that I had a good American accent!’ It must have been the first time he had ever heard a recording of his own Voice.”

“My first meeting with Lewis occurred as a result of a letter I received from my mother who had heard him on the Christian Culture Series. His theme was [Georges] Roualt, ‘Painter of Original Sin’.1 Lewis delivered this lecture at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit ー it must have been in 1944.2 Having checked that he was the Wyndham Lewis, the ogre of Bloomsbury, I got on the train with my friend Felix Giovanelli, of the Modern Language Department at St. Louis University. We found Lewis in a basement apartment in the heart of Windsor, and he told is how lucky he had been to find it. He had simply stood on the street, asking passers-by if they knew of any available space for rent. Lewis accepted us at once, with no kind of formality, and we gradually formed the project to bring him to St. Louis where we hoped to find him some painting commissions and some lectures. We were sufficiently successful in this to justify his coming to St. Louis with [his wife] Froanna. One bit of luck occurred when I discovered through a neighbour in St. Louis (Mrs [Martha] Gellhorn, mother-in-law of Ernest Hemingway) that [Joseph] Erlanger, the [1944] Nobel Prize winner in Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, was to have his portrait done. When speaking to Mrs. Gelhorn, I proposed Lewis as a worthy painter to do the Erlanger portrait and she at once phoned Hemingway in Cuba and asked him directly about whether she should commission Lewis for the job. Hemingway promptly said “yes” and gave Lewis an enthusiastic build-up , With the result that Lewis did the painting for $1,500.00. This act of Hemingway’s is not insignificant in view of the rage that he had felt when ‘The Dumb Օx’ essay appeared in Men Without Art.”

  1. In ‘Wyndham Lewis at Windsor‘, Stanley Murphy, the longtime head of the Christian Culture Series, gives the title of the lecture as ‘Religion and the Artist’ (Canadian Literature #35, Winter 1968, p 11). ↩
  2. Murphy gives the date as January 1943. In fact, since McLuhan and Giovanelli first visited Lewis in the summer of 1943, McLuhan’s 1944 date cannot be correct. ↩

Lewis in 1943: “The Frontiers of Art or the Cultural Melting Pot”

An announcement in the Detroit Free Press on November 28, 1943, page 50, read:

Wyndham Lewis to Lecture
Novelist, poet, critic, philosopher and painter, Wyndham Lewis will lecture on ‘The Frontiers of Art” Tuesday evening in the Detroit Institute of Arts, developing his belief that in the world of the future national or nationalist cultures must disappear.  He sees in the United States a preview of a forthcoming international “cultural melting pot.”
Lewis will remain at Assumption College, Windsor, throughout December to complete a series of lectures, later to be published in book form, on the duality at the root of American political life.

McLuhan was open about his intellectual debt, or debts, to Wyndham Lewis.  One of these is clear in a passage from the beginning of this lecture:

The day of closed systems, of watertight group-consciousness, are at an end. With television tomorrow causing us to be physically present (in our living room, with one of its walls a screen for long distance projections) at contemporaneous happenings all over the earth: with the vast development in the immediate future  of airtravel, which will abolish distance, and strangeness: with the cultural standardisation which has already resulted, and must in the future increasingly result, from this — with all these and many other technological devices expanding our horizons and making a nonsense of the old-fashioned partitions and locked doors of our earthly habitat (…) national or nationalist (…) cultures must disappear.1

In fact in a 1929 essay, “A World Art and Tradition”, he had already observed that “the Earth has become one place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.”

Further strong influences on McLuhan from Lewis included his blasting style, his use and abuse of masks, his delineations of human types, his concern with varieties of space and time, his insights into nihilism2 and his fascination with the “magnetic city”, especially its warp of “the human dimension”3. Many of these McLuhan would develop in reverse, probing how to counteract or how to preserve when Lewis saw an unstoppable transformative force at work. Across such differences, however, above all in regard to religion, Lewis gave McLuhan a model for the use and development of his childish eye which, like Lewis’, could see very well that the emperor had no clothes.

 
  1. This passage from Lewis’s lecture has appeared, with slight variations, in Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, Paul O’Keeffe, 2000, p 472; and in Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson, ed Gregory Betts, Paul Hjartarson, Kristine Smitka, 2016, p 71. The original lecture is available in the Lewis collections in both Victoria and Cornell. ↩
  2. “And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. This situation became so evident to Lewis in 1920 that he devoted the next two decades to warning us about and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, as well as our everyday activities in commerce and social engineering”. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955) ↩
  3. See note 2 above. ↩

McLuhan’s realism 6: dialectics and erudition not enough

Hutchins and Adler have part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates. Dialectics and erudition are needed, but, without the sharp focusing of training in moral sensibility, futile. (McLuhan to Clement McNaspy, Christmas 1945, Letters 180)1

Throughout the 1940s McLuhan (then in his 30s) was concerned to define a principle that would avoid both of two extremes in contemporary educational theory (and in its implicated epistemology, sociology and ontology): on the one hand, the Dewey-progressive wing; on the other, the Hutchins-Adler wing.

He had long seen education as taking place primarily outside of school:

It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day. (‘Public School Education’, The Manitoban, Oct 17,1933!)

The ‘education’ principle to be defined was therefore a kind of principle of principles that would embrace — better illuminate — all the foundationally interconnected areas of life.2 As he wrote in the same Christmas 1945 letter to McNaspy:

This job must be conducted on every front — every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics. (Letters 180)

To this end, a critique of both the Hutchins-Adler wing and the Dewey-progressive wing of education theory was needed. Whereas most of McLuhan’s contemporary 1946 essay ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (Classical Journal, 41:4, 156-62) came down clearly in favor of the Hutchins-Adler wing against the Dewey-progressive wing3, perhaps because McLuhan was considering with Cleanth Brooks how the University of Chicago might be enlisted in their revolutionary education program (reflected in McLuhan’s 1947 proposal to Hutchins), the essay concludes by subordinating both wings to a third principle of their mutual implication:

Between the speculative dialectician and scientist [here the Dewey-progressive wing] who says that “the glory of man is to know the truth by my methods,” and the eloquent moralist who says that “the bliss of man is good government carried on by copiously eloquent and wise citizens” [here the Hutchins-Adler wing]4, there need be no conflict. Conflict, however, will inevitably arise between these parties when either attempts to capture the entire education of an age or a country.5

When, that is, the sides ignore the principle of the original unity bonding them in their difference.

 

  1. In the unpublished ‘Failure at Chicago’, envisioned as a part of The American Vortex project, McLuhan sharply differentiated between the dialectics of Adler and the rhetorical position of Hutchins. Lumping them together as rhetoricians, as McLuhan does in ‘An Ancient Quarrel’, or in the opposite way as dialecticians as he does in the letter to McNaspy, was therefore of rhetorical significance only. In both cases, McLuhan himself contravened his own admonition at the end of ‘Ancient Quarrel’ not to “raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”. ↩
  2. Or, better yet, a kind of principle of principles that would reflect the existing illumination providing the original interconnection of all the various areas of life. ↩
  3. Eg: “Hutchins, Adler, and Van Doran have made commando raids deep into enemy territory, and the rage of the immobilized battalions of standard and progressive education is uttering itself in howls against them as “reactionary,” “obscurantist,” “metaphysical,” “unscientific.” (…) The end of education as described by Hutchins is the making of the citizen. The citizen is rational man equipped for social and political life by means of encyclopedic (non-specialized) training in the arts and sciences (the great books program). Special skill in the arts of reading and writing are paramount. The citizen must be fluent, even eloquent, on all subjects. The citizen must know all things which concern the welfare of the group. The opponents of Hutchins, whether scientists, progressive educationalists, positivists, or experimentalists, are all agreed in a specialist notion of human activity. Scientific knowledge and method are the ultimate bases of social and political authority for men like Professor Dewey (…) working with Rousseau’s basic assumption that (only) the state is a moral person. (…) “Teacher and pupil are not isolated individuals. They are both agents of the state.” (…) Whereas Hutchins’ program would make every citizen a potential ruler, the “liberals” conceive rather of the individual as a technologically functional unit in the state. (Alexander) Meiklejohn employs the analogy of the individual as a note in the musical score of society, whereas Hutchins thinks of each person as a complete musical work. Again, Hutchins adopts the classical view of man as a rational animal and hence a political animal. The state from this point of view is an association of autonomous persons. Opposed to this, a conventional representative of nineteenth-century social thought, such as Dewey or Meiklejohn, regards the collectivity as the basic thing. The individual has no nature which is not conferred on him by the collectivity. Man is not a rational animal.” ↩
  4. As seen in his Christmas 1945 letter to McNaspy cited above, McLuhan usually assigned Adler and the Great Books program to dialectic. Here they are assigned to the opposing category of rhetoric which McLuhan associated with the south. (One of the sub-titles to ‘Ancient Quarrel’ is “South vs. North” and its concluding section is “The south vs New England”.) McLuhan was presumably attempting to warm “an eminent Kentuckian such as Robert Hutchins” (‘Ancient Quarrel’) to his ideas. Since the essence of McLuhan’s ‘third’ principle was to conjoin the other two primordially, such sliding between categories was not impossible and was even likely in differing circumstances. Indeed, also the assignment of the Dewey-progressive wing to dialectic in ‘Ancient Quarrel’ is the reverse of the usual procedure — one necessitated simply by the requirement that it be on the opposite side from the other wing. As already noted above, in both of these cases (conjoining Adler and Hutchins and in the varying classification of the ‘wings’), McLuhan himself sinned against his own admonition at the end of ‘Ancient Quarrel’ not to “raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”. ↩
  5.  After this highly important observation of principle, McLuhan quickly ended ‘Ancient Quarrel’ with a recommendation for the further study of it such as his Nashe thesis had begun — “knowledge of the history of the present dispute would serve to diminish the fog and the passions aroused at present, and would substitute some light for much heat” — together with the resigned proviso that such study would, alas, “deprive us of that major distraction from boredom which is invariably sought in hasty accusation and warm rejoinder where both parties raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”. ↩

Nef on McLuhan’s proposal

If 30-60 men can be found, gradually, and encouraged to talk to one another instead of to the robots they must pretend to talk to for a living, then something may come of it. (McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, January, 1951)

Robert Hutchins gave McLuhan’s December 1947 proposal for an “editorial community”1 to his close University of Chicago colleague, John Nef2, for his comments.  It took Nef only a few days to report back that he found its central object “little short of idiotic”:

Mr. McLuhan’s idea of having eight editors strikes me as little short of idiotic. The responsibility for any journal, if it is to be valuable, has got to be in one place.3

In fact, the tremendous need for such for an “editorial community” is so simple and so obvious that it could not be seen at the time — nor in the 70 years since.

The basic idea came to McLuhan from two publications of Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (originally lectures at Harvard in 1938), together with his ‘‘A Faculty of Interrelations’ (1942 and variously reprinted thereafter). McLuhan and Giedion met in St Louis in 1943 (the same year McLuhan met Wyndham Lewis in Windsor) and McLuhan quickly read everything from Giedion he could find.

The first lines of the foreword to the first edition of Space, Time and Architecture states that the book:

is intended for those who are alarmed by the present state of our culture and anxious to find a way out of the apparent chaos of its contradictory tendencies. I have attempted to establish, both by argument and by objective evidence, that in spite of the seeming confusion there is nevertheless a true, if hidden, unity, a secret synthesis, in our present civilization.

The great question was how this “true (…) unity” and “secret synthesis” was to be defined and certified. Addressing himself to academics across the spectrum of disciplines, Giedion stipulated:

Our task and our moral obligation is to make order in our own field, to establish the relations between the sciences, art, and the humanities. This Is what is lacking today. [We must] build up the interrelations between the different branches of human knowledge (…) A faculty must be created In the universities which functions as a sort of coordinator between the sciences and the humanities. Scholars will not only have to teach on such a faculty; each of them will have to learn as well. There must be built up a knowledge of methods, the beginning of a common vocabulary. Scholars must have systematic contact with one another.4 (Giedion, ‘A Faculty of Interrelations‘)

This was exactly what McLuhan hoped Hutchins would help to establish, potentially, but not necessarily, in Chicago. In order to fulfill its chief functions — definition of “true (…) unity”, and authoritative certification of it — such a faculty would need to include widely recognized scholars. In his cover letter to Hutchins, McLuhan suggested Eric Voegelin and Étienne Gilson as the sort of academics who would be required.5 Hence the need for an ample budget in order to have any hope of attracting and retaining such luminaries.

Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, 6 months after McLuhan sent his proposal to Hutchins, in June 1948, Harold Innis made some of the same points to a conference of Commonwealth university administrators in Oxford

Knowledge has been divided in the modern world to the extent that it is apparently hopeless to expect a common point of view. (…) I propose to ask why Western civilisation has reached the point that a conference largely composed of University administrators should unconsciously assume division in points of view in the field of learning and why this conference, representing the Universities of the British Commonwealth, should have been so far concerned [only] with political representation as to forget the problem of unity in Western civilisation, or, to put it in a general way, why all of us here together seem [ourselves] to be what is wrong with Western civilisation.6

Innis concluded:

The Universities should subject their views about their role in civilisation to systematic overhauling and revise the machinery by which they can take a leading part in the problems of Western culture [especially “the problem of unity”].

The “problem of unity in Western civilisation” and this way of attempting to address it in the university environment was just what McLuhan had proposed to Hutchins. Compare Innis’ conclusion just given with McLuhan’s earlier proposal:

The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival — that is the task.

As indicated by the repeated word ‘overhaul’ in these passages, Innis could have been nudged in this direction by Giedion’s ideas via McLuhan (doubtless mediated by McLuhan’s old friend from Winnipeg, Tom Easterbrook, who was now a close associate of Innis at UT).7 

What requires decision is the question whether “a common point of view” (Innis) is possible for all humans and their cultures and religions — or not.  If it is possible, presumably this is a conclusion which only the wisest of human beings might work out first of all among some of themselves. This knowledge might then spread out from them, through the power both of their definition of it and of their reputations in their respective fields. Indeed, if such commonality were not defined and publicized in this way, how could it ever (given the conditions of modernity) be established among us?8

Innis’ good friend, John Nef9, perfectly illustrated the problem at stake in his reaction to McLuhan’s proposal.  Faced with multiplicity, Nef could perceive only a plurality without even the potential for unity; or, conversely, any actual unity would have to be imposed on plurality by reducing it to singularity:

Mr. McLuhan’s idea of having eight editors strikes me as little short of idiotic. The responsibility for any journal, if it is to be valuable, has got to be in one place.

A third possibility, a real multiplicity which was also at the same time a unity, Giedion’s “systematic contact” among scholars, seemed to him “idiotic”.10

We remain in the same “idiotic” — and incredibly dangerous — situation today.

 

  1. “Editorial community” was McLuhan’s description in his cover letter to Hutchins. ↩
  2. Nef was a long-time friend and correspondent of Harold Innis.  He was also a good friend of Sigfried Giedion. Strangely, it was to Nef that Giedion first wrote in his attempt to help McLuhan find a more felicitous position in the academy. For discussion see Giedion to Nef re a “promising young scholar”. ↩
  3. Memo from John Nef to Robert Hutchins, Dec 18, 1947. ↩
  4. Emphasis added. The physical sciences have “systematic contact” with each other and it was Giedion’s great insight that this was both an intellectual demand for the the humanities, but also the one answer to national and international peace. ↩
  5. McLuhan to Hutchins, December 6, 1947: “Nothing is said (in the proposal) of the actual personnel of the editorial community, but I have men in mind. (…) Eric Vogelein is a “must” for Political Science, I think. (…) Etienne Gileon, with whom I have discussed the project (…) would not, I think, hesitate to join the venture.” ↩
  6. ‘A Critical Review’, in The Bias of Communication, 1951, remarks originally delivered at the sixth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth at Oxford, on July 22nd. 1948. ↩
  7. If Innis’ remarks in Oxford were sparked by McLuhan’s proposal to Hutchins, the bond between the two would not have been, in the first place, the study of media.  It would have been their mutual diagnosis of the fate of western civilization and ideas for its rehabilitation and rescue. Remarkably, the same sort of revision may be in order for an understanding of the relationship of Eric Havelock and McLuhan.  Instead of concentration on media, the bond in this case may have been, on the one hand, a shared analysis of literature focused on synchronic structures (for discussion, see The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land) and, on the other, a mutual interest in the history of education (for discussion, see Havelock, McLuhan & the history of education). ↩
  8. For McLuhan’s ultimate position on this question, where new science would instantiate such a common view, see McLuhan’s new sciences: “only the authority of knowledge”. ↩
  9. Innis in the ‘Preface’ to Empire and Communications: “I have been greatly encouraged also by Professor and Mrs. John U. Nef and the Committee on Social Thought (…) of the University of Chicago.” Nef was also good friends with Giedion who, strangely enough in the present conttext, wrote a letter to Nef recommending McLuhan. ↩
  10. It is possible that Nef’s objection to McLuhan was not so much notional as territorial. The University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (now named The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought) had been Nef’s inspiration and achievement. Given Nef’s friendship with Giedion, the idea may have had as much impetus from him as did McLuhan’s proposal. In any case, Nef may well have thought that McLuhan’s ‘editorial team’ was close enough to his ‘committee’ to require stiff resistance. ↩

The brother’s tale

Poe’s ‘Ms. Found In A Bottle’ fits closely together1 with ‘A Descent in to the Maelstrom’ as the tale of the mariner’s brother — the brother who goes down with the Maelstrom into the abyss. The Ms. ends with these lines:

Oh, horror upon horror! — the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small — we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool — and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering — oh God! and — going down!

These are the last lines of the Ms. the doomed sailor has time to entrust to a bottle which would later be found floating in the sea — like the mariner who was saved in ‘Descent’. Both the Ms. and the mariner survive the whirlpool: but only by being “cast (…) within the sea”:

At the last moment I will enclose the Ms. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.

The Ms. and the mariner in ‘Descent’ are bearers of a message from the depths of the abyss. Both record the inception of an unprecedented change in perception:

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul — a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. (…) Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense — a new entity is added to my soul.

And both describe the strange “curiosity” that arises in this changed state:

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It it evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

This secret is struck like a spark from an encounter with “the blackness of eternal night” at “the walls of the universe”:

All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foaming water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.2

 

  1. In both tales a sudden hurricane engulfs a ship leaving it with only two of its crew.  In both there is a lesser whirlpool (“the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were ingulfed”) before which the ship can run; and a greater whirlpool which takes the ship down. In both the mariner telling the tale goes through a profound change which leads him to study his unprecedented situation despite its “horror”. ↩
  2. Poe has the strange “foamless water” in this passage, not “foaming water”. This is probably some kind of typo.  If it is not, Poe may have wanted to draw a contrast with the “foaming ocean” of the lesser whirlpool at the start of the tale — and to emphasize, perhaps, “the blackness of eternal night” in which no foam could be seen. ↩

Proposal to Robert Hutchins 1947

In 1946 McLuhan’s friend, Cleanth Brooks (then a visiting professor at the University of Chicago), facilitated a meeting between him and Robert Hutchins — the UC chancellor and arguably the most influential education leader nationally. Some 18 months later1, McLuhan submitted a proposal to Hutchins for an inter-disciplinary seminar and associated journal.  In his cover latter of December 7, 1947, McLuhan explained:

The enclosed proposal for an “editorial community” is a direct outgrowth of the talk I had with you about the college at Chicago.

The proposal is given below (with the permission of the McLuhan estate). It will be discussed in future posts.2 Suffice it to note here only that it clearly looks forward to the Culture and Communication seminar that the Ford Foundation would finance beginning in 1953 with a grant of $44,000 over three years.  But McLuhan’s proposal to Hutchins, 5 years before, was looking for $200,000 annually (or almost $3million annually in today’s 2024 dollars)!

Surely McLuhan was correct, however, that the extent of our response to our spiritual and cultural collapse would have to be commensurate with the threat. So the astonishing thing is not the audacity of McLuhan’s proposal, but the fact that it has never even been much contemplated, let alone implemented.

*****

Dear Mr. Hutchins:

The enclosed proposal for an “editorial community” is a direct outgrowth of the talk I had with you about the college at Chicago. The project is really conceived with a sense of the urgency and probable brevity of our affairs. But that note of alarm was kept out of these pages since they were intended not so much for your eye as for that of some wealthy sponsor who might occur to you, and who would prefer a longer view.

Somebody of the stature of Henry Luce or Marshall Field is indicated as the “angel” for this venture. Might not that indeed be a plan well-suited to the fulfillment of Luce’s hope for a fourth magazine?

Nothing is said of the actual personnel of the editorial community, but I have men in mind. You, however, would know of some who would be even more suitable. Eric Voegelin is a “must” for Political Science, I think. As for the locale of the venture, that would have to be settled on lines of expediency. Proximity to a big center like New York or Chicago is indicated.

Etienne Gilson, with whom I have discussed the project, approved it, but was most sceptical about the financial possibilities. Given the financial backing he would not, I think, hesitate to join the venture. This fact might be a useful one to hold in reserve, though.3 There are, I am aware, reasonable objections to having Gilson associated with the review. The community idea calls for younger men on the whole.

Should you see fit to approve this plan, would you, then, forward it to Luce or some likely sponsor? Naturally I would not ask such a thing as a merely personal favor to myself, but rather for the merits, if any, of the plan itself.

Very sincerely yours,
Marshall McLuhan

Proposal

[1]4

The Situation

Not since the scholars fled westwards from Constantinople in 1453 has there been a movement to rival the present accumulation of European specialists in the United States.5 And the role of the U.S. as host and custodian of the refugees and their learning can only be envisaged as a second Westward Movement of the scholars.

The resulting stimulus to American learning has been and will continue to be comparable to that which produced the developments in Italy, France, and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be the American centuries in a sense more decisive than that of economic and political initiative. But without the economic and political hegemony these larger functions and fulfillments would be impossible.

The Possibilities

There is much that is involuntary about the role of Custodian of Western Civilization which has descended on the United States. So far as the larger drama of Western ideas and culture was concerned the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought of its role not even as a “walk-on” part but rather as a “walk-off” bit.

Everything involved in the trauma of emigration suggested to the emigrants a minimal rather than a maximal continuity with Western civilization. But it is important to realize that not merely external events but also a deep fidelity to the basic

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European heritage which was brought to America, has reversed the conscious intention to attenuate the traditions of the West.

The American North fostered speculation in theology, philosophy, and science, in harmony with the great European current which flowed through Aristotle, Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Descartes, and Locke. The American South typically developed the correlative tradition of “Ciceronian” humanism which cultivates the practical virtues in the attainment of artistic taste, forensic eloquence, and legal and political skill.

Thus the United States has within her own immediate traditions rich points of contact with the entire range of European civilization. And this is a fact of the utmost value at present; since the new responsibilities and tasks do not impose any need for hasty initiation but call only for an enlargement and a comprehension of the native traditions.

As indications of the readiness and ability of Americans to undertake the business of exploration and re-adaptation of the entire Western heritage, consider on one hand F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West [1946], and on the other hand the testimony of Cyril Connolly in the American number of Horizon [1947]. Northrop’s sense of the fragmentary and scrappy character of American life when measured against the entire range of available civilized values and achievements is nothing less than a portent. Especially since Northrop speaks from within a specialized and limited portion even of American experience. He thereby gives evidence of an intellectual resilience and hospitality which is utterly different from that which once prompted the discontented American to live abroad in order to  

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redress the pragmatic bias of life at home. Northrop really proclaims the fitness of contemporary America for the new task, in the very act of calling for major readjustments. Connolly, on the other hand, speaks as an apprehensive Englishman carefully testing our intellectual resources and climate for their immediate possibilities. He, too, provides a verdict of a most favorable kind. America is equal to the new intellectual and spiritual role.

Strategy

The radical deficiency of American intellectual life vis-a-vis the new tasks of revaluation, synthesis, and exploration, is its lack of communal sense. This is true even of the academic scene. But outside the academic world there is certainly no likelihood of finding the leisure, the erudition or the disinterestedness for the work at hand. The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for a local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival — that is the task.

To accomplish this end it would be pointless to talk to presidents and deans and department heads. What must be done is rather to re-energize the entire body of the arts and sciences. That such a flow of energy into long dormant arts and sciences as poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics has actually occurred is already evident to many. In fact, no such major revisions have taken place within the main provinces of human knowledge since the time of Hume and Kant.

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At the end of the eighteenth century the main lines of human thought and action had been established for the ensuing century and a half. And in England and America the major means of making effective the new adjustments in the arts and sciences was the Edinburgh Review. In this Review the consequences of the positions of Adam Smith, Bentham, and Hume were thrashed out for and by economists, historians, philologists, critics, and scientists. What the French encyclopedists had been to France, the Edinburgh Review was for England and America. All the provinces of learning and investigation were opened up to discussion and revaluation. The due inter-relation between them was decided and the degree of cognizance which one was to take of the other was considered and settled.

That great positivist synthesis lasted until the time of Herbert Spencer and petered out in the popular fantasies of the encyclopedic H.G. Wells. Meantime it was increasingly challenged by the more speculative synthesis which stemmed from Vico and Hegel and was carried on through Marx on the economic side and through Nietzsche on the psychological and philological fronts. However, it has never been understood that the second-rate character of the English and American nineteenth century as compared with the German and French was owing to the German and French having adopted psychological rather than the biological experience as the source of the guiding analogies for the synthesis of social study and discussion. Adam Smith introduced into the

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intellectual currency the analogy of a vague evolutionary providence operating through both human and animal appetites. This analogy fructified the minds of Malthus and Darwin. But it was analogy quite incapable of stimulating the great anthropological and cultural histories which, under Viconian and Hegelian inspiration, appeared on the continent. Sir James Frazer and Arnold Toynbee are by-products of Max Muller and Oswald Spengler rather than of their own traditions.

Every age has its reigning analogy in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this analogy. To be “ahead of the time” is to be critically aware of the analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy. To be creative and directive of the currents of the age is, while admitting the limitations of the dominant analogy, to carry out as complete as extension and synthesis of the arts and sciences as it will permit. But also to explore as much new terrain in each art and science as it will allow. To recover as much of the past as can be made creatively relevant to the present. To be aware of the past as presently useful and of much of the present as already irrelevant — all this is to be a contemporary mind. And this mode of awareness is itself based on an analogy derived from relativity physics (as also from the correlated Jungian conception of the collective consciousness of the race) whose usefulness to a society faced with the problems of world government and international community is as immense as it is as yet unexploited.

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Tactics

To impinge at the most decisive point with the most adequate materials. To this end it is proposed that there be established a Review of an entirely new sort. It will consist of eight or ten full-time editors who will for the most part write it. Each editor is to be a specialist. but a specialist with encyclopedic interests and tendencies. A genuine intellectual community is indispensable. The first business of the editors will be during some months to conduct a mutual inquisition into each other’s specialty and to develop a full sense of the congruities of method and pursuit among their specialized interests. The study of methods and results is to be both of investigation and transmission or pedagogy. The editors should represent at least

  • Philosophy (metaphysics, logic, cosmology)
  • Mathematical Physics
  • Political Science
  • Anthropology
  • Analytical Psychology
  • Philology (classics, modern languages, art, music, history. and criticism)

Associated with each of the permanent editors should be two or more temporary editorial fellows recruited on a leave-of-absence basis from the universities. These men would be selected with regard to such considerations as the following:

(a) Youth and ability to discuss and express the problems of their specialized fields

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(b) Advanced development of some new concepts in their fields.

(c) Variety of experience at several leading institutions.

The reason for this selection is two-fold. First to insure a fresh flow of perceptions and problems to the editorial community.  Second, to provide a free flow of editorial influence into the major institutions of the country.

Program

The procedure of the review would be to present, in the first place, a clear picture of the total situation in each province of knowledge. This would also involve a thorough critique of each subject and of the best methods of pursuing and teaching it. A sharp scrutiny of the actual pursuits and teaching methods at the dominant institutions would, even as a rhetorical strategy, assure an attentive body of readers among the entire faculties and graduate students of the universities.

The contents of the Review would include new contributions to specialized studies; but a press associated with the Review could, in general, handle such matters more expediently. More typically the contents would follow the lines of definitely established projects, doing on an advanced level what Fortune magazine does for the casual reader. The method of each project would ideally be that of genetic investigation of each problem. The genetic method insures a maximum of comprehension with a minimum engendering of irrelevant emotion.

For example, F.S.C. Northrop offers an excellent instance

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of the genetic method as applied to the total absence of developed sensibility in American life coincident with the hypertrophy of action. The notable superiority of the Chinese culture in the matter of esthetic and moral discrimination is a fact from which much can be learned. One major deficiency in American life and education calls precisely for redress of the balance between theoretic and esthetic or particular perception and judgement.

The editorial community would function as a super-seminar in which the projects of each person would be submitted to the constant inspection and discussion of all the rest. In this way alone is it possible (a) to escape the intellectual isolation of the present-day specialist and (b) to inter-animate one knowledge with the due life and results of the others.

Finances

Estimated annual cost of projected Review (exclusive of its earnings), $200,000.6

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  1. The delay between the meeting with Hutchins and the submission of McLuhan’s proposal may have had several grounds. In the first place, McLuhan must have needed time to think through his ideas and to find a way to express them clearly.  This was especially the case, second, that he suspected even before his 1946 meeting with Hutchins that work with him and with UC generally might be fruitless: McLuhan wrote to Cleanth Brooks on March 29, 1946, “I came increasingly to feel that Hutchins was beyond any hope from our point of view, and my tone, therefore, became uncompromising. I’m sure that he’ll put this in the hands of Adler, McKeon, and Crane, but nothing is to be gained by playing ball with those lads” (letter cited in Mark Royden, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, 1996, 205). Third, he was unsure himself of the wisdom and goodness of his ideas.  As he wrote to Clement McNaspy at Christmas, 1945: “What an object lesson a Christian has to-day in seeing so much good produce so much ill. Not for a moment do I imagine that I can frame a course of action which will do good. (…) How easy it would be to set up a school on these lines, utilizing the encyclopedic learning of our age. But whether that is desirable?” (Letters 180) ↩
  2. See Nef on McLuhan’s proposal. Some discussion of the meeting and proposal may be found in Marchand’s McLuhan bio, 98-99. But Marchand had not seen the proposal himself and some of the details reported to him are wrong. The connection of the proposal with Sigfried Giedion’s ideas is very important. And Harold Innis had comparable suggestions. Nef on McLuhan’s proposal discusses these ties with Giedion and Innis. ↩
  3. Minor corrections to McLuhan’s cover letter and proposal have been made. So here, the word ‘though’ appears in McLuhan’s letter not at the end of this sentence, but at the start of the next. McLuhan often composed by dictation to his wife at this point in his career and then seldom corrected the result. ↩
  4. Page numbers of the original proposal are given in square brackets. ↩
  5. McLuhan specifically suggested only two scholars for his proposed project and both were Europeans, Eric Voegelin and Etienne Gilson. ↩
  6. $200,000 in 1947 dollars = $2,815,260 in 2024 dollars. ↩