Author Archives: McEwen

Carey on Innis and Havelock

James W Carey’s ‘Introduction’ to Harold Innis’s Changing Concepts of Time (2004) describes the relation of the communication work of Innis and Eric Havelock as follows:

[Innis] was aided by the fact that the University of Toronto had a splendid Department of Classics and within the department a great student of Greek thought, Eric Havelock. Havelock and Innis worked independently and only discovered one another four years after Havelock left Toronto for Harvard. (xiv)

This is a bald variation on the view taken by Babe and Watson. It simply ignores the evidence of the extensive contact, both personal and intellectual, between Innis and Havelock over the almost two decades Havelock taught at UT.

 

McLuhan’s second conversion

Have discovered the meaning and value of [interior] landscape (…) paysage intérieur à la Rimbaud Pound Joyce as means of unifying and digesting any kind of experience. Should have got to it 20 yrs ago if I hadn’t the rotten luck to bog down in English lit [ie, bog down with Leavis/Scrutiny]… (McLuhan to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, Letters 216)

Between the ages of 35 and 40 (roughly, 1946-1951) McLuhan experienced a second conversion, a decade after his first one.  

His first conversion (formalized at Easter, 1937) brought him into the Catholic Church from his vague Protestant upbringing and represented no fundamental change in his core beliefs in God and traditional values. Like many converts today from Protestant denominations to Orthodoxy or Catholicism, this first conversation reflected his doubtless prayerful view that the Catholic Church best attested what he already strongly believed.  While this had great meaning for McLuhan himself, of course, it was nothing particularly unusual or significant for the world at large.

In contrast, his second conversion (a second conversion to the same place!) was driven by the determination (forced on him, as he often pointed out, by contemporary research in anthropology, psychology, archaeology, classics, linguistics, even evolutionary biology) that there is no such thing as privileged experience and that traditional beliefs and values therefore had to be validated, if at all, on the strange foundation of the relativity of all human experience and culture. This conversion, unlike the first, was of fundamental significance generally.

Since McLuhan’s own core beliefs could not be immunized from this insight into experiential relativity, the effect of it was to dissolve his previous world of lived experience.  It had been based on ‘continuity’1 which he now saw to be fundamentally broken. Hence identity, too, as the correlate of experience, was necessarily broken and was inexorably exposed at every moment to an unbridgeable gap. As he specified two decades after the event in Take Today (1972):

Managing The Ascent from the Maelstrom today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point. (13)

Now The Maelstrom was plainly no longer viewed as escapist entertainment (as it was in 1946). In fact, it was now experienced as describing that synchronic (or simultaneous) process of Descent/Ascent through which all human cognition, individual and social, is continually (or diachronically) achieved.2 

Partly through the fact that Leavis and the Scrutiny school assigned the care of traditional values to literary culture and partly through the recognition via Havelock and Innis that societies have maintained their cultures through differing modes of communication (especially orality and literacy, but now also the electric), McLuhan came to describe his second conversion as a turn from an exclusive valorization of print and literary values to the inclusive valorization of all forms of communication and culture, literary or not: 

defenders of book-culture have seldom given any thought to any of the media as art forms, the book least of all. The result is that their “defense” might as well be staged on an abandoned movie lot for all the effect it has on the actual situation. When I wrote The Mechanical Bride some years ago I did not realize that I was attempting a defense of book-culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me to much that was actually happening for good and ill. 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… (‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’, Commonweal, 60:1, April 9, 1954, 7-11, here 10-11; emphases added)

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student. 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 [it] could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend its impact on man, but even there some of my old literate “point of view” bias crept in. (Playboy Interview. March 1969, pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63, here 63; emphasis added)

Already in early 1951, the year of its publication, McLuhan saw The Mechanical Bride as prelapsarian, as a document reflecting conditions before the fall (as he had come to experience it in Poe’s Maelstrom and Joyce’s “pftjschute of Finnegan”):

Mechanical Bride is something that happened before the Flood. Assumed an audience …. It is a wedding announcement found 1000 years from now in a block of concrete… 3

That is, The Mechanical Bride had been written as if the collapse of the tower of Babel had not occurred, as if an author could assume continuity of language, perspective, reason and values with the audience of readers.  Having undergone his second conversion, McLuhan could now see not only that this assumption could not be made (and was therefore not made by the best of modern art), but also that this assumption stood in the way of genuine communication. From now on he would have to take up the question of the symbolists and Pound and Joyce of how to communicate the process of communication (dual genitive!) as the most important step in communication. (The strikethroughs here are not deletions. They are markers of ineluctable gaps in these nouns.)

  1. The title of the first collection of Scrutiny papers by F.R. Leavis in 1933 was For Continuity. ↩
  2. Physical materials are maintained as integral solids in space and time through a dynamic process of surface cohesion and/or adhesion. Individual and social identity qua modes of perception are maintained through an analogous but completely different (though no less dynamic) process that is linguistic in character. Just as language presupposes a series of unconscious choices regarding what is to be considered significant noise (among all possible noises) and what is to be considered significant variation in those noises (among all possible variations of them), so perception always reflects choices made among possible forms.  Poe’s Maelstrom may be read as a depiction of this usually unconscious process. His mariner undergoes a radical change of identity and experience by entering the strom and choosing a different vehicle for them in it: he “survived by pattern recognition. He perceived (in) the action of the strom, that there were certain objects which recurred and survived (its cataclysmic descent). He attaches himself to the recurring (ascending) objects and survives” (‘Art as Survival in the Electric Age’, 1973). Any reading of human experience (reading which can then lead to science) must be based on and from this strange ano/kato (Heraclitus) or up/down way of identity formation and integrity. (Notably, one of the epigrams to Eliot’s Four Quartets is the Heraclitian fragment ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή (hodos ano kato mia kai houte, the way up and the way down are one and the same). Further Maelstrom posts will have the aim of describing this process and its significance in detail. ↩
  3. McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, 30 January 1951, cited in Andrew Chrystall, ‘A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion‘. Cf, “My own book, The Mechanical Bride, took as theme ‘the Love Goddess Assembly Line’ with the car as bride, just when the prior American economy and culture (ie, the car) was altering its stress from industrial hardware to the world of design and software.” (‘The Implications of Cultural Uniformity’, 1973, in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, 1975) ↩

A “trick of analysis” in the Maelstrom

Cleanth Brooks’s poem, ‘Maelstrom’, written in 1944, was published in the first 1946 issue of The Sewanee Review.1 Later, in the fourth issue of the Review that year, McLuhan would discuss Poe’s Maelstrom for the first time in ‘Footsteps in the Sands of Crime’2. The concluding passage of this essay reads as follows:

The sailor in [Poe’s] story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape. Like everything else in Poe the recital proceeds in a casual off-hand manner. Like the chat of a well-bred man of the world. But in this parable Poe embalms the mystery of the sleuth himself. His sailor escapes from the strom by a trick of analysis. The sleuth produces the murderer in the same way. And at the same time the sleuth also enables the reader to “escape” from the horror of his own world by conferring on him the sense of detached power associated with the scientific attitude. To that extent at least the whodunits must be accredited with the formula for happiness which Swift noted as dear to man — the possession of being perpetually well deceived.3

The first three sentences represent a kind of pre-view4 in which McLuhan looks forward to his upcoming second conversion (“the means of escape”) and to his life’s work thereafter (in which the Maelstrom will be cited, and sometimes quoted at length, over and over again)5:

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.

But the remainder of this 1946 passage looks backward to what he will later, in 1954, on the other side of his second conversion, call his “obsession with literary values”6, an “obsession” he had exercised for more than a decade following his graduation from Cambridge in 1936 as an energetic member of the F.R.Leavis-Scrutiny branch of the Cambridge English school.7 (In a letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, McLuhan remarked on his “rotten luck to bog down in English lit at university” (Letters 216) where he apparently meant “the rotten luck to bog down” with Leavis.)

It was near the end of this preliminary period of his career that McLuhan’s attention was drawn to A Descent into the Maelstrom, presumably by Brooks’s poem in the Sewanee Review. Of course he knew of Poe’s story before this time, but apparently without seeing any special significance in it for him and his work. However, with a series of other factors at this time in the late 1940’s (like his study of the symbolists, his rereading of Joyce and Eliot with Hugh Kenner, his meeting and subsequent correspondence with Ezra Pound, his introduction to cybernetics via Sigfried Giedion, his learning of Havelock’s research on Greek orality, his introduction to Innis’s communication work, his beginning reading of modern management theory with Bernard Muller-Thym, etc etc), Poe’s Maelstrom would soon cease from being one more piece of furniture in his familiar world. Instead, it would transform that world — and McLuhan himself along with it. The Maelstrom would help instigate McLuhan’s second conversion which would fundamentally change his tune:

…organic harps
And each one’s Tunes be that, which each calls ‘I’
– Coleridge, The Eolian Harp (draft of 1795)

In 1946, however, that earthquake had not yet occurred — McLuhan had not yet exposed himself to the transformative power of the Maelstrom. Instead he regarded it as merely one more item to be accommodated within his established perspective. This was accomplished by his reading it as a variation on Poe’s detective stories:

Like everything else in Poe the recital proceeds in a casual off-hand manner. Like the chat of a well-bred man of the world. But in this parable Poe embalms the mystery of the sleuth himself. The sleuth produces the murderer in the same way [as the mariner solves the case of the Maelstrom].

In both sorts of fiction, mystery and nautical, an “escape” was seen to be provided in multiple senses:

And at the same time [as he unravels the mystery of his case and so finds an “escape” from it] the sleuth also enables the reader to “escape” from the horror of his own world by conferring on him the sense of detached power associated with the scientific attitude. To that extent at least the whodunits [and their Maelstrom parallel] must be accredited with the formula for happiness which Swift noted as dear to man — the possession of being perpetually well deceived

The reader of Poe was provided with pseudo-escape from the “horror of his own world” by the fictional escapes of the detective and the mariner from their predicaments.  That is, Poe’s readers were captured, as we say, exactly through tales of escape — tales of escape which then provided them with illusory escape from the world in which they were actually captured (not least by their recourse to ‘escape’ entertainment in it!). A double real attachment (to escapist entertainment and to a world which had escaped its foundations) was achieved via a double fictional detachment (tales of escape in escapist entertainment). 

However this analysis may have been fitting in part, it is noteworthy that McLuhan at this time saw no need in his own right for “detached observation”, “scientific interest” and a “scientific attitude”. He already had the correct “point of view” (“my old literate ‘point of view’ bias”, as he called it in his Playboy interview) and any detachment from it could only be negative (with, given his theology at the time, potentially eternal consequences for him). Only everybody else was bound to “the horror of his own world” by being “perpetually well deceived”. He himself, however, was Catholic and, as he wrote to Corinne Lewis before their marriage in 1939, years before she herself became Catholic, “there is nothing good or true which is not Catholic”.8

The “horror” here is that industrialism and general modernity “associated with the scientific attitude” which had, in the Leavisite analysis, caused the world to slip its moorings from the established values of the tradition. (The partial fit of this analysis with the Chesterbelloc valorization of tradition provided McLuhan with his Catholic variation on Scrutiny criticism, which itself was a variation on the criticism of I.A. Richards.) So it was that McLuhan dismissed “detached observation” and “scientific interest”, the motors of modernity, as deceptions similar to those of “whodunits” — deceptions amounting to nothing more than “a trick of analysis”.9

The whole world was deceived, this is to say, except McLuhan and some like-minded few. More, the world had in this process somehow achieved escape velocity from the power and grace of God. “Modern times” were no longer subject to them, it seemed, and therefore demanded McLuhan’s summary rejection of them:

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.  (Playboy Interview)10

At this time in the middle 1940s McLuhan — now age 35 — exercised a starkly oppositional mindset, in fact a type of gnosticism. (The aggressive animus he would show against gnosticim in the early 1950’s may have reflected his rueful awareness of his own long constriction in it.) Coming loose from it would define his life’s work. But just how he came to do so is a highly complicated question (to be treated in a series of future posts). Suffice it to note here only that Corinne McLuhan’s entrance into the Catholic Church in 1946 may have signaled the beginning of an easing of his former rather brittle and hyper-intellectualized faith. Corinne was anything but a brittle and hyper-intellectual person and her conversion at this time may well have helped to ease his way into a second one of his own.  She and the life experience of a family with 6 kids — his four girls were all born in the time-span of his second conversion — could well have taught him, as nothing else could, that “there are more [good or true] things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. 11

  1.  ‘Maelstrom’, Cleanth Brooks, Sewanee Review, 54(1), 1946, 116-118. ↩
  2. Sewanee Review, 54(4), 617-634, 1946. ↩
  3. Sewanee Review, 54(4), 634. ↩
  4. Scottish “second sight”. ↩
  5. See McLuhan on Poe’s Maelstrom ↩
  6. ‘Sight, Sound, and Fury’, Commonweal, April 1954. ↩
  7. Hugh Kenner to Philip Marchand: “McLuhan in those days took the Leavis line on nearly everything” (Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger, 103). ↩
  8. McLuhan to Corinne Lewis, January 21, 1939, Letters 102.  One can well imagine a properly raised eyebrow on the receiving end of this observation. ↩
  9. McLuhan took the same view of Joyce. In a letter to Philip Marchand, Hugh Kenner recalled that at this time, “McLuhan despised (Joyce) as merely ‘mechanical’, a ‘contriver’.” (Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger, 103).  A contemporary letter from McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli from May 10, 1946 notes in related fashion: “Looking at Joyce recently. A bit startled to note last page of Finnegan is a rendering of the last part of the Mass. Remembered that opening of Ulysses is from 1st words of the Mass. The whole thing an intellectual Black Mass.” (Letters, 183) ↩
  10. For further discussion, see McLuhan’s second conversion. ↩
  11. As if to force home to McLuhan the “good or true” things on the margin, only one of his children, Eric, remained Catholic. ↩

McLuhan on Poe’s Maelstrom

Art as Survival in the Electric Age 1973
The strom of which Poe spoke in 1850 was nothing compared to the stroms in which we are involved at the present moment.

*

Starting at age 35 — the halfway mark of life according to Dante, life’s roofbeam — until he died 35 years later on New Year’s eve 1980, McLuhan cited A Descent into the Maelstrom over and over (and over) again.  Leaving aside his very frequent general references to the whirlpool (sometimes “worldpool”), and his even more frequent discussions of the vortex and vortices, the following are passages in his work (in chronological order) that take off from Poe’s short story:

McLuhan to Brinley Rhys1, June 16, 1946
Here is the key to the sleuth.  He is that part of Poe which eluded the strom by studious detachment. 

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

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
Poe’s sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. The present book likewise makes few attempts to attack the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress and in which everybody is involved. (v)

The Mechanical Bride, 1951

Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality. It is here suggested that the outlines of world order are already quite visible to the student of the swirling flood released by industrial technique. And they are to be discerned in the very way in which the flood operates. Poe’s sailor in “The Maelstrom” saved himself by cooperating with the action of the “strom” itself. (75)

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
our situation is very like that of Poe’s sailor in “The Maelstrom,” and we are now obliged not to attack or avoid the strom but to study its operation as providing a means of release from it. (151)

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 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? (77)

Understanding Media, 1964
Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom. (vii)

Technology and World Trade 1966
Any economy is an information pool and, under electronic conditions, the world is a single information pool; therefore, there can and must be just one economy. As the world becomes a total information pool, and therefore simultaneous, the natural tendency is for all the older patterns and barriers and structures to be swept aside.

Technology and World Trade 1966
There is a well-known story by Edgar Allen Poe. It is called ‘The Maelstrom’ — about a sailor who goes fishing one afternoon and becomes so absorbed in his thought that he forgets to notice the turn of the tide and suddenly is caught in a great whirlpool. He realizes he can’t row his boat out of the maelstrom and so he begins to study the action of the maelstrom. He observes that certain kinds of materials are sucked down into it and never return while other kinds pop up again. He attaches himself to one of these recurring objects and survives. This is pattern recognition. My point is: to understand the process is an indispensable way of coping with information overload. 

The Medium is the Massage, 1967
The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media -– movies, Telstar, flight -– far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage. (14)

The Medium is the Massage, 1967
“I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculation upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below.” In his amusement born of rational detachment from his own situation, Poe’s mariner in “The Descent into the Maelstrom” staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool. His insight offers a possible stratagem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl. (150)

Playboy Interview, 1969
The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems (…) are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. (…) But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing — rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.

Playboy Interview, 1969
The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ — Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

McLuhan to The Listener, 1971
Poe provided clues for ascending from The Maelstrom (Letters 443)

Take Today, 1972
The following chapters explore both the gradual variations and the sudden transformations that occur in the figure-ground interplay of man and his artifacts, as each remakes the other. Our chief resources are the gripes and jokes, the problems and breakdowns, of managers themselves; for therein lie the solutions and breakthroughs via pattern recognition of the processes involved. Managing The ‘Ascent’ from the Maelstrom today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point. (13)

Reschooling Ivan Illich,2 1972
Poe’s sailor, as he became engulfed by the vast ‘strom’ began to study its action. He discovered the key to the structure of the strom when he perceived the type of object that reappeared after having been sucked down into the vortex. Attaching himself to one of these recurrent objects, he survived.

Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973
[Poe’s sailor] survived by pattern recognition. He perceived [in] the action of the strom, that there were certain objects which recurred and survived. He attaches himself to the recurring objects and survives. (…) Poe hit upon the key to the electric age, programming from effects in order to anticipate cause.

Art as Survival in the Electric Age 1973
“It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-strom.
“By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way — so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of splinters — but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed (…) I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent; – the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere; – the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly (…)
“There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the broken yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station.
“I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. (…)
“The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale – as you see that I did escape – and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say – I will bring my story quickly to conclusion.”3

Man and Media, 19754
Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” had tremendous influence on the nineteenth-century poets and symbolists like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others. In this story, Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the strom, and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of [their] consequences, of [our] destruction [by them]. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we’re involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.

Man and Media, 1975
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.

Spiral – Man as the Medium, 1976
spiralling amidst the archetypes of human logic and ingenuity (…)  the labyrinth of the creative process. 

Global Village and the Tetrad, 19775
Edgar Allen Poe, one of the key figures in the origins of symbolism and of great influence on Baudelaire and Europe, was very much aware of the technology of his time. In fact in his famous story of the Maelstrom he insisted that art made possible survival by pattern recognition. In the story of the Maelstrom his sailor — caught in a great whirlpool while out fishing — began to study this vast thing in which he was caught and he noticed that some things disappeared downward and other things reappeared and came up. He attached himself to one of these reappearing objects and survived. This is the allegory that Poe presents to the world of the function of art in society, the function of pattern recognition and the function of anticipating effects with causes.

The Possum and the Midwife, 1978 6
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.

  1. As ‘Editorial Assistant’ at the Sewanee Review, Brinley Rhys filled in as its editor in 1946 after Allen Tate resigned and before John Palmer was appointed as the new editor. ↩
  2. Unpublished lecture at St Joseph College, October 16, 1972. ↩
  3. Anticipating Andy Kaufman, who began reading The Great Gatsby on Saturday Night Live in 1978, McLuhan read this entire segment of The Maelstrom in this April 9 1973 lecture (‘Art as Survival in the Electric Age’, Understanding Me, 2003, 207-224, here 211-212). McLuhan had premiered the skit twenty years earlier in his 1954 lecture, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, when he read an even longer passage from Cesare Zavattini. In 1975 he was still at it: a single quotation from Martin Heidegger took up 10% of his ‘Man and Media’ lecture (Understanding Me, 2003, 278-298, here 289-291). (The lecture is misidentified in Understanding Me as being from 1979 instead of 1975.) ↩
  4. ‘1979’ per Understanding Me. But the date should be 1975. ↩
  5. Lecture at Johns Hopkins University. ↩
  6. ‘The Possum and the Midwife’ was a lecture given in 1978 at the University of Idaho. It was printed there in a brochure with this title. It was then reprinted as ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’ in New Literary History, 10:3, 1979, 557-580. ↩

Innis to McLuhan February 26, 1951

This letter from Harold Innis to McLuhan is included in an online exhibit (since taken down) of McLuhan and Innis materials mounted by Library and Archives Canada:
Its February 26, 1951 date is important since it throws light on the famous March 14, 1951 letter (Letters 220-223) from McLuhan to Innis which we have only as a ‘rewrite’. Because Innis apologizes for his slow reply to McLuhan’s original note, it may be guessed that that note was sent to Innis either in January 1951 or already late in 1950. 

Feb 26 1951

Dear McLuhan,

Needless to say I was very much interested in your letter and, if you have no objections, I would like in have copies typed for circulation to one or two of our mutual friends.

I would like to see your views elaborated since they seem very important [and] could be used as a basis for general discussion. I was interested in your remarks on Deutsch1 and his views as expressed in your pamphlet.  I would be very pleased if you would put me on your list of people receiving copies of the mimeographed sheet.

I am sorry not to have answered your letter at an earlier date, but I have only recently escaped from the demands of the Royal Commission.

With many thanks,

Yours ever, HAI

  1. The reference is to Karl Deutsch (1912–1992), ‘Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge‘, presented as a lecture in 1948 at the ninth ‘Symposium of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion’ and printed in 1950 in Goals for American Education, A Symposium, ed, L Bryson, L Finkelstein, R.M. MacIver, pp 55-139. McLuhan was apparently sent the off-print by his friend, Sigfried Giedion — an offprint of this same article is to be found in Giedion’s papers in Zurich. (McLuhan and Giedion met in the spring of 1943 in St Louis when Giedion lectured there.) Giedion was a visiting scholar at MIT in 1950, where he was a colleague of Deutsch and Norbert Wiener. (In a October 26, 1951 letter to Giedion, McLuhan records: “Friends of mine gave me great pleasure in reporting some of your lectures at MIT last year.”)  It was probably through the Giedion-MIT connection that McLuhan and Wiener would come to correspond in 1951-52 and Deutsch would write a review of Innis’s Bias of Communication in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science in 1952. The topic of Deutsch’s paper, ‘Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge‘ was, of course, a central interest of McLuhan during his whole career, but particularly in the two decades from 1940 to 1960. ↩

Cleanth Brooks on the Maelstrom

….even if you never wrote another [poem] I should still be in favor of publishing it. It would be the phoenix of modern poetry. (Allen Tate to Cleanth Brooks, September 17, 1944)1

…the poetic process as revealed by Poe and the symbolists was the unexpected and unintentional means of reestablishing the basis of Catholic humanism.
(Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)2

Although nothing is more common in McLuhan research than to suggest Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom as a, or even the key to his work, there is general ignorance about just when and just how this story came to his particular notice and about the place it was to have in his project.

When McLuhan left Cambridge in 1936 to begin teaching English, first as a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin and then in a faculty position at St Louis University, he was a dedicated distributist3 and a follower of the F.R. Leavis-Scrutiny line of the Cambridge English school. Both of these attachments were anchored in his conviction that rigorous thought necessarily enacts (or re-enacts) a bond with the social and cultural tradition.4

Both of these commitments led him to seek out association with the American ‘new critics’. On the one hand, the American distributist movement led by John Rawe, SJ, a colleague of McLuhan at SLU in 1937 (but soon to be assigned elsewhere, apparently on account of a serious illness which would eventually claim his life), had sought common cause with the Agrarians at a combined convention in Nashville in 1936.5 On the other hand, the distinguished southern poets and  so-called ‘new critics’ who participated in the Agrarian movement and who attended this convention (like Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate) saw themselves as allied with the Cambridge English school and especially (though not without reservations similar to those of McLuhan) with the work of I.A. Richards.6

On both counts, McLuhan sought out intellectual and personal association with the new critics7 and by the middle 1940s was close enough with Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate that he visited them at their homes in Baton Rouge and in Sewanee (Tennessee) in 1945 from Windsor.8  As Brooks recorded to Tate (June 27, 1945):

Marshall McLuhan has written of seeing you and the pleasant time that he had at Sewanee. We were delighted with him here.

The association with Tate, then the editor of Sewanee Review, provided McLuhan with an outlet for the majority of his early publications.  The friendship with Brooks was closer on a personal level and would lead to a very frequent correspondence and an exchange of students between the two in the 1940s and 50s. 

Now Poe held a special place for the new critics in a series of respects. He was a southerner who was yet prized for his modernity by the symbolists in France, particularly by Baudelaire, the translator of Poe’s works into French. (The idea that the tradition could be defended and re-energized by the ultra-modern would, of course, be central to McLuhan following his second conversion after 1950.)  Poe’s high valuation of Coleridge agreed with their own. And Poe’s popular works were prized by them both as imaginative reactions to industrialism and as attempts to reach beyond the literati to the world at large.

It was in this context that McLuhan wrote his essays, ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ (Sewanee Review, 1944)9 and ‘Footsteps in the Sands of Crime’ (Sewanee Review, 1946).10 He had been led to Poe around this time through his work and association with the new critics, and this, in turn, would lead to his engagement with the symbolists and to his reengagement, via the symbolists, with Eliot, Pound and Joyce.

Now just when McLuhan was writing his first essay on Poe, Brooks was writing a poem (not one of his usual occupations)11 on Poe’s Maelstrom:

Maelstrom

Cleanth Brooks

“At first I could not make out what he meant — but soon a hideous thought flashed upon me. I dragged my watch from its fob. It was not going. I glanced at its face by the moonlight, and then burst into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean. It had run down at seven o’clock! We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Strom was in full fury!” — From Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom”

Then when the terror is at its height, you hurl
The useless watch away, fling time away,
Having no more to do with time, and watch
The scudding circles of the empty spray
That are not empty — are competent and clutch
The abandoned rudder, and firm it to their whorl.

Geared to the whirlpool now, destruction’s dial,
The fool can read — the fool that runs, that speeds
On the dial’s hurrying face, knows what’s o’clock,
Himself the second hand, at first hand reads
The timepiece Braille-wise past strained eyes’ denial
Like the scared mouse that climbed inside the clock.

The gleaming funnel into nothing shines
As black as mahogany, as brittle as ice,
Down which the fluid moonlight steadily pours
Past spinning flotsam, past concentric lines
Of ordered wreck, to spill on what far floors
Beneath. You wipe the spindrift from your eyes.

But now, committed to time’s enterprise,
Your boat itself can teach the sought-for poise,
As, neatly tilted to the spinning walls —
Adjusted in an instant to hell’s laws —
It rights itself before your dazzled eyes,
And like a delicate water-fly clings and crawls.

And tranced by the murderous organ-roar, or cleared
By the monstrous centrifuge, the chilling brain
Is hardened to a screen across which run
The pretty patterns: spar, green branch, broached tun,
Smashed dory, orange-crate, each carefully steered
And keeping like a racer, each his lane.

And you, the railbird, loll and eye the track
That’s lightning fast, the field of wreck that’s slow.
You back the rakish derelict to beat
The bluff Dutch brig
And lose! But win the heat,
For your own boat, now on her easiest tack,
Creeps past both downward toward the spume below.

And then you see! Prepare to abandon ship,
Explain to the frantic brother, your clumsy hands
Futilely gesturing physics. But the leap
Asks too much of his mind; the tilting boat
Is the sole formula he understands.
He shouts you down with screams from the mute throat.

But hands keep up their argument until
Your brain, now tingling like the rat’s gray fur
Alive with prescience, hauls them from the craft
Onto the polished water that does not spill
Or foam like water, is darker and thicker far
Than the thinned blood that rides your crazy raft.

But is the expedient desperate enough?
You have abandoned everything but hope
That scuds too fast — that would anticipate
The last gyrations down the nether slope
And after, when the spent vortex shall slough
Its fury off, and like a flower dilate.

Yet hug hope to you like the empty cask
And strictly purge the brain as dry as cork
That it may bob, dry-shod, outside the gates
Of the abyss, may bob, and dip, and lurk
Above the false rainbows of spume that mask
The final gyres of Dante and of Yeats.

Who knows the whirlpool’s season or the hour
That ripens it to peace? Who thinks to catch
Time’s phoenix on her nest? Not even the fool
With the fool’s luck. Yet stare; prepare to watch —
Since nothing’s left but staring — the calm floor
Ascend, the surge become the stagnant pool.12 

Brooks’s poem appeared in the Sewanee Review, volume 54, issue 1, 1946. It was later that same year in volume 54, issue 4 of the Review that McLuhan would first appeal to the Maelstrom in ‘Footsteps in the Sands of Crime’.

 

  1. Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate Collected Letters 1933-1976, ed Alphonse Vinh, 1998, 114. In 1944 Tate, a longtime close friend of Brooks, was then the new editor of the Sewanee Review. ↩
  2. Reprinted in The Medium and the Light, 1999, 153-174, here 157. ↩
  3. Cf, Letters 27 (October 1934), 37 (November 1934), 43 (December 1934), 46 (December 1934), 48 (December 1934), 62 (February 1935) and 68-69 (May, 1935). ↩
  4. Future posts will detail his thinking as it developed in the 1930s around this conviction, particularly in reference to his encounter with Chesterton. ↩
  5. Cf, Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century, by Peter McDonough, 1992, 518n66: “that year (1936) Rawe had attended a meeting of the Agrarians in Nashville that promoted closer ties between the Americans and the English Distributists. (…) Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate were among the Southern luminaries (attending). (…) Rawe and several of the Distributists contributed essays in 1936 to Who Owns America?, edited by Tate and Herbert Agar.” ↩
  6. As late as 1973, Brooks contributed an essay to the IAR Festschrift of that year, I.A. Richards, Essays In His Honor. ↩
  7. Other not unimportant factors were McLuhan’s 1939 marriage to a southern belle, Corinne Lewis from Fort Worth, and his teaching position in St Louis, 1937-1944, a border city with considerable southern sympathy. Further, McLuhan understood that Canada and the south had comparable relations to the north, aka industrial, America. ↩
  8. This trip would have represented a not inconsiderable outlay for McLuhan at this time — a measure of its importance to him. Corinne was pregnant again (their twin girls would be born in October that year) and he was teaching at Assumption which was almost a high school compared to SLU, where McLuhan had been teaching, or LSU, where Brooks was teaching.  Marchand: “Certainly after he arrived (in Windsor) in 1944, McLuhan felt that he was sinking into what he called ‘a little backwater in a stagnant stream’ (the “stagnant stream” being Canada). He discovered that students in his day classes were even more lethargic and dull-witted than the students at St. Louis — a harsh assessment considering that he felt he had not had any good students in his last years at St. Louis. Even the physical setting was unfortunate. His heart must have sank when (in Windsor) he first walked into the old wooden barracks, once used to house R.C.A.F. trainees, warmed by a coal furnace, where he was to teach.” (The Medium and the Messenger, 81) ↩
  9. Sewanee Review 52(1): 24-33, 1944. ↩
  10. Sewanee Review, 54(4), 617-634, 1946. ↩
  11. In a March 1, 1945 note to Tate, Brooks calls his poem “the first in 15 years”. ↩
  12. ‘Maelstrom’, Cleanth Brooks, Sewanee Review, 54(1), 1946, 116-118. Although written in 1944, Brook’s poem was published only in 1946 due to Tate’s misgivings about it which Brooks seems subsequently to have come to share. See Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate Collected Letters 1933-1976, 110-118.  The poem is reprinted in the Collected Letters at 265-267. ↩

Richards and Havelock before 1947

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I.A. Richards and Eric Havelock became colleagues at Harvard in 1947. How their personal relationship developed thereafter may be seen in the dedication Havelock (now chair of the classics department at Yale) prefaced to his contribution to the 1973 Festschrift for Richards:

For Ivor Richards, revered friend and former colleague, who in all that he has taught and written has held a lamp for us to see by. (259)

Havelock’s essay for Richards was titled ‘The Sophistication of Homer’. Originally, this was a public lecture he gave at UT on January 31, 1946 (as recorded at the time in the UT Monthly, January 1946 (Vol 46, Issue 4). While it is clear from contemporary references in the 1973 essay that it somewhat updated the lecture, a 1948 UTQ review by Havelock1 makes it equally clear that the essay must largely have reproduced the lecture — the examples used in the review to illustrate “the sophistication of Homer” are just those of the ‘later’ essay.

Part of Havelock’s purpose in contributing this early lecture to the Festschrift may have been to recall that time in 1946 when he and Richards first became acquainted.2 In that 1946 year, prior to his appointment at Harvard, Havelock was a guest lecturer there — a position which functioned both as a recruiting tool and as a test run. During this time, Havelock’s published scholarship, and some of his unpublished manuscripts like his Homer lecture, had presumably been supplied to Harvard for use in its evaluation process.

However that may be, by 1947 Havelock’s work was well enough known to Richards3  that he could observe in a BBC Third Programme radio broadcast in October of that year on ‘The Spoken and the Written Word’4:

Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself. (Complementarities, 204)5 

Going back from 1947, it seems that Havelock, at least, had long studied Richards’s work, probably beginning already as a student at Cambridge. In those years, 1922-1926, Richards was a popular lecturer in the nascent English School and had published The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), both with C.K. Ogden, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Science and Poetry6 (1926).  For his part, Havelock, when he began his university studies at Cambridge in 1922, was already a practising and even published poet. As he notes in his preface to The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939), whose first half consists of “imitations” of poems by Catullus:

If apology is needed for a book which has been a labour of love rather than learning, I may plead that the discovery of the charms of Catullan lyric has been my diversion ever since my schooldays. Some of the responsibility for this must rest with W. H. Balgarnie, of Leys School7, who as my form-master once encouraged my early attempts at imitation. I believe, indeed, that the fourteenth [poem] in this collection appeared in the school magazine…(viii)

Then, once Havelock began his teaching career in Canada in 1926 (at Acadia University, until 1929, thereafter at UT) his first publications were poems in The Canadian Forum. For a Cambridge man writing and publishing poetry in the 1920’s, Richards’s work could hardly not have been of intense interest.

In any case, there is clear evidence of Havelock’s continuing engagement with Richards. The first essay of commentary in The Lyric Genius of Catullus is titled ‘The Canons of Catullan Crititicism’ — an echo of Richards’s 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism, which Havelock would specifically reference in 1946 (as detailed below).

The Catullus book goes on to cite Poe’s poem To Helen as an “analogy” to the Catullan Lesbia (130). Havelock then returned to this same matter in 1943 in a short contribution to The Classical Weekly (Vol. 36, No. 21 , pp. 248-249) titled ‘Homer, Catullus and Poe’. Significantly, this piece begins:

Readers of [John Livingston] Lowes‘ Road to Xanadu are aware that poets sometimes build highly imaginative structures out of miscellaneous materials recollected from the books they have read. Poe’s famous address To Helen seems to be a poem of this order.

These lines look both backwards and forwards.  Backwards, not only to Havelock’s reference to Poe in his Catullus a few years before, but also to Richards’s Imagination in Coleridge (1934) which treats Lowes’ Road to Xanadu as a rival attempt to investigate imagination in Coleridge.8 And forwards, because Havelock, in a kind of sweeping swansong to his almost two decades at UT, would publish a 3-part essay in the first volume of Phoenix, the new journal of the Ontario (later Canadian) Classical Association (of which he was the founding president). The essay was titled ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’9, clearly signaling that Lowes’ Road to Xanadu had been its inspiration.  Here, too, however, the theme had already been anticipated in the 1939 Catullus:

Virgil responded to [the novi poetae] readily, not only in his occasional pieces, but in his Ecologues and above all in the great episode of Orpheus and Eurydice which closes the Fourth Georgic. This tale of romantic regions under the sea, of passionate love and tragic separation, is too rarely recognized for what it is — an example of what the epyllion could become in Latin when handled with emotional sincerity and sure taste. Constructed on the sort of mechanical plan perfected by Callimachus, of a plot within a plot, (…), it yet manages to combine romantic mystery, prettiness, passion and pathos in a kind of literary tapestry. (172)

Havelock’s 1946-1947 Virgil essay is exactly a detailed exposition of this “tapestry” from the Fourth Georgic, using Lowes’ katabasis theme (aka the road to Xanadu) for its structure.

The Catullus book, like the 3-part Virgil essay taking off from it, would have been in the package of texts submitted by Havelock to Harvard and the word “sincerity” here would have struck Richards as a tip of the hat to his work. And, indeed, Richards’s 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism is specifically cited in the essay.10

Meanwhile, the word “epyllion” in this passage will strike the reader of McLuhan as potentially of great interest, since he reverted to the form throughout his career and sometimes gave the impression that practically anything of aesthetic value necessarily exemplified it. In fact, the “epyllion” and “little epic” are referenced several times in Havelock’s Catullus (he notes on 186,n7 that “the story-within-a-story was a device of the epyllion”) and again, repeatedly, in ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’. 

Now this essay from Havelock was published in McLuhan’s first year at UT in a new journal published by the university press.  This would already have attracted general notice. But its motivating force, the first president of the classics association publishing the journal, namely Havelock, was already at Harvard as a guest lecturer and was no doubt tipped to leave UT permanently. At a time when the classics department was already sorely depleted by the death of Charles Cochrane in 1945 and the poor health of E.T. Owen (who would die early in 1948), the prospective loss of such an energetic figure as Havelock would doubtless have aroused further comment.

Havelock’s essay would, however, have attracted McLuhan’s notice in particular. In that same year of 1946, he had published a cross-disciplinary essay of his own (‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’) in another classics periodical (The Classical Journal).  Then, when he published ‘Henry IV, A Mirror for Magistrates’ in UTQ, 1948, the Owen review by Havelock (referenced above) was in the same issue. Here Havelock described his ‘oral encyclopedia’ theory of illiterate culture as contrasted to the textual information storage and resulting social forms constituting a literate one. This encounter was surely an important milestone on McLuhan’s intellectual journey and one that would have sent him to other work by Havelock like the Phoenix pieces (if he had not already seen them).

For reasons to be detailed in a future post, it seems manifest that McLuhan read Havelock’s Xanadu essay at some point and was deeply influenced by it, though in a different way than he was by Havelock’s review of Owen. However, absent firm dating, especially relative to his roughly contemporaneous exposure to the work of Harold Innis (who had his own relations with Havelock) and to his rereading of Joyce with Hugh Kenner, it is not possible, or not yet possible, to judge precisely how this cloud of influences functioned to rejigger his thinking. What can be said at present is only that these influences, together with others in the late 1940’s (like his introduction to cybernetics through Sigfried Giedion, his meeting and subsequent correspondence with Ezra Pound and his introduction to management theory via Bernard Muller-Thym and Peter Drucker) melded together in these years around 1950 (McLuhan turned 40 in 1951) to prompt the new directions in his work which would gradually emerge in the 1950’s.  

This process would amount to — McLuhan’s second conversion…

 

  1. Havelock reviewed The Story of the Iliad by his former UT colleague E.T. Owen.  For further discussion see here. ↩
  2. Or, perhaps, this may have been when the two became better acquainted, if they had met before then — for example in their common years in Cambridge, 1922-1926. ↩
  3. The academic community in Toronto had a similar knowledge of Havelock’s work at this time. A. John Watson has recorded an anecdote from Ernest Sirluck about a conversation he had with E.T Owen prior to March 1948 (when Owen died): “At this period there was much discussion among classicists concerning the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people. Sirluck recalls a stimulating conversation with Owen on this subject, with (Harold) Innis as a quiet, note-taking witness.” ↩
  4. Recorded on September 17, 1947, broadcast on October 5 that year. A transcript was published in The Listener, Vol xxxviii, Nr 977, October 16, 1947, 669-670. A slightly revised version appeared thirty years later as ‘Literature, Oral-Aural and Optical’ in Complementarities, (ed) John Paul Russo, 1976, 201-208. ↩
  5. In The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939), Havelock had already observed: “Plato was right when he refused metaphysical honours to poetry. It belongs to the flux, and apologists who try to explain away Plato’s doctrine concerning poetic art merely seek to disguise this essential truth. If poetry teaches anything which is permanently valid, it does so by accident, because it may happen to deal with grave ideas which could be clearly rendered in prose…” (159). Relatedly, in his 1941 review, ‘The Riddle of Plato’s Politics’: “the so-called ‘Theory of Forms’ is justly expounded as a necessary contribution to the methodology of the sciences, both physical and social, without which they could not advance beyond the stage of barren empiricism” (Canadian Forum, April 1941, 15-19, here 16). These observations should not be taken to valorize the “permanently valid” and “science” over “the flux” and “barren empiricism”, however. Havelock was himself a published poet and appreciated what he called “the impermanence of poetry” (the title of a chapter in The Lyric Genius of Catullus) as an essential aspect of its value and necessity. Furthermore, as an outspoken socialist, Havelock did not at all discount what he found in Dewey — that “man’s significance is to be discovered not in cloistered concentration of thought, but in his daily attempt to control his material environment, with plough and test tube and machine tool” (‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, The Canadian Forum, July 1939, 121-123, here 121). Finally, looking back on his career in 1987 shortly before his death in 1988 Havelock concluded: “The gifts of Greece on which I have sought to place an accent concern technology and the social and political sciences rather than the realm of metaphysical and moral values — not on beauty, truth, and goodness of the Platonic model but on the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication” (Literacy and Orality, 19). As will be treated in detail in further posts, Havelock sought to give just weight to both orality and literacy and opposed any attempt to tip the balance in one way or the other. ↩
  6. If ‘science and poetry’ are taken as modes of information storage, the title of this short 1926 work from Richards may be seen to capture Havelock’s life work  in nuce. ↩
  7. Havelock studied at the Leys School in Cambridge in the school-years 1917 to 1921. ↩
  8. In the meantime, Richards had joined Lowes in the English Department at Harvard. ↩
  9. ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’: (1) The poet of the Orpheus-fantasy, Phoenix, 1:1, 3-8, 1946; (2) The Laboratory of a Poet’s Mind, Phoenix, 1:2, 2-7, 1946; (3) The Waters of the Great World, Phoenix, Supplement to Volume One, 9-18, 1947. ↩
  10. In ‘(2) The Laboratory of a Poet’s Mind’, p 2, full reference in the previous note. ↩

Havelock on the interpretation of all epochs

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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. (McLuhan, ‘Sight, Sound, and Fury’, Commonweal, April 1954)

this process of arrest and retracing, which has been consciously followed by poets since the end of the eighteenth century (…) provides the very technique of empathy which permits intimate insight into the processes and impulses behind products utterly alien to our own immediate experience. In fact, the Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer [of human experience and so of all art and science] represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically. (…) 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. (McLuhan, ‘Coleridge As Artist’, 1957)1

In 1987, less than a year before his death, Eric Havelock presented a lecture on “The oral-literate equation: a formula for the modern mind”. Here he noted:

The gifts of Greece on which I have sought to place an accent concern technology and the social and political sciences rather than the realm of metaphysical and moral values — [an accent] not on beauty, truth, and goodness of the Platonic model but on the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication. (Literacy and Orality, 19)2

To understand what Havelock meant here, and also what he did not mean, it is helpful to go back 50 years to his review of John Dewey’s work in 1939.3

On the one hand, Havelock approved of Dewey’s practical approach:

Here is the philosopher of the machine age, the modern Socrates who has striven to call down philosophy from heaven to earth. For a generation he has proclaimed (…) that the proper object of philosophic inquiry is the day’s work, that man’s significance is to be discovered not in cloistered concentration of thought, but in his daily attempt to control his material environment, with plough and test tube and  machine tool. (121)

…conditioned by the American scene, Dewey turns upon the classic philosophies of the old world and attacks them for divorcing “knowing” from “doing,” for failing to come to terms with the machine age. “They brought with them the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality, of which alone true science is possible, and of an inferior world of changing things with which experience and practical matters are concerned. They glorified the invariant at the expense of change (…). They bequested the notion, which has ruled philosophy since the time of the Greeks, that its office is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgements, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise.” (121)

Dewey’s turn against “the classic philosophies of the old world” could not, however, keep him from re-enacting them:4

He represents in modern times that same revolt against metaphysics, and against the separation of [universal] ends from [particular] means, which the Epicureans represented in antiquity. But he no more than they can really solve the dilemma of directing the activity of human life by [particular] ends which on his premises are to be inferred from the very activity [or means] which is to be directed. (123)

The convoluted implications of this passage will be treated in future posts.5 Suffice it to note here only that Havelock presents the view in it that the forms of human experience are both plural and recurrent. As he observed in his contemporary monograph, The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939):

true originality is to be found not in new form, but in a powerful spirit; (…) new wine is ever poured into old bottles. (135)

That is, the forms of human expression constitute an ideal order (comparable to the ideal order of the table of chemical elements) that is always available: the store of “old bottles”. It is the office of a “complete” or “powerful spirit” to confront the possibilities and puzzles of that plurality:

If the complete philosopher — and history has admittedly produced few such — is one prepared to accept the full paradox of man’s life, steeping himself in the flux of vital activity and manipulation of men and things only to fly from the flux again in order to separate his formulas, contemplate them in detachment. and ask, What of permanence is here? then Dewey is not a complete philosopher. His very “realism” has had the effect of making him the prophet of one particular historical epoch rather than the interpreter of all epochs. (123)

Interpreting epochs in their fundamental plurality, instead of being the mouthpiece of “one particular historical epoch”, is the deep intent of Havelock’s focus on “the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication” (1987 lecture).  His thinking may be seen in terms of passage he cites from Dewey:  

“The significant difference is that of two types of possible operation, material and symbolic. This distinction when frozen into the dogma of two orders of being, existence and essence, gives rise to the notion that there are two types of logic (…), the formal and the material, of which the formal is higher and the more fundamental. In truth, the formal development is a specialized offshoot of material thinking. It is derived ultimately from acts performed and constitutes an extension of such acts…” (122-123)

Havelock could not endorse this view as stated by Dewey without an important qualification to the penultimate sentence of the passage as follows:

“In truth, the formal development is a specialized offshoot of [some particular type of] material thinking.”

That is, “material thinking” is no singular. If formality is to be understood as the correlate of material behavior, then material behavior, in turn, must be understood in its fundamental plurality. And it is just this that Havelock proposed to do by investigating “the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication”. Hence the significance of Havelock’s comment in his lecture:

Observing (…) that Plato’s text contained an explicit rejection of both Homer and Greek drama as unsuitable for the curriculum of higher education that his academy was designed to offer, I concluded that a great divide in Greek culture had begun to occur, perhaps at the time when Plato was born [c. 425 BC] or a little earlier, which separated an oralist society relying mainly on metrical and recited literature for the content of its cultural knowledge to a literate society that was to rely in the future on prose as the vehicle of serious reflection, research, and record.  (Literacy and Orality, 23)

By “the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication” Havelock did not mean only the grammar, vocabulary, phonology etc of a certain place and time (though he certainly did not consider these unimportant), but how language was used in carrying out the full range of social functions (schooling, worshiping, entertaining, commercial trading, ruling, warring, etc) in their material particularity. The divide between oral and literate Greece emerged when the full spectra of these functions were compared over time.

Prerequisite to such analysis was, on the one hand, acknowledgement of the material differences between societies in space and time as manifested in them by “the nuts and bolts of linguistic communication”. No such acknowledgement, no appreciation of their individual particularity.  On the other hand, however, there must be communication across such divides if comparative analysis of them is to be possible. It is with intimations of just such inter-cultural communication that Havelock concludes his Dewey review using, however, the rubrics of “pessimism” and “failure”:

In American capitalist society during its expanding period, the interaction of ends and means, of ideas and functions, seemed automatic, but as man progressively extends scientific technique to the purpose of dominating his fellow men, the activities of totalitarian communities are going to force the thoughtful to turn with renewed attention to that old fashioned question. What after all is the chief end of man? Put in this form Mr. Dewey would probably deny that the question has much relevance. His philosophy has grappled more completely than any other with the analysis of daily habit and operation. But it lacks that dash of pessimism, that sense of failure in the midst of success, which has turned many a thinker since Plato towards the notion that the good for man cannot be fully comprehended within the span of his mortal life. (123)

Such “pessimism” and “failure” have to do with the inevitable lack of “success” of any “one particular historical epoch”, or any one “span of (…) mortal life”, measured against against the immensity of cosmic space and time.  Or even against the full range of potential human experience.  Or even against what the each of us could and should have done — but failed to do. Havelock would examine this question at length in 1950 and would call its dawning realization the “crucifixion of intellectual man”.

But for Havelock — and, indeed for Innis and McLuhan as well (and it is just here where the knot of their complicated relations must above all be illuminated) — consciousness of limit and of the resulting relativity of all human experience was not debilitating and depressing, but enabling and energizing. For once “the  great divide” between forms of particular material life were exposed and appreciation exercised for each of them across the divide, it became possible for the first time to correlate the effects of human action, especially war and other sorts of strife, with their causes in those forms. (It is just this new possibility in human culture that McLuhan called the movement from the ivory tower to the control tower.) 

The requirement, as Havelock put it, was to abdicate being “the prophet of one particular historical epoch rather than the interpreter of all epochs”. And the key to this, in turn, was awareness of the “great divide” that both limits all the forms of particular human life and enables their comprehensive study.

If such study may well be called “communication”, namely across the “great divide” between the forms of human life, the ground is exposed for the idea that it is exactly some particular type of communication that structures every material culture and even every moment of every individual human life. Exactly because communication is ground in this way, deeper than all the forms of human life, and so both linking and delimiting them, so does it figure in their “nuts and bolts”. Innis (b 1894), Havelock (b 1903) and McLuhan (b 1911) shared this fundamental determination.

 

  1. Reprinted in The Interior Landscape, 1969, 115-133, here  116. ↩
  2. Compare Havelock already in a book review in 1941: “Conforming to the demands of a historical interpretation, the author very properly devotes well over half his work to establishing Plato’s context in the unfolding process of Greek society, a process conditioned by economic forces and determined by deep underlying class conflicts. (…) This account of Plato and his times has one great merit: it is synoptic, and at the same time dynamic. Greek history is presented not as a series of (separate) events (linked only by their chronology), but as an organic process in which Plato’s philosophy appears not as an isolated creation, but as part of a pattern of Greek behavior.” (‘The Riddle of Plato’s Politics’, The Canadian Forum, April 1941, 15-19, here 15, 16) ↩
  3. ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, review of Intelligence in the Modern World, (an anthology of) John Dewey’s Philosophy, edited by Joseph Ratner, Canadian Forum 19:22, 121-123, July 1939.  All page references below, unless otherwise noted, are to this review. ↩
  4. The same point both is central to McLuhan’s 1943 Nashe thesis and to his 1946 (originally 1944) ‘Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’. ↩
  5. Nietzsche showed already in the 1880s that the reduction of ends to means abolished not only ends but means as well: “With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!”. ↩

Innis on the pulp and paper industry 1937

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In her ‘Economic History and Economic Theory: Innis’s Insights’1, Irene (Biss) Spry writes of a time when she was working closely with Innis:

His [Innis’s] work on the pulp and paper industry never reached publication as a book but appeared as an article in The Encyclopedia of Canada (1937, vol. 5, 176-85). The conclusion of this article makes it clear that this study was leading him into his later work on communications. (107)

Her reference is to the following concluding remarks to Innis’s Encyclopedia of Canada article, ‘Pulp-and-Paper Industry’:

The demand for newsprint has been closely dependent on advertising activity and on the efficiency of publishing houses in securing increased circulation. Wars have been important in increasing the consumption of newsprint and in increasing the efficiency of the printing press in securing increased speed. The radio tends to be complementary and competitive, and demands for economy have led to the narrowing of the margin of newspapers, to standardization of size to 20″ (8 columns of 12 ems), and to the emergence of smaller-size papers such as the tabloid. Expansion of press services and of advertising agencies has accompanied the marked improvements in communication and in the distribution of newspapers. The metropolitan press has steadily encroached on the papers of smaller centres, forcing amalgamation or abandonment. Compulsory education and the decline of illiteracy have been basic factors in the development of the industry. The power of the press [has been] increased by effective organization and expansion of large units (Hearst and Howard Scripps in the United States; Southam and Sifton in Canada)… (184)

Spry’s point seems to be that Innis here broaches factors in social history — war, education, entertainment, media — in addition to his usual concentration on more purely economic factors (treated, indeed, earlier in this same encyclopedia entry) like the availability of raw materials, access to water transportation, labour costs and financing.  And just as he had long been driven to investigate the complex inter-relations of the latter in his staple studies, so, Spry could see, would he now be drawn to understand the interconnections of the former in somewhat analogous fashion.

The result would be his communication studies where the new staple, apparently drawing on Eric Havelock’s work on the Greeks, was to be information storage over space and time. (For further consideration of this crucial period in Innis’ career, 1935-1937, see here.)

  1. In Harold Innis in the New Century, ed C.R. Acland and W. J Buxton, 1999, 105-113. ↩

Havelock on the ‘oral-literate equation’

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Eric Havelock died on April 4, 1988.  Less than a year before, in June 1987, he participated in a 3-day conference in Toronto on ‘Literacy and Orality’.1 

Havelock’s lecture, titled ‘The oral-literate equation: a formula for the modern mind’, amounted to his last word on this topic. This 1987 lecture forms a book-end to Havelock’s introduction, almost forty years before, to his translation of Prometheus by Aeschylus (1950). In the lecture, the “modern mind” is said to be undermined by “the dilemmas posed by the deconstructionist methods of interpretation” (17-18).  This corresponds in the earlier essay to “the crucifixion of intellectual man”, which is depicted as deconstruction on a universal scale:

Our relationship to time and space is no more a matter of metaphysics but of precise [scientific] calculation, and the calculation yields an equation which crushes us by its reduction of our stature. This is the new burden we bear. We learn not only that we are alone, that in time we are a temporary event, but also that the territory on which we have a foothold [namely, earth itself] is like a boulder on a mountainside, not to be distinguished from a thousand others; capable of being kicked [down the slope at any time] into insignificance. The knowledge is too much for us, and it may yet kill us. We may end ourselves (…) because we think we have nothing left in ourselves to respect. In any case, our species will come to an end [at some point, having been merely] a tiny insignificant event (…) — so utterly ephemeral is our whole story. To know these things, and to live with this knowledge, is the special burden of our age.2

Seventy-five years before, Nietzsche had set out a comparable vision:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe (…) there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet it still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. (…) It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence. 3

In his 1987 lecture, Havelock suggests that “the rediscovery of the rules of orality may be part of the answer (…) to the dilemmas posed by the deconstructionist methods of interpretation” (17-18). The great question is, how might such an “oral-literate equation” or “formula for the modern mind” function as an “answer” in the face of the Nietzschean concerns Havelock set out in 1950? Havelock’s response to this question is given in his lecture as follows:

The competition between orality and literacy continues to flourish: It is announced in a growing chorus of publications. But has the chorus any concordance? Is there not a need to construct some overall pattern into which these various perceptions can fit — some overarching body of theory covering the oral-literate equation both as it has operated historically and as it may still operate in the present; a theory that will state certain fundamentals of the situation to which all investigators can relate themselves? (19, emphasis added.)4

Havelock also gives some clues as to the sort of “oral-literate equation” which might present such an “overarching body of theory” or “fundamentals (…) to which all investigations can relate”:

The two, orality and literacy, are sharpened and focused against each other, yet can be seen as still interwoven (…). It is of course, a mistake to polarize these as mutually exclusive. Their relationship is one of mutual, creative tension, one that has both a historical dimension (…) and a contemporary one (…). The tension can sometimes be perceived as pulling one way in favor of a restored orality and then the other way in favor of replacing it altogether by (…) literacy. (11)

There are two keys to this suggestion:

First there must be insight into the plurality of time: “theory covering the oral-literate equation both as it has operated historically and as it may still operate in the present”, “both a historical dimension (…) and a contemporary one”.  Crossing times like these function in all scientific explanation.  On the one hand there are unfolding events in linear time, like rust accumulating on an iron fence; on the other, there are chemical laws which account for these events in an ‘if>then’ chronology of their own: Fe + O => Fe2O3 . The time of the accumulation of rust and the time of the laws governing such oxidation are different — but, as Havelock, says, they are “interwoven”.  So the accumulating rust on the iron fence occurs gradually in clock-time; but in doing so it exemplifies the chemical laws of oxidation which express themselves in a kind of ideal chronology and set out what always occurs given certain conditions. Havelock’s suggestion is simply that a comparable sort of explanation, situated at the crossing of historical and theoretical times, be exercised in and on human experience.

Second, the prerequisite to such explanation is the isolation of “fundamental” theoretical structures “to which all investigations can relate”.  The law-governed interrelation between these structures constitutes that ‘if>then’ chronology which crosses the time of historical events and provides their background explanation. Havelock’s suggestion is that the set of possible oral-literate relations be taken as fundamental to social change and that this set be envisioned as a spectrum stretching between pure orality at one end and pure literacy at the other. All the points along the spectrum between these poles would represent a correlative “tension” of the two together where “the tension can sometimes be perceived as pulling one way in favor of a restored orality and then the other way in favor of replacing it altogether by (…) literacy”.  In the middle of the spectrum, the oral and literate ‘sides’ would be evenly balanced, with neither of them having “favor” over the other. (Cf Coleridge, The Aeolian Harp: “A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light”.)

How this sort of explanation might function is described by Havelock in terms of his own experience:

Observing (…) that Plato’s text contained an explicit rejection of both Homer and Greek drama as unsuitable for the curriculum of higher education that his academy was designed to offer, I concluded that a great divide in Greek culture had begun to occur, perhaps at the time when Plato was born [c. 425 BC] or a little earlier, which separated an oralist society relying mainly on metrical and recited literature for the content of its cultural knowledge to a  literate society that was to rely in the future on prose as the vehicle of serious reflection, research, and record. (23)

This break, which has a rough analogy in the life of any individual who learns to write, showed that

the narrative requirement, the activist syntax, and the living agents required for all oral speech held in the memory could also be laid aside, replaced by a [literary] reflective syntax of definition, description, and analysis. Such was the prose of Plato and all his successors, whether philosophic, scientific, historical, descriptive, legal, or moral. European culture slowly moved over into the ambience of analytic, reflective, interpretative, conceptual prose discourse. (25)

On the one hand there was the flow of unfolding events in the Greek world between, say, 900 BC and 400 BC; on the other an underlying set of oral-literate ratios.  Havelock’s intuition was that as these ratios changed, so did Greek culture in correlative ways. It followed that such oral-literate ratios could be used to map the course of social and cultural events, just as proton-electron ratios (constituting the different chemical elements) can be used to map material events.

Havelock proposed that the work of Harold Innis was dedicated to just such a goal:

[Innis] saw the forests of his native land [being] converted into a moment’s reading on a New York subway. Recalling his own upbringing in a small town, where communication besides being personal was economical, unhurried, and to a degree reflective, he leapt to the conclusion that the mass media of modernity did not give modern man time to think. Instant news robbed him of historical sense, to look backward, and of the power to look forward, to envisage a probable future of consequences that follow from present decisions. This was the bias of modern mass communication. The technology itself encouraged a state of mind that he regretted. He set himself the historical task of pursuing the ways in which previous technologies of the word had worked to produce their corresponding social and cognitive effects. (14)

It is notable that Havelock brings together Innis’s regret at the loss of “historical sense” (the ability “to look backward and (…) forward to envisage a probable future of consequences that follow from present decisions”5) and the need for an “overarching body of theory covering the oral-literate equation” (the “task of pursuing the ways in which [oral and/or literate] technologies of the word had worked to produce their corresponding social and cognitive effects”). This  loss of an “unhurried and (…) reflective (…) historical sense” was exactly a reduction of the plurality of time as times to a singular “moment’s reading” or “instant news”, which gave no “time to think”.  The rediscovery of the plurality of time and the formulation of an “overall pattern” were therefore each necessary for the other. Neither was possible alone.

Such an “historical sense” needs to be made explicit today when “the mass media of modernity [do] not give modern man time to think”.  For time was, even in the recent past of Innis’s youth, and continuing more or less unnoticed even into the present, when “communication besides being personal was economical [ie ecological], unhurried, and to a degree reflective”. For the most part, indeed, even for “intellectual man” and the “modern mind”, life is always already lived in the crossing of times where we are all able, to greater or lesser extent, “to envisage a probable future of consequences that follow from present decisions”.

Just as chemistry did not invent new elements that were not already at hand, but instead represented the discovery of how to see what was already present before us, so Innis and Havelock proposed that we learn to study the “technologies of the word”, conceived as oral-literate ratios, as already functioning “to produce their corresponding social and cognitive effects”.

Such study would combat the “time-denying”6 effects of modern media (which include continuous war and authoritarianism); it would bond us to our past (and so exercise piety) by giving us a new respect for the “small town” thinking of our grandparents; it would relativize nihilism by exposing its presuppositions; and it would institute progressive research into human experience which would revolutionize our understanding of it as much as our understanding of the physical world has been revolutionized in the last two centuries by the discovery of its “fundamentals (…) to which all investigators can relate themselves”.

Is there not a need to construct some overall pattern into which these various perceptions can fit — some overarching body of theory covering the oral-literate equation both as it has operated historically and as it may still operate in the present; a theory that will state certain fundamentals of the situation to which all investigators can relate themselves?7 (19)

 

  1. Papers from the conference have been printed in Literacy and Orality, ed David R Olson and Nancy Torrance, 1991. All page references below, unless otherwise noted, are to this volume. ↩
  2. The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, 1950, 6. Both Innis and McLuhan took specific note of this essay by Havelock: Innis in The Strategy Of Culture (1952); McLuhan in his unpublished lecture ‘Eliot and The Manichean Myth As Poetry’ (1954). ↩
  3. ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense‘, 1873.  The German original is given here. ↩
  4. Havelock has ‘investigations’, not ‘investigators’. But ‘themselves’ would seem to require ‘investigators’ and ‘investigations’ would seem to require the passive:  ‘to which all investigations can be related’. ↩
  5. This sort of backwards and forwards prognostication is, of course, just what scientific law enables. ↩
  6. Innis, A Plea for Time, 1950. ↩
  7. Cf McLuhan to Pound, January 5, 1951, where he declares his aim “to open up inter-communication between several fields. To open eyes and ears of people in physics, anthropology, history, etc. etc., to relevant developments in the arts which concern them so that they in turn contribute their newest insights to the arts (…) to ideogram important new books in such wise as to indicate precise bearings of techniques involved in other fields. To ideogram single issues of Life, Vogue, Satevepost occasionally in order to indicate interrelations between popular and serious culture.” (Letters, 218) ↩

Havelock’s ‘Professional Technique of the Sophists’, 1940

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Havelock lectured at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in 1940.  His lecture revisited the essay he had published in the Ontario College of Education monthly magazine, The School (Secondary Edition) in May and June 1938, ‘The Significance of the Greek Sophist’.

His abstract of the lecture appeared in the Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 71 (1940), p xli:

The Professional Technique of the Sophists, by E. A. Havelock, Victoria College.

Aside from apprentice systems in the crafts and trades, fifth century Athens afforded neither a curriculum nor any institutions designed for the specific purpose of giving instruction to the adolescent youth after leaving school. The state undertook some responsibilities in this connection in the fourth century, but it is incorrect to read these back into earlier times. Hence adult character (arete) was conceived as relying on “native endowment” plus “experience” (Pindar, Theognis). However, arete did in fact rely for its communication between the generations on an arrangement which could be described as “family group association” (synousia), which brought the adolescents under regular influence if not discipline.

The sophists sought to offer both a curriculum and some organized educational discipline, i.e. lectures by professionals. But initially they also strove to preserve continuity with the past. Hence (a) they constructed formulas to reconcile “native endowment” with “instruction” (Protagoras, Democritus, Anonymus Iamblichi) and (b) they continued to describe their organized teaching in non-professional terms (epidemia, synousia, diatribe, etc.). However, their activities gradually professionalized these terms, as a comparison with fourth century usage shows. These activities were bound to precipitate a collision within the city state, both of theory and of practice. This is reflected acutely in Athenian comedy, from Cratinus onwards. The challenge to the “family group system” was dramatized as a conflict between two generations over the rights of parents. Eventually the sophists, possibly in self-defense, rationalized their claims in the form of an avowed profession with its proper technique, content and standing (Discoi, Logoi, etc.).

This fifth-century background affords a perspective by which to interpret the positions taken up by Plato and Aristotle in these educational controversies. Both philosophers were committed to positions more ambiguous than they cared to admit. On the other hand, Epicurean contubernium1 marked an attempt to return to pre-professional condition.

Of particular note is Havelock’s observation that “arete did in fact rely for its communication between the generations on an arrangement which could be described as ‘family group association’ (synousia)”.  Havelock was well aware that such inter-generational communication was necessarily oral in the centuries before the invention of the alphabet and even after its invention during the extended time of its gradual adoption throughout Greek society. What would happen in the following decade is that he would reverse his thinking between what was ground and what was figure here.  Where the oral/literate contrast was formerly seen as figured on education (and on educators like Socrates and the Sophists) as its background, now changes in education and other functions of society would be seen to figure against the background of communication modes and their associated techniques of information storage.2

So it was that by 1947 Havelock could write of 

that enormous weight of tribal baggage, of lore, precept, genealogy, custom, which the [oral] poet has to drag along in his epic. (…) Homer the encyclopaedist, the didactic recorder of oral tradition, freighted with catalogues and memories… 3

And in that same year I. A. Richards could report from Harvard:

Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself. 4

And Ernest Sirluck could report:

At this period [middle 1940s] there was much discussion among [UT] classicists concerning the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people. 5

 

  1. The epicurean contubernium was treated in an article of this name by Havelock’s colleague, Norman W. DeWitt, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 67 (1936), pp.55-63. See here ↩
  2. Six years before his death Havelock would title his 1982 collection of essays, representing a summation of his life’s work, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. ↩
  3. Havelock’s review of E.T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, UTQ, Jan 1948, 17:2, 209-211, here 211. ↩
  4. BBC Third Programme radio broadcast on October 5, 1947, ‘The Spoken and the Written Word’ (recorded on September 17, 1947). A transcript was published in The Listener, xxxviii:977, October 16, 1947, 669-670; a slightly revised version appeared thirty years later as ‘Literature, Oral-Aural and Optical’ in Complementarities, (ed) Russo, 1976, 201-208. ↩
  5. A. John Watson, Marginal Man, 297. For discussion, see here. ↩

Babe on Havelock, Innis and McLuhan

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Robert Babe’s essays on Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (in Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers, 2000) are undermined by his taking Eric Havelock and McLuhan at their word regarding the timing of their encounters with Innis.  Leaving aside the questionable readings he makes of the texts of these figures (to be considered in future posts), Babe’s work illustrates an ongoing general failure to come to grips with the facts, let alone with the meaning and significance, of Canada’s fundamental contributions to the social sciences and humanities.

Referring to Havelock’s statement in his Innis Memoir (1982) that he was “only on the edge of [Innis’s] acquaintence, not one of his close circle of friends” (Canadian Communication Thought, 376 n460), Babe concludes that “Havelock attested that while at Toronto he had little contact with Innis” (ibid 272). These are hardly the same thing and, significantly, this passage from Babe’s original essay from 2000 was excised when it was republished in 2011 in Media, Structures, and Power: The Robert E. Babe Collection. Indeed, Havelock’s statement is qualified in this same Memoir by his detailed description of some of his contacts with Innis beginning already in 1930.1 Moreover, Havelock’s account could have described many further contacts between the two: the fact that Havelock and Innis’s wife, Mary Quayle Innis, were contributing to The Canadian Forum, sometimes in the same issue, even before Havelock came to the University of Toronto from Acadia University in 1929; the fact that Innis himself, along with his wife, contributed to The Canadian Forum at a time when Havelock was not only continuing his contributions to the magazine, but had assumed a leadership role in its publication; the fact that, as described by Ernest Sirluck, “Innis used to dine regularly with faculty colleagues at Hart House” where “there was much discussion among classicists concerning the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people”2 — a topic plainly reflecting Havelock’s work.

It is evident that when Havelock reported being “only on the edge of [Innis’s] acquaintance, not one of his close circle of friends”, he was not describing the extent of their contact — which was considerable — but one aspect of its quality (or lack thereof). This was especially to be seen, given Innis’s great influence with the UT administration, in the fact that Havelock, after almost 20 years at UT, was never promoted to professor despite the acknowledged expertise of his scholarship.3 In contrast, at both Harvard and Yale Havelock became not only a distinguished professor but, in turn, chairman of the classics departments at both of these great institutions.

Given the “little contact” Babe reports between Innis and Havelock during their almost two decades together at UT, and given that McLuhan came to UT just as Havelock was leaving for Harvard4, Babe accounts for the many striking commonalities in the work of the three through the postulation that only “after leaving the University of Toronto (…) Havelock developed themes parallel to those of McLuhan”5 and Innis. This claimed chronology overlooks the Sirluck anecdote cited above and, more importantly, unaccountably ignores Havelock’s published work while he was at UT.

Here is Havelock already in 1934(!):

Dramatized conversation was a traditional method of rendering abstract ideas, as examples from the poets and historians show. Hence the “Socratic Logoi“, whether of Xenophon or Plato, owe their form to literary reasons, and not to a desire to represent the historic Socrates [who, as Havelock stressed, did not write]. It is only modern prejudice and literary fashion which prevents the fact from being appreciated.6

And, at the very end of his UT career, written in 1947 in a UTQ review of E.T. Owen’s The Story of the Iliad:

[Owen] plays down the total effect of that enormous weight of tribal baggage, of lore, precept, genealogy, custom, which the [oral] poet has to drag along in his epic. To Owen, Homer the artist is everything; but Homer the encyclopaedist, the didactic recorder of oral tradition, freighted with catalogues and memories, does not exist. This, it seems to me, actually minimizes Homer’s genius, as though he were able to work within the narrower, more controllable limits of a literate method, a Virgil or Dante or Milton armed with pen, picking his themes with nicety, not a bard operating within the great straggling medium of the [oral] saga. If the Iliad is not only astonishing but unique, it is precisely because a controlling perspective, a single point of view, has been imposed upon the most intractable materials.7

It is known that unpublished manuscripts of Havelock were circulating in Toronto at this time and, to judge by I.A. Richards’s knowledge of his orality research, also at Harvard. At a guess, these would have been from his long-time work on Socrates8 (for which he was awarded a Guggenheim scholarships in 1941 and 1943) and his January 31, 1946 public lecture in Toronto, ‘The Sophistication of Homer’9. In any case, it was surely even better known in Toronto what I.A. Richards was able to report from Harvard in a BBC broadcast in 1947: “Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself.”

In this general context, the January 1948 UTQ review by Havelock is particularly noteworthy in a series of ways. First, it is a kind of valediction to his time in the UT Classics department.  Just as he would later do in Festschrift essays for his former classics colleagues on the left, Gilbert Norwood and George Grube10, Havelock here celebrates a longtime older colleague (“Owen remains faithful to the Greek as against the modern mind”) who would die (on March 2, 1948) only a month’s time after the appearance of the review.  Second, Owen is the very colleague recalled in the anecdote from Ernest Sirluck cited above. It is plain that Owen did not first learn of Havelock’s oral culture theory from the review (since he did not live long enough after it to have the discussion recorded by Sirluck and since Sirluck left UT for the University of Chicago in 1947). Indeed, since it was Havelock’s practice to recall with his Festschrift essays some earlier significant event shared with the honoree11, it may be that Owen and Havelock had long gone back and forth concerning the implications of Havelock’s theory. Third, since Owen was an old friend of Innis and was to be specifically acknowledged (along with Charles Cochrane) by Innis in his preface to Empire and Communications (1950) and since UTQ was the house organ of UT scholarly life (of which Innis was now the Dean of Graduate Studies), this review could hardly have escaped Innis’s interested notice. This was, of course, especially the case when Havelock’s recent appointment at Harvard and Innis’s role in this event must have been the subject of much faculty gossip. Fourth, in this same issue of UTQ, Marshall McLuhan published an essay (‘Henry IV, A Mirror for Magistrates’, UTQ, 1948, 17:2, 152-60) so that Havelock’s review could not have escaped his notice either.

Furthermore, it may be that this review functioned between Innis and McLuhan as a kind of touchstone of their discovery of their mutual interests.  Havelock writes in his review:

If Homer be compared to a very powerful radio station, which however has to transmit to us over an immense distance, Owen allows himself to intervene as the relay station, picking up the wave length and re-transmitting it to us, so that  we can hear it. (210)

Compare the end of McLuhan’s letter to Innis from March 14, 1951 (Letters, 223):

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. Using Frequency Modulation [FM radio] techniques one can slice accurately through such interference, whereas Amplitude Modulation [AM radio] leaves you bouncing on all the currents.

A contemporary (June 12, 1951) letter to Ezra Pound concludes in a comparable way:

I’m interested in such analogies with modern poetry as that provided by the vacuum tube. The latter can tap a huge reservoir of electrical energy, picking it up as a very weak impulse. Then it can shape it and amplify it to major intensity. [The] technique of allusion as you use it (…) seems comparable to this type of circuit. Allusion not as ornament but as precise means of making available [the] total energy of any previous situation or culture. Shaping and amplifying it for current use. (Letters, 224]

Future posts will detail further noteworthy contacts between Havelock and McLuhan in the 1940s.  Suffice it to note here only that it was arguably Havelock, even more than Innis, who set McLuhan on the path he was to follow into his mature work beginning around 1950.

It remains to be shown here how Babe’s mistaken chronology also distorts his assessment of the relation of Innis and McLuhan.  Babe writes:

McLuhan often referred to himself as being a ‘disciple of Harold Adams Innis.’ However, although they were for several years contemporaries at the University of Toronto, Innis and McLuhan hardly knew one another: as late as December 1948 McLuhan still misspelled Innis’s name, and only in 1951 did he begin reading anything by that great political economist. Upon learning that Innis had placed The Mechanical Bride on his syllabus, however, the future media guru12 decided he should learn more about such a person, and turned immediately to ‘Minerva’s Owl’, where he found instant recognition – so much so that McLuhan referred to his Gutenberg Galaxy as being but a ‘footnote to the observations of Innis’. (273)

Once again, Babe has happily allowed himself to be misled by testimony (this time from McLuhan’s 1964 introduction to The Bias of Communication) that was clearly not accurate.13  Facts overlooked here by Babe (and McLuhan?) include:

– Innis and McLuhan were introduced by Tom Easterbrook, who was a protégée of Innis in the 1930s, then his colleague in the Political Economy Department in the 1940s and finally his intimate friend.  A letter cited by Babe as evidence that Innis and McLuhan “hardly knew one another” (since McLuhan misspelled Innis’s name in it) shows them at lunch together with Easterbrook in December 1948 (Letters, 208).  Babe calls Easterbrook “a boyhood chum” of McLuhan (377 n55), but this characterization widely misses the mark.  Easterbrook and McLuhan became lifelong close friends after meeting in engineering classes at the University of Manitoba in 1928.14 Easterbrook was already in his early 20’s, McLuhan in his late teens: hardly their “boyhood”. In 1932 they then traveled in England together and at some point, variously reported as in Canada or in England, Easterbrook brought Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World? to McLuhan’s notice and thereby helped set the whole course of McLuhan’s life, both personal and intellectual.  So when both started work in Toronto (McLuhan in 1946, Easterbrook in 1947), Easterbrook would have been McLuhan’s closest friend there by far (since he, unlike Easterbrook, had no previous experience at UT). The two must have immediately resumed their lifelong habit of long walks and talks.15 And Innis and his work would inevitably have been an important topic for them given Easterbrook’s increasingly close relation with Innis and his communications work, and given McLuhan’s established interest in the topic of media and communication16.

– It was partly as a reflection of these relationships that Easterbrook, surely with Innis’s blessing and help, and probably at McLuhan’s urging17, arranged a  ‘values discussion group‘ at UT in 1949 financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Babe seems not to have been aware of this seminar (which is not referenced even in his 2011 collection) in which Innis would never have participated, given his hectic schedule, unless it had been of special interest to him. McLuhan must have been part of that interest, perhaps its greater part. Further, given their lunching together and regular participation in the seminar, how could it be that the two “hardly knew one another”?  Or, since the seminar of April 5, 1949 saw the presentation by Innis of what would later become two important essays18, how seriously maintain that “only in 1951 did he [McLuhan] begin reading anything by that great political economist”? Far more likely, given McLuhan’s voracious reading habits, his access to Innis’s work through Easterbrook and the motivation provided by the seminar, that McLuhan knew all of Innis’s then available communications work (like ‘Minerva’s Owl’ from 1948 and the earlier Political Economy in the Modern State from 1946).

– McLuhan’s March 14, 1951 letter to Innis (Letters, 220-223) was originally written earlier in 1951 (since it was acknowledged by Innis on Feb 26) or even in 1950 (since Innis apologizes in his February letter for his late reply).19 In this letter, McLuhan comments on Empire and Communications, which he must have read in 1950 (presumably via Easterbrook).  So much for the idea that “only in 1951 did he begin reading anything by that great political economist” — especially if the first thing McLuhan read from Innis was not Empire and Communications but (as Babe notes following McLuhan) ‘Minerva’s Owl’ (which was published separately by UTP in 1948).20

Babe sums up his sense of the Innis-McLuhan relationship by noting that McLuhan was “greatly indebted to Innis, a person, incidentally, towards whom he did not feel particularly warm on a personal basis” (274). But it is Babe who has the animus. As for Innis and McLuhan, Innis begins his January 12, 1952 handwritten letter:

Dear McLuhan,
I was immensely pleased to get your warm letter…

 

  1. For discussion, see here. ↩
  2. Watson, Marginal Man, 297. Watson continues: “Sirluck recalls a stimulating conversation with (E.T.) Owen on this subject, with Innis as a quiet, note-taking witness.  Since Innis had contributed little to the conversation, Sirluck was taken aback to see him that same afternoon borrowing from the library all the authorities Owen had cited. When Sirluck expressed his surprise that Innis should be interested in this area, Innis replied emphatically that he thought the subject was of fundamental importance.” ↩
  3. As regards Havelock’s scholarship. he was awarded Guggenheim fellowships in 1941 and 1943. These were some of the earliest Guggenheims ever awarded to Canadians. As regards Havelock’s lack of promotion at Toronto, he was an outspoken activist whose social and political views were not appreciated by Ontario politicians or by UT administrators who were dependent on those politicians for their funding. ↩
  4. Havelock’s appointment at Harvard became official in 1947. But in 1946, the year McLuhan came to UT, Havelock was already a guest lecturer at Harvard. ↩
  5. Canadian Communication Thought , 296, emphasis added. As discussed here, A John Watson takes the same position as Babe in his Innis biography, Marginal Man. ↩
  6. ‘The Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 65, 1934, 282-295, essay abstract, emphasis added. ↩
  7. Havelock’s review of E.T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, UTQ, Jan 1948, 17:2, 209-211, here 211. ↩
  8. Havelock’s work on the pre-platonics — a term he preferred to pre-socratics — went back to his studies with F.M. Cornford at Cambridge (1922-1926) and began to see the light of day with ‘The Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates’ in 1934 (cited above). His 1952 essay for Gilbert Norwood, ‘Why Was Socrates Tried?’, came from the same planned multi-volume work. (Havelock’s good friend and colleague at Victoria College at UT, Northrop Frye, noted in his diary for Sept 18, 1942: “Havelock back (ie, from his Guggenheim sabbatical) — his Socrates will run to two volumes”  (The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955, NFCW Volume 8).  Havelock’s papers at Yale include work on a third volume as well.) ↩
  9. Frye: “One of my colleagues at Victoria College was a professor of classics, Eric Havelock, who soon afterwards went to Harvard. He has written a brilliant book called A Preface to Plato. But of course he had been thinking about the ideas in this book for many years, and I remember a public lecture that he gave at Victoria (sic, University College) on Homer that impressed me deeply.” (Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976, 189) An augmented version of Havelock’s 1946 lecture was published in Richards’s 1973 Festschrift. As will be treated in further posts, there are many noteworthy parallels between the lecture and the 1948 UTQ review. ↩
  10. For discussion, see here. ↩
  11. For example, Havelock’s essay in the I.A. Richards Festschrift (1973), ‘The Sophistication of Homer’, was first given as a public lecture at UT a quarter century earlier in January 1946 (as recorded in the UT Monthly and in the UT President’s Report for the Academic Year for 1945-1946). This lecture in typescript was doubtless part of the package that Richards and others at Harvard received at that time for their evaluation of Havelock. In a similar way, as will be discussed in a later post, Havelock’s contribution to the Gilbert Norwood Festschrift in 1952 recalled his 1938 essay on ‘The Significance of the Sophist’.  Presumably Norwood had contributed in some way to Havelock’s thoughts in the earlier essay and it was part of Havelock’s intent to assure Norwood of his thankful memory of this. ↩
  12. The intentionally slighting “future media guru” is amended to “McLuhan” in the 2011 republication of this chapter from Canadian Communication Thought. ↩
  13. McLuhan was notoriously loose with facts, especially about his own work.  In 1965, he told Frank Kermode: “I remember I decided to write that book (Gutenberg Galaxy) when I came across a (1959) piece by the psychiatrist, J.C. Carruthers (sic, Carothers) on the African mind in health and disease, describing the effects of the printed word on the African populations – it startled me and decided me to plunge in. ” (‘The Future of Man in the Electric Age’, Understanding Me, 57).  In fact, McLuhan was already working on the book in 1952 (!) and sent an outline of it to Ezra Pound that year.  Carothers’ article was ‘Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word’, Psychiatry, November, 1959. ↩
  14. Cf, Speaking of Winnipeg, ed John Parr, 1974, p 27. ↩
  15. In his Preface to The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan alludes to this ancient practice: “To Professor W. T. Easterbrook I owe many enlightening conversations on the problems of bureaucracy and enterprise.” ↩
  16. See, already in 1947, McLuhan’s ‘Time, Life, and Fortune’, View 7:3, Spring 1947. ↩
  17. As reflected in McLuhan’s later letter to Innis from March 1951, but as already expressed by him throughout the 1940’s, McLuhan was much animated at this time by a seemingly simple conviction. If language and intellect are at home in this world, but modernity has somehow lost this assurance, the first step towards its recovery must be the agreement of a small group of acute minds concerning the formulation of this fundament for further research. The later Culture and Technology seminar with its Explorations magazine represented both a realization of this idea and — something that has been little investigated — its disappointment. ↩
  18. “The Bias of Communication” and “Technology and Public Opinion in the United States”, both later to appear in The Bias of Communication (1951). ↩
  19. See the editorial note to McLuhan’s letter, Letters, 220 n1. ↩
  20. But see Innis and McLuhan in 1936. ↩

Innis to McLuhan January 12, 1952

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When McLuhan’s library was donated to the UT Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, among the papers found stuffed into the books was a letter from Harold Innis to McLuhan dated January 12, 1952.1 Innis died later that same year in November.

The letter reads:

Jan 12, 1952

Dear McLuhan,

I was immensely pleased to get your warm letter particularly as it is the first I have had which indicated that the reader had taken the trouble to understand what it [= The Bias of Communication] is all about.

I have not seen the book by [Theodore] Gaster [= Thespis, 1950], but must get it out. I have been very interested in allied problems, but had not thought of attacking that of myth and ritual. I must also get Eliot’s Theory of Communication2 — do not trouble to send your copy.

I have just finished a book3 on the movies by Will Irwin (Adolph Zukor)4  in which the problem is brought out rather sharply in the refusal of the industry over a considerable period to break from the emphasis of the photograph on space and the ultimate recognition of the importance of time in its development of narrative and length. But it may be that I have become too sensitive to implications of the theme.

For this reason I was greatly heartened to find that others are aware of it.

With very many thanks, yours, HAI 

  1. The letter was posted in image here, but has since been removed. ↩
  2. This was Don Theall’s MA thesis from 1951, supervised by McLuhan. ↩
  3.  The House That Shadows Built, 1928 ↩
  4. The bracketed insertion here was made by Innis. The reference is to Irwin’s book which was subtitled “The Story of Adolph Zukor and His Circle”. ↩

Sirluck on Innis, Owen and Havelock

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In an interview with A. John Watson for Watson’s bio of Harold Innis, Marginal Man, Ernest Sirluck, a successor of Innis as Dean of Graduate Studies at UT and later President of the University of Manitoba, supplied the following anecdote:

At this period (circa 19461), there was much discussion among classicists concerning the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people. Sirluck recalls a stimulating conversation with [E.T.] Owen on this subject, with Innis as a quiet, note-taking witness.  Since Innis had contributed little to the conversation, Sirluck was taken aback to see him that same afternoon borrowing from the library all the authorities Owen had cited. When Sirluck expressed his surprise that Innis should be interested in this area, Innis replied emphatically that he thought the subject was of fundamental importance. (297)

Watson uses this anecdote to suggest that Havelock (clearly the source of the research described by Owen) may have influenced Innis through such “oral channels” (298). He is forced to this suggestion of oral influence since, in company with other Innis scholars like James Carey and Robert Babe, he holds in regard to “the timing of his [Havelock’s] scholarly publications that deal with themes of interest to Innis” that “only one of these appeared before Innis’s death [namely] Prometheus Bound, 1950″ (ibid). As detailed in other posts2, however, Havelock published a great deal while he taught in Canada and the topic of oral vs literate communication had long been present in his work.

As a result of this general research failure (apparently following Havelock’s own faulty memory instead of looking into the documents), the history of communication theory in Canada has been fundamentally skewed. For example, Watson comes up with the following fantastic conclusion concerning the Innis-Havelock relation that has no other basis than his failure to consult the articles Havelock wrote in Canada between 1927 and 19473:

It is not an exaggeration to say that Havelock’s work is the equivalent of a detailed extension of Innis’ treatment of Greek civilization. At the risk of simplification it seems that Havelock picked up Innis’ concept of media supersession as a focus for looking at Greek literature and society.  (300)

No, as further discussed in Innis and Havelock – 1930 and beyond and in What Havelock knew in 1938, it was Innis who took up Havelock’s insight into information storage as an illuminating focus in social analysis comparable to (and doubtless influenced by) Innis’s own staple theory. Watson was correct, however, to suspect mutual influence between the two during Havelock’s time in Canada — even when he did not consult the texts necessary to discern when and how this took place.

  1. Sirluck’s anecdote concerns Eric Trevor Owen, b 1882, longtime professor of classics at UT, who died in 1948. Sirluck himself served in WW2 and left Toronto for the University of Chicago in 1947. The potential timespan for the anecdote is therefore late 1945 to early 1947. ↩
  2. See http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/category/havelock/ ↩
  3. Leaving aside unpublished texts and lectures which seem to have circulated in typescript, like Havelock’s 1946 public lecture at UT on ‘The Sophistication of Homer’, also his important literary publications (which included his full monograph from 1939, The Lyric Genius of Catullus) and most of his frequent contributions to The Canadian Forum, these were: ‘The Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 65, 1934, 282-295; ‘The Significance of the Greek Sophist’, The School (Secondary Edition), 1938, May 782-785 and June, 874-877; ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey’, The Canadian Forum, July 1939, 121-123; ‘The Riddle of Plato’s Politics’, The Canadian Forum,  April 1941, 15-19; and his review of E.T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, UTQ, Vol. 17:2,  Jan 1948, 209-211. ↩

Innis and Havelock – 1930 and beyond

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In his October 1978 lecture, ‘Harold Innis: A Man of His Times’1 Eric Havelock described his first encounter with Innis.2 This apparently took place at the turn of the year, 1930-1931, a year after Havelock began his career at UT in 1929:

On November 17, 1930 (…) a small group assembled itself (…) in a room of Hart House [at the University of Toronto] (…) the initiative lay with several persons of whom I was one. (…) During the next 12 months, this little body (…) held seven or eight sessions, and then quietly expired. (…) During that existence, however, it had heard and discussed seven papers by invited speakers, on various political and economic subjects. (…) The second [of these papers] on January 12, 1931, covered the topic of Economic Conditions in Canada, and was delivered by Harold Innis. (…) I seem to recall a personal responsibility for inviting him and soliciting his support.3 It was at this point [apparently towards the end of 1930] that my personal acquaintance with him began. The substance of what he read and said appeared in a paper later read before the Canadian Political Science Association [in May 1931] with the title, “Transportation as a Factor in Canadian Economic History”4. As secretary of the [Hart House] group, I remember I arranged to have reprints of the paper circulated to the members. (…) It is possible that its author felt some appreciation for the fact that I had fostered its circulation outside the circle of professional economists. (‘Harold Innis: A Man of His Times’, ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 38:3, 243-245)

Havelock especially appreciated Innis’ understanding of the complexity of social relations:

The paper read before the [Hart House] group in effect could be interpreted as giving a picture, a summary of the economic factors and forces which had controlled the development of Canada as an independent entity among the family of nations. This of course was also true of such major works of his as the histories of the CPR and the Fur Trade. (…) [Innis was] never content to select only one or two elements in a complex situation in order to build a policy or program; [he was] far ranging enough in intellect to take in the whole sum of the factors, and comprehend their often contradictory effects. (…) His brand of nationalist piety was controlled by the complications of his country’s situation. (245, 251)

In the following 17 years at Toronto, Havelock would come to focus increasingly on the transition in the Greek world from an oral society to a literate one. Although his definitive statement on the subject would not be published until 1963 with Preface to Plato, his position was already well defined by the middle 1940s such that I.A. Richards could characterize it on October 5, 1947 in a BBC radio broadcast, ‘The Spoken and the Written Word’, as follows:

Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself.5

What particularly characterized Havelock’s description of these contrasting states of mind was the attention he gave to their respective roles in constituting the evolving Greek world over the half millennium after 900 BC. The guess may be made that he took Innis’ complex analysis of economic, political and social relations as a model and then asked how orality or literacy functioned in Greek society in which they were, in turn, the means of information storage in it.

Outlining his theory in 1977, Havelock himself expressed this point as follows:

the classical culture of the Greeks was (…) already in existence before the invention [of the alphabet] took effect. That culture began its career as a nonliterate one and continued in this condition for a considerable period [even] after the invention, for civilizations can be nonliterate and yet possess their own specific forms of institution, art, and contrived language. In the case of the Greeks, these forms made their appearance in the institution of the polis, in geometric art, in early temple architecture, and in the poetry preserved in the Homeric hexameter. These were all functioning when Greece was nonliterate. (…) A nonliterate culture is not necessarily a primitive one, and the Greek was not primitive. Once this proposition is taken seriously, one has to ask: in the absence of documentation in a preliterate society, what was the mechanism available for the storage of such information — that is, for the continuous transmission of that body of religious, political, legal, and familial regulation which already constituted, before literacy, the Greek way of life?6

On Innis’ side, the parallel guess may be made that he took Havelock’s analysis of the fundamental role played by oral and literate capabilities in the constitution of Greek society and applied this idea of media as a formal cause universally. Here, too, Havelock may be cited in 1977 as describing the point Innis took from his work (and from others like Milman Parry) thirty years before:

The invention of the Greek alphabet, as opposed to all previous systems, including the Phoenician, constituted an event in the history of human culture, the importance of which has not as yet been fully grasped. Its appearance divides all pre-Greek civilizations from those that are post-Greek. (…) On this facility were built the foundations of those twin forms of knowledge: literature in the post-Greek sense and science, also in the post-Greek sense.7

Innis could see a whole series of such media revolutions stretching over the 5000 years of recorded history and would begin their delineation in Empire and Communications (first given as a series of lectures in Oxford in 1948).

McLuhan, coming to the University of Toronto just as Havelock was leaving, and just as Innis was beginning his last fervent research period prior to his premature death, would be the heir to the insights of both men.

 

  1. Given at Innis College, University of Toronto, and published in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 38:3,  242-254, October 1981. Reprinted in Harold A Innis: A Memoir (1982), 11-26. ↩
  2. Havelock was the secretary of the small group which came to include Innis. Fifty years later in his Innis College lecture his secretarial notes from the time enabled him to describe this initial meeting with Innis in surprising detail. ↩
  3. It is possible that Havelock made his approach to Innis based on the fact that both he and Mary Quayle Innis, Innis’ wife, were frequent contributors to The Canadian Forum. Innis began her short-story contributions to the Forum in 1927; Havelock contributed poetry and impression pieces beginning in 1929. Both had contributions in the January 1929 issue. ↩
  4. Proceedings of the Canadian Political Science Association, 1931, 166-184 =  Problems of Staple Production in Canada, 1933, 1-17 = Essays in Canadian Economic History, 1956, 62-77 ↩
  5. Prof John Paul Russo has kindly provided the information that this talk was recorded on September 17, 1947. A transcript was published in The Listener, xxxviii:977, October 16, 1947, 669-670; a slightly revised version appeared twenty years later as ‘Literature, Oral-Aural and Optical’ in Complementarities, (ed) Russo, 1976, 201-208. ↩
  6. ‘The Preliteracy of the Greeks’, New Literary History, 8:3, 1977; reprinted in The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences, 1982, p 186. ↩
  7. ‘The Preliteracy of the Greeks’, New Literary History, 8:3, 1977; reprinted in The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences, 1982, p 185, emphasis added. ↩

Havelock to McLuhan, 1970, and its background

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On September 23, 1970, Havelock wrote to McLuhan:

Please look after yourself. I still carry with me the feeling that you area man who works always near the bone, pushing his nerves to the limit.  (Letters, 406, n2)

He was answering a letter from May 22, 1970, which McLuhan had dictated to his secretary from hospital following a heart attack.

It would be interesting to know what Havelock’s reference was with the word ‘still’ here. Evidently he was thinking back some years — or decades.  Indeed, it is possible that the two had met already in 1946, McLuhan’s first year at St Michael’s. Officially, that was Havelock’s last year at UT before moving to Harvard.  But Havelock was already a guest lecturer at Harvard that year and was presumably in Toronto only sporadically.  

In the intervening years, Havelock seems to have been in Toronto frequently, partly as a result of his continuing close ties with the classics department where he had spent almost two decades.  As a sign of these ties, Havelock contributed essays to the Festschrift volumes for Gilbert Norwood in 1952 (‘Why Was Socrates Tried?’) and for George Grube in 1969 (‘Dikaiosune. An Essay in Greek Intellectual History’).1

But Havelock also had important ties in Toronto outside the classics department, notably with his old progressive comrades like Frank Underhill (history) and even with less progressive former colleagues like Harold Innis (political economics). In his essay ‘Harold Innis: A Man of His Times’2 Havelock recalled a visit to Toronto to lecture in 1951 or 1952:

one morning in the fall of 1951, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I received, somewhat to my astonishment, a personal phone call from him [Innis] to come up to Toronto as soon as I could, to speak to his seminar in the old McMaster building3. (247)

Later in this same essay, Havelock describes his impression of Innis from this visit:

A fatal illness of the body overcame him when his mind was still young, superactive in the formulation of a historical theory or set of theories which he did not live to complete. He had always retained a surprisingly youthful appearance, to match the mind within. His biographer [Donald Creighton] records the memory — it is mine also — of that tragic change which overcame it in the latter days of his life. This had already occurred when I went back to Toronto to encounter him for the last time. I remember being slightly surprised — it was a few years since I had seen him — by a kind of nervous and suppressed energy which seemed to animate him. He seemed not so much to walk around the building as stride purposefully through it. I speculate that he may have sensed already that not much time was left, and that he was determined to pack the maximum of thinking, reading, and writing into it, drawing on the resources of a disciplined will; assembling all those concepts, researches, and conclusions which constitute what has been called the third phase of his scholarly journey; putting down all he could as quickly as he could often in jumbled sequences which make hard reading. (253-254)4

By this time McLuhan had participated in the 1949 ‘values seminar‘ with Innis and was now,  in 1951, in correspondence with him.5 It is very likely that McLuhan would have audited the session with Havelock and, if he did not already know him personally, have met him at that time. 

If Havelock and McLuhan did not meet in 1946 or during this 1951 (or 1952) visit of Havelock to Innis’s seminar, it is entirely possible that the two met in connection with Explorations magazine (the organ of the Culture and Communications seminar), which was, of course, centrally concerned with Havelock’s topic of orality and literacy. This could have occurred either in Toronto or Harvard6 since Jackie Tyrwhitt, an important member of the Explorations team, transferred from Toronto to Harvard in February 1955.  McLuhan mentions Havelock in his 1954 address to the Catholic Renascence Society, ‘Eliot and the Manichean Myth’, and (as will be detailed in further posts) certainly came to know of Havelock’s work on orality and literacy, but also his literary criticism, soon after he arrived in Toronto in 1946. 

  1. Havelock returned to Canada in an official capacity to present a Vanier lecture in Ottawa in 1970 (‘War as a Way of Life in Classical Culture’) and for his important series of lectures in Toronto in 1974, ‘Origins of Western Literacy’. ↩
  2. In ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 38:3,  242-254, October 1981. Reprinted in Harold A Innis: A Memoir (1982), 11-26. The essay was originally given as a lecture in October, 1978, when Havelock and McLuhan together recalled Innis at Innis College (UT). ↩
  3. Before moving to Hamilton in 1930, McMaster was located on Bloor Street in Toronto just north of the University of Toronto. At the time of the move, the McMaster building was sold to UT. Innis would have attended classes in this building as a McMaster undergrad forty years before his seminar with Havelock in 1951/2. ↩
  4. This visit must have taken place in late 1951 or early 1952. As tendered in this same essay, Havelock’s overall assessment of Innis was very high: “Take him all in all, in the specific categories of his achievement, and you will not, I think, find up to this point in time his equal among his fellow Canadians. (…) I hazard the opinion that his premature death constituted a minor disaster in the long history of the human understanding.” ‘Harold Innis: A Man of His Times’, 253-254 ↩
  5. See also letters from Innis to McLuhan here and here. ↩
  6. In a letter to Pound from June 12, 1951 (Letters 223), McLuhan mentions being at Harvard in May that year. So he and Havelock could have met then, for the first time or again. ↩

Havelock, Innis and Richards in 1947

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In a BBC Third Programme radio broadcast1 on October 5, 1947, ‘The Spoken and the Written Word’, I.A. Richards noted that

Professor Havelock has suggested that we may see in Plato’s rejections of Homer the revolt of the writing mind’s mode of apprehension against the pre-literate mind’s other, less abstract and intellectual, ways of ordering itself.

This was 16 years before Havelock’s Preface to Plato was published in 1963 and contemporary with Harold Innis’s first communications publications which began with Political Economy in the Modern State in 1946.

Innis had long had contact with Havelock at the University of Toronto (see below and here) and now Richards had come to know of his work in 1946-1947 since Havelock moved at just that time from UT to Harvard (where he eventually became chairman of the Classics department).2 Richards had been teaching at Harvard since 1939 and had close ties with the Classics department there and particularly with its star professor, Werner Jaeger (who had come to Harvard in the same year as Richards). In fact, ancient Greece, including translations from Homer and Plato, was to be central to Richards’ research and thinking in his 35-year Harvard career. A translation of Plato’s Republic by him had already appeared in 1942; his abbreviated translation of the Iliad, The Wrath of Achilles, would be published in 1950; further Plato translations would follow in the 1960’s.

Some background to this story is supplied by Havelock in essays he wrote in the 1980’s in the last decade of his life:

After encountering the work of Milman Parry [in 1943, see below], guided also by a reading of Martin Nilsson’s Homer and Mycenae (1933; for me still the classic work on the subject)3, and following (…) intuitions born of [my] pre-Socratic studies4 (…) I recall giving two or three public lectures at the University of Toronto on the topic of oral composition, and I suspect Innis was one of those who heard them, at a time when he was thinking along similar lines in his own field.5 (The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity, 1986)

…phrases like “oral formula” and “oral composition” in connection with Homer had come into currency at Harvard about the time, just after the Second World War, when I joined the faculty [in 1947]. This was because of the close connection of Milman Parry [1902-1935] and Albert Lord [1912-1991] with that university. (…) [Parry’s] doctoral thesis, L’Epithete traditionelle dans Homere, was the founding document of the modern Homeric oralist theory of composition. It was published in Paris in 1928 (…) By the years 1946-7, Parry’s thesis, reinforced by articles [he] subsequently published in the Harvard Studies in Classical Philology,6 was gaining notice at Harvard, and his pupil Albert Lord was able to begin giving recordings of performances of the Balkan material Parry had collected, some of which I heard myself. (…) After Parry, the oral-literate question (as it was later to become) received impetus from a very unexpected quarter when Harold Innis published The Bias of Communication (1951). (…) Innis (…) drew some support from the Homeric model provided by Parry, which tempts me to add a brief personal note. Innis and I had known each other for some years7, not intimately, but with mutual regard. During the summer of 1943 I read Parry’s  work — I should have read it earlier — and later gave one or two public lectures on Homer and oral composition at the University of Toronto. Innis came to hear them and at once connected what I was saying with what he had been contemplating in a different context [namely, Canada’s pulp and paper industry and its relations with the technology, content and social effects of printing]. (‘The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind’, 1987)8 

Perhaps as prompted by Havelock, but more likely already by Parry’s work as brought forward by Lord at Harvard, Richards in this late 1940’s period was looking into these questions of the nature of oral composition and its differences from literary writing.  A marker of this research is given in his 1950 ‘Introduction’ to his translation of the Iliad, The Wrath of Achilles:

A very large proportion of the Iliad consists of line-beginnings, [complete] lines, and line-endings which the poet could use very freely over and over again, knowing them to be metrically satisfying and sufficiently neutral as regards the context of what he was saying to raise no difficulty for him or his audience. Most of the stock epithets annexed to the characters, the formal openings and transitions, and many of the similes and descriptive fillings are essentially ready-made rests, for the poet and his hearers, by which the strain of composition, and of comprehension for the listeners, can be lessened. (11)

The technical world ‘rests‘ is italicized by Richards and is a silent reference to Parry’s pioneering work and in particular to Lord’s first publication of that work in 1936 immediately after Parry’s sudden death in 1935: ‘The Singer’s Rests in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song’. 9

It may be that a particular sign of this intellectual exchange between Havelock, Innis and Richards (and eventually also McLuhan) is the story of the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Theuth in Plato’s Phaedrus (274ff). As detailed here, this story was cited repeatedly by Innis (beginning in 1946) and McLuhan (beginning in 1953); but it also appears at length in Richards’ 1947 BBC radio broadcast as follows:10:

Socrates may have had a prejudice against writing. Plato gives him — in the Phaedrus (274c-277a) — a very curious little story about the invention of the letters:
”I heard, then,” says Socrates, “that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus . . . To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each . . . when they came to the letters, ’This invention, O King,’ said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.’ But Thamus replied, ‘Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess . . . you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom . . . for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with’...”
“Socrates,” says Phaedrus, “you easily make up stories about Egypt or any country you please.” But Socrates goes on:
“He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person . . .every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it . . . for it has no power to protect or help itself.”
Instead of such [written] words, the true teacher will use “the legitimate brother of this bastard [sort of communication] . . . [planting] in a fitting soul intelligent [spoken] words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest possible limit of human happiness.“
Socrates is notably serious here.

Havelock references this same section of the Phaedrus both in Preface to Plato (1963) and in Communication Arts in the Ancient World (1978).  The guess here is that he also cited it much earlier in lectures in Toronto and Harvard in the 1944-1946 period. The story was then cited — at second or third or forth hand (via Havelock citing Plato citing Socrates citing Thamus) — by Innis in Political Economy in the Modern State in 194611 and by Richards in his BBC talk in 1947.

 

  1. Prof John Paul Russo has kindly provided the information that this talk was recorded on September 17, 1947. A transcript was published in The Listener, xxxviii:977, October 16, 1947, 669-670; a slightly revised version appeared thirty years later as ‘Literature, Oral-Aural and Optical’ in Complementarities, (ed) Russo, 1976, 201-208 ↩
  2. Havelock’s official appointment at Harvard began in 1947 at the start of the 1947-1948 academic year.  But he was a guest lecturer at Harvard in the previous academic year as reported in the Harvard Crimson here on October 10, 1946. Further, Richards and Havelock were both at Cambridge in the early 1920s, Richards as an influential teacher whose lectures were overflowing, Havelock as a brilliant student, so it is entirely possible that they knew, or at least knew of, each other from that time. ↩
  3. This bracketed remark is from Havelock. ↩
  4. Havelock’s work on the pre-Socratics began in 1925 while he was still at Cambridge (The Muse Learns to Write, 6). ↩
  5. Havelock’s lectures were probably given in 1944 or 1945, before Innis’s Political Economy in the Modern State in 1946 and after Havelock’s reading of Parry in 1943. ↩
  6. In The Muse Learns to Write (p6) Havelock specifies the importance of two Parry articles in HSCP: “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I.’Homer and the Homeric Style” (1930) and “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: II. The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry” (1932). ↩
  7. Innis began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1920; Havelock in 1929. As described here, the two became acquainted early in 1930, just months after Havelock arrived in Toronto. By the mid-1940’s they had therefore known each other for around 15 years. ↩
  8. In Olson and Torrance (eds.), Literacy and Orality, 1991. ↩
  9. ‘Homer and Huso I: The Singer’s Rests in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 67: 106-113, 1936. Huso was a blind oral poet who was Parry’s main contact with Serbian ‘Singers of Tales’. ↩
  10. Listener 670: Complementarities 205-206. ↩
  11. In the ‘Preface’ to this 1946 collection of essays, Innis cited this passage from the Phaedrus as follows: “The most dangerous illusions accompany the most obvious facts including the printed and the mechanical word. Plato refused to be bound by the written words of his own books. He makes Socrates say in Phaedrus  regarding the invention of  writing, ‘this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.’ Since this was written the printing press and the radio have enormously increased the difficulties of thought. The first essential task is to see and to break through the chains of modern civilization which have been created by modern science.” (Political Economy in the Modern State, vii) ↩

Explorations

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The name of the magazine published by the UT seminar on Culture and Communication (1953-1959) and edited primarily by Carpenter and McLuhan was, of course, Explorations.  Now it is probable that this name came from a book by Lionel C Knights published in 1946, Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly On the Literature of the Seventeenth Century.1 Indeed, Knights went on to publish Further Explorations in 1965 and Explorations 3: Essays in Criticism in 1976. With these further Explorations titles, Knights may have been making the point that this name, if not, per impossible, original to him was at least his baby in the recent history of English criticism from the school of F.R. Leavis. Knights was a co-founder of Scrutiny with Leavis in 1932 and one of its co-editors for its entire history until its demise in 1953.

McLuhan was intimately familiar with Knights and his work since he (McLuhan) considered himself a working member of the Scrutiny school for the first 10+ years following his graduation from Cambridge in 1936.  Leavis and his book Revaluation are cited in McLuhan’s first UTQ publication in 1943, ‘Aesthetic Pattern in Keats’ Odes’.  Then the next year, in his essay ‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’, McLuhan makes the bald assertion apparently referring to himself:

Mr. Leavis, with a rare sense of fact [‘tact’?] and without any chance of popular recognition, was engaged in executing the program which Mr. Eliot had indicated but relinquished. Just how well he succeeded the reader who has worked for six years with Revaluation is best able to say.

McLuhan mentions Knights lecturing in Toronto in a letter to Muriel Bradbrook from January 12, 1973 (Letters 462).

  1. McLuhan’s books, now at the UT Fisher Library, include 5 books by Knights. His 1946 Explorations is one of them. ↩

McLuhan to Richards July 1968

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In his 1968 book, So Much Nearer, I.A. Richards wrote of the “Principle of Complementarity”: “This immensely important topic— publicized recently by Marshall McLuhan…”.

McLuhan wrote to Richards on July 12, 1968 (Letters 355):

I want to mention at once my gratification at your kindly reference to me on page 63 of So Much Nearer. Naturally, I owe you an enormous debt since Cambridge days.

The extent of McLuhan’s “enormous debt” may be seen in multiple posts here.

The next sentence of the letter is probably an indication that one of Richards’ books McLuhan read at Cambridge was Coleridge on Imagination:

I also owe a great deal to S.T.C.1

McLuhan’s letter shows that he saw Richards as more than a professor and critic of English literature:

As the evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology in the electric age, I am fascinated by your suggestion (on page three) of the possibility of a non-verbal language of macroscopic gesticulation, an interface of entire cultures. (…) Your wonderful word, ‘feedforward’, suggests to me the principle of the probe, the technique of the ‘suspended judgement’ which has been called the greatest discovery of the 20th century.2

McLuhan would see that the rigorous study of “macroscopic gesticulation” demands that its types (or elements or fundamental structures) be isolated and that this, in turn, demands free experimentation both objectively (seeing the investigated object differently) and subjectively (being the investigating subject differently3). Such free experimentation could be called the exercise of ‘feedforward’ or probing or the practice of ‘suspended judgement’.

  1. McLuhan had already studied Coleridge in some depth at the University of Manitoba. He is cited in his MA thesis on Meredith in regard to the types of human experience — a topic McLuhan was studying at the time with his Manitoba mentor, Rupert Lodge. ↩
  2. “Feedforward” seems to have been coined by Richards for his 1951 Macy Cybernetics Conference lecture, “Communication Between Men: The Meaning of Language”. ↩
  3. See Richards’ existential demand for documentation. ↩

Richards on the media 5

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Practical Criticism, p 339-340:

…a decline can be noticed in perhaps every department of literature, from the Epic to the ephemeral Magazine. The most probable reasons for this are the increased size of our ‘communities’ (if they can still be so called, when there remains so little in common), and
the mixtures of culture that the printed word has caused. Our everyday reading and speech now handles scraps from a score of different cultures. I am not referring here to the derivations of our words they have always been mixed but to the fashion in which we are forced to pass from ideas and feelings that took their form in Shakespeare’s time or Dr Johnson’s time to ideas and feelings of Edison’s time or Freud’s time and back again. More troubling still, our handling of these materials varies from column to column of the newspaper, descending from the scholar’s level to the kitchen-maid’s.
The result of this heterogeneity is that for all kinds of utterances our performances, both as speakers (or writers) and listeners (or readers), are worse than those of persons of similar natural ability, leisure and reflection a few generations ago. Worse in all four language functions, less faithful to the thought, less discriminating with the feeling, cruder in tone and more blurred in intention. We defend ourselves from the chaos that threatens us by stereotyping and standardising both our utterances and our interpretations. And this threat, it must be insisted, can only grow greater as world communications, through the wireless and otherwise, improve.

Here again there are many ideas which McLuhan would come to treat in his own fashion decades later:

– the complications of time — the increasing speed (or foreshortening of time) in modern communications forces different historical times together in the present: “we are forced to pass from ideas and feelings that took their form in Shakespeare’s time or Dr Johnson’s time to ideas and feelings of Edison’s time or Freud’s time and back again.”  In McLuhan’s terms, the accelerating speed of communications tends under electric conditions to “all-at-onceness”.

– the global village vs the global city — the world has become at once both bigger (“the increased size of our communities”) and smaller (“Our everyday […] now handles scraps from a score of different cultures”). But it has not learned how these fit together as a global city; instead, like a village subject to sudden instabilities, it has become increasingly subject to “heterogeneity” rather than “community”.

– the layout of the newspaper with “scraps from a score of different cultures” treated with widely different sensibilities (the “handling of these materials varies from column to column of the newspaper, descending from the scholar’s level to the kitchen-maid’s”) displays the modern global village situation in nuce.

Richards on the media 4

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Practical Criticism, p 314:

If we wish for a population easy to control by suggestion we shall decide what repertory of suggestions it shall be susceptible to and encourage this tendency except in the few.

Richards describes here what has become of politics, commerce, entertainment and education today — what McLuhan called “the age of advertising”.  

 

Richards on the media 3

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Practical Criticism, p 320:

It is arguable that mechanical inventions, with their social effects, and a too sudden diffusion of indigestible ideas, are disturbing throughout the world the whole order of human mentality, that our minds are, as it were, becoming of an inferior shape — thin, brittle and patchy, rather than controllable1  and coherent. It is possible that the burden of information and consciousness that a growing mind has now to carry may be too much for its natural strength. If it is not too much already, it may soon become so, for the situation is likely to grow worse before it is better. Therefore, if there be any means by which we may artificially strengthen our minds’ capacity to order themselves, we must avail ourselves of them. And of all possible means, Poetry, the unique, linguistic instrument by which our minds have ordered their thoughts, emotions, desires . . . in the past, seems to be the most serviceable. It may well be a matter of some urgency for us, in the interests of our standard of civilisation, to make this highest form of language more accessible.

  1. A central difference between Richards and McLuhan may be seen here.  Richards’ imagination of solutions to the present crisis derive from the Gutenberg Galaxy — he looks to what is simplified (‘Basic English’), “controllable” and some “means by which we may artificially strengthen our minds’ capacity to order”. ↩

Richards on the media 2

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From an interview with I.A. Richards1 from March 11, 1969:

Interviewer: When did television become an important part of your design for escape?

R: About the middle of the war, ’42 or ’43. It looked like the heaven-sent instrument. You could put pictures along with words and sentences. If you can get the eye and ear cooperating, you can do anything, I think. Television looked like the divinely appointed medium. (…) There’s more power to the eye and ear together than to either of them apart…

Earlier, in the introduction to his translation of the Iliad — The Wrath of Achilles — Richards had written (already in the original 1950 edition?):

The reign of writing looks like it is drawing soon to a close. The radio may be restoring to the ear some of its original priority in ‘literature’. (12)

  1. ‘An Interview With I. A. Richards’, by B. Ambler Boucher and John Paul Russo,

Richards on the media 1

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McLuhan seems to have read I.A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929) in 1934 during his first term at Cambridge.  In that same Michaelmas term (or the next Michaelmas term in the fall of 1935) he heard Richards lecture on ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’.

Page 248 of Practical Criticism reads:

We come by our ideas in three main fashions : by direct interaction with the things they represent, that is, by [direct] experience ; by suggestion from other people ; and by our own intellectual elaboration. Suggestion and elaboration [the second and third of these] have their evident dangers, but are indispensable means of increasing our range of ideas. It is necessary in practice to acquire ideas a great deal faster than we can possibly gain the corresponding experience, and suggestibility and elaboration, though we must make them responsible for our stock responses, are after all the capacities that divide us from the brutes. Suggestion, working primarily through language, hands down to us both a good and an evil heritage. Nine-tenths, at the least, of the ideas and the annexed emotional responses that are passed on by the cinema, the press, friends and relatives, teachers, the clergy (etc)  — to an average child of this century are (…) crude and vague rather than subtle or appropriate. But the very processes by which they are transmitted explain the result. Those who hand them on received them from their fellows. And there is always a loss in transmission which becomes more serious in proportion as what is transmitted is new, delicate and subtle, or departs in any way from what is expected. Ideas and responses which cost too much labour both at the distributing end and at the reception end both for writer and reader are not practicable, as every journalist knows. The economics of the profession do not permit their transmission ; and in any case it would be absurd to ask a million tired readers to sit down and work [at the interpretation of subtle ideas]. It is hard enough to get thirty tired children to sit up, behave and look bright.
A very simple application of the theory of communication shows, then, that any very widespread diffusion of ideas and responses tends towards standardisation, towards a levelling down.

There are many ideas here which McLuhan would come to treat in his own fashion decades later1:

– the rear-view mirror — “what is expected” is “responsible for our stock responses” and results in “a loss in transmission which becomes more serious in proportion as what is transmitted is new, delicate and subtle”.

– the medium is the message — “the very processes by which they* are transmitted explain the result.” (* “ideas and the annexed emotional responses…”) 

– all media have further media as their environmental context — “Ideas and responses which cost too much labour both at the distributing end and at the reception end both for writer and reader are not practicable, as every journalist knows. The economics of the profession do not permit their [more exacting] transmission; and in any case it would be absurd to ask a million tired readers to sit down and work [at interpretation].” Ideas in print in newspapers in economics…in a galaxy…

– the content of a medium is another medium — “Nine-tenths, at the least, of the ideas and the annexed emotional responses that are passed on (…) are (…) crude and vague rather than subtle or appropriate. (…) A very simple application of the theory of communication shows, then, that any very widespread diffusion of ideas and responses tends towards standardisation, towards a levelling down.”2 

– “the theory of communication” — must study human interaction “working primarily through language” in a range extending from individual experience with “friends and relatives, teachers, the clergy (etc)” to mass media like “the cinema [and] the press”.

–  the opposition of breadth and depth — The “means of increasing our range of ideas” and of acquir[ing] ideas a great deal faster than we can possibly gain the corresponding experience” entail “stock responses” at “both at the distributing end and at the reception end” of communication. Hence, the “widespread diffusion of ideas and responses tends towards standardisation”.

– speed is fundamental to “the theory of communication” — In the diachronic unfolding of history, it becomes “necessary in practice to acquire ideas a great deal faster than we can possibly gain the corresponding experience”. This is enabled first of all through language and then through contact with wider and wider groups of people (itself enabled through advances in transportation, agriculture, industry, trade, etc), then through writing (and all of its associated consequences), then through printing (and all of its associated consequences), etc etc. This ever increasing speed of diffusion is the most important consideration in an investigation of the modalities of communication and their effects: “the very processes by which [ideas] are transmitted explain the result.” 

 

  1. This is not to claim that these ideas were unique to Richards or that McLuhan first found them in Richards. It is noteworthy, however, that these ideas are found together in Richards and that they form a kind of system in his thought in the general context of the rigorous criticism of English literature. ↩
  2. Both the ‘exterior’ context (as seen in the previous point) and the ‘interior’ content of a medium are further media. This opens a ‘house of mirrors’ effect whose consideration is an unavoidable step in the investigation of the possibility of a science of criticism. ↩

Autobiography 1967

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The blurb from McCall’s magazine, December 1967, to McLuhan’s short piece (p 97 & 163), ‘A Glimpse of Christmas Future’:

Professor McLuhan, who holds a PhD from Cambridge, taught at the University of Toronto for twenty years and now holds the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New York’s Fordham University.

The use of the simple past tense here — taught at the University of Toronto for twenty years — is interesting.  McLuhan may originally have envisaged staying at Fordham (before the state grant for his chair became embroiled in controversy and before his brain tumor operation).

Hopkins: peace allows the death of it

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In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Peace1, “pure peace” is questioned as follows:

What pure peace allows,
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? 

It would seem that true peace, peace that is foundational, is not “pure”, but is utterly complicated by “alarms of wars, the daunting wars” and therefore seems to hide itself and even to allow “the death of it[self]”. 

Foundational peace is not “pure”, but impure. It is what is termed “true strength” in the I Ching in a passage cited by McLuhan in TT (22):

[true strength] does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible. 

The expression of such “peace” and “strength” manifests itself in letting go — even to its own “death”. But the genitive here (of such “peace” and “strength”) is dual, both objective and subjective. Such peace and strength do not merely lose themselves in creative expression, since creative expression is what they are. 

This is why they are not abolished in not being “outwardly visible”, even to “the death of it”.  

And this is why McLuhan notes that “pouring [out] is also fulfillment, is not emptying but filling. There’s a complementarity here.”

  1. I.A. Richards cites the poem in full in ‘Gerard Hopkins’ (1926), reprinted in Complementaries (1976). ↩

Richards and McLuhan: essential differences

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There is no question but that I.A Richards influenced McLuhan in multiple respects, lifelong. But the great lesson to be drawn from their relationship concerns their fundamental differences.

These regard:

1. Time: for Richards, time is singular and diachronic; for McLuhan, time is plural and both diachronic and synchronic ‘at the same time’.

2. Ambiguity, synaesthesis, complementarity: for Richards these are results, something produced; for McLuhan these are original — the pro-ducing.

3. Light: for Richards light is thrown on things by human activity; for McLuhan humans are illuminated by light which comes through things to them. 

4. Finitude: for Richards, finitude precludes grasp of (gen obj) the whole; for McLuhan, finitude is the sign of the grasp of (gen subj) the whole.

5. Language: for Richards, language is a human invention and tool; for McLuhan, language is the environment within which human existence unfolds.

Examples can be found in both Richards and McLuhan which would seem to fall on the side of the other (as defined above).  Whenever this is found to occur, the prediction here is that the example will prove to be secondary — something subject to deeper explanation in terms of the above differences.

 

Richards and McLuhan – The Windhover

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I.A. Richards was one of the first to comment on the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins after they were posthumously issued in an edition by Robert Bridges in 1918.  Richards’ essay ‘Gerard Hopkins’ was published in The Dial in 1926.1

In this short (8 page) piece, Richards cites The Windhover, complete, and quotes a letter from Hopkins to Bridges in his explication of it:

Indeed, when, on somebody’s returning me [The Loss of] the Eurydice2,  I opened and read some lines, as one commonly reads, whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.

One of McLuhan’s  first published literary essays, ‘The Analogical Mirrors’ (Kenyon Review, 1944, reprinted in The Interior Landscape) is a detailed consideration of The Windhover. And Hopkins’ letter to Bridges is cited in GG, p83.

Richards ends his essay with the suggestive sentences:

He did not need other beliefs than those he held. Like the rest of us, whatever our beliefs, he needed a change in belief, the mental attitude, itself.

Absent the penultimate sentence, the last would seem to equate “belief” with “the mental attitude, itself” and to indicate the “need” in Hopkins for a “change” of it. Given the penultimate sentence, however, as well as the qualifying phrase “like the rest of us”, this reading can be ruled out. Instead, Richards must be equating “the mental attitude, itself” with the “need” for “change”, as if it were the essence of the exercise of mind to deploy itself freely on a kind of fulcrum, across an open gap in different possible experiential takes. Richards may have been suggesting that Hopkins misconceived his (and our) “need” — whereas he thought he “needed” “beliefs”, what he really “needed” was appreciation of our potential to effect “a change in belief, the mental attitude, itself”. Hence Richards’ intense preoccupation with ambiguity, multiple definition and the meanings, plural, of meaning — and even with that which is “between truth and truth” (the title of a 1931 essay3 by Richards).

For McLuhan this “gap  is where the action is” and is first of all ontological — and then, because ontological, therefore operative in all human experience. Its transitivity is what enables perception, thus also the learning and use of language, thus all the distinctively human occupations in the arts and sciences.

Between Richards and McLuhan, then, the central difference is not that Richards values human freedom as fundamental and McLuhan does not. Instead, both value human freedom as fundamental, but draw very different consequences from this.  For Richards, freedom undercuts perception and especially ontological perception, precisely because it could be different (if not possibly different, then not possibly free); for McLuhan, freedom enables perception and especially ontological perception, precisely because this opens a new relationship with the environment (one that a plant or an animal lacks) on the basis of which something like language (and so, truth and value) first becomes possible.

 

 

  1. ‘Gerard Hopkins’ was reissued by Richards in his “uncollected essays”, Complementaries (1976). ↩
  2. HMS Eurydice went down in a storm in 1878 with the loss of 317 lives. Hopkins’ poem on the catastrophe is available online here. ↩
  3. Reprinted in Complementaries (1976). ↩

McLuhan’s Topic #4: the secret songs that orchestrate the universe

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McLuhan frequently identifies “existence” or “being itself” as his topic:

To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high order. (The Mechanical Bride, 4)

We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude — a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith in which this book has been written. UM (1964) 

I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth. Playboy Interview (1969)

Here is a chronological sampling of the “sense of Being” (dual genitive) in his work:

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 morrice1. They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages of apprehension, that Joyce found the archetype of poetic imitation. He seems to have been the first to see that the dance of being, the nature imitated by the arts, has its primary analogue in the activity of the exterior and interior senses. James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953)

In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves — in their interior faculties — the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the Nous Poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being. I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we recreate within ourselves the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality. Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters (1954)

The interval is the means of epiphany or revelation. It is the release which Hopkins called Sprung Rhythm. It is the instrument of analogical intuition of Being. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (1957)

it was not till the pre-Raphaelites and Hopkins that a deliberate campaign for Saxon tactile values in language was to begin in English. Yet tactility is the mode of interplay and of being rather than of separation and of lineal sequence. GG (1962)

For with the isolation of the visual, the feeling of interplay and of light through the mesh of being yields, and “Human thought no longer feels itself a part of things.” GG (1962)

symbolism strove to recover the unified field of being once more… GG (1962)

Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. UM (1964)

we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth. Playboy Interview (1969)

the word medium in Aquinas refers to the gap or interval, the emptiness between matter and form as such, i.e., the hidden ground of Being, and in every sense, it is the message. MM to Fr Gerald Pocock (May 7, 1976)

There is [for an oral tradition] no past or future, only the essence of being that exists now. GV (posthumous)

the uttered logos (…) embedded in things animate and inanimate which structures and informs them and provides the formal principles of their being…  GV (posthumous)  

  1. “Morrice” is ‘moorish dance’. Cf, Milton, Comus: “The Sounds and Seas with all their finny drove / Now to the Moon in wavering Morris move”; and Wordsworth, To the Daisy: “In shoals and bands, a morrice train / Thou greet’st the traveller in the lane”. McLuhan’s “gestures (…) move before us in solemn morrice” seems to have come from Ulysses 2.155: “the symbols moved in grave morrice”. ↩

Richards – the trivium, the eddy and the 2 sides of the mirror

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Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic — the first three liberal Arts, the three ways to intelligence and a command of the mind that met in the Trivium, meet here again. (Interpretation in Teaching, 3)

It may be that McLuhan’s career must be seen as a kind of convoluted flip from, or counter movement to, the work of I.A. Richards.

On the one hand, McLuhan fundamentally disagreed1 with Richards from his first exposure to him in 1934 (through his reading of Practical Criticism, from 1929, and from attending Richards’ lectures on the Philosophy of Rhetoric). Although McLuhan would always disagree with Richards in these fundamental regards, his different projects represent various ways of expressing that disagreement and of attempting to demonstrate his side of it. For example, it seems clear that McLuhan’s PhD topic of the history of the trivium received its initial impetus from Richards’ 1938 Interpretation in Teaching, whose three parts were organized according to the trivium’s three disciplines, Rhetoric, Grammar and Dialectic.  But where Richards was antagonistic to Grammar relative to Rhetoric and Dialectic,2 McLuhan would relatively champion it. Underlying these differing takes on Grammar were more profound differences having to do with ontology, time and religion. From the start, McLuhan knew that these differences existed. But what he did not then know, and what his work would attempt to accomplish over the next 45 years, was how to articulate these differences for testing and for social application.3

On the other hand, McLuhan received from Richards such a wealth of recommended reading to figures who were unknown to him in 1934 (especially Hopkins, Eliot and Pound), of central problems (the meaning of meaning, the necessity of interpretation for all human experience, the need for a general theory of language, the imperative to understand and to improve communication, the fundamental nature of “complementarity”, the possibility of a science of criticism, the central role of metaphor, etc etc) and of particular topics for the further investigation of these problems (eg, the trivium, the eddy — or maelstrom — and the 2 sides of the mirror), that his work simply cannot be understood, nor his contributions properly identified, aside from a consideration of Richards work in the background.

The Trivium

When he returned to Cambridge in 1939 with his new wife, it is highly likely that one of the first things McLuhan read was Richards’ latest book, Interpretation in Teaching, which had just been published at the end of 1938. The title of the book named McLuhan’s two great interests and it addressed itself to a problem he knew all too well from first-hand experience: “the cruel waste of effort (for teacher and pupil alike) our present courses entail” (vi).

The book does not have a regular Table of Contents but instead offers an ‘Analytic Contents’ stretching over some 11 pages. The first sentence of this extended precis reads: “Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic, the first three Liberal Arts, need to be restored.” And Richards divided his book into three Parts named in turn after each of these three disciplines of the trivium.

Here are some excerpts from Richards’ ‘Analytic’:

Rhetoric is ‘the art by which discourse is adapted to its end’ (…) Logic [is] the critical examination of likenesses and unlikenesses, the study of our sortings and their manipulation (…) A reflective awareness of how we are sorting, and why, is the aim of Logic, which is prevented from taking its proper place in education mainly by misunderstandings and historical accidents, which have separated it unduly from the general study of Language. (…) Grammar [is] the study of the co-operations of words with one another in their contexts — [it] equally loses its power to help when separated [from the general study of Language].

Part One: Rhetoric (…) The theory of metaphor is an attempt to take critical account of skills we already possess (…) Its difficulty [is] not a matter of shortage of technical terms, but of our universal and inevitable use of metaphor in thinking (…) Thought is itself metaphoric (…) Love and the Motor Car (…) The expected satisfaction controls the supplied settings and thus the interpretation (…) aberrations in interpretation mostly come from disordered appetitions (…) The conduct of language has always ulterior motives, e.g. self-esteem (…) Our business is to restore helpful self-criticism (…) the need for detailed studies of misinterpretation [and to] pool experience in place of principles (…) The survival of the playworld (…) Metaphor always at least double (…) Is metaphor in its own nature untranslatable? (…) Any translation expresses only part of the original meaning (…) The main ambiguity of ‘metaphor’ is supported by all the ambiguities of ‘meaning’ and its synonyms (…) What is the whole of an analogy? (…) Different writers called different things ‘definite’ and meant different things by the word  (…) To plot the shifts of this landmark is helpful with many confusions  (…)  Our use of ‘definite’ is not simple, but plays with likenesses, differences, and implications (…) Three senses in which things may be definite (…) senses in which some representation, idea, expression or desire of or for something may be definite (…) Important not to state these in terms of correspondence (…) confusions (…) imperil our civilization (…) The gap between theory and practice is bridged by studying it

Part Two: Grammar (…) The need for a fresh start (…) The deadening notion of usage (…) ‘Law’ as ukase (…) How far does the Usage control go? (…) The forms of extant languages do not correspond to the forms of thought 

Part Three: Logic (…) The Principle of Grammatical Freedom in Analysis (…) Versatility of  IS (…) The ear behind the eye (…) Three interpretations of this IS (…) Asking language to do for us what we must do for language (…) We have to avoid questions bred by miscegenation of logic and grammar (…) Three aims of an improved logic (…) Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic are interdependent and their three central problems inseparable  (xi-xxii)

The first page of Interpretation in Teaching sets out the aim of the book as follows:

Less by design than from the nature, history, and life of its subject, this treatise has grown into three parts which correspond roughly to ancient provinces of thought. Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic — the first three liberal Arts, the three ways to intelligence and a command of the mind that met in the Trivium, meet here again. And though each is for us today cumbered with much deadfall and much obsolete technical tackle which we must shift from the path, neither the general problem nor the plan of attack can be new. To orientate, to equip, to prepare, to encourage, to provoke, a mental traveller to advance by his own energies in whatever region may be his to explore; to make him think for himself and make him able to do so sanely and successfully, has always been the aim of a civilizing education. How to hand back the gains of the more experienced to the less experienced in the least hampering and most available form is the general problem. And, since language must be the medium, the three traditional modes of the study of language keep or renew their importance. They meet and mingle incessantly; they cannot, as we shall see in detail, be separated without frustration, and separation has historically been the most frequent cause of failure. But still, Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic, if we set aside their repulsive terminologies and associations, are the headings under which to arrange what the student we hope to help needs most to study. (3-4)

McLuhan’s historical approach to the trivium in his thesis would be very different from that of Richards. Especially he would not follow Richards’ view that it was replete with “repulsive terminologies and associations”. But the initial suggestion of the trivium as the background topic for his doctoral thesis on Thomas Nashe surely came to McLuhan from Richards’ 1938 investigation. 

The Eddy

Probably no two images appear more often in McLuhan than the vortex and the maelstrom. Although George Meredith may have supplied a first exposure with his recourse to Scylla (the rock shoal) and Charybdis (the whirlpool) — a figure in Meredith which is cited repeatedly by McLuhan in his MA thesis — it may have been Richards who brought home to McLuhan the importance of this image (or image family).

In Coleridge on Imagination (1934)  Richards reverts to the image of the eddy several times over. The first instance occurs in a citation from Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667):

The foe approach’d, and one for his bold sin
Was sunk; as he that touch’d the ark was slain:
The wild waves master’d him and suck’d him in,
And smiling eddies dimpled on the main. (Coleridge on Imagination, 95)

Later, in regard to some lines from Coleridge’s Dejection (1802) 

To thee do all things live from pole to pole
Their life the eddying of thy living soul.

Richards comments:

Eddying is one of Coleridge’s greatest imaginative triumphs. An eddy is (…) a conspicuous example of a balance of forces. This ambiguity (or rather, completeness) in Coleridge’s thought here (…) give[s] us a concrete example of that self-knowledge, which (…) was (…) the principle of all his thinking.  (Coleridge on Imagination, 152)

 The Two Sides of the Mirror

If any image appears as frequently in McLuhan’s work as the vortex/maelstrom, it is that of Alice going Through the Looking-Glass. Here again the initial exposure may have come from Richards. In Mencius (1932) he writes:

The problem, put briefly, is this. Can we, in attempting to understand and translate a work which belongs to a very different tradition from our own do more than read our own conceptions into it? Can we make it more than a mirror of our own minds, or are we inevitably in this understanding trying to be on both sides of the looking-glass at once? To understand Mencius, for example, must we efface our whole tradition of thinking and learn another; and when we have done this, if it be possible, will we be any nearer being able to translate the one set of mental operations into the other? Is such translation, at best, only an ingenious deformation… (86)

Several thoughts in the passage came from a letter written to Richards by T S Eliot several years earlier concerning his own experience with Sanskrit:

I shall be very much interested in any results of your study of Chinese abstractions. I dare say it is likely to be more profitable than my attempt, so many years ago, at studying Indian metaphysics in Sanskrit. The conclusion I came to then (after it is true only a couple of years’ struggle with the language) was that it seemed impossible to be on both sides of the looking-glass at once.4 That is, it made me think how much more dependent one was than one had suspected, upon a particular tradition of thought from Thales down, so that I came to wonder how much understanding anything (a term, a system etc.) meant merely being used to it. And it seemed to me that all I was trying to do and that any of the pundits had succeeded in doing, was to attempt to translate one terminology with a long tradition into another; and that however cleverly one did it, one would never produce anything better than an ingenious deformation… (TSE to IAR, Aug 9, 1930)5

In a later essay, ‘Mencius through the looking glass’, Richards recalled:

The odd title of this essay comes from T. S. Eliot. When I was working in Peking at Mencius on the Mind about 1930, he wrote to me (…) that reading in a remote text is like trying to be on both sides of a mirror at once. A vivid and a suitably bewildering image. (So Much Nearer, 1968, 202)

  1. See Autobiography — Richards and Empson and McLuhan’s Topic #3 – Richards and ontology. ↩
  2. “Interpretation in Teaching is a grammarian’s funeral.” I. A. Richards: His Life and Work, J.P. Russo, 413. ↩
  3. McLuhan might well be seen in this regard as practicing Richards’ own methods against him. For it was central to Richards that the analysis of mistakes in interpretation and communication (ie, “practical criticism”) was the key to their correction and to the discovery, thereby, of improved theory. ↩
  4. It is possible that Eliot’s image of the sides of the looking glass here was suggested in turn by Richards.  In Practical Criticism (published the year before Eliot’s letter) Richards had written: “to imagine that a mirror stands between us and other people is certainly the most reliable means of studying ourselves.” (247) ↩
  5. The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 5: 1930-1931. ↩

Comparative philosophy – Masson-Oursel and Crookshank

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In 1923 Paul Masson-Oursel (1882–1956) published La Philosophie Comparée, which was issued in English translation in 1926 as Comparative Philosophy in the International Library of Philosophy (later The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method), founded and edited by I.A. Richards’ friend and frequent collaborator, C.K. Ogden.  F.G. Crookshank wrote an introduction to the translation which first appeared the year before (1925) in Ogden’s journal Psyche.  Two years before that, in 1923, Crookshank had contributed a ‘supplement’ to The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards: ‘The importance of a theory of signs and a critique of language in the study of medicine’.1

Crookshank’s introduction to Comparative Philosophy made a series of points that McLuhan would later come to assert himself and to extend2:

Masson-Oursel, in the domain of philosophy, insists that we should always consider the “fact” in relation to its “milieu” or context, and that comparisons be made, not between isolated facts, but between one and another fact; each fact being considered only in relation to its context. “The comparability of two facts is a function of the comparability of their contexts.” If only such comparisons as these are engaged, fructuous analogies result (…) Only when in comparison or analogy four factors are involved, do we draw near to positivity.3

Here is McLuhan to Ezra Pound a quarter century later:

the principle of metaphor and analogy [is] the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD (…) relations in four terms (…) I am trying to devise a way of stating this (…) Until [the principle of metaphor and analogy is] stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist. (December 21, 1948, Letters 207)

Crookshank again:

M. Masson-Oursel’s method is one which may be said, without any desire to play upon words, to be designed to attain the positive by way of the comparative, for he would secure objectivity by the due appreciation of relativity. He tacitly admits that both science and philosophy are concerned, in every case, with what is a function of two variables: and so he is more concerned to establish some kind of a positive ratio between the two variables than, following a will-o’-the-wisp, to give a positive value to one variable in terms of an assumed positive value of another.

As also discussed in footnote #3 below, the great question seen by Crookshank as implicated in Masson-Oursel’s study is that of the relation (or lack of relation) of truth (“attain the positive […] secure objectivity”) to “relativity”.  And the decisive suggestion is recorded that truth can be attained, and attained only, “by way of the comparative” aka “by the due appreciation of relativity”. From this vantage, nihilism, as the reign of the “will-o’-the-wisp”, results from “assumed positive value” (of, say, ‘the apparent world’4) rather than (as it thinks) from the absence of any such value. Hence the way to truth would be through the dissolution of all “assumed positive value” in the “positivity” of “the comparative” — through, this is to say, investigation of the complete spectrum of all possible “positive values” in their utter “relativity”.

McLuhan’s later animus against archetypes had its basis in the point that analogy “is a function of two variables” and that as soon as one of them is assigned “an assumed positive value” (as buttress for the other) and thereby loses its variability, the analogy is lost — because rendered secondary to the assumed valuation. Cliché in McLuhan’s vocabulary recaptures Masson-Oursel’s ‘variable’ and represents “the due appreciation of relativity”.

Crookshank once more:

Now this method of comparison, whereof the adoption does seem to relieve us of the scandalous necessity of “cooking facts to suit theories, and theories to suit facts” (as well as of pretending that we are measuring something by an objective standard when we are stating in terms of our own personal co-efficient) is one that, although nowhere generally acknowledged and formally stated, has yet been utilized, empirically at least, by certain workers in certain departments of science. By others it has been avoided, as inconsciently as definitely, just as by the man-in-the-street: who compares what is unfamiliar only with what is familiar: who inconsciently holds that what is familiar is what should be: to whom what is unfamiliar offends by what, in ultimate analysis, is but unfamiliarity ; and who never stops to consider whether what is familiar has any claim to acceptance other than [its] familiarity. 

This is just McLuhan’s critique of the ‘rear-view mirror’ and of “assumed positive value”.  

When he came to Cambridge in 1934, McLuhan was jolted awake by the notion, common across a whole spectrum extending from artists to scientists through literary critics, anthropologists and economists, that rigorous definition is necessarily “impersonal” (aka without “assumed positive value”).  As he described in a contemporary letter:

until I came to the Cambridge English School, my principal qualification was a boundless enthusiasm for great books, great events, and great men. Dr. Richards and Dr. Leavis have proved to be a useful supplement and corrective to that attitude. (McLuhan to E.K. Brown, December 12, 1935, Letters 79)

On this model, “great men” are able to create “great books” and “great events” exactly by giving “a positive value to one variable”, namely the lives and circumstances of less-than-great-men, “in terms of an assumed positive value of another”, namely through their “great” lives and books.  The difference between the great and the less-than-great here is just that the “assumed positive value” of the former means something while that of the latter does not —  except in relation to the former. A spectrum of value is envisaged stretching from “great” value at one pole to the absence of value at the other and where all of the intermediary positions receive what value they have from their relation to the plenary pole.

In the early 1950s McLuhan turned against the ideas on ‘value’ that he had taken over from F.R. Leavis and that he now saw represented the “assumed positive value” of a single tradition (whose “great man” was Gutenberg). He came to see that all valuation represented a selection (conscious or unconscious) from another sort of spectrum (often called by him “language itself” or “the unconscious”) and that it was through engagement with this full spectrum of all possibilities of valuation, and through this alone, that values might be grounded in a new way and thereby saved.

Crookshank:

The late Dr. [W.H.R.] Rivers, when writing the lectures afterwards published in his Magic, Medicine, and Religion [another volume published in Ogden’s International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method] was impelled to declare that the systems of therapeutics and of diagnosis adopted by certain “ savage’’ peoples are no less coherent and logical than our own are supposed to be, and that (…) their [medical] practice flows naturally from what must be called the philosophical and metaphysical beliefs held by them concerning the nature and causation of disease. Of course [every variety of] Medicine (…) everywhere reflects, and has always reflected, not positive truth, but the mentality, the metaphysics, the philosophy, and the religion — or its lack — of those who have professed it. And (…) the Art of Medicine — the habit, not in respect of things to be known, but in respect of things to be done — is, in every milieu, partly derived from experiences common to all mankind and partly from special, local, and temporal experiences, (…) the psychical no less than the physical environments, in which it has been practised.

In turning against Leavis and the idea that the literary tradition had some intrinsic value (aka “positive truth”), McLuhan reverted to the idea that non-literary values “are no less coherent and logical than our own are supposed to be” — once they were appreciated in the context of “the mentality, the metaphysics, the philosophy, and the religion”, in short “the psychical (…) environment”, of those holding them.

Just as much, this represented a decisive turn from Richards, Ogden and Malinowski and their common assumption that human understanding is geared to diachronic progression.  Like Crookshank , these three all insisted that “the meaning of meaning” depends upon an appreciation of context or situation,  As Malinowski put it:

language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture, the tribal life and customs of a people, and (…) it cannot be explained without constant reference to these broader contexts.  (The Meaning of Meaning, 305)

Meaning (…) does not come to Primitive Man from contemplation of things, or analysis of occurrences, but in practical and active acquaintance with relevant situations. The real knowledge of a word comes through the practice of appropriately using it within a certain situation.  (The Meaning of Meaning, 325)

But Richards, Ogden and Malinowski also insisted that past (and to some extent also present) contexts or situations were “magical”, “childish” and “primitive”.  Here is Malinowski again:

The various structural peculiarities of a modern, civilized language carry, as shown by Ogden and Richards, an enormous dead weight of archaic use, of magical superstition and of mystical vagueness.  (The Meaning of Meaning, 328)

To sum up, we can say that the fundamental grammatical categories, universal to all human languages, can be understood only with reference to the pragmatic Weltanschauung of primitive man, and that, through the use of Language, (…) barbarous primitive categories (…) have deeply influenced the later philosophies of mankind.  (Ibid.)

Meaning is fundamentally contextual, in this view, but contexts are themselves subject to historical progress. Richards, Ogden and Malinowski situated themselves as agents of this progress.

For fifteen years (roughly 1935-1950), beginning with his first years of study in Cambridge, McLuhan had shared Leavis’ inversion of this notion, namely, that while meaning is indeed fundamentally contextual, contexts are themselves subject to historical deterioration and loss. McLuhan had therefore situated himself, against the progressive orientation of Richards, Ogden and Malinowski, as an agent of restoration.

But then, around 1950, chiefly through his work on the French symbolists and on Eliot, Pound and Joyce — but reflecting as well McLuhan’s ever-optimistic temper — he came to understand that the contexts which structure meaning in human experience form a primary synchronic order that is only secondarily diachronic.  From now on he would cite, over and over and over again, Eliot’s account of “auditory imagination” from his Norton lectures at Harvard in 1932-1933:

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. (The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism, 111)5 

 

 

  1. Another ‘supplement’ included in The Meaning of Meaning came from Bronisław Malinowski: ‘The Problem Of Meaning In Primitive Languages’ (discussed below). ↩
  2. It is not the intent of this post to argue that McLuhan read Masson-Oursel or Crookshank’s introduction to Masson-Oursel’s book. He may or may not have. But the ideas at stake in this post were very much in the air in Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. ↩
  3. Crookshank leads off his Introduction with the assertion that Masson-Oursel’s study is “designed for the advancement of philosophy to the high level of positivity.” Now “positivity” is the range over which the “positive” extends — “positivity” is the domain of  the “positive”.  The “positive” in this sense goes back to Lessing and Kant and Hume in the late eighteenth century and designates that component of religion or law or economics which is purely factual, which is present as a matter of fact and not as a matter of rational design and decision. Hence Crookshank’s description of “positive value” as “what is familiar” or “assumed”, as what is held in place “in terms of our own personal co-efficient”. The “positive” in this sense is a factor in all individual and social life and the question arises how it is to be related to theory and enlightenment, on the one hand, and to the free self-development on the other. The great question (once waged between conservatives and liberals, before conservatives became arch-liberals) is whether the positive has an intrinsic value simply as existing fact (the position of, say, Burke) or whether it must be subjected to such tests as ‘is it true?’ or ‘what is its social value?’ (the position of, say, Bentham and of the reformers of all stripes). Hegel understood that these alternatives ultimately lead to repression (the imposition of fact) or nihilism (the dissolution of fact) and therefore must be rethought in a way that would relate positive fact both to theory and to free self-development. The Cambridge English School never got clear about these fundamental questions (as future posts will show in discussions of Richards and Leavis, but which may already be seen in Richards’ Benthamite materialism) and it is at just this juncture where McLuhan made his advance on it. For related discussion see “Pouring out is also fulfillment, not emptying but filling”. ↩
  4. For discussion see here. ↩
  5. Leaving aside McLuhan’s many bare references to “auditory imagination”, this passage from Eliot is cited 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 Implications of Cultural Uniformity’ (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). The preponderance of citations falling in the last decade of McLuhan’s life doubtless reflects his growing awareness then that the nub of his work had to do with time and in particular with the relationship of synchronic and diachronic times. ↩

McLuhan’s Topic #3 – Richards and ontology

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The chief weakness of our best criticism today is the pretence that fundamental matters can be profitably discussed without prolonged and technical thinking. (A.I. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 1934, 5)

As discussed in Autobiography — Richards and Empson, McLuhan first described I.A. Richards in a letter from January 16, 1935 as follows:

Richards is a humanist who regards all experience as relative to certain conditions of life. There are no permanent, ultimate, qualities such as Good, Love, Hope, etc., and yet he wishes to discover objective, ultimately permanent standards of criticism. He wants to discover those standards (what a hope!) in order to establish intellectualist culture as the only religion worthy [of] a rational being and in proportion to their taste for which all people are “full sensitive, harmonious personalities” or “disorganized, debased fragments of unrealized potentiality”. When I see how people swallow such ghastly atheistic nonsense, I could join a bomb-hurling society. (Letters, 50)

McLuhan heard Richards’ lectures on the ‘Philosophy of Rhetoric’ that same year and they were suggestive enough to exercise profound influence on him for the remainder of his life (as future posts will detail). But it is unlikely that the opinion of Richards expressed to his mother was based purely on personal experience. Instead, McLuhan probably had this impression mostly from Cambridge scuttlebutt, which, in turn, was based on Richards’ notorious anti-clericalism and on emphatic statements made by him like the following:

I write then as a Materialist trying to interpret before you the utterances of an extreme Idealist [Coleridge] and you, whatever you be by birth or training, Aristotelian or Platonist, Benthamite or Coleridgean, Materialist or Idealist, have to reinterpret my remarks again in your turn. (Coleridge on Imagination, 19)

As seen here, Richards sometimes had the idea that conflicting views needed to be reduced to a single one of them (“have to reinterpret … in your turn”) and it was in this mood that he identified himself as a materialist and a Benthamite. A clear statement of this sentiment may be seen in a footnote in Practical Criticism (1929):

I use “need” here to stand for [an imperative within] an imbalance mental or physical, a tendency, given suitable conditions, for a movement towards an end-state of equilibrium. A swinging pendulum might thus be said to be actuated by a “need” to come to rest, and to constantly overdo its movements towards that end. We are much more like pendulums than we think, though, of course, our imbalances are infinitely more intricate. (275n1, emphasis added)

In these terms, Richards could be said to have been “actuated by a ‘need’ to come to rest” and that he did so as a materialist. This was his “end-state of equilibrium“. But elsewhere in Practical Criticism he resisted this sort of monolithic self-identification.  For example, when his thought was criticized as crassly utilitarian both by his friend T.S. Eliot and by Herbert Read, Richards rejoined:

Mr Eliot, reviewing Science and Poetry in The Dial, describes my ideal order as “Efficiency, a perfectly-working mental Roneo Steel Cabinet System“, and Mr Read performing a similar service for Principles [of Criticism] in [Eliot’s journal] The Criterion, seemed to understand that where I spoke of “the organisation of impulses” I meant that kind of deliberate planning and arrangement which the controllers of a good railway or large shop must carry out. But “organisation” for me stood for that kind of interdependence of parts which we allude to when we speak of living things as “organisms”; and the “order” which I make out to be so important is not tidiness. (285n1, emphasis added)

Now “organisms” as such complex (“interdependence of parts“) structures “need” not, in fact cannot, “come to rest” with one of them.  Applied to the above citation from Coleridge on Imagination, page 19, an “organic” view would be one in which Aristotelian and Platonist, Benthamite and Coleridgean, Materialist and Idealist would maintain themselves in an organic “kind of interdependence”. In fact, still in Coleridge on Imagination, Richards himself put forward — in highly convoluted language, perhaps indicating that he had not been able to think through all the implications of his claim — something very like just this suggestion. Citing Coleridge’s question whether “ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant; or likewise constitutive, and one with the power and life of nature, according to Plato and Plotinus” (Coleridge on Imagination,183-4) with Coleridge’s following observation that this “is the highest problem of philosophy, and not [merely] part of its nomenclature” (ibid), Richard wrote:

What by and in it [“the whole soul of man”] we know [what we know] is certainly not [merely] a part of philosophy’s nomenclature. But what we say about it — whether we say that it is the mode of (…) our knowledge (ideas are regulative) or that it is [all of] what we know (ideas are constitutive) — must be said (…) in a vocabulary. And I have tried to make the position acceptable that these rival doctrines here derive from different arrangements of our vocabularies and are only seeming alternatives, that each pressed far enough includes the other, and that the Ultimate Unabstracted and Unrepresentable View that thus results is something we are familiar and at home with in the concrete fact of the mind. If this were so, the problems of criticism would no longer abut [ie, conflict in sterile fashion], as they so often did for Coleridge, on this problem of Reality; they would be freed for (…) inexhaustible inquiry… (Coleridge on Imagination, 184, emphasis added)

Relatedly in Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932):

can we maintain two systems of thinking in our minds without reciprocal infection and yet in some way mediate between them? And does not such mediation require yet a third system of thought general enough and comprehensive enough to include them both? And how are we to prevent this third system from being only our own familiar, established tradition of thinking rigged out in some fresh terminology or other disguise ? There is nothing new about the problem, that is obvious. What would run some risk of novelty would be an attempt to discuss it explicitly, to bring it out of the realm of midnight dubiosities and initial misgivings into the field of arguable methodology or technique. The problem seems to grow still more formidable as we realize that it concerns not only incommensurable concepts but also comparisons between concepts and items which may not be concepts at all. (87)

A series of points grow out of these considerations which are important both in general and for an understanding of McLuhan’s project in particular.

1.

Richards studied philosophy under G. E. Moore at Cambridge. And Moore, like the three other world famous philosophers at Cambridge in the first decades of the twentieth century, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein, thought that it might be possible to solve philosophical problems via their reformulation in some special language (like the logics proposed in the Principia Mathematica and in the Tractatus) or in ordinary language (as suggested by Moore and by the later Wittgenstein). Richards applied this search for a better understanding of language1 to the “criticism” of literature, but hoped for similarly broad results as regards (eg) the “problem of Reality”.2 Here communication would be both the means and the goal of solving problems (or dissolving them, as Wittgenstein had it) through, as Richards put it, the dialogue of “inexhaustible inquiry”. 

McLuhan brought forward these ideas in new ways. On the one hand, he took a more historical approach than the Cambridge philosophers or Richards by asking how language was used and considered at different times and in different societies.3 Within this approach, he suggested that focus on the disciplines of the trivium or on the senses (including the sensus communis), or on the canons of rhetoric, or on the material means of communication (like writing or radio or TV) or on the hemispheres of the brain (etc etc) could enable the required comparative study.4 As with Richards, the intended result would be to isolate possibilities “we are familiar and at home with in the concrete fact of the mind”, not because we are conscious of being so, but because these have shown themselves as organizing forms of experience in people with whom we can imaginatively identify today thanks to developments in anthropology, psychology, sociology and the arts — as well as in transportation and the media.5 These possibilities could then not only be studied as possibilities with testable qualities; they could also be ‘tried on’ by investigators to see if they might solve problems which were intractable in our usual perspectives.6 This sort of experiential dynamism and resulting research is exactly what McLuhan learned at Cambridge (see Autobiography – encountering Shakespeare) and is what he would come to call “probing” resulting in “perception”.

Commenting on “Coleridge’s conversion from Hartley to Kant”, Richards nicely specifies the point:

The two systems (or set of assumptions), violently opposed though they seemed to him, may each — to a Coleridge — be ways of surveying our mind. In the final theory what he had learned from each came together. A later inquirer, for whom materialist associationism and transcendental idealism are usually systems to be thought of rather than to be thought with, is not likely to learn so much either through or about either. (Coleridge on Imagination, 17, emphasis in the original)

On the other hand, McLuhan took nihilism as a theoretical and practical problem of great moment (in a way few academics have done, including the greats in the Cambridge philosophy and english schools). If other approaches to experience could solve problems that twentieth century experience could not, and if they did not lead to nihilism, as it did, and if they could account for nihilism, as it could not, then these rival modes would recommend themselves, not (or not only) for our comparative study, but for personal adoption.7

2.

Richards can be seen in the passages given above to instigate (or to be subject to the instigation of) a kind of quarrel with himself.  One side of him thinks that in a situation of “imbalance” between “rival doctrines” there is “a need to come to rest” in “an end-state of equilibrium”. But the other side of him thinks that “organisation” may be thought as a “kind of interdependence of parts” where “rival doctrines” may be seen as “only seeming alternatives” such that “each pressed far enough includes the other”.  This would “require yet a third system of thought general enough and comprehensive enough to include them both”.  But each time Richards attempted to state one of these sides, the other came out as well.  So when he identified himself as a Materialist, he is instantly aware that the person he is addressed by, namely Coleridge, is instead “an extreme Idealist”, and that those persons whom he, in turn, addressed himself to were “Aristotelian or Platonist, Benthamite or Coleridgean, Materialist or Idealist”. The situation was such that the quarrel of these “rival doctrines” not only did not end when Richards declared himself for one or the other, but was rather further incited. Similarly, so soon as Richards put forward the organic view for which “rival doctrines” are interdependent “parts” and “only seeming alternatives”, he somehow came to sum up this position in starkly monolithic terms: “the Ultimate Unabstracted and Unrepresentable View [singular] that thus results”! Supposedly fundamental plurality suddenly showed itself as an Unsurpassable Singularity! In caps!

What is to be witnessed here within Richards himself is the “ancient quarrel” that McLuhan would describe in terms of the trivium in his PhD thesis and in his programmatic essay, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’.  This was an essay which was first delivered as a talk in 1944, then published in 1946 (in The Classical Journal, 41:4, January 1946, 156-162) and finally republished in The Interior Landscape, almost 25 years later, as its final chapter. It is noteworthy that the essay therefore brackets in time, before and after, nearly all the work for which McLuhan is known.

‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ concludes with this summation:

Between the speculative dialectician and scientist 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,” 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. It would seem to be a matter of distributing time for these studies.

“The speculative dialectician” here is Richards’ “Platonist (…) or Coleridgean (…) or Idealist”, while “the eloquent moralist” is Richards’ “Aristotelian or (…) Benthamite or (…) Materialist”. McLuhan takes the “organic” view of them that “these rival doctrines (…) are only seeming alternatives, that each pressed far enough includes the other”. He therefore says that between them

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.

Taken not in terms of pragmatic education policy, but in terms of ontology  or, as Richards has it, of “Reality”, it is, however, exactly the essential activity of each of these parties that it “attempts to capture the entire education of an age or a country”, indeed their entire being. In this case, if “the speculative dialectician” did not make a monolithic ontological claim, it would not be “the speculative dialectician” at all; it would be a third “organic” view instead, a view approvingly relating itself to difference.  Similarly with “the eloquent moralist”. All three “doctrines” make universal claim to constitute “Reality” and it is precisely in this that the corresponding magnitude of their “quarrel” consists. The “quarrel” at stake concerns, indeed enacts, “Reality” itself.8 It is therefore not a “quarrel” that can ever be brought to resolution (through some kind of historical development, say) but must instead be active in its fundamental plurality always. It is “ancient”, then, not only diachronically, but synchronically as well as being ‘before’ (or “ancient” to) all experience at every moment. (See McLuhan and Plato 2 – When is myth?)

That this “quarrel” is ground or “being itself” (as McLuhan sometimes put it9) is well illustrated in Richards.  When he attempts to settle the quarrel and “to come to rest” with one of its contestants (by taking either a materialist view or an organic one), the other “parts” immediately assert themselves against it.  It is not Richards who grounds the quarrel, then, but the quarrel that grounds Richards. No matter what he argues, he is always only some or other figure of it. While it remains constant (but in its dynamic struggle), he shows himself (or is himself shown) now as this, now as that, derivative aspect of it.

3.

Richards’ work illustrates the laws of what Plato called “1,2,3”. The matter at stake is the number that applies to ontology.

One of these laws is that reality must be 1 or 3 and cannot be 2. When Richards writes of “Aristotelian or Platonist, Benthamite or Coleridgean, Materialist or Idealist”, he is aware that these pairs are either exclusive or inclusive.  If they are exclusive in the sense of not being equally fundamental, there is a “need” or imperative “for a movement towards an end-state (…) a ‘need’ to come to rest” on one of the sides or the other — whichever is more real.  If they are not equally fundamental, this is to say, one of them (1 or 2)  must be more real than the other and we ourselves must, in the end, be oriented by it, indeed  we ourselves must ultimately be it. It is in this “exclusive” mode that Richards declares himself to be a Materialist and Benthamite. Here 1 or 2 (ie, Materialist or Idealist) implies a decided 1.

Contrariwise, if they are inclusive or equally fundamental, there must also be a third possibility that would account for such a fundamental balance of 1 and 2. Here these “rival doctrines (…) are only seeming alternatives, [such] that each pressed far enough includes the other”.  Here 1 and 2 implies an “organic” 3.

Either way, if 1 and 2 are or are not equally fundamental, “Reality” must be 1 or 3 and not 2.

Another law is that each of 1,2,3 requires the others in order to be itself. Each side of the oppositional pairs of “Aristotelian or Platonist, Benthamite or Coleridgean, Materialist or Idealist” is what it is in not being the other side.  As Richards put the point by citing Chaucer in the epigraph to Mencius:

By his contrarie is every thyng declared. (Troilus and Criseyde, Bk 1)

Absent such an other (in these cases, absent such an absolute other, since these oppositions concern the nature of “Reality”), the remaining singularity would be more like Richards’ “Ultimate Unabstracted and Unrepresentable View” than any distinct side — which is to say that any such side would cease to be itself.  More, since these oppositional pairs “need” their absolute other in this way, they also need that third kind of organicism through which “rival doctrines are only seeming alternatives”.

1 cannot be 1 without 2 (just as 2 cannot be 2 without 1) and 1 and 2 cannot be together without 3.

In a comparable way, an “organic” third is impossible without 1 and 2. Alone, 3 would be a singularity — Richards’ “Ultimate Unabstracted and Unrepresentable View” — that would not only not be 1 or 2 (as just seen), it would in particular not be 3 as the unity of “parts” that are at once independent — and interdependent. 

At the fundamental level of “Reality” that is at stake here, “parts” cannot be subject to some kind of supposedly deeper resolution in an “Ultimate Unabstracted and Unrepresentable” third since there is no deeper level — “Reality” is as deep as it gets. Here “parts” must be absolute in their independent difference and it is only through some third that is equally deep with them that they can both be equally and ultimately real and — therefore — also interdependent (exactly in that fundamental equality). It is just the absolute difference of 1 and 2 from each other, then, and of both 1 and 2 from 3, that is “needed” by the “organism” of 3 in order to be a third. Such a 3 cannot be 3 at the level of “Reality” without 1 and 2 as absolutely independent “parts”.10

4.

The “ancient quarrel” is a “quarrel” because it ‘is’ the irreducible plurality of absolute forms. And such absolute forms cannot not contest since each asserts itself universally.

And it is “ancient” both as having an original time in the perpetually on-going ontological quarrel itself and as some or other a priori (prior, ancient) form from that contest as expressed in every moment of our changing historical times. (See McLuhan and Plato 2 – When is myth?)

Now just as Richards shows himself to be subject to a fundamental ambiguity between 1 (the “endstate” of Materialism) and 3 (“organisation”), so is he subject to an isomorphic ambiguity between diachrony and synchrony.  He argues for the latter against Quiller-Couch’s quip that “systems of philosophy are perhaps the most fugacious of all human toys” (cited at Coleridge on Imagination, 8):

But we may regard philosophers in another way; and then they will not seem so fugacious. No careful, acute and resolute piece of thinking ever loses it value  (…) every good philosopher stands with Plato and Aristotle; his work remains permanently as an aid in exploring the possibilities of our meanings.  (Coleridge on Imagination, 9-10, emphasis added)

Further on the same page, however, Richards plumps for an over-riding diachrony:

And here is the modern reader’s difficulty with Coleridge; that neither as theology (…) nor as symbol, is this fabric satisfactory, or even intelligible, to him. Coleridge constantly presents it as though it were the matrix out of which he obtained his critical theories. But the critical theories can be obtained from the psychology without complication with the philosophical matter. They can be given all the powers that Coleridge found for them, without the use either literally, or symbolically, of the other doctrines. The psychology and the metaphysics (and theology) are independent. For Coleridge’s own thought, they were not; they probably could not be; to a later reader they may, and, as a rule, will be. (Coleridge on Imagination, 10-11, emphasis added) 

Richards reverts to the advance beyond philosophy again, a few pages later:

the problems and methods of metaphysics and morals which Coleridge’s theory of poetry could supersede are in fact those that have most exercised most philosophers; and (…) they would be superseded not by being taken into the theory and there solved but by being shown to be, as problems, artificial, and, as methods, inadequate.  (Coleridge on Imagination, 20, emphasis added)

Synchrony and diachrony are opposed in these passages as metaphysics to psychology or as idealism to materialism or as 1 to 2. Absent a 3 (despite his arguments everywhere for its necessity), Richards had a resulting “need” or imperative “for a movement towards an end-state” in one or the other.  He came down on modernity.  His fundamental problem may thus be seen to have been an inability to think and to live the irreducible plurality of time as times.

Here again Richards may be taken to reveal, against himself, a background “quarrel” of which he is figure to its ground.  It is by beginning with it, and not with him, that it may be seen how right he was in observing “that to ask about the meanings of words is to ask about everything.” (Coleridge on Imagination, xxi) Not, or not only, as Richards intended, that a deeper study of words is the way to study “everything” in a rigorous way; far rather, instead, that the rigorous study of “the meanings of words” must first of all focus on what take they have on “everything” — on the ontological ground they figure. 11

  1. ‘Language’ understood broadly to include all the modes of logos, hence also logic. ↩
  2. Cf Richards in his preface to Mencius: “these linguistic situations have an interest that spreads beyond the field of English-Chinese translations. A theory which could handle them would have direct bearing upon the whole range of our language purposes from the practice of the most elementary education up to the more abstruse enterprises of comparative criticism and philosophy.” (xi-xii) ↩
  3. McLuhan was again following Richards’ lead here, since Richards championed Malinowski’s pioneering anthropology with its emphasis on primitive languages and “phatic communication”, himself repeatedly visited the far east and published on Mencius. What distinguished McLuhan from Richards was the greater flexibility of his approach such that conversion was possible to (indeed mandatory in the constitution of) any position (as it was not for Richards for anything that smacked of organized religion). To be noted in this connection are McLuhan’s opening remarks in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954): “For 2,000 years, wrote Theodore Haecker, Western man has been pre-eminent because it has been possible for him to understand all other men through his Catholic faith.” ↩
  4. McLuhan may not have found a satisfactory way to characterize different “modes of experience” and therefore kept trying new ones. Or he may have known very well how to characterize such modes (“the ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship.” Take Today, 3), but may not have found a satisfactory way to communicate this finding — and therefore kept trying new ones. ↩
  5. These developments might enable the required sympathetic identification, but in the main they seem not to.  We continue to exterminate cultures, languages, customs and mythologies at an astonishing pace. ↩
  6. Cf Richards in a letter to a Cambridge colleague, Raffaello Piccoli, during his first teaching assignment in China in 1929: “Students very able and incredibly charming but moving so much in another medium of thought and language from ours that they feel nearly as far off as fishes in a tank.” (Cited in Mencius on the Mind, 2001 edition, ‘Editorial Introduction’ by  John Constable, xii, emphasis added.) Richards’ study of Mencius was presumably an attempt to “put on”, as McLuhan would say, this rival medium. ↩
  7. Something like this took place, of course, with McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism. He begins ‘The Medieval Environment’ (1974) as follows: “I want to explore a theme concerning a new inter-relationship of past and present. (…) The electric age, by virtue of its simultaneity, has created a universal “acoustic” environment. Having left the Middle Ages by the visual route, we are returning to full medieval awareness by the acoustic route.” ↩
  8. See McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia ↩
  9. See McLuhan’s Topic #4 on Being itself. ↩
  10. The importance of absolute ontological difference cannot be overstated.  If nihilism (for example) is to be subject to account, without essential distortion, this is possible only within an economy that has no “need” for ultimate singularity and that can, or must, recognize absolute difference. ↩
  11. This post will be updated with at least two further points beyond the four in its concluding section.  One will consider how criticism might unfold if it were “freed for (…) inexhaustible inquiry”, in Richards’ suggestive phrase; the other will describe the abysmal gaps implicated in an ontology of 1,2,3 — both between its own “parts” and (as a result) between the parts of historical (ontic) events grounded in that ontology. Such iconic isomorphicism between the two realms, in turn, holding them both together and apart, is generated as a re-play of “the fecund interval” already dis-played in the ontological quarrel between its contesting parties. ↩

McLuhan’s Topic #2 – confronting nihilism

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McLuhan was clearly aware of the threat of nihilism while still in his twenties.  The world had lost its bearings and the questions were, how did this happen and how were bearings to be regained? His work over the following four decades and more must be understood in this context.

The Cambridge English School, 1938
In view of the generally recognized collapse of serious standards of living, of taste, and of judgment, it has become almost impossible for an individual to find his bearings amidst the hubbub of cheap excitements today. The attainment of genuine critical judgment was never so difficult, or so rare. If in view of this situation alone, the Cambridge English school might easily vindicate its insistence on the rigorous training of sensibility. And literature, properly considered, remains one of the few uncontaminated sources of nutrition for impulse and the education of emotion. With the failure of the external environment to provide such nutrition, or anything except confused sensations, it has become the major instrument of education.

Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput, 1944
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.

Network #21, 1953
The area of spatial communication is that of politics, business and power. Time is the sphere of language and knowledge. Equilibrium between these interests means social viability. Divorce between them is the breakdown of communication — the jamming of the social network. Nineteenth century development of spatial communication widened the gap between knowledge and power, [between] poetry (all the arts) and politics [&] business. The withdrawal of the arts to an ivory tower and of politics and business to a tower of Babel is the figurative way of citing the current divorce between knowledge and know-how. Irresponsibility and loss of bearings occurred in both domains.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian Proto-Martyr of the Arts, 1953
“feedback” [ie, dialogue] is necessary for getting bearings. It is perhaps the essential character of the new mass media of communication that no feedback is possible. A person can be a divinity in radio or pictures and yet remain a lonely, isolated private figure with no experience of his audience. Yet this divorce between the artist and the public, seemingly inherent in our new media, is fatal for the arts. It starves them and misguides them. Hopkins was an early victim of this situation, a kind of proto-martyr of the arts. We have not begun to solve or understand the problems that faced him.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
Today, therefore, when writing, speech, and gesture have all been mechanized, the literary humanist can get his bearings only by going back to pre-literate societies. If we are to defend a civilization built on the written and printed word against the present threat from TV, for example, we must know what we are defending.

New Media in Arts Education, 1956
this break-through from the visual world into the acoustic world seems to be the most revolutionary thing that has occurred in Western culture since the invention of phonetic writing. To understand the human, social, and artistic bearings of this event is indispensable today whether for the teacher or the citizen. Most of the cultural confusion of our world results from this huge shift in the geography of perception and feeling. 

MM to Serge Chermayeff Dec 19, 19602
Today, when all of the senses have been externalized [and] 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. (…) 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.

MM to Jackie Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960, Letters 277–2783
Now that by electricity we have externalized all of our senses, we are in the desperate position of not having any sensus communis. Prior to electricity, the city was the sensus communis for such specialized and externalized senses as technology had developed. From Aristotle onward, the traditional function of the sensus communis is to translate each sense into the other senses, so that a unified, integral image is offered at all times to the mind. The city performs that function for the scattered and distracted senses, and spaces and times, of agrarian cultures. Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional [ie, they “are by no means” spatial problems, to be conquered or otherwise politically ‘managed’].

Canadian Poetry, 1965
Canadian landscapes, if used as equations for inner mental states, would yield some quite amazing results. [But] Canadians could never bring themselves to accept the logic of their landscape (…) Had Canadians been daring enough to accept their landscape as the formula for mental states, they would have been projected into non-human orbits at once. (…) This theme of stark isolation and human insignificance (…) was to be repeated by Canadian poet and novelist [over and over again, but without drawing its implications]. What Pascal had shuddered at in the unsocial spaces of the heavens, the Canadian writer lived with at home. 

A Glimpse of Christmas Future (1967)
A satellite environment where the Christmas star that guides us might well be man-made. 

Through the Vanishing Point (The Emperor’s New Clothes), 1968
The artist puts on the distortion of sensory life produced by new environmental programming and creates artistic antidotes to correct the sensory derangement brought by the new form. In social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings despite magnetic deflection of the needle by changing environmental forces. So understood, the artist is not a peddler of new ideals or lofty experiences. He is the indispensable [navigational] aid to action and reflection alike.

MM to Ted Carpenter, April 9, 19694
From Cliché to Archetype is a paradox from beginning to end. It is the clichés that are alive and the archetypes that are dead.  

Take Today, 1972
the new frontier is as invisible as a radio wave. There are no tracks to identify or to locate the new frontiersman, even nostalgically. He has neither retrospect nor prospect in his instant space-time field.  (…) The new frontier is pure opacity.

 

  1. The known recipients of his flyer were Ezra Pound, Claude Bissell, A.E. Malloch & Louis Dudek. Pound’s copy is at Indiana in his papers there; Bissell’s is in his papers at UT; Malloch’s is in his papers in Ottawa (MG 31, D 254); and Dudek published some of Network 2, without naming it, in his review of Innis and McLuhan in CIV/n, No. 3, 1953.  Dudek was in correspondence with Pound at the time and may have received his copy from him rather than from McLuhan. At a guess, McLuhan must have sent it also to such friends and correspondents of his as Bernard Muller-Thym, Cleanth Brooks, Fr Gerald Phelan (who received Network #1), Hugh Kenner, Tom Easterbrook, Ted Carpenter, Carleton Williams, Don Theall, Walter Ong, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Sigfried Giedion. ↩
  2. Part of this letter was published in Chermayeff & Alexander, Community and Privacy, 1963, 102. ↩
  3. This letter to Tyrwhitt refers repeatedly to McLuhan’s letter to Serge Chermayeff which was written a few days earlier. In fact McLuhan begins the letter to Tyrwhitt by saying that it will attempt to summarize the earlier one: “After having written six single-spaced pages to Chermayeff, I think I can put them all in a couple of sentences, as follows.” (Letters 277) The two letters were written between Project 69 (Project for Understanding New Media) and The Gutenberg Galaxy and are highly important indications of his thinking at this crucial time. ↩
  4. Cited in Gordon’s Escape Into Understanding, 411n15. ↩

McLuhan’s Topic #1 – “the law of writ”

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Some pieces of what would become McLuhan’s topic were already in place when he left Winnipeg for Cambridge in the fall of 1934. Most importantly, Henry Wright had introduced him to the central role of communication in all the provinces of human activity from individual thought to social life and culture.  And Wright and Rupert Lodge (see here for further discussion) together had introduced him to the idea going back to Hegel and ultimately to Plato that there are plural possible approaches to the consideration of all things and that a prior consideration of these approaches1 was necessary if a new foundation was to be won for civilization (which the first world war and the depression beginning in 1929 had already showed — not needing the second world war — to be in extremis).2

At Cambridge, further pieces of his topic came into focus.  As will be shown at length in future posts, the project of I.A. Richards to establish a new basis for criticism, specifically in the service of communication, supplied McLuhan with problems and methods which would occupy him for the rest of his life. Jacques Maritain gave him a more sophisticated way to approach the philosophical notions he had from Manitoba and a way to link these both to aesthetics and to religion, specifically Catholicism. First exposure to Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lewis revealed developments in literary practice which were new to him and which necessitated a complete renovation of his ideas about literature and the literary tradition. 

In early November, 1934, only a month into his Cambridge career, McLuhan attended a lecture before the Cambridge English Club by “the great Dover Wilson” (Letters 32) on ‘Hamlet’s Make-up’.  Dover had just published his controversial edition of Hamlet within the New Cambridge Shakespeare where, for example, he replaced “O that this too solid flesh would melt” with “this too sullied flesh”. McLuhan declared himself “unconverted” (ibid). But the occasion seems to have acted as a catalyst in setting all the new influences flooding into him at Cambridge into combined motion.3 He immediately began to report in his letters home how he was experiencing a strange sort of welcome unsettling (that he would ever after associate with “perception”):

My mind is a ferment these days — boiling with new ideas and experience. (McLuhan to his family, December 6, 1934, Letters 44; see similarly in his letters from January and February, 1935, as discussed in Autobiography – encountering Shakespeare.)

Biographers and commentators have described McLuhan at this time as a kind of hayseed from the prairies who was bowled over by the sophistication of Cambridge. But this is to underestimate both McLuhan and Cambridge.  How could anybody — be they from Winnipeg or from Paris — not be impressed, even incredulous, at the intellectual firepower assembled at Wilson’s lecture?  Here were people, including Muriel Bradbrook4, Arthur Quiller-Couch5, Joan Bennett, George (Dadie) Rylands and others from the English School whose knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age was so precise and so alive that the discussion following Wilson’s lecture lasted, as he reported, “far into the night” (What Happens in Hamlet, 22). McLuhan was stunned by the vivacity of the occasion, not because he was a hayseed, but because he was smart enough and prepared enough to appreciate what was taking place before him. In comparison, he would shortly afterwards judge his own competence as “scarcely literary”6, but would then spend the remaining 45 years of his life turning out an enormous volume of published and unpublished writings whose main aim would be to help resuscitate the tradition to which Cambridge had exposed him in unforgettable ways. (Uniquely among literature and communication scholars, McLuhan saw that such resuscitation work entailed a confrontation with nihilism and it is just in this — as yet completely unappreciated, of course — that the fundamental importance of that work lies.)

Here is a part of what McLuhan would have heard from Wilson:7

… it is probable that the aesthetic standard of both playwright and audience is lower to-day than it was in the age of Elizabeth. It was killed, like so many of the old art-forms, by mechanical invention. The printing-press brought about the multiplication and the cheapening of books, and, as the reading habit became general, dramatists took more and more to writing with publication in mind, until today plays with any pretension to literary merit appeal quite as much to the reader as to the spectator. This is one, perhaps even the chief cause of the decline of the poetic drama; for, directly a dramatist begins to keep one eye upon a reading public, he is obliged, or at least feels himself obliged, to conform to the rigid consistency which the novelist must observe.  Nor dare he leave points in doubt or intentions obscure. Both the chiaroscuro and the orchestral scope of the Elizabethans are denied him. Yet modern critics, instead of envying Shakespeare the liberty of his art and praising the masterly use he makes of it, condemn him for not obeying the “law of writ”8 that binds an Ibsen and a Bernard Shaw.9

If The Gutenberg Galaxy could be seen as a footnote to the work of Harold Innis, as McLuhan himself observed, so can it be read as an expansion, thirty years removed, of what McLuhan heard in Dover Wilson’s lecture at the very beginning of his Cambridge studies regarding the “law of writ”.

  1. That a consideration of approaches cannot dispense with an approach of its own, one that has necessarily not yet been proofed in “a consideration of approaches”, is not only not an insuperable barrier to this quest, it is a kind of milestone on its way to which it is imperative to pay explicit attention.  It is exactly because an unproofed approach can relate itself successfully to the world that it is possible to learn and use language, to comport oneself unreflectively in all sorts of practical ways — and to learn how to proof approaches. ↩
  2. These two notions — the centrality of communication and the analysis of approaches to experience — were first brought together by McLuhan in his PhD thesis written in the early 1940’s.  The thesis traced the disciplines of the trivium as contesting structures of experience over the 2000 years from the Greeks to Thomas Nashe. Then, following his exposure to the work of Harold Innis around 1950, he would come to combine these notions explicitly in the study of modes of communication as variable forms of experience. ↩
  3. McLuhan described the lecture in a letter to his family from November 3, 1934, Letters 32-33. For further discussion see Autobiography – encountering Shakespeare. ↩
  4. According to Marchand  (53) on the basis of an interview with her, Bradbrook was McLuhan’s first PhD research supervisor before leaving Cambridge to work in the war effort in 1941 (but see Letters 118 and 121 for indication that F.P. Wilson was his already his supervisor in 1939). At the least, however, Bradbrook was certainly a good friend of McLuhan (and later also of Corinne) and a lifelong correspondent. In 1934, although only two years older than McLuhan, she was already the author of Elizabethan Stage Conditions: A Study of Their Place in the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Plays (1932) and was about to issue Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935). It appears that Bradbrook and McLuhan met early in his Cambridge career since he reports going to tea with her in May 1935 (Letters 65). ↩
  5. “Q” was Wilson’s fellow editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, an edition that would take them almost half a century to complete. McLuhan would be privileged to take a “course” with Quiller-Couch that at least on one occasion amounted to a tutorial since only one other student attended (as described by McLuhan in a letter to his family, Feb 7, 1935, Letters 57). ↩
  6. “I can see that I would perhaps have been better to have taken History to teach, not only because my faculty is scarcely literary….” (McLuhan to his Mother, Jan 18, 1935, Letters 51) ↩
  7. Taken from What Happens in Hamlet (1935), chapter vi, pages 231-232. In the book, Wilson describes his lecture at Cambridge as follows: “But the final stroke of fortune (in the composition of the book) came as a chance sequel to a lecture delivered last November (1934) before the Cambridge University English Club, in which I tried out the argument of Chapter vi” (What Happens in Hamlet, 22). The lecture and chapter vi had the same title, ‘Hamlet’s Make-up’, and, as Wilson writes, the same “argument”. ↩
  8. The phrase is from Polonius in Hamlet II:2 — “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.” ↩
  9. Wilson appended a footnote to this passage which reads: “Since these paragraphs were written I have been reading Miss Muriel Bradbrook’s Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935). Had I done so earlier I might have enriched and strengthened this chapter. As it is, I will only say that her book seems to me the first systematic attempt to deal with Elizabethan dramatic technique on satisfactory lines.” Now Muriel Bradbrook, as noted above, seems to have been McLuhan’s supervisor in the initial stages of his PhD research in Cambridge in 1939 (and was a good friend and unofficial adviser to boot). It is therefore remarkable that Wilson cited her work in just this “law of writ” context to which McLuhan would subsequently (first beginning more than 15 years after Wilson’s book) dedicate himself. The potential role of Bradbrook in this development invites investigation.  Suffice it to note here only that Wilson and Bradbrook were clear that Elizabethan society in general, and Elizabethan drama in particular, had very different notions of the relations between individual and society (and character and play) than did Victorian and early twentieth century England. Further, they were clear that this difference had much to do with the economic and communications organization of the country. Further still, they knew that this difference, or differences, were necessarily also expressed in such contexts as religious belief and political practice. ↩

Autobiography – encountering Alfred Adler

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McLuhan frequently discusses Freud and Jung in his texts (often citing Joyce’s “yung and easily freudened” from FW 115), but Alfred Adler, the third member of the founding troika of psychoanalysis, is (to my knowledge) never mentioned.  But Adler appears to have played an important role in McLuhan’s late twenties as he transitioned from bachelor student to teacher and then husband.

McLuhan’s attention to Adler was probably elicited through the fact that an English translation of his Individual Psychology was issued in 1924 as one of the first volumes in C.K. Ogden’s International Library of Philosophy (later The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method).  Other early volumes in this very distinguished series included Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922), Moore’s Philosophical Studies (1922), Jung’s Psychological Types (1923), and Vaihinger’s Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1924).  Ogden was a major figure in Cambridge as a publisher, author and translator (of, eg, Wittgenstein) and the close friend of I.A. Richards, with whom he authored The Meaning of Meaning.

In a letter to his brother, Maurice (‘Red’), January 11, 1940, McLuhan, now in his first year of marriage and back in Cambridge to do research for his PhD thesis, writes:

Have been reading a bit of Alfred Adler recently. See whether you can obtain his “Social Interest”, “Understanding Human Nature”, or “The Nervous Character”. Quite certainly, you would find these of great interest, and incidentally, you would find a patient account of all the kinds of neurosis which can grip a person whose life pattern or life-style is that of a second child.1 I’m not exaggerating when I say that you will be in a much better position to conquer your habits of procrastination, of systematic inefficiency in studies, etc etc. Above all he will put you on your guard against reposing in facile explanations of “failure”. He proves that all people who for various reasons have an acute and special interest in avoiding any real [recognition of] failure such as a partial achievement in initial attempts, such people invent an elaborate system of evasions and never permit themselves to come to any test which they would admit to be a test. His mode of explaining these things I have found extremely helpful to myself… (Letters, 125)

McLuhan may have been reading Adler as early as 1936.  A letter to his Mother from April that year records some sobering thoughts which have a decided Adlerian ring to them:

I think there is latent in my mind a fear to exert myself fully on any occasion, lest I should have to admit the result to be my best; and the best not good enough. I have a strong sense of superiority that is utterly incommensurate with my abilities — by superiority, I mean superior ability to do, not superiority of personal value. (…) My very ordinary mind having been stimulated somewhat beyond the ordinary by whatever queer motives… (McLuhan to his Mother, April 12 1936, Letters 82)

A further letter to Maurice, apparently from 1937 (when McLuhan was teaching in Madison), again has the flavor of Adler’s style of big boy advice (here applied by McLuhan both to himself and to his brother):

I realize more and more that I am “grown up” and that I need look for no miracle to happen now! What I am now, I must be, more or less, for the rest of my life, and it gives me a queer feeling of hopelessness to think that all those large dreams of the powers and talents which I was to possess at this time for the bedazzlement of men and perhaps the “disembowelment of Heaven with high-astounding terms” are just a chimerical blank. I have no affection for the world. I cannot be sure whether my present indifference to its objectives and its pleasures is genuinely grounded in the love of God or merely in the despair of myself. At least I can say this, that my dissatisfaction is so deep that I cannot imagine anyone in history or anyone alive who I would [not?2] choose to be (…) rather than myself. My malady is of the marrow. It is a hunger in the bone for something which cannot be satisfied by flesh and blood. (…) If you consider the pettiness of so many of our troubles (to be matched only by the meanness of our delights) I think you may give your worries a fall or two, Red.3

  1. Maurice was, of course, the second child in the 2-child McLuhan family. ↩
  2. McLuhan”s meaning here may have been that his “dissatisfaction” with himself was “so deep” that it amounted to a kind of individual calling which he could not imagine belonging to anyone else. Or he may have been thinking that his “dissatisfaction” with himself was “so deep” that he could not imagine it not being better to be anyone else. Much of McLuhan’s writing — increasingly so as he aged — must be read as a kind of compromise expression between such conflicting notions. ↩
  3. Parts of this letter have appeared in the biographies of Gordon (73-74) and Coupland (66). Gordon substitutes “bedazzlement of Heaven” for McLuhan’s “disembowelment of Heaven” and Coupland copies this error. ↩

Autobiography – encountering Shakespeare

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McLuhan had systematically studied all of Shakespeare’s plays by the time he left Winnipeg for Cambridge in the fall of 1934 at age 23.1 At Cambridge he was tutored by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (cf Letters 57, cited extensively below) and heard a memorial Dover Wilson lecture on Hamlet (cf Letters 32, also cited extensively below), the year before Wilson published his influential What Happens in Hamlet.2 Since Quiller-Couch and Wilson were the joint editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, issued between 1919 and 1966, McLuhan could hardly have received more authoritative training in the works of the bard.

Here is McLuhan as an undergrad at the University of Manitoba:

Shakespeare (…) that paragon of mortals, the very quintessence of human clay (…) Shakespeare held up the mirror to life itself (…) sublime genius (…) I spent 2 hours reading Hamlet this morning. I never enjoyed anything so much. What power! What tremendous genius! A wonderful cure for conceit and ambition. (McLuhan, age 19, to his Mother, February 19, 1931, Letters 9)3

Here he is a few years later as a grad student, but still in Winnipeg:

What infinite delight there is in Shakespeare (…) I have not had any dull moments except with the incredible pedants who crawl all over him with their microscopes and fine [tooth] combs, and then write up their “discoveries” with a mixture of stupid dullness and childish delight (…) I [myself] stick to Coleridge 4 and shall do [so] all my life so far as Shakespeare is concerned. (McLuhan, age 22, to his Mother, spring 1934, Letters 17) 5

Later that year he had begun his career at Cambridge and reported home to his family about a lecture (“paper”) by the famous Dover Wilson:

His paper was excellent: ‘The make-up of Hamlet’6 — [that is,] his psychological make up— briefly (…) stated: Hamlet is not a real person, not a consistent psychological creation7 but simply a portion of the tissue of the play. Shakespeare published his plays upon the stage and would have been amazed at the critical ingenuity of readers. Hamlet’s character is simply a means of developing a total dramatic effect — one of tremendous brooding mystery. Therefore his ‘madness’ and his antic-disposition are a problem Shakespeare never meant us to understand as the drama is actually played. And so [also] with the reasons for [Hamlet’s] procrastination. After bringing H’s character into discredit and low worth [Shakespeare] suddenly rehabilitates him with almost a single magic stroke. It is his greatest artistic triumph — the duel scene — of tremendous interest to the Elizabethans — the process of the duel has not been appreciated. Laertes anticipates the [start] signal [of the duel] and wounds Hamlet. H. drops his [sword,] wrests [Laertes’] untipped sword from him and ironically points to L. to take up [the dropped sword]. Then he runs L. through. (McLuhan to his family, age 23, November 3, 1934, Letters 32-33)8

In this same letter from November 3, 1934 McLuhan included a parody of Prospero’s speech from The Tempest Act 4 scene 1: 

This orgy now is ended. These mad hustlers
As I foretold you, were all bluff and
Are shown to be air, even hot air:
And like the baseless credit of their business
Their sign-capped towers and raucous newspapers.
Their film temples, great Hollywood itself.
And all that it doth breed on shall dissolve,
And like an insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. They were such stuff
Screen-stars are made on and their feverish life
Is quieted now in sleep.9

Shakespeare and Coleridge are coupled again in a letter to his brother from this same time:

But in psychology the confusion arises from the fact that the thing which [studies] is also the thing studied. The psychologist forgets that a man does know some things about a man long before he is cloven in 2 and 1/2 becomes a psychologist and the other a psychological problem. When he plunges into the dark sea of the subconscious he forgets that there is such a thing as the broad daylight of human nature. You will remember Coleridge saying that “Shakespeare keeps to the main highway of the human affections”. (McLuhan to Maurice McLuhan, December 1934, Letters, 44-45)

The turn of the year from 1934 to 1935 seems to have been crucial for McLuhan. A series of letters from this time record his sense of decisive change:

My mind is a ferment these days — boiling with new ideas and experience. I must keep it so for years yet, if I am to be worth anything as an educator. (McLuhan to his family, December 6, 1934, Letters 44)

How rapidly my ideas have been shifting and rearranging themselves to make room for others! My difficulty is to keep up with myself. (McLuhan to his Mother, January 18, 1935, Letters 51).

My position in regard to English Literature is altering rapidly. I have discovered that having in previous courses sampled numerous bits of it, I came to certain conclusions about them which really discouraged a further expansion of interest. I have discovered the utmost reluctance to open Keats or Shakespeare (…) largely because of an unconscious reluctance to disturb my previous judgements about them.  I have recently, in this new atmosphere, dissolved the old incrusted opinions (even where they were “correct” but none the less sterilizing) and obtained a fresh receptivity which is the thing most difficult to maintain in America. I had thought that I at least was not being victimized by our insane methods of abstracting certain men from the living context of English history and considering them as classics per se.  [But] I had not escaped… (McLuhan to his family, February 1935, Letters 54)10

An important letter to his family that same month records his impressions of a tutorial11 with  Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and the first of his life-long considerations of King Lear:

Having just returned from the Divinity School where “Q” recommenced his course on The Poetics of Aristotle, I wish to set down certain facts while they are fresh. There was just one other chap with me and so we were able to be a very chatty trio. The Poetics were soon side-tracked when illustrating the theory of the punctum indifferens in Shakespeare — ie. the idea that in all art there is a point of rest in the midst of surrounding conflict. Horatio in Hamlet, Kent in Lear etc. The last led us to ask whether the fool played a similar part in maintaining the salutory mean of sense and sanity. Then “Q” gave us a “frantic” (he called it, and justly) theory about the fool in Lear. He appears only when Cordelia is off stage (both parts prob. acted by some boy ‘star’). He brings missives from Cordelia, and when Lear holds the dead Cordelia in his arms he calls her “my poor fool” (or sumpin like it). The idea is that Kent is in on the secret. When the fool meets the wild “Tom O’ Bedlam” Edgar he goes quite hysterical etc. We had a lot of fun mauling this idea. (McLuhan to his family, Feb 7, 1935, Letters 57)

 

  1. See his letter to his Mother from the spring of 1934: “Just one more play to read: The Winter’s Tale. I (am) completing The Tempest having 1st done MacBeth with some care to-day.” (Letters 17) ↩
  2. Wilson refers to this lecture as an important occasion in the history of the book’s composition: “But the final stroke of fortune came as a chance sequel to a lecture delivered last November (1934) before the Cambridge University English Club, in which I tried out the argument of Chapter vi. My kind hosts for the evening were old friends, Stanley Bennett and his wife, Joan Bennett, whose charming and helpful study of Four Metaphysical Poets you like the rest of us will have been reading. And when I tell you that George Rylands of King’s, producer of the notable Marlowe Society Hamlet of 1932, was also of the company, you will not be surprised to hear that after the lecture discussion went on far into the night. ” (What Happens in Hamlet, 22) ↩
  3. The number of young men in 1931 repeatedly writing to their Mothers about Shakespeare was doubtless not large.  The number doing so in Winnipeg was presumably equal to exactly one. ↩
  4. McLuhan is referring to lectures on Shakespeare given between 1808 and 1818 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published as Shakespearean Criticism (2 vols., 1907). ↩
  5. Although it was to cost him in various ways, McLuhan throughout his life never tried to hide his scorn for ‘scholars’ who concentrated on the trees at the expense of the forest. And his esteem of Coleridge would be affirmed later that same year in Cambridge, where he would find I.A. Richards influentially maintaining that modern criticism had to revert to Coleridge to find its way.  (McLuhan would recall this connection in a letter to Richards 35 years later: “I owe you an enormous debt since (my) Cambridge days. I also owe a great deal to STC.” McLuhan to I.A. Richards, July 12, 1968, Letters 355) ↩
  6. As further discussed above, the title of Wilson’s lecture was just the title of Chapter vi of What Happens in Hamlet. ↩
  7. In the Preface to the Third Edition of What Happens in Hamlet Wilson makes this point as follows: “to abstract one figure from an elaborate dramatic composition (…) is to attempt something at once wrong in method and futile in aim.” ↩
  8. McLuhan’s later development may be seen here in nuce.  He sees from (or possibly already with?) Dover Wilson, that personality is not an individual matter of “psychological creation” but a question of its “portion of the tissue” of a larger theme: “Hamlet’s character is simply a means of developing a total dramatic effect”. McLuhan would later call this a matter of “putting on” an environment or assuming a “role”. It may be that he already vaguely intuited that one such larger theme is that of “readers” — the Gutenberg galaxy — and that it is in this literary context alone that “consistent psychological creation” becomes a need and a standard. Further, surely following Wilson far beyond his own appreciation and knowledge, he specifies the scene of the duel between Hamlet and Laertes for special attention, noting that it was “of tremendous interest to the Elizabethans” and even calling it Shakespeare’s “greatest artistic triumph”. Indeed — as was, however, unknown to McLuhan and perhaps even to Wilson (since the fact is not mentioned in his 1935 What Happens in Hamlet) — this scene recaptures one of the oldest mythological dramas in the western tradition, one that already appears in Homer and Ovid: that of the the Aloadai twins who waged a gigantomachia against the gods by piling the mountains Pelion and Ossa on top of each other in order to attack the immortals in the sky.  In the end, “Artemis finished off the Aloadai in Naxos by means of a trick: in the likeness of a deer she darted between them, and in their desire to hit the animal they speared each other.” (Apollodorus, Library 1.53) In Hamlet Shakespeare carefully prepares the ground for this mythological re-enactment of “brothers” killing one another (just before the final duel, Hamlet pardons himself to Laertes by saying, “I have shot mine arrow o’er the house, And hurt my brother”) through a series of specific allusions in the play which are described here. For further on this gigantic theme see McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia and Babel. ↩
  9. Many posts in this blog will treat McLuhan’s contributions to a consideration of nihilism. What is particularly noteworthy in this parody is the direction in which McLuhan takes Shakespeare’s wonderful paeon to insubstantiality — “These our actors (…) were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of (…) the great globe itself (…) shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep”. McLuhan plainly wanted to pose the question of how, outside the theatre in what is thought to be ‘real life’, such insubstantiality could yet seem so real to so many and with such effect. His answer here, at 23, is that a concerted alliance of business (“mad hustlers” with “baseless credit”), advertising (“sign-capped”), media (“newspapers”) and entertainment (“great Hollywood itself”) is able to “put on” a production of ‘real life’ such that we all take our identities and roles from it. A couple months later, on January 18, 1935, McLuhan would conclude a letter to his Mother by noting the “glib acceptance of officially encouraged and systematic hypocrisy” (Letters 51). ↩
  10. A series of points in this letter would germinate in McLuhan’s later work. First, he sees the need for “fresh receptivity” and the difficulties of enabling it, in the event that humans have an “unconscious reluctance to disturb (…) previous judgements” and even “correct” views can be “none the less sterilizing”.  This would become his critique of the rear-view mirror and his differentiation between perception and conception. Second, he sees the related need to see through texts (and, indeed, through everything else including individual human beings and historical events) to “the living context” beneath them. Not to do this he calls “abstracting”: instead of attending to phenomena as complexly transparent, as partially revealing their underlying ground, an “abstracting” view remains with the “incrusted” surface “per se”. Decades later, figure absent ground and figure with ground would become McLuhan’s usual way of describing this contrast, although he also spoke frequently of the need to go through the looking-glass — aka the rear-view mirror — with Alice. Importantly, McLuhan applied these insights to himself since he notes his own “unconscious reluctance to disturb my previous judgements” and records how this new self-consciousness was radically changing his mind across a series of areas. In addition to his changed view of English Literature, McLuhan had, of course, begun the process of religious conversion that would culminate the next year with his decision to enter the Catholic church. ↩
  11. Nominally this was a course, but as only two students attended this session, McLuhan and “one other chap” received a tutorial from this legendary figure. In his letter to his family describing the resulting “very chatty trio” of “Q” and the two students, McLuhan mentions Quiller-Couch’s “theory of the punctum indifferens in Shakespeare — the idea that in all art there is a point of rest in the midst of surrounding conflict” (Letters 57).  This was an idea going back to Schelling, the German romantics and their English counterpart, S.T. Coleridge. One of the sources of McLuhan’s later formulation that the “gap is where the action is” is doubtless to be found here. ↩

“Pouring [out] is also fulfillment, not emptying but filling”

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Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language.  James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial  (1953)

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 2: on “true strength” concludes as follows:

It thus comes into view that original “dialogue” as original ”dialogue” requires its own oblivion as the only way in which it can be the sort of radical plurality required by it as original and as “dialogue”.  Only so can it effect its own repetition in difference as its way of “creating the new”…

Because dialogue needs its oblivion in this way, it doesn’t lose itself through it, through its own absence, but gains itself. Thus it is said in the I Ching, and repeated by McLuhan on TT 22, that this genuine and total loss yet represents its “true strength“.

Something of this strange notion emerges in a conversation McLuhan had with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on December 20, 1969.1

McLuhan: I think of this time that we live in as having come to the end of ‘steal’. You can use ‘steal’ in many senses, but when you become totally involved in each other, you can’t help but steal from each other. (…)
Ono: I prefer using the word emerge, or communication. Stealing, I mean, you can never steal anything. Nothing is going to be lost, you know.  It’s not like if you pour water in a cup, on this side [of the] cup — that this [other] side [of the cup] would be empty. When you pour [water into] it, both sides would be [equally] full, you know.
McLuhan: That’s right. The experience that is the result of the pouring is also fulfillment, is not emptying but filling. There’s a complementarity here.
Ono: That’s why I think, you know, this logical thinking made people start to be so fearful of giving because they feel that if you give, then you’re gonna lose. But it’s not that.
McLuhan: No.
Ono: Giving is getting too.2 (127)3 

  1. A transcript of the conversation is given in The Beatles and McLuhan: Understanding the Electric Age by Thomas MacFarlane, 2012, 123-142. Footage from the conversation is available here. ↩
  2. Cf Heidegger, “es gibt Sein” (SD, 9).  His point is that being ‘is’ being — being en-acts being — only by letting beings be.  So its loss of self-contained purity (culminating in the Seinsvergessenheit of humans) is what makes it what it ‘is’.  In Yoko’s terms, being gets to be being by giving beings their independent being. ↩
  3. Footage of this particular exchange may be seen here beginning at 1:02. ↩

Autobiography – remembering St Louis 1937-1944

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Bernard and Mary Muller-Thym were the witnesses at the McLuhans’ rushed wedding in 1939 and were godparents to several of the McLuhan children, beginning with Eric in 1942.  Bernard Muller-Thym was a graduate of the IMS at St Michael’s, a favorite pupil of Etienne Gilson and colleague of McLuhan at SLU in the philosophy department.  In June, 1974, when Muller-Thym was mortally ill1, McLuhan recalled their times at SLU, thirty years before:

Naturally we are thinking of you day and night, and remembering all the wonderful times we had in St Louis. Your home was the super seminar of all time, in which young instructors were taught the mysteries of cuisine, avant garde music, new liturgy, and metaphysics. It was a very rich and heady brew that formed and that was shared by your delighted friends.  I pray that other such centres exist even now and that others will be as lucky as I in sharing them. The fact that you [Mary2] and Bernie had such a wonderful musical background, to say nothing of your knowledge of St Louis University, and the Jesuits, and the city of St Louis, was like knowing James Joyce himself! (McLuhan to Bernard and Mary Muller-Thym, June 11th, 1974, Letters 498)

 

  1. Muller-Thym would die 3 months later on September 29, 1974. ↩
  2. Her father was the conductor of the Kansas City Symphony and she was an accomplished pianist. Muller-Thym was an expert violinist. ↩

Autobiography – encountering Maritain

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My first encounter with your work was at Cambridge University in 1934. Your Art and Scholasticism was on the reading list of the English School. (McLuhan to Jacques Maritain, May 6, 1969, Letters 371)

It was in 1934-6, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in England, that I encountered the writings of Jacques Maritain. Art and Scholasticism was featured on the shelves of our English department library, and I had a glorious time discovering that art and the art process were essentially intellectual in character. In those years I was deeply interested in things Catholic, having started in that direction under G.K. Chesterton whose What ‘s Wrong with the World I had read in 19321. From that time I read everything I could get my hands on by Maritain, and have kept fairly well up on all of his works.
Part of the excitement in reading Maritain was the awareness that he was saying something new about something very old, so that there was the excitement of discovery and of sharing this discovery with one’s contemporaries. I discovered Maritain simultaneously with the work of I. A. Richards, and T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. All of these people seem to relate to each other in many different ways, and each seems to enrich the other. Along with the work of contemporary painters and ballet and the world of Sergei Eisenstein and music, one had the experience of a very rich new culture, in which the great intellectual Maritain was a notable ornament. Maritain helped to complete the vortex of significant components in a single luminous logos of our time. (McLuhan to John Dunaway, September 1, 1976, Letters 521)

  1. This should probably be 1931 given McLuhan’s diary entry from July of that year: “Few writers, yes I can say, no other writer, has ever before been able to arouse my enthusiasm for ideas as has G.K.” (Escape, 32) ↩

Key texts #2 — SI/SC revisited as “cliché­-probes”

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It could be argued that McLuhan never thought about anything other than a spectrum of “modes of experience”, each conceived as a combination of “sensory input” (SI) and “sensory completion” (SC). But his explicit use of these SI-SC terms was limited. He used them extensively in his 1960 Report on Understanding New Media, and in letters around this time, took them up again in TVP (1968) (considered in Key Texts #1), and then returned to them once more in From Cliché to Archetype (1970).  Here is a key passage in this 1970 book: 

The Oriental world has, on the whole, tried to anesthetize itself against the inputs of sensation because of its thousands of years of knowledge of the experiential effects of the inputs. The West, in contrast, has tried to maximize the sensational inputs and to minimize the experiential effects. It is useful to have a shorthand for this pattern of input and response: SI/SC — sensory input or impact and sensory closure or involvement. Today the roles of East and West seem to be shifting. The Orient is more inclined today to give the SI side of things a go, while the West, undergoing retribalization, may appear to be already satiated with involve­ment and participation of SC. The outer trip has been specialist and Western. The inner trip has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliché­probes. Each has its own methods and preferences of retrieval from the rag-and-bone shop of past experience. The outer trip prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes. The inner trip prefers the probing cliché world of the module. (From Cliché to Archetype,13-14)

This text may well seem hasty, if not fundamentally confused, an effect deriving especially from two sections of it.  First, the phrase “knowledge of the experiential effects of the inputs” in the initial sentence seems a very strange way to describe what earlier in the same sentence is called the attempt “to anesthetize (…) against the inputs of sensation”.  How have “knowledge of the experiential effects of (,..) inputs” by anesthetizing against them? Second, it seems equally puzzling to characterize the West as “already satiated with involve­ment and participation of SC” when everywhere else in the text the West is equated with SI. While a flip from SI to SC would be strange enough, the characterization of such a flip as “already satiated” seems bizarre. Already? Satiated?

An attempt to come to grips with the text might begin by amplifying it with additions, many taken from different parts of itself:

The Oriental world has anesthetized itself against the inputs of sensation [ie, against their revolutionary “impact”] because of [= through] its thousands of years of knowledge of the experiential effects of the inputs [= through intense subjective “involve­ment and participation” with those inputs such that their negative “impact” is ameliorated]. The West, in contrast, has tried to maximize the [revolutionary effects of] sensational inputs and [thereby moved] to minimize the experiential effects [of subjective “involve­ment and participation” with them]. It is useful to have a shorthand for this pattern of input and response: SI/SC — sensory input or impact and sensory closure or involvement. Today the roles of East and West seem to be shifting. The Orient is more inclined today to give the SI side of things a go, while the West [is more inclined to give the SC side of things a go. This trend in the West appears as if it were] undergoing retribalization [in some ways, such that its younger generations] may appear to be already satiated with involve­ment and participation of SC. The outer trip [SI] has been specialist and Western. The inner trip [SC] has been echological [implicating back and forth “involve­ment and participation”] and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliché-­probes. Each has its own methods and preferences of retrieval from the rag-and-bone shop of past experience. The outer trip [SI] prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes [or scientific laws or theorems, all of which it isolates ‘on their own’ by ruthlessly suppressing SC]. The inner trip [of the Oriental world or of the space shot] prefers the probing cliché world of the [self-enclosed] module [where strict SC — as ancestor worship or as a technologically fabricated environment — dominates SI].

Once the passage is augmented in this way, it is important to consider not only what it has to say, but also how McLuhan (and Watson?) chose to say it. And why this choice was made. This post will examine the first question  (in the main), but future posts will need to investigate the latter two at length.

In the most puzzling sections of the text, McLuhan appears to have run together several different lines of thought. These different lines of thought may be teased apart as follows…

He proposes in the first place to analyze “modes of experience” in terms of a singular, but variable, complex: “It is useful to have a shorthand for this [recurring] pattern of input and response”. The central thought here is that all experience has, or is, some variety of a singular “pattern” or form (much as all physical materials exhibit some variety of the elementary structure).

In the second place, he proposes that this pattern and its variations are best approached through focus on two essential components of it: “input and response”, SI and SC. Here it is important to note that SC or “sensory closure” is not conceived as an enclosure or as a barricade, but as an action of “response” and of “involvement and participation” with SI. Indeed, all experience must have both SI and SC. If only one component part of the pattern were present, only “input” or only “response”, only SI or only SC, the required “pattern” of experience would not be present and there would be no experience. SC does not, and cannot ever, operate in the absence of SI, just as SI does not, and cannot ever, operate in the absence of SC.

But, in the third place, in order to achieve the recommended focus, it is necessary to understand the two essential components of it on their own. Similarly, elements must be approached in terms of their particular structure of electrons and protons, but in order to achieve this approach it is necessary to understand what electrons and protons are. So when McLuhan writes of “the Orient” and “the West”, his intent is not to reference all experience in these rather inchoate areas, but to define SI and SC apart from concrete manifestations in which both are always present and always mixed. An unreal “Orient” and an unreal “West” are used to describe the unreal situation of SI or SC on their own.

In the fourth place, once a recommended method of analysis is in place, it is necessary to see how it may be used to investigate concrete matters around us. This helps to specify the method and to proof it. In this mode, McLuhan looked at hair and clothes fashions, children’s toys, sizes of cars, styles of dancing, advertising, war, etc etc etc. If chemistry is chemistry only because all materials are chemical, and similarly with physics and biology, McLuhan insisted that nothing in experience could fall outside the purview of the sort of analytic of experience he was proposing. This is one important implication of his mantra that he had no point of view and took no moral position.

Lastly, precisely because the pattern of experience is fundamentally variable and there is, therefore, no singular instance of it that is definitive or normative in all respects, all particular “modes of experience” may be regarded as clichés separated (and necessarily separated) from the archetypal “rag and bone shop of the heart” (“where all the ladders start”, as Yeats has it). Any “mode of experience” represents a limited selection from a “plenary” range before it (where ‘before’ must be understood in multiple senses). Any sample of experience, including any attempt to analyze experience like McLuhan’s own, is necessarily limited in this way and any fitting presentation of it must keep this factor of limitation front and center.1

The key text represents a kind of compromise expression of these different currents of thought. But McLuhan’s evident contentment with such a ‘compromise expression’ itself demands consideration. In fact, he did this himself for us:

You do not seem to have grasped that the message as it relates to the medium, is never the content, but the (…) effects of the medium as an environment of service and disservice.(…) I have always assumed that the user of any medium is the content. The person who turns on an electric light is the content of the electric light, just as the reader of a book is the content of a book. This is standard Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrine, that the cognitive agent is himself thing and content. (…) My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them ‘theories’ is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of rationalistic prose any time I choose to do so. (McLuhan to Bill Kuhns, December 6, 1971, Letters, 448)

 Similarly to Ralph Cohen (July 13, 1973):

Since ‘communication’ means change, a theory of communication most naturally concentrates on the sort of public with which they [authors/artists] felt themselves to be confronted. It is this public which always affects the structures which the performer chooses to adopt, and it is this public which he seeks to shape and alter in some way.

It would seem that the effort required to untangle2 McLuhan’s prose, especially the prose he turned out in the last 15 years of his life, was an important factor in his composition of it. Or, perhaps better put, in his decision not to put much effort into the construction of it as polished prose. The central question may have been: How to attempt to elicit thought once more — aka the effort of untangling — in a civilization gone brain-dead (despite its mountains of polished prose)?

  1. McLuhan’s evident satisfaction with hasty composition has one of its motivations here — somewhat like abstract expressionism in painting, perhaps. This also explains his suspicion of the cliché/archetype opposition, since any attempt to describe an archetype is necessarily limited and therefore necessarily cliché. A further factor may have been the idea that he had from I.A. Richards that subsequent correction is more important to analysis than initial perfection: “The neglect of the study of the modes of metaphor in the later 19th Century was due, I think, to a general feeling that those methods of inquiry were unprofitable, and the time was not ripe for a new attack. I am not sure that it is yet ripe in spite of all that Coleridge and Bentham did towards ripening it. Very likely a new attempt must again lead into artificialities and arbitrarinesses. If so, their detection may again be a step (ahead) on the road. In this subject it is better to make a mistake that can be exposed than to do nothing, better to have any account of how metaphor works (…) than to have none. (…) And progress here (…) comes chiefly from profiting by our mistakes” (I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936, 115-116). Richards gave these lectures in the U.S. in 1936, but McLuhan heard what must have been substantially the same lectures in Cambridge the year before. His lecture notes on them are retained in his papers in Ottawa. A passage from the preface to The Meaning of Meaning by Richards and Ogden (1923) goes to a related point: “Convinced as they are of the urgency of a stricter examination of language from a point of view which is at present receiving no attention, the authors have preferred to publish this essay in its present form rather than to wait, perhaps indefinitely, until, in lives otherwise sufficiently occupied, enough moments of leisure had accumulated for it to be rewritten in a more complete and more systematized form. They are, they believe, better aware of its failings than most critics will suppose, and especially of those due to the peculiar difficulties which a fundamental criticism of language inevitably raises for the expositors thereof.” ↩
  2. Cf Richards: “In all interpretation we are filling in connections, and for poetry, of course, our freedom to fill in the absence of explicitly stated intermediate steps is a main source of its powers. As Mr. Empson well says (in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 32),  ‘Statements are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relations for himself. The reason why these statements should have been selected is left for him to invent; he will invent a variety of reasons and order them in his own mind. This is the essential fact about the poetical use of language.’ The reader, I would say, will tryout various connections, and this experimentation — with the simplest and the most complex, the most obvious and the most recondite collocations alike — is the movement which gives its meaning to all fluid language.” (Philosophy of Rhetoric, 125) ↩

Autobiography – McLuhan’s place in Canada and in the arts

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In a short entry in The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (ed Spender & Hall, 1963) under the heading ‘Canadian Poetry’, McLuhan reflected on Canada and its arts. It is a description (given here in abbreviated and rearranged form) which may be taken to specify what he took to be his own place in them. 

From the colonial beginnings until 1920, Canadian poets accepted the fate of outer landscape as the formula for inner states of mind, if only because this pattern had been worked out by the [English] Romantics on the basis of Newton’s Opticks.

Alienation from the medium of speech as such has been a special Canadian problem, because Canadians began to write poetry just when English poets had shifted the stress in poetry away from speech to the presentation of mental states by means of descriptions of landscape. Canada has a macroscopic landscape and a microscopic social life; and the coincidence of the new landscape poetry and the new Canadian settlement was not fortunate for the arts. Its shaping effect on Canadian poetry was noted by a reviewer as follows: “For what emerges indubitably (…) is that Canada is a country where every prospect is so vile that the villainies of man are dwarfed by the assembled cruelties of rock, wind and snow.”

This theme of stark isolation and human insignificance was to be repeated by Canadian poet and novelist alike (…). What Pascal had shuddered at in the unsocial spaces of the heavens, the Canadian writer lived with at home.

The struggle to perceive some sort of autonomous centre of significance in Canadian expression is made difficult by the fact that a third of the small population is French-speaking. The English group, reading and speaking a principal literary language of the world, can scarcely discern the segment of its image or detect its own intonation in the mosaic of English (…), the Canadian poet feels like an amateur radio-station operator who has to compete with a national network. The Canadian writer has never been encouraged to imagine that English, as a medium of experience and expression, was a personal responsibility and possession. But this situation is not even mainly due to the circumstances of marginal remoteness. Lack of confidence in the medium of English is also due to lack of community and conversation in an over-sized environment. Yet Robert Frost [in the United States] was able to use this very factor of lonely incoherence in North American speech in achieving many of his uniquely successful effects of laconicism amidst large silences.

Writing in the second issue of The Tyro (1922) in an essay entitled “The Three Provincialities”, T.S. Eliot began by observing: “It has been perceptible for several years that not one but three English literatures exist: that written by Irishmen, that written by Americans, and that composed by the English themselves.” By provinciality Eliot here indicates that uneasy state of groping towards identity and definition which was once referred to by a Canadian critic as “the sense of our density”. When a remote section of population aspires to be in the mode, it involuntarily becomes provincial. When the same group simply assumes the right to innovate and to create without any regard to modishness, it becomes an authentic centre of culture. Canada has not yet approached this state, but the once provincial United States have done so.

But Canadian landscapes, if used as equations for inner mental states [= “the world of natural and urban processes alike traversed with tactile rather than visual stress”], would yield some quite amazing results. (…) Had Canadians been daring enough to accept their landscape as the formula for mental states, they would have been projected into non-human orbits at once.1

Canadian poets have never been disposed to wipe their hands across their mouth and laugh. The ability to yearn for pre-industrial charm among the ice-floes and the blasted pines appears as an impressively rugged trait of the Canadian artist and writer. But it may have been no more than loyalty to British fashion.

Corresponding to the Group of Seven in Canadian painting, we find E. J. Pratt and the Montreal poets who turned to Expressionism and observation of the outer processes of nature and urban commercial life. This meant a quite sharp break with picturesque poetry. Finally, corresponding to the new International Group in painting, are the Academic poets who consider that poetry is made from other poetry. Just as the painters became very much aware of other painters and publics, the poets have begun to notice varieties of poetry and reading publics. The result is a strong tendency towards what might be described as a dialogue in the arts. It even points towards the possibility of Canadian poets beginning to take the resources and traditions of language as their province. 

The world of natural and urban processes alike traversed with tactile rather than visual stress — such was the new Canadian poetry and painting as it arose in the twenties to the fifties. (…) And this tendency, so different from derivative adaptation, has led (…) deeper into the world of language than Canadians have ventured before.

The emergence of a dialogue among the poets speaks of an entry into the world of the English language which is quite new. The long reign of the picturesque landscape may be over.

  1. McLuhan seems to have been of two minds as regards “outer landscape as the formula for inner states of mind”.  On the one hand, he plainly welcomed the fact that “the long reign of the picturesque landscape may be over”. On the other, he saw actual landscape, rural and urban, natural and constructed, as an integral aspect of engaged perception. This same ambiguity may be seen in his Foreword to The Interior Landscape where he first reports: “After a conventional and devoted initiation to poetry as a romantic rebellion against mechanical industry and bureaucratic stupidity, Cambridge was a shock. Richards, Leavis, Eliot and Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception on the poetic process, and its role in adjusting the reader to the contemporary world.” But he then concludes: “All this is merely to say that my juvenile devotion to Romantic poetry is closely related to my present concerns with the effects of the media in our personal and political lives.” He seems to have thought that the modernists not only turned decisively away from the romantics, but were also their fulfillment. ↩

Autobiography – encountering Chesterton

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McLuhan first read a bit of G.K. Chesterton in 1930 when he was still in his teens, a preface by GKC to an edition of Great Expectations. Gordon reports McLuhan commenting on the fact (without evident enthusiasm) in a diary entry from June 17 that year (Escape, 358, n21).   A year later, a diary entry from July 1931 records a very different impression:

Few writers, yes I can say, no other writer, has ever before been able to arouse my enthusiasm for ideas as has G.K.  (Escape, 32)

Between these two dates seems to have fallen an incident that has been variously dated and variously located (eg, Letters 10; Marchand 28; Escape 32; Medium and the Light xiv) when Tom Easterbrook either gave him, or traded to him, or brought to his attention, Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

Both McLuhan and Easterbrook must have developed a mutual interest in Chesterton thereafter. A letter to his parents about their experiences in Montreal prior to their embarkation for England in the summer of 1932 has McLuhan reporting:

Since a further shower of rain was impending we hastened into a library (…) and each [of us] sat down with a book of G.K.C. and spent a very pleasant 2 hours. (Letters, 11) 

Two years later, in his first month at Cambridge (October, 1934), he could already speak of Chesterton’s “social (not faddish) philosophy based on a completely adequate religion” (Letters, 24) and was subscribing (as he had perhaps already done in Winnipeg) to the G.K Weekly (Letters, 27, 45 and 62).  From this and from the fact that McLuhan was already talking up Chesterton from Cambridge to his Winnipeg friends at this time (eg, by circulating copies of  the G.K Weekly among them)1, it would seem that McLuhan’s engagement with Chesterton must have crystallized in Winnipeg when he was in his early twenties (age 20 to 23) — between his July 1931 diary entry given above and his departure for Cambridge in the fall of 1934.2

Several of his letters from his first months in Cambridge illustrate conclusions he must have brought with him from Canada. A letter from November to his family has this recommendation for his brother:

I can heartily recommend GK’s book on St Thomas as being of use to you in your philosophy. He deals with Plato and Aristotle and their influence on Christendom — incidentally there is a very clear exposition of their theories of knowledge (how we know and know we can know). (Letters, 39, McLuhan’s emphasis)

The question of “how we know (…) we can know” would remain central for him throughout his career. On the one hand, it points toward his religion — toward his notion of, and response to, the nature of the real (within which mortals can come to know). On the other hand, it points toward those complex problems of communication he would consider for the next 45 years — how does communication both with things (eg in the sciences) and among humans (eg in the arts, but also in all the provinces of practical life) take place at all and how may consideration of these questions about communication be communicated?

A letter to his brother Maurice from December 1934 broaches some of the implicated problematics:

But in psychology the confusion arises from the fact that the thing which [studies] is also the thing studied. The psychologist forgets that a man does know some things about a man long before he is cloven in 2 and 1/2 becomes a psych-ist and the other a psychol-al problem. When he plunges into the dark sea of the subconscious he forgets that there is such a thing as the broad daylight of human nature. You will remember Coleridge saying that “Shak keeps to the main highway of the human affections”. (Letters, 44-45)

Decades later, in 1968, McLuhan would set out a view of “the modes of experience” as constituting a spectrum between white SI (sensory input) and black SC (sensory completion): see Key texts #1 — “physiological and psychological balance”.  It is noteworthy that in both these 1934 and 1968 reflections, McLuhan associates light with external SI (” broad daylight”) and darkness with internal SC (“the dark sea of the subconscious”).

At the same time (late 1934) he was already planning the article on Chesterton that would become his first scholarly publication. As he reported to his mother:

My head is teeming with ideas for the GK article which will be written on a sudden shortly. I have kept jotting down separate notions as they came from all sorts of reading I have been at lately, so the longer it waits the better it will be. I intend to send it to the mgr of GK’s Weekly before sending it to Canada, to have any criticism or suggestion he can offer. (December 17, 1934, Letters, 48)

It is significant that the article was already intended for Canada — in fact for The Dalhousie Review — and that Elsie would have understood this.  As will be detailed in a further post, it would seem that she had met Fr Gerald Phelan in Toronto, perhaps at one of his lectures on Chesterton, and that she had then brought Phelan into contact with McLuhan (whose enthusiasm for Chesterton she knew all too well). Phelan was from Halifax, was a long-time friend of the founding (and continuing) editor of The Dalhousie Review (Herbert L. Stewart) and had published in it himself. Just as he would later help McLuhan obtain his first teaching position at St Louis University in 1937, so (it may be guessed) did Phelan pave the way for his first published article the year before. McLuhan’s conversion fell between these two events, again helped along by Phelan who was the first to learn of McLuhan’s decision in a letter of November 26, 1936 (Letters 93) and who then proofed McLuhan’s intention when he traveled from Madison to visit his mother in Toronto that Christmas. 

The article was published in January, 1936 and must have been finished sometime in the middle of 1935.  Letters to his family from early in 1935 record:

Heard GK on the wireless again to-night. Will turn to the completion of my article on him as soon as [Lent] term ends. If it is accepted I will feel impelled to further essays and efforts. (February 27, 1935, Letters, 62; Lent term in Cambridge extends from January to March)

The GK article — ignoble me — is not done yet, but much more has been written. It shall be complete before [Easter] term commences. (March 30, 1935, Letters, 66; Easter term in Cambridge extends from April to June.)

Not long thereafter, on June 1st, McLuhan attended a dinner in London of the Distributist League at which Chesterton was present.  He described the event in a letter from June 2, 1935:

Well, GK was at the dinner! I had seen his pictures, heard his voice, and thought his thoughts, and knew what to expect. But I was not prepared for his quick, light-blue eye, or the refinement and definition of his features. He has much that reminds me of R.B. Bennett, but a larger head, and as I say, finer features. His hair is not very long but it curls up at the back of his head — like his light moustache, it is quite white. His bulk is unexaggerated by accounts. He is 6 feet 2 or 3 and much thicker (at the equator) than he is wide at the shoulders, or elsewhere. His voice is not tiny or high-pitched but it is not very powerful. He holds himself quite erect when he  stands — necessarily he moves slowly, and because he is GK, he imparts a sense of largesse, ample humour, tolerance, and significant dignity to the necessity which nature has laid upon him. His eye and head and face might easily, in a more portable figure, have been consonant with the speedy active agitator and leader (…) GK made several short speeches at various times. His chair was directly opposite an emergency exit and he feigned each time he rose that the morbid grip of the prepensive suggestion which he was sure was in our minds had tightened on his mind. At 10.15 when he rose to go he announced that he had conquered the morbid desire to fling himself through the emergency exit and would content himself with breaking several stairs as he departed in the usual manner. He urged us to go on with our songs and recitations (which we did) and hoped that his departure would occasion only a geographical deficiency (which it did). (Letters, 68-69)

A few months later (September 5, 1935) McLuhan summed up the first five years of his encounter with Chesterton in a letter to his Mother:

Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of religious truth, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all in me that3 was simply blind anger and misery. He went through it himself; but since he lived where much Catholic culture remained and since he had genius he got through it quicker. He was no fanatic. He remained an Anglo-Catholic as long as he was able to do so (19224). (Letters 73)

But this same letter from September 1935 also records the fact that a year in Cambridge had effected a decisive change in McLuhan’s view of Chesterton. He was no longer seen as McLuhan had viewed him in Winnipeg — as a great personality heroically standing against the tide of modernity.5

The very definition of an enthusiast is that he has seized a truth which he cannot and would not if he could, relate to other truths of life. He is invariably unsympathetic and lacking in humanity. l have some elements of enthusiasm which have  been more than occupied in hero-worship —- e.g. Macaulay and Chesterton. Them days is gone forever but I shall always think that my selection of heroes was fortunate. Both were calculated to suppress effectively any tendency I had towards harping on one truth at a time.6 (Op. cit. — McLuhan to his Mother, September 5, 1935, Letters 72)

In this same month, a letter from McLuhan was published in Chesterton’s newsletter, G.K.’s Weekly, in which he took earlier correspondents to task over this same point:

They assume that the stock-in-trade of this paper consists in two vials, one of wrath and one of ardour, to be poured automatically upon unjust and righteous causes. (McLuhan to the Editor, G.K.’s Weekly, September 19, 1935)

McLuhan had come to see that the mark of truth is not certainty based on singularity (“the very definition of an enthusiast is that he has seized a truth which he cannot and would not if he could, relate to other truths of life” aka the “vial…of ardour”), but insight or perception based on a fundamental complexity:

the greatest fact about man [is] that he is a creature and an image, and not sufficient unto himself. It is the whole bias of the mind that it seek truth, and of the soul (…) that it seek that which gave7 it. The great difficulty about Truth is that it is not simple… (Op. cit. — McLuhan to his Mother, September 5, 1935, Letters 72)

Chesterton had helped McLuhan to this insight, but would now himself (along with all else) be subject to it. Chesterton would now be appreciated as “a creature and an image” through whom could be witnessed the complex interaction of contesting fundamental truths, of contesting forms of reality: “the great difficulty about Truth is that it is not simple”. The imperative question (that in the following year McLuhan would answer for himself with his decision to convert) was which one of these contesting truths best reflected this complexity of truths — ie, which one of these truths fundamentally committed itself to the creation and maintenance of plural difference both on the level of these contesting truths themselves and as regards the relation of such creative power (or powers) and the existence of less-than-fundamental creatures like ourselves?  This one would then be exemplary as an account of the real by explicating how and why it was not alone.8

 

 


  1. Letters 45 ↩
  2. Cf Marchand, 27: “Chesterton’s influence permeated McLuhan’s experiences in his last year at the University of Manitoba…” ↩
  3. McLuhan: “all that in me” ↩
  4. Chesterton converted to Catholicism in 1922 at age 48. ↩
  5. “Until I came to the Cambridge English School, my principal qualification was a boundless enthusiasm for great books, great events, and great men. Dr. Richards and Dr. Leavis have proved to  be a useful supplement and corrective to that attitude.” (McLuhan to Prof E.K. Brown, December 12, 1935, Letters 79) ↩
  6. The contentions here are that there are plural “truths of life”, and that “harping on one truth at a time” is an evasion of that plurality. The implication is that time, too, must be plural. But when would multiple truths deploy if not “one truth at a time” — and then another truth at another time? In this case, the plurality of truth would depend upon diachrony or lineality: because lineal time constitutes itself in plural moments, so can plural truths be constituted in the sequence of those moments. This would, however, be nothing other than “harping on one truth at a time”, even if different truths might be harped upon, in different moment after different moment.  Instead, it is McLuhan’s contention that if the plurality of truth is fundamental, the contest of truths must take place synchronically — “an interminable battle is always going on” as Plato says — and this time of the contesting plural “truths of life” must occur as an essentially different chronology from that of sequential historical moments. Times cross, in this view, and humans are that type of being that stands, knowingly or unknowingly, at their intersection. Only so can multiple truths be in contest at the same time. In sum, multiple truths are possible only if there are multiple times and multiple times are possible only if there are multiple truths.  As will be described in detail in a further post, this knot of truths and times may be imagined in terms of the maelstrom, where the waves of the surface of the sea may be taken to represent the on-going moments of lineal (diachronic) time, the maelstrom to represent vertical (synchronic) time, and the different sorts of debris in the maelstrom to represent contesting truths, some of which save and some of which doom — by leading between, or failing to lead between, these differing vertical and horizontal axes of time. For further discussion of time as times, see McLuhan and Plato 2 – When is myth? ↩
  7. On giving, see this footnote and its associated post. ↩
  8. In regard to this knotted combination of plurality and singularity, cf McLuhan to John Dunaway, September 1, 1976, Letters 521): “I discovered Maritain simultaneously with the work of I. A. Richards, and T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. All of these people seem to relate to each other in many different ways, and each seems to enrich the other. Along with the work of contemporary painters and ballet and the world of Sergei Eisenstein and music, one had the experience of a very rich new culture, in which the great intellectual Maritain was a notable ornament. Maritain helped to complete the vortex of significant components in a single luminous logos of our time” (emphasis added throughout). Similarly (even featuring the same word “luminous”), McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff. Dec 19, 1960: “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.” ↩

Key texts #1 — “physiological and psychological balance”

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In the Introduction (called ‘Sensory Modes’) to his 1968 Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan cites a passage from his friend , Gyorgy Kepes:

In ancient writings on vision two polar points of view were prevalent. On the one hand, emission theorists regarded the eye itself as the source of rays which explore the world somewhat as the fingers palpate objects. On the other hand, reception theorists regarded the eye as a receiver of information originating from external objects.1

McLuhan then comments:

Emission theories prevailed for many centuries. They yielded to reception theories with the advent of Newton’s Optics. (…) The late nineteenth century saw a remarkable advance on2 Newtonian ideas, with particular emphasis on the afterimage and simultaneous contrast. While this theory is generally known to practicing painters, its wider sociological implications have never been explored. To explain simply, in the field of color the afterimage consists of a physiological balancing on integral white. A brief formula might be sensory impact plus sensory completion equals white (SI + SC = W). (…) It is postulated that just as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio. Black is, therefore, the after-image of touch [SI + SC = B]3. Naturally as the visual [or white] gradient of the culture ascends, the modalities of touch [or black] are minimized. This appears very vividly in the sensory evolution of the arts. From cave painting to the Romantics, there is steady visual progress. Thereafter, with the coming of synesthesia in the arts and non-visual electronic phenomena in the sciences, we may well be moving into a kind of zero-gradient culture, with all modes of experience receiving simultaneous attention. The need for physiological and psychological balance means that any new sensory impact needs to find familiar sensory completion, just as a man on the moon would need to translate all lunar experience into familiar earth terms.4

It is easy to misunderstand this passage or not to understand it at all.  One misunderstanding is to think that McLuhan is writing about diachronic5 progressions, both in history in general and in the individual processing of sensory data.  After all, the object of his analysis is what he terms an “afterimage”, which invokes the before and after of time, and he speaks of it as a “result”. However, he also emphasizes the “simultaneous” which excludes our usual sequential (or diachronic) sense of time. And further, he somehow brings these two together in the phrase “emphasis on the afterimage and simultaneous contrast”.

With this juxtaposition of process and simultaneity, McLuhan’s point is that any notion of the simultaneous in which ‘time stands still’ and ‘nothing happens’ must be discarded. Instead, the simultaneous is to be understood as that time and process among plural times and processes in which the essential unfolds or ‘takes shape’ — and thereby ‘gives shape’. The vulgar happenings in historical or diachronic time are secondary6 and receive what intelligibility they have from the synchronic order. Compare chemistry: although physical materials are certainly subject to change in historical time, through fire, say, or through slow everyday processes like desiccation, just how they can change depends upon their elementary structure which determines the range of their diachronic modalities from another dimension — the synchronic.

Another related misunderstanding can arise from McLuhan’s admittedly strange use of ‘familiar’ in the last sentence. Once again, ‘familiar’ seems to implicate sequential historical time in the purported imperative to subject new experience “on the moon” (say) to the rule of the old: the “need to translate all lunar experience into familiar earth terms”. But the purported neccesity of consumption of the new by the old is exactly what McLuhan doesn’t mean! On the one hand, this would contradict his ever-repeated critique of the RVM, aka of “concept”, as against fresh “percept”. On the other hand, this would deny even the possibility of perceptual change (let alone the understanding of perceptual change) since the “familiar” would remain fixed in place, subjecting everything to itself.  But the understanding of perceptual change (“the sensory evolution of the arts”) in terms of variable “emphasis” and “gradient” and “attention” is precisely what this passage concerns. And besides, if the “familiar” were fixed, how could there be so many varieties of what is “familiar” to different societies and different eras and to different individuals in the same society in the same era? In fact, of course, what is “familiar” even to the same individual varies greatly over a lifetime (and sometimes over an hour).

What McLuhan means by the “familiar” in the last sentence of the key text does not refer to some fixed understanding from the past, but to the defining characteristic of human being — what is so “familiar” that human being cannot be without it — namely, its “need to translate” its encounter with the world, its need to come to “terms” with it, its need to establish “physiological and psychological balance”. The same point is made in ’James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953) and is described as the “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.”

“Familiar” in the key passage is the same as “age-old” in the Joyce essay. The “familiar” is what has always been practiced by humans and cannot not be practiced by them. “A man on the moon” would get nowhere by simply repeating his familiar actions on earth — breathing ‘normally’, for example, would be fatal. Instead, “a man on the moon” needs to do what is more deeply “familiar” to humans even than breathing normally, namely, he needs to establish “physiological and psychological balance” by “adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind [and body] to the outer world” (in this case, the lunar world).

To sum up thus far: McLuhan is concerned here not only with diachronic processes in sequential or historical time (what can be called “sociological implications”), but also with synchronic or “simultaneous” processes and with the inter-relation between these two orders of time and being.  And the focus of his investigation is on what is fundamental or “age-old” or “familiar” to all humans at all times — namely, the need to establish “physiological and psychological balance” through “adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world”.  This is a singular imperative that, notably, yet appears in “innumerable variants” (TT 22).

McLuhan’s proposal in the key passage is that analysis should focus on what he calls “the afterimage” which he defines “in the field of color” as the “physiological balancing on integral white”. “Balancing”, in turn, is said to be “assembling (…) in ratio”, while “balancing on” means “balancing on [the basis of]”.  The point at stake is that “in the field of color” the range of “sensory impact” consists of the entire spectrum of colors that — as “is generally known to practicing painters” and can be illustrated with a prism — is equal to white.  Any particular color other than white represents a fraction (or “ratio”) where the numerator is (say) blue and the denominator is white.  The sum of all the possible color fractions together is always equal to unitary or “integral” white — so blue/white + red/white (…) = white/white = white, in the same way as 1/8 + 2/8 (…) = 8/8 = 1. This “balancing” or “contrast” (McLuhan sometimes calls it “zoning”) within the total spectrum is “simultaneous” or synchronic because it does not come about through a process in sequential time, but is a way of understanding the ‘production’ of color out of a different order. As with chemistry, the point is to understand “sociological implications” with reference to such ‘prior’ determinations — here, “assembling (…) in ratio” some fraction of white to produce (say) blue.

“Practicing painters” work with this notion, but without understanding its “sociological implications”.  In a similar way, cooks and vinters and blacksmiths always worked with materials in a chemical way, but with no understanding of the “sociological implications” of their activity. As Hegel remarks, what is known is not necessarily well known.

The “afterimage” is, however, not confined to “the field of color” or to “sensory impact” or to “information originating from external objects” (as Kepes says).  There is also the field of the senses and of “sensory completion” considered on its side as another “source” (Kepes) of perceptual in-formation.  The “afterimage” or basis on the sensory side can be said to be “touch” because touch is both a singular sense and “an [integral] assembly of all the senses” just as white is both a singular color and the “integral” basis of all the colors. So Kepes can describe one theory of the working of sight as “the eye itself [being] the source of rays which explore the world somewhat as the fingers palpate objects”.  Comparably, taste, smell, and hearing can all be described as ways of registering the touch of sensations via the tongue, nose and ears.

McLuhan ‘postulates’ that the senses constitute a spectrum on the basis of touch just as colors constitute a spectrum on the basis of white: “just as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio”. Thus, where any color is a fraction with denominator or “afterimage” of “integral” white, so any sense can be said to be a fraction with denominator or “afterimage” of “integral” touch. So it is that humans can touch something with a hand (say), but they can also be touched in a global way (touched by some drama, say), reflecting no one sense, but all the senses together of the whole person. Further, this “afterimage” of sense can be said to be SC ‘black’ both because it represents the opposite extreme from SI ‘white’ and because it works as the unperceived background — the sensus communis  — to any particular exercise of sensing (like the black backing of a mirror to any particular image reflected in it).

In the 1969 Counterblast (22) McLuhan notes:

Media tend to isolate one or another sense from the others. The result is hypnosis. The other extreme is withdrawing of sensation with resulting hallucination as in dreams or DTs, etc.

What is missing in each of these “extremes” is attention to the “afterimage” of the complete range of SI “sensation” on the one side and of SC “senses” on the other. “Hypnosis” is possible only when awareness is incomplete. “Hallucination” is possible only when sensory input is incomplete. Further, this isolation from the “afterimages” of the “integral” spectra of external input and of internal awareness is itself a product of the fateful “exclusion” of SI and SC from each other. Where both are at work together, neither can be isolated in an “extreme” way.

McLuhan’s whole enterprise may be said to be the interrogation of the phenomenon of SI/SC co-variability.

McLuhan’s suggestion in the key text is that “all modes of experience” are the “result” of both of these SI/SC sides at once such that human experience is always the sum of “SI + SC” together aka of the perpetual “adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world” aka of the achievement of “physiological and psychological balance”.  The synchronic ‘production’ of experience on this model proceeds through the summation (or “balancing” or “assembly”) of these two fractions together.  And just as the spectrum of color has its basis in the “afterimage” of white (where white may be imagined as the terminal unit of all possible color fractions), and just as the spectrum of the senses has its basis in the “afterimage” of touch (where touch may be imagined as the terminal unit of all possible sense fractions), so in turn may all the possible sums of SI + SC together be seen to form a further spectrum stretching between unitary vision/white and unitary touch/black at the two extremes.

In contrast to the two spectra of color and of touch, however, the “afterimage” or denominator of experience does not have a single “gradient” but two: W and B. Its complete expression is not “SI + SC = W” or ‘SI + SC = B’, therefore, but SI + SC = W and B together. ‘W and B together‘, in turn, have three possible types of expression: W/B or B/W or WB. That is: experience is always the product of a selection between fundamentally incompatible “afterimages” where W may be figured on base B, or B may be figured on base W, or the two together may be figured as equally basic, WB.

It is in regard to this double-gradient spectrum of W-B spectra that McLuhan says:

Naturally as the visual [or color or white or SI] gradient of the culture ascends [= B/W], the modalities of touch [or sense or black or SC] are minimized. [Contrariwise, as the touch (or sense or black or SC) gradient of the culture ascends (= W/B), the modalities of the visual (or color or white or SI) are minimized.] This appears very vividly in the sensory evolution of the arts. From cave painting to the Romantics, there is steady visual progress. Thereafter, with the coming of synesthesia [= WB] in the arts and non-visual electronic phenomena in the sciences, we may well be moving into a kind of zero-gradient [= WB] culture, with all modes of experience receiving simultaneous attention [= WB].

“Attention” or “emphasis” may be allocated dynamically all along the SI + SC  spectrum, from all white to all black to all the white/black positions between these.  Total attention or emphasis at one end of the W-B spectrum would be “integral white” = (all SI and no SC) = “hypnosis”. Total attention or emphasis at the other end of the spectrum would be integral black = (no SI and all SC) = “hallucination”. In both of these “extreme” cases, experience collapses into incoherence. In contrast, the middle of the spectrum represents “a kind of zero-gradient culture with all modes of experience receiving simultaneous attention.” This “zero-gradient” condition is also called “synesthesia”.

Any one “mode of experience” represents a certain SI + SC sum which may be called a position of “attention” on the black/white spectrum. McLuhan also speaks of such “attention” in this context as a certain “emphasis”. In other texts he uses the terms “preference” and “stress” for this same synchronic marking of a base position within the range of experiential possibility. The question at stake is always what base or “afterimage” — either W or B or BW — is to be the denominator in the resulting “fraction” or “ratio” of experience.7 In a comparable way, the synchronic analysis of language use might be thought to begin with the selection of a certain language which then leads on to the choices of expression given with that optional base. A different base would entail different choices.

McLuhan’s law of “physiological and psychological balance” is the hypothesis that there is a “natural” inverse correlation between the two sides of the W-B spectrum of W and B spectra: “Naturally as the visual [or color or white or SI] gradient of the culture ascends, the modalities of touch [or sense or black or SC] are minimized.” Further, each of the multiple individual positions at points along the entire length of the W-B spectrum — each of which is some “fraction” or “ratio” of W and B together — is subject to this same law of “balance” or of “assembling (…) in ratio”. That is, as “attention”  or “emphasis” on W ascends, “attention” or “emphasis” on B descends — and vice versa. 

The ‘production’ of experience on this model must be understood as implicating the selection of some position on this white/black spectrum; the “innumerable variants” of experience may then be understood in terms of changes of position on it (in a synchronic ‘progression’) and/or of combinations of such positions (at the same synchronic ‘moment’). Here human experience is understood on the model of a piano score where the keyboard represents the spectrum of possible white/black ‘positions’ and the melody set out by the score represents a pattern of “attention” or “emphasis” exercised on the individual keys. As emphasized again and again by McLuhan, both experience itself and the study of experience are matters of “pattern recognition”. Just as all possible piano melodies are given with the keyboard, so are all “patterns” of experience given with the W-B spectrum — including the experience of the study of experience. What is required is the passion to re-cognize it.

A piano score sets out music synchronically; playing the score sets out the music diachronically. 

But how can “all modes of experience” be subject to “simultaneous attention”? In the same way as chemistry is investigation against the background of the complete table of elements, or musical composition envisions the complete range of notes (but neither of these need be definitively complete and perhaps cannot be definitively complete), so experience must be understood against its complete (or “plenary” as McLuhan sometimes says) range or spectrum. Now McLuhan had little interest in the spectrum of colors or even in the spectrum of the senses considered in themselves. For his purposes, it was enough for these to be designated simply as ‘white’ and ‘black’.  But these color and sense spectra were very important to him as illustrations of his understanding of “the modes of experience” as fractions along a spectrum of the total W-B range of “the afterimage(s) and simultaneous contrast(s)”.

 

  1. Cited by McLuhan at TVP 15 from Gyorgy Kepes, Structure in Art and in Science, 1965. ↩
  2. TVP has ‘of’, not ‘on’, but this may well be a typo since McLuhan is not concerned here with a further development of Newton’s ideas but on their transformation. ↩
  3. The first formula in round brackets ‘SI + SC = W’ stems from McLuhan; the second in square brackets ‘SI + SC = B’ has been added.  For added clarification, these formulas might be rewritten as ‘SI(v) + SC = W’ and ‘SI + SC(t) = B’. ↩
  4. TVP 15. All bold and underlining in the passage has been added. ↩
  5. The word ‘temporal’ might be easier to understand than ‘diachronic’. But the nature of the (the!) temporal is exactly one of the central questions at stake in this passage. Therefore the recourse to ‘diachronic’ as a way of indicating that different sorts of time are at stake here. ↩
  6. The relation between the synchronic and the diachronic therefore ‘takes place’ in yet another dimension of time, in which the former is first and the latter second! ↩
  7. How “attention”, “emphasis”, “preference” and “stress” work will require detailed exposition in further posts.  Suffice it to note here that this peculiar pre-experiential action from which identity and experience “result” may be termed ‘bobbing’. Cf. Counterblast (1969) 35: “We’re in an age of implosion after 3000 years of explosion — an implosion in which everybody is involved with everybody. The age of co-presence of all individuals is the age of communication — the age of instant humans.” ↩

Autobiography 1930

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In Speaking of Winnipeg (ed John Parr, 1974) McLuhan reported:

I walked to school many times in 50-below zero along Osborne Street across from the Parliament grounds to the old quondset huts that used to be called Manitoba University.

In the postcard vista of downtown Winnipeg from ca 1935 here, Osborne is the street on the right. What was then the downtown campus of the University of Manitoba, where McLuhan apparently took many of his courses,  was located between the auditorium in the front left and the Legislative building in the back centre. A view of the university at this site in 1922 is shown here.

The McLuhan family home on Gertrude St  was located in the back right of the postcard view. McLuhan’s walk to school was only a little over a mile.

 

 

 

Autobiography — Richards and Empson

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Sometime after a 1973 dinner1 with William Empson, Northrop Frye and William Wimsatt , McLuhan memorialized Empson’s description there of his first encounter with the new critical methods of I. A. Richards.  This would have been 1927-1928, around 6 years before McLuhan himself arrived in Cambridge to study in the English school with Richards.2

When visiting U of T in the spring of 1973 Empson and Frye and  Wimsatt had dinner. It was there that Empson told of days when he had begun supervisions under Richards. He said that he was in the habit of regaling his undergraduate friends after each supervision with a detailed account of what he and they regarded as Richard’s utter absurdity. They would literally roll on the grass, howling with merriment as the crazy psychological and linguistic ideas were reviewed. Empson said it was more than a year before he began to detect some sense in I.A.R.3

McLuhan described his own first impression of Richards in a contemporary letter to his mother on January 18, 1935:

Richards is conducting mass experiments in the criticism of prose extracts this term. He hands out sheets with the extracts, and gives us 20 minutes. He produced a huge volume by this method using poems, and made the “great” discovery that nobody admired or was repelled from anything for any “good” reason. I have some doubts about the method of giving one poem of any person as a test. A really cultivated taste might hit the nail most all the time, but uncultivated people can enjoy many things in a volume by one writer, where the merits of his craft  and ideas and feelings are permitted to permeate the consciousness from 1000 different angles. Richards is a humanist who regards all experience as relative to certain conditions of life. There are no permanent, ultimate, qualities such as Good, Love, Hope, etc., and yet he wishes to discover objective, ultimately permanent standards of criticism. He wants to discover those standards (what a hope!) in order to establish intellectualist culture as the only religion worthy [of] a rational being and in proportion to their taste for which all people are “full sensitive, harmonious personalities” or “disorganized, debased fragments of unrealized potentiality”. When I see how people swallow such ghastly atheistic nonsense, I could join a bomb-hurling society.4

It is noteworthy that McLuhan’s experience with Richards replicated Empson’s. Empson quickly went from the “utter absurdity” of Richards to the writing of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a classical text in ‘practical criticism’.5 Similarly, what McLuhan here calls “ghastly atheistic nonsense”, the contrast between “full sensitive, harmonious personalities” and “disorganized, debased fragments of unrealized potentiality” was close to what was to become in his work the contrasts of inclusive vs exclusive structures and of electric form vs print. And McLuhan, too, would go on to “regard all experience as relative to certain conditions of life (…) and yet (…) wished to discover objective, ultimately permanent standards of criticism.”

Perhaps Richards may be seen as a proto-structuralist for whom ambiguities were the key to unlocking the underlying laws expressed in texts and (as another Richards student, F. R Leavis, would explore before McLuhan) in the environment generally. The fertility of his insights may be judged from the range and extent of the work to which it led in his students.

Notes McLuhan made for his 1938 essay, ‘The Cambridge English School’, show how far he had revised his opinion of Richards by this time6:

Dr. Richards improved the instruments of analysis [at the English School], and has consolidated and generally made accessible the contribution of Coleridge — a contribution which had been obscured by a mass of academic criticism. (…) “The one and only goal of all critical endeavours (…) is improvement in communication” 7 (…) Dr. Richards has been a pioneer in the training of sensibility (…) Today, language, the indispensable mode of thought, is in danger from an organised cynicism which insists on exploiting the stupidity of the Many (…) modern advertising, in itself, presents an utterly irresponsible force exploiting language for the deception, or rather coercion, of the Many (…) And advertising is only one of the forces that are disintegrating [our] medium of expression, and destroying the major means of effective communication among men. (…) Dr. Richards and others at the English School, in advocating a strenuous and practical criticism, have welcomed the warning of Mr. Pound in his vigorous book How to Read: “Has literature a function in the state, in the aggregation of humans, in the republic, in the res publica? (..) It has (…) It has to do with the clarity and vigour, of ‘any and every’ thought and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself.” 8

The published essay cites Leavis from Scrutiny9 and concludes in his vein: 

In view of the generally recognized collapse of serious standards of living, of taste, and of judgment, it has become almost impossible for an individual to find his bearings amidst the hubbub of cheap excitements today. The attainment of genuine critical judgment was never so difficult, or so rare. If in view of this situation alone, the Cambridge English school might easily vindicate its insistence on the rigorous training of sensibility. And literature, properly considered, remains one of the few uncontaminated sources of nutrition for impulse and the education of emotion. With the failure of the external environment to provide such nutrition, or anything except confused sensations, it has become the major instrument of education.10

  

 

  1. This must have been in the first weeks of January.  McLuhan mentions the dinner in a letter to Muriel Bradbrook from Jan 12, 1973 (Letters 462) and to Hugh Kenner from Feb 2, 1973 (Letters 464). ↩
  2. Empson was gone from Cambridge by the time McLuhan arrived, having been expelled for possessing prophylactics. Later he would be knighted. ↩
  3. McLuhan’s note was written on the fly-leaf of his copy of Some Versions of Pastoral by William Empson (1935) as recorded here and here. ↩
  4. McLuhan to Elsie McLuhan, January 18, 1935, Letters 50. ↩
  5. As footnoted in his Letters, 462n3, McLuhan recorded reading Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in his diary for December 30, 1935 and January 4, 1936,  — “Found it excellent”. ↩
  6. In a letter 25 years years later to Bascom St John, McLuhan brings Richards together with Freud: “Much of the significant work of our time, whether it be that of Freud or I.A. Richards in criticism (…) has indicated a very wide breakdown of communication between individuals and between societies.” (June 15, 1964, Letters 302) ↩
  7. McLuhan here cites Richards from Practical Criticism, 1929: “the one and only goal of all critical endeavours, of all interpretation, appreciation, exhortation, praise or abuse, is improvement in communication”. ↩
  8. Cited from McLuhan’s papers in the National Archive Canada in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 365-366, n33. ↩
  9. “A serious interest in literature starts from the present and assumes that literature matters, in the first place at any rate, as the consciousness of the age. If a literary tradition does not keep itself alive here, in the present, not merely in new creation, but as a pervasive influence upon feeling, thought, and standards of living (it is time we challenged the economists’ use of this phrase), then it must be pronounced to be dying or dead. . . . Practical criticism of literature must be associated with training in awareness of the environment — advertising, the cinema, the press, architecture, and so on — for, clearly, to the pervasive counter-influence of this environment the literary training of sensibility in school is an inadequate reply.” (For Continuity, 1933 — a collection of Leavis essays from Scrutiny). ↩
  10. ‘The Cambridge English School’, Fleur de Lis, 1938. ↩

Autobiography 1932-1934

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In his Foreword to The Interior Landscape (1969), McLuhan remembered:

In the summer of 1932 I walked and biked through most of England1 carrying a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury [of Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language]. There had never been any doubt in my mind that art and poetry were an indictment of human insentience past and present:

Aye, many flowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony.

In the Lake Country I reveled in Wordsworth phrases: 

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies.

Every poem in that book seemed to have been written to enhance my pilgrimage:

Yes, there is holy pleasure in thine eye!
The lovely cottage in the guardian nook
Hath stirr’d thee deeply; with its own dear brook,
Its own small pasture, almost its own sky!

“Pied Beauty,” the single poem of Hopkins in my copy, was quite startling. I assumed he was a Victorian eccentric who had been noted for one or two small poems such as this. Nobody could tell me about him.

After a conventional and devoted initiation to poetry as a romantic rebellion against mechanical industry and bureaucratic stupidity, Cambridge was a shock. Richards, Leavis, Eliot and Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception on the poetic process, and its role in adjusting the reader to the contemporary world.

My study of media began and remains rooted in the work of these men. (…) 

The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world.

All this is merely to say that my juvenile devotion to Romantic poetry is closely related to my present concerns with the effects of the media in our personal and political lives.

  1. McLuhan traveled with his Winnipeg friend and future UT colleague, Tom Easterbrook. ↩

Autobiography 1944-1946

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On October 5, 1973, McLuhan wrote to his old Winnipeg friend, colleague at UT, fellow editor of Explorations and now president of the University of Western Ontario, Carlton Williams, as follows:

Fr. Stan Murphy (Basilian) of the University of Windsor (formerly Assumption College) has sustained the Christian Culture Series with zero staff and zero budget for more than thirty years. Almost every famous writer, painter, philosopher, and  head of state, to say nothing of whole symphonies, ballet troupes, and choirs of world reputation have performed for him for free. The reason is they admire Stan Murphy so much for his cultural work…

…to put the matter mildly, there has never been anything approaching the scale of Murphy’s [Windsor] operation in Toronto. The international greats he has brought to Windsor are not people who perform in Toronto…

You may remember that Murphy came to Toronto when he heard of the presence of Wyndham Lewis here during the war. He rescued Lewis from absolute poverty and total neglect by Toronto and took him back to Windsor where Lewis began to teach Comparative Literature. It was when Lewis gave a lecture in the Culture Series on Rouault that my mother, who attended the lecture, wrote me in St. Louis. I could not credit the possibility that the great Lewis was actually in Windsor. After all, he was one of the greatest men of the century, both in painting and in prose. I got on a train at once and went to Windsor and met Lewis. When I got back to St. Louis, I arranged sitters and lectures for him, and he came to St. Louis for a  year. One day he said: “Why don’t we go back to Windsor and start up my old art magazine The Enemy?” I wrote Murphy at Assumption and he arranged for me to have a job at Assumption at once, so Lewis joined me in Windsor, just as the war ended. Lewis decided to go back to London and I stayed on at Assumption, whence I moved up to Toronto via the Basilians. (Letters, 482-483)

Autobiography 1934-1936

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In 1974, McLuhan looked back 40 years in ‘English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study’:

lt was a little book by F. R. Leavis and D. Thompson called Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933) that first directed my attention to the role of advertising and movies in shaping the awareness of students in general.
l began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1936, having come from Cambridge, where language and popular culture as forms of perception and perceptual training were a somewhat new and exciting development. After all, it was the radio age, and sound movies were well established. A holistic attitude toward the planet as a single human environment had become natural and acceptable. Radio had created a simultaneous world of information, which in effect, bypassed all the existing divisions of knowledge with their schematic and visual classifications. Physics and astrophysics and anthropology alike were asserting the new claims of the inclusive and resonating world of quantum mechanics on one hand, and the “Third World,” on the other. For the Third World arrived with radio and anthropology and with the study of preliterate or “traditional” societies.  

 

The Beginnings of Gutenberg Galaxy 3 – Proof-reading in progress

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On Christmas Day, 1960, McLuhan wrote to Corinne McLuhan’s family in Fort Worth as follows:

You would have heard from me sooner except that I’ve been so keyed up this book job [The Gutenberg Galaxy] that until Sunday comes I’m useless for anything else. However, the end is in sight. Proof-reading of typescript and chaptering is in progress. So I’ve written a 400-page book in less than one month. (…) it goes into the mail (Tuesday) (…) I’ve been reading and reading and reading for twenty years and now it’s time to put out some things of my own. It’s going to mean some extra cash eventually. (Letters 276)

Researchers sometimes repeat the claim (in wonder or blame) that GG was written “in less than one month”. In fact, of course, GG was written over a full decade and required, in 1960, as much assembly as writing. Even in 1960, it took up more of McLuhan’s time than he acknowledged to the Lewis’ in Fort Worth. A letter to John Wain in March of that year noted

Shall take the whole of this summer off to do the Gutenberg book…

Babel

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Genesis 11:4-9
4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. 

Over the course of his career McLuhan took a variety of views on the Biblical story of the tower of Babel. It might be taken to symbolize the fundamental human condition of finite fragmentation; or it might be taken to signify the reign of “witless assumption”1; or it might be taken to reflect the perennial denial of the human condition “by which man sought to scale the highest heavens”. With these, however, McLuhan also listened for “the babble of Anna Livia”. He was well aware that the condition of Babel/babble can never be put entirely aside and that meaning, if to be found at all, must be found in it/them. As he observed in ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’:

the daily paper is not lacking in moral edification, for the hubbub of appetites and protests to be found among the advertisements and announcements proclaims each day the ‘original servitude’ of man and the confusion of tongues of the tower of Babel.

Here are samples (in chronological order) of McLuhan’s takes on the Tower of Babel:

we have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel. For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age. (Symbolist Communication 1953)

like Shakespeare and Chesterton, Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language. And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep. In sleep “the people is one and they have all one language” but day overcomes and scatters them. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

Nineteenth century development of spatial communication widened the gap between knowledge and power, [between] poetry [and] all the arts [on the one hand] and politics [and] business [on the other]. The withdrawal of the arts to an ivory tower and of politics and business to a tower of Babel is the figurative way of citing the current divorce between knowledge and know-how. Irresponsibility and loss of bearings occurred in both domains. Yet major developments in each sphere were strikingly parallel, and recognition of common problems and solutions [however belated] may help mend the broken network. (Network 2, 1953)2

Now for the Platonist as for the Gnostic a symbol or poem is simply a sign linking Heaven and Hell. Art and beauty point from this world to another world from which we have all fallen. In the ancient pagan view, so predominant today, man is a fallen angel. (…) So that granted the pagan premise that man is simply a fallen angel the ideal of modern industrial humanism is quite consistent. Let us doll up the fallen angel and let us put it in ever more powerful machines until the whole world looks like Marilyn Monroe in a Cadillac convertible. (…) In this angelic view the business of art has nothing to do with the analogy of cognition nor with our miraculous power to incarnate the external world. It is a means [like the tower of Babel]3 rather to lift us out of our human condition4 and to restore us to the divine world from which we fell at birth. In this view the artist becomes one with the Nietzschean superman, the transvaluer of values. Reality is not to be trusted or revered but to be remade by social engineers. (Christian Humanism and Modern Letters 1954)

This work of “popular enchantment” which is the daily paper is not lacking in moral edification, for the hubbub of appetites and protests to be found among the advertisements and announcements proclaims each day the “original servitude” of man and the confusion of tongues of the tower of Babel. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press 1954)

It is now obvious that as all languages are mass media, so the new media are new languages. To unscramble our Babel we must teach these languages and their grammars on their own terms. This is something quite different from the educational use of audio-visual aids or of closed-circuit TV. (Media Fit the Battle of Jericho, Explorations 6, 1956)

in the Babel created in North American schools by the new mother tongues or the new media, the case is now that the young know several languages from the cradle which their teachers have acquired, if at all, as ‘second languages’. For the most part, the teachers are oblivious of the fact that most of the experience of their charges is handled in forms for which the teachers express hostility and contempt.  (The Electronic Revolution in North America 1958)

To-day, our new media compel us to notice that English is a mass medium, as is any important language, and that the new media are new languages with unique powers and deficiencies. Not to recognize this situation is to encourage the rise of a new tower of Babel. (Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication 1958)

The newspaper will serve as an example of the Babel of myths or languages. (Myth and Mass Media 1959)

Professor [Edward T.] Hall simply states and sustains the proposition that these externalizations, however separate and distinct, speak yet 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. (Common Language Nonetheless 1961)

[Alexander Pope, ‘Essay on Criticism’:] “One science only will one genius fit / So vast is art, so narrow human wit”. He [Pope] well knew that this was the formula for the Tower of Babel. (GG 1962)

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. (GG 1962)

Languages as the technology of human extension may have been the Tower of Babel by which man sought to scale the highest heavens; and today, computers hold out the promise of instant change of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer promises, in short, by technology, a Pentecostal condition5 of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of “weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. (UM 1964)6

  1. See the Gutenberg Galaxy citation given in this post on the “tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption”. ↩
  2. To “the withdrawal of the arts to an ivory tower and of politics and business to a tower of Babel” aka “the current divorce between knowledge and know-how”, compare TT 22 twenty years later: “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.” ↩
  3. Reading McLuhan on the tower of Babel it is important to bear in mind its two phases of construction and destruction as well as the paradoxical relation between these phases with each other. It is the first construction stage that reflects “a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity” (UM) in which “the people are one and they all have one language” (Genesis 6). But this construction phase proves destructive, since it amounts to an attack on heaven — and this results in God ‘scattering’ mankind over the earth in a confusion of tongues. Contrariwise, the destruction phase proves constructive in restoring the proper relation of finite (“scattered”) humans before God. The same thought is to be found also in the New Testament in Paul’s letters: “Professing themselves to be wise, they become fools.” (Rom. 1:22.) And again: “For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of our preaching, to save them that believe. . . .the foolishness of God is wiser than (the wisdom of) men.” (I Cor, 1:21,25) ↩
  4. “It is a means (…) to lift us out of our human condition”. Compare from ‘Technology and the Human Dimension’ two decades later (1974): “Now, when you put on an environment or mask of power — a vortex of energy such as radio or telephone or TV — you are both extending your own ego and invading other egos to a fantastic degree. The ability to speak to Peking by telephone is the act of a superman, and we now take for granted that all people on this planet are supermen. What has thus happened to the ‘human scale’ is very important to recognize. Can there be a ‘human scale’ anymore? Or, under electric conditions, does everybody become superman? As far as I know, the answer is absolutely yes. Any child is superhuman today — on the telephone or radio or on any electric medium. The traditional human dimension hardly exists anymore (…) but the electric surround of information that has tended to make man a superman at the same time reduces him into a pretty pitiable nobody by merging him with everybody. It has extended man in a colossal, superhuman way, but it has not made individuals feel very important. (…) Electrically, the corporate human scale has become vast even as private identity shrinks to the pitiable. The ordinary man can feel so pitiably weak that, like a skyjacker (= hijacker), he’ll reach for a superhuman dimension of world coverage in a wild desperate effort for fulfillment”.) ↩
  5. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, the work of Etienne Gilson was discussed extensively by McLuhan: “Gilson has used the method of reconstruction in the history of philosophy as a new creative technique which permits a new kind of communication between the present and the past” (‘Christian Humanism and Modern Letters’). In particular he was very familiar with Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1938) and would hardly have been able to bring Bergson and Pentecost together without thinking of Gilson on Descartes: “During the same night (November 10, 1619), Descartes had dreams when he ventured to find a confirmation of his extraordinary and almost supernatural mission. Was that, as has been suggested by a modern historian, the Pentecost of reason? It merely was the Pentecost of mathematical reasoning, and less a Pentecost than a deluge. In the joy of a splendid discovery, mathematics began to degenerate into mathematicism and to spread as a colourless flood over the manifold of reality. Descartes was a great genius, but I sometimes wonder if his dream were not a nightmare” (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 136). ↩
  6. Texts like this have frequently been used to support the contention that McLuhan’s thought was “utopian” and that he predicted a return to “the garden of Eden”. Once this reading was in place, others could be cited where he was highly critical of any such ideal. Ergo, he not only made ridiculous predictions, he also contradicted himself. But McLuhan was clearly “putting on” his readers here. He was assuming their attraction to the ideal of “a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity”. But in the Bible (as discussed above) such unity “of collective harmony and peace” is exactly what the Tower of Babel narrative represents as negative in the sight of God: “the people is one and they have all one language (…) Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Hence, as McLuhan notes, this supposed ideal is realized only in “the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols” (GG). “But day overcomes and scatters them” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial). Compare the UM Pentecostal passage with the one cited above from CHML: “granted the pagan premise that man is simply a fallen angel, the ideal of modern industrial humanism is quite consistent. Let us doll up the fallen angel and let us put it in ever more powerful machines until the whole world looks like Marilyn Monroe in a Cadillac convertible.” ↩

Sense and senselessness 2 — Wittgenstein on language and language learning

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At almost the same time that McLuhan and his new wife were back in Cambridge to complete his PhD requirements in 1939-1940, Ludwig Wittgenstein has been described by C.H. Waddington considering language and language learning there as follows:

During one summer, 1940, I think, or 1941, Wittgenstein and R. H.Thouless and I used to meet one evening every week, and spend three or four hours after dinner discussing philosophy in the Roundabout Garden of Trinity, Cambridge. The subject of most of these discourses was the relationship between a word and the thing it signifies. I vividly remember those twilit evenings, when Wittgenstein would jump up from the lawn on which we had been sitting and pull out of a pocket of his shabby sports coat a matchbox or some other small object. As he held it up in front of us and tried to make us realize the impervious vacuity of the gap which exists between the object in his fingers and the auditory modulation of air pressure or the black marks on white paper by which we refer to it, his main weapon of exposition was to persuade us to shed the preoccupations of the first year of the Second World War and to feel ourselves again children whose mother was instructing us in our first words. Something of the same method — a method which explicitly recognizes the importance of a developmental analysis of language1 — comes over in the first four pages or so of the Philosophical Investigations, but it was of course incomparably more vivid when the phrases were formulated slowly and painfully by Wittgenstein himself, his face (…) frowning and contorted with the effort to express precisely his understanding of the way in which the relation he was discussing is inexpressible. Often, indeed, his words came to a standstill…2

  1. “A developmental analysis of language” is a strange way to depict Wittgenstein’s method and may reflect a misunderstanding on the part of Waddington, who was a self-described Darwinian.  Wittgenstein begins his Investigations with a citation from Augustine where he, Augustine, speaks of his learning language as a child on the basis of what he calls the natural language of all people (verbis naturalibus omnium gentium). Wittgenstein is interested in the clarification and implications of this ‘natural language’ that is the basis of all language and other modes of communication among human beings. It is what must already be in place for communication of any sort, indeed for any activity of humans, to arise. This ‘natural language’ therefore has a synchronic relation to humans and to their ways of communicating, not at all a “developmental” or diachronic one — except, of course, that language does indeed “develop” given this foundation. ↩
  2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, ed Klagge and Nordmann, 2003, 381-382, citing C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal, 1960, 41-42. ↩

Sense and senselessness 1 — Some sense?

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Der ehrliche religiöse Denker ist wie ein Seiltänzer. Er geht, dem Anscheine nach, beinahe nur auf der Luft. – Sein Boden ist der schmalste, der sich denken läßt. Und doch läßt sich auf ihm wirklich gehen.1 Wittgenstein

One of the fundamental issues posed by McLuhan’s work lies in the question: can there be some sense? That is, is it possible for some things to make sense — the sciences, say — but for other things to remain senseless?2

Or may it be that there is no such thing as some sense — either because nothing at all makes sense, or because everything makes sense?

Nietzsche makes the former case that nothing at all makes sense, most pointedly in the unpublished early fragment ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’3: 

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe (…) there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet it still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.4 (…) It is remarkable that this [insight into its own nullity] was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.

Nietzsche’s argument turns on the finding that the gap between our finite grasp of anything and that thing itself — the thing that would be grasped — can never be closed. Words are thus left hanging in the air, without achieved reference, and without any reality of their own once they themselves (‘they themselves’!) are the thing (the ‘thing’!) we would attempt to grasp:

we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, flowers [and words and ourselves] ; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things –- metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. (Ibid.)

That it makes no sense to speak of “original entities” in such a case is exactly Nietzsche’s point. Notably, it also makes no sense to speak of “metaphors” in this context since, in their case as well, these noises we make (me-ta-phor) “correspond in no way to the original entities”. Hence Nietzsche’s insight that “with the true world we also have abolished the apparent one”5 (aka the ‘metaphorical’ one). 

McLuhan, on the other hand, argues that it is exactly the metaphorical power of the irremedial gap between us and the things we address that is the very foundation of sense. Hence it is that truth and reality are not in his view to be found through the matching of thought/word and thing (via the collapse of the gap and of metaphor) but through making (the triumph of the gap and of metaphor). Not that human making on its own is able to achieve anything more than castles in the air — here Nietzsche was quite correct.  But McLuhan’s contention is precisely that human making is not — ‘on its own’. Instead, human making on the basis of a foundational medium of sense6 successfully communicates with other people and with things and even with gods. It is this foundational or grounding medium of sense that is the primal message/massage. 

McLuhan’s claim is precisely that everything ‘makes’ sense because it is sense that is the foundational ground of everything. A series of considerations may help to specify this claim. 

1. It is difficult to make the case that science fails to grasp real things. If anything, a nuclear bomb, say, seems all too real. Even Nietzsche was greatly impressed by science and thought it unreal, along with everything else, only in the absence of a cogent contrary position. Accepting that Nietzsche may have demonstrated only (only!) that certain premises are self-defeating (premises around which the world increasingly turns), the implication of the astonishing success of science in a great many fields is that sense does truly exist in some way and the resulting tasks are to specify that way and especially to understand its relation to senselessness.  

2. It is difficult on the other hand to see how a case for some sense (as exemplified by science, say) can be sustained if some massive senselessness can never be obviated. Must not such ultimate senselessness (like the foreseeable extinction of the solar system) swallow any and all purported sense over the long run? Here Nietzsche may be thought to have supplied the coup de grâce to the notion that sense and senselessness can co-exist over time (“eternal recurrence” being exactly ‘endless time’): “After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.” 

3. The remaining possibility, that sense is fundamental, seems to be the only way to account for language learning and everything that language learning enables. For children learn language, not by interpreting it in terms of their natural lights, but by interpreting their natural lights in terms of it.7 That this instantaneous flip occurs at all, and that it then enables all the various arts and sciences, and the myriad social dealings humans have with one another, was taken by McLuhan to evidence the fundamentality of sense and hence the very metaphysical nature of the universe:

The ideal orator will be a man of encyclopedic8 knowledge because learning precedes eloquence. (…) “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. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

The timeless or simultaneous aspect of words leaps out at us (the literal sense of “object”) when they are used not as conventional signs but as metaphysical existents. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

The pattern by which one learns one’s mother tongue is now being extended to all learning whatsoever.9 (McLuhan to John Snyder, Aug 4 1963, Letters 291)

A child does not learn language as a series of classified meanings. He learns language as he learns to walk, or to hear, or to see. He learns language as a way of feeling and exploring his environment. Therefore, he is totally involved. He learns very fast because of this enormous sensuous involvement and the resulting depth of motivation. (The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion 1967)

In a word, that “pattern by which one learns one’s mother tongue” is the synchronic relation of human beings to sense. Were this relation diachronic — constructed — language would never be learned (and therefore never be) since, as McLuhan repeatedly cited Thomas citing Aristotle, “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”.10 Not understanding language (“the opposite form”) can never bring about an understanding of language except via a transformation through which a completely new understanding is inaugurated. This new understanding has its basis in what is to be learned: “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form”. But for an as yet unknown form to guide the way to itself through an “opposite form”, and to ground the required transformation into it from that “opposite form”, requires that it be existing foundation. This is the synchronic medium that is the message, the medium that is the massage into new identity and new possibilities of communication. 

In the 1969 Counterblast McLuhan observes:

The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.

By ‘content’ here McLuhan means something like: the previous medium that any medium always re-plays (re-cognizes, re-trieves, re-calls, etc), like speech by writing or movies by TV.  But the medium re-played and recalled by the first use of speech by human beings was no previous human technology, for in McLuhan’s understanding there were no humans prior to speech. Instead the prior medium to speech is the medium of existence (dual genitive!) itself — what McLuhan terms in ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’ (Explorations 2, 1954) “the dance of existence” or here “mental dance, non-verbal ESP”.

It is this “dance of existence” itself that first of all enables humans to speak. It is always implicated in their speech, as a sort of “content”, but (as further brought out below) in a distorted way that allows its identification only by seeing through it to the other side of the mirror.

4. McLuhan was aware that the use of language of any sort, specifically including pre-historic (ie, pre-written) oral language in what he called “tribal” societies, arbitrarily abstracts from immediate contact with the surrounding world11 (‘immediate contact with the surrounding world’!) just as Nietzsche detailed.12 Although always in the context of discussion concerning the alphabet, McLuhan repeatedly referred to “meaningless phonemes” which are, however, not alphabetic particles but sound particles belonging to spoken language:

The phonemic principle is that there are in each language a limited number of elemental types of speech sounds, called phonemes, peculiar to that language; that all sounds produced in the employment of the given language are referable to its set of phonemes; that only its own phonemes are at all significant in the given language. (Laws of Media 14, citing Morris Swadesh, ‘The Phonemic Principle’, 1934, emphasis added)

Alphabetic aka visual abstraction only extends the abstraction that is already in force in any and all language use:

The role of language itself, as of any other medium, is to translate and transform being by “participation” and perception. (McLuhan to Jane Bret, January 3 1973, Letters  460)

The phonetic alphabet also served as a paradigm for the process of abstraction, for the written word is an abstraction of the spoken word which, in turn, is an abstraction from the holistic experience. (Alphabet Mother of Invention 1977)13

The basis of this abstraction is the phoneme. The irreducible meaningless bit of sound which is translated [in the alphabet] by a meaningless sign, the phoneme is the smallest sound unit of speech and it has no relation to concepts or semantic meanings. The phoneme is then a thing perceived on special fragmentary terms. (Havelock & McLuhan, The Early and Later Innis 1978, emphasis added)14

According to McLuhan, language does not arise from human perception and experience, but the reverse: human perception and experience, even thought, arise from language (which is one more indication that language — either in the individual or the species — is no cumulative achievement of a supposed ‘pre-linguistic’ state lacking “thought and perception as well as communication”):

language itself is the principal channel and view-maker of experience for men everywhere. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1954)

language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication. (Alphabet Mother of Invention 1977)

Human being and language use are, therefore, as McLuhan often observed, co-extensive. But since language inherently abstracts and irremedially distances at the same time that it illuminates

the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering. This is all in the Wake around p. 506 ff. This uttering is the means of taking HCE out of the woods into the world of the self-consciousness and guilt. (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, summer 1965)

Because phonemes are meaningless aside from their context within languages, and because languages are social constructs presupposing what McLuhan often called a “do-it-yourself” principle15, human beings and their languages are unable on their own to establish any relation to reality. Words as agglomerations of phonemes “correspond in no way to the original entities” they would designate and therefore have, as McLuhan said, “no relation to concepts or semantic meanings”. In the event, the notions of “original entities” and of “words” (as one class of “original entities”) and of “designation” (as the relation between these unrealities) fall away, just as Nietzsche described. With them go any and all “meanings”. “The ultimate uttering” proves in this way only to be an “outering” and not meaningful “uttering” at all.

McLuhan was clear that this entire story is self-defeating (as Nietzsche himself insisted, “self-defeating” being his verdict on the human adventure) and insistently diachronic. But modern science (even social science like Saussure’s linguistics) and modern art are, McLuhan maintained, primarily synchronic. And history is replete with different notions of time than the purely diachronic — only Gutenbergian civilization assumes its exclusive domination. It follows (since the diachronic possibility is senseless and alternate accounts are available) that some other story (or perhaps stories) must be the case. 

McLuhan’s contrary suggestion was that humans have a synchronic relation to a foundation of sense and that this accounts not only for the initial learning of language, but also for the ongoing performance of language as it is exercised in human society at large and in particular in the arts and sciences. Although never capable of matching correspondence with the real (here Nietzsche was prescient), human making, while always incomplete and therefore to some degree arbitrary, achieves genuine communication with other humans and with the surrounding world16 beyond its own its constructive ability to do so — given (and only given) the medium in which and on the basis of which it operates.

McLuhan’s repeated allusion to fish being the last to recognize water was therefore no mere illustrative simile.  He thought it demonstrable that human beings are fish who do not recognize the medium in which they live and without which they could not be — the waters of intelligibility. Human history is largely the story of this remarkable blindness, Joyce’s “nightmare from which I am trying to awake”.17

It followed for McLuhan that all human perception is always a (usually unknown and unacknowledged) retrieval or replay of the original synchronic relation to the foundational ground or medium of sense through which language is first learned and then exercised in human “thought and perception as well as communication”:

The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1954)

5. It is the fundamentality of sense that continues to enable human beings, throughout their individual lifetimes and throughout history, to be addressed by language, and indeed by things, instead of merely addressing them in the RVM (rear-view mirror).18 As evidenced first of all by the learning of language, and then by all the arts and sciences that arise through language, humans beings are not restricted to the mere reception of things on the basis of what they already know (or think they know). Instead, human beings can be, and are, freely trans-formed and in-formed — massaged — by words and things in such a way that they come to learn what those words mean and what those things are.19

The first section of Through the Vanishing Point begins:

The word itself as evocative power, not a sign.
Fusion with the natural process. “Weed in a river am I.” An artist might have said: “Used by the words, am I.”
There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.20

It is this fundamental “free flow of corporate energy” — the ubiquity of sense — that McLuhan saw as underlying all human culture including, especially, modern culture: 

In Mallarmé the Word has no theological overtones. It is rather a return to the pre-Christian doctrine of the Logos which included ratio et oratio and was the element in which all men were thought to move and have their being. Mallarmé did not approach this question as a speculative one, but as a practical matter of poetics. (T. S. Eliot [Review of Eleven Eliot Books] 1950)

6. What then to make of senselessness if it is not all-annihilating, as Nietzsche argued, but also is not some independent power competing with sense? If McLuhan did not take sense to be limited by senselessness, did he believe that the senseless death of a child (for example) might ultimately be seen to make some kind of terrible sense? No, McLuhan had, if anything,  a clearer view of human folly and the general reign of senselessness than the rest of us. But he also saw that senselessness, indeed the very possibility of senselessness, arises through the seriousness with which sense or meaning entails relationship and relationship entails plurality:

Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment . A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. Consciousness is corporate action involving all the senses (Latin sensus communis or “common sense” is the translation of all the senses into each other). The “meaning of meaning” is relationship21. (Take Today 3)22

Sense restricted to itself would not be sense. “There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.” Hence the association continually stressed by McLuhan of ‘sense’ with ‘extension’. As implied by its etymological ties to ‘direction’,23 sense inherently ex-presses itself out to, and with, another: it ex-ists as dia-logue. It is essentially “corporate”. But the extreme extended other of sense is — senselessness. Hence it is that sense and meaning, as inherently dia-logical, do not remain in some crystal palace of purity, but utter/outer themselves in “free flow“ to, even as, the possibility of senselessness:

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)24

It is this inherent creativity of sense — the “process of creating the new [that] came before, and goes beyond” — which opens the possibility, even the necessity, of senselessness. But this ex-pression of sense (objective genitive) so little contradicts or empties sense that it is the sign of sense (subjective genitive). This ex-pression out of itself is what sense is. “There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.”

7. This free dramatic structure of sense is synchronic, not (or not only and not first of all) diachronic. When sense ex-presses itself outwardly to the extreme of senselessness it does not utterly (outerly) lose itself or, contrariwise, initiate an historical process through which it eventually comes to itself. Instead, its free outflow is immediately its assured inflow: “The timeless or simultaneous aspect of words leaps out at us (the literal sense of ‘object’)” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953).

Sense as dramatic dia-logue is what it is in the “timeless or simultaneous” creation and   maintenance of compound difference which yet remains in communicative correlation:

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship.

So it is that a foundational synchronic dynamic of identity and difference — aka, of sense or meaning — structures all the contrasted pairs considered by McLuhan:

eye / ear
visual / oral
visual space / acoustic space
diachrony / synchrony
print / speech
left hemisphere / right hemisphere
civilized / tribal
cliché / archetype
concept / percept
C/M / C-M
mechanical / electric
figure (without ground) / ground (with figure)25

Some observations in The Global Village concerning visual and acoustic space and the hemispheres of the brain apply to all these pairs:

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

No matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres… (GV 62, emphasis added)26

In each of the listed pairs, an uncollapsible difference is installed via a “gap” between the two; but both of the two are always present in their irreducible plurality and they always remain in dynamic relation with one another. Such is the synchronic medium of sense on the basis of which all things occur. There is always both plurality and relation:

no sense can operate in isolation from all the others and no medium can exist by itself. (Title VII Research Abstract [Report on Project in Understanding New Media], 1961)

the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of electric speed. But the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media. (UM, 26)

8. Human beings are subject to this gapped medium of sense in an extraordinary way. For humans have a free or distanced or gapped relation to it. “We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes” (UM 25).  This is the motor of diachronic history, the story McLuhan tells of the diachronic trajectory from “the tribal” through the alphabet and Gutenberg to “the electric” — a diachronic trajectory which yet never fails to observe its underlying synchronic law of identity and difference.

This gapped relation of humans to the gapped ground of sense means that we are its sign — in humans and in humans alone sense manifests that extreme outreach into senselessness whereby beings attempt to take over sense on their own. This is another story McLuhan tells — of Babel — to which McLuhan returned again and again.

Only in humans is it possible and indeed usual to emphasize or prefer or stress one of the two elements in McLuhan’s pairs — pairs whose explicit consideration goes back to the Greeks and whose implicit consideration is what human society ceaselessly goes on about.

Humans as the extreme senselessness of sense can never escape the role they play within the need of sense to go “beyond the exchange of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”. Human being, exactly in its failure to respect “equivalence”, is the kenotic fulfillment of this need of sense for that plurality or distance from itself through which it synchronically maintains itself in and as “dialogue”.

Here is McLuhan to Jackie Tyrwhitt Dec 23, 1960: “irrelevance is a needed margin for any kind of attention or center. In the field of attention27, a center without a margin is the formula for hypnosis, stasis and paralysis” (Letters, 278). The “irrelevance” of humans is the “needed margin” in which the the “stasis” of sense is definitively overcome in dynamic outreach.

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 a certain point, we are in that induced state called hypnosis. The dialogue has ended. (McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff, Dec 19, 1960)

Hence McLuhan’s citation from the I Ching regarding creativity or innovation or “the free flow of corporate energy” that

“does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.” (Take Today 22)

The “true strength” of guidance has its mobility in its not “being outwardly visible” to and in humans. 

  1. “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” ↩
  2. The generality of this question should be startling and it is simply not understood if it does not startle. But most people are unable to pose it (even those who don’t mindlessly fail to consider the sense of things at all) because they are utterly convinced that some things — in fact a great many things — don’t make sense and can’t make sense. Such as all the needless suffering and death that has characterized history from the beginning of time and that continues to do so as we speak.  Or all our own idiocies. Or the beginning and end of things. In the face of these black holes of senselessness, it can seem crazy to wonder if there is some foundational sense to things — an assumption that defines the modern world. Moreover, when one’s insight is necessarily limited by a host of factors (as McLuhan’s was, just like the rest of us), how make such a judgement at all — or, at least, how do so conscientiously? ↩
  3. See here for references, the original German and further discussion. ↩
  4. Cf Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation: “This was a torment of torments, a ceaseless, unbearable humiliation from the thought, which would turn into a ceaseless and immediate sensation, of my being a fly before that whole world, a foul, obscene fly — more intelligent, more developed, more noble than everyone else — that went without saying — but a fly, ceaselessly giving way to everyone, humiliated by everyone, insulted by everyone.” ↩
  5. See here for references and further discussion. ↩
  6. ‘Medium of sense’ is an objective genitive when it is construed as the medium through which sense is generated and sustained. The medium of what? of sense! This is the foundational medium that is the message as being the basis and germ of all messages. But the ‘medium of sense’ may also be construed as a subjective genitive. The medium belonging to what? to sense! For McLuhan followed that ancient tradition of the Logos according to which the world is first created and shaped by the intentional — sensible — Word. ↩
  7. A citation in War and Peace in the Global Village from The Senses by Otto Lowenstein throws an interesting light in this context: “Seeing seems to be a rather calculating business, and all this makes one wonder whether one can ever ‘see’ something of which one has had no previous knowledge. We gain this impression also from patients, blind from childhood, on whom normal vision has been bestowed by an operation. Previous to this ‘opening of the eyes ‘, they had been living in a world of tactile experience, of sound and scent, full of objects familiar to them in terms of their restricted range of sensory experience. How they shrink at first from the welter of additional stimulation, longing at times to return to the relative seclusion of their former world! One of the most striking facts is that it takes a lot of time and effort before they recognize the objects around them as separate items. They have gradually to learn to ‘make sense of them’ by associating their visual appearance with their tactile and other properties familiar to them. ‘At first sight’ the world looks like a flat extension of meaningless patches of light, dark, and color jumbled up into a quilt work. One by one objects grow out of this chaotic world, and remain unmistakably separate once they have been identified. A student of microscopy experiences something similar. A meaningless jumble of shapes defies description, until the demonstrator has drawn on paper one or the other specific shapes to be searched for. The saying ‘seeing is believing’ may fittingly be reversed in this context into ‘believing is seeing.” (WPGV 10-11, emphasis added) The same considerations apply to language learning, except that before language is learned there can be no “demonstrator” whose words help one along. It would seem that language learning must be based on something that is inherent, not itself learned (as Chomsky argues). ↩
  8. “Encyclopedic knowledge” is not knowledge of every detail of every matter, but knowledge of the nature of the whole, knowledge of the entire ‘cycle’ of things. ↩
  9. Cf Sense and senselessness 2 — Wittgenstein on language and language learning ↩
  10. Cited by McLuhan in English translation in CA (160) and in Latin in ‘The Medieval Environment’ and in a May 6, 1969 letter to Jacques Maritain (Letters, 371). ↩
  11. Language also abstracts from our own senses and our own selves! Cf McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff Dec 19, 1960: “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.” Such pre-literate and literate abstraction can never be recalled in a ‘simultaneous’ world where all past and future is present. Instead, the question must be posed: how do abstraction and integration each enable the other? ↩
  12. Cf McLuhan to Pound (July 25, 1951, Letters 228-229): Joyce “decided that the poetic process was nothing else than the process of cognition. That sensation itself was imitation since the forms of things in our sensation are already in a new matter.” (Emphasis in the original.) Also: “That there is, however, a degree of poetic imitation in abstraction itself, is plain from the fact that even in sensation ‘things exist in the soul without their proper matter, but with the singularity and individuating conditions which are the result of matter’ (St. Thos., De Anima, article 13). That this is so is the effect of the nous poietikos, which has the power of individuating anew in a bodily organ that which it has abstracted from existence. ‘For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan’ (St. Thos., De Anima, article 12). Again, ‘For every object produced by art is the effect of the action of an artificer, the agent intellect being related to the phantasms illuminated by it as an artificer is to the things made by his art’ (article 5).” (‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’) 1951 ↩
  13. There is no such thing as pre-linguistic “holistic experience”,  of course.  It follows, as Nietzsche saw, that humans are an abstraction per se. ↩
  14. The transcript of these lectures printed in the Innis Herald has “the reducible meaningless bit of sound” which is an obvious transcription error or misprint. A section of the first chapter of Laws of Media is based on McLuhan’s remarks with Havelock and corrects this error on Laws of Media 14. ↩
  15. Cf Thomas as cited by McLuhan in ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’: “For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan (St. Thos., De Anima, article 12).” ↩
  16. Cf ’James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “the (…) 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.” ↩
  17. But human history also has an opposite current in which individuals and institutions — for McLuhan chiefly the Catholic Church — maintain the memory and the living reality of an underlying source of life and buoyancy. ↩
  18. In his first published paper, ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ (1936), McLuhan wrote of “the daily miracles of sense and consciousness”. Then in 1970, as cited by Eric McLuhan in The Medium and the Light: “a thing has to be tested on its terms. You can’t test anything in science or in any part of the world except on its own terms or you will get the wrong answers.” (xvii) The great question is, how is relation to the “own terms” of a thing or a word possible given the multiple biases and limitations of all “sense and consciousness”? McLuhan thought about this question his whole life.  That is, he kept hammering away at it in an attempt to get clear about it both for himself and for others. ↩
  19. Cf, again, ’James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “the (…) 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.” ↩
  20. McLuhan has not received sufficient credit for the periodic brilliance of his writing (in fact his writing is usually dismissed as completely artless).  But this sentence — “There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy” — evidences great subtlety. It contrasts “private” to “corporate” identity, of course, but at the same time it also specifies the condition of words functioning with “evocative power” such that we are “used” and trans-formed by them. Namely, that “there is no question here of privacy or private identity”. That is, not only does “private identity” present no barrier to the “free flow of corporate energy” exercised by words, but “private identity” somehow results from that “flow” as from a “formal cause”.  And is even the sign of that “free flow” exactly in its own “privacy”. The same sort of complex play may be seen at work in a phrase cited above from ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’: “The timeless or simultaneous aspect of words leaps out at us.” What leaps out to our understanding is that words as “evocative power” leap out to us to shape who we are. And both examples express at the same time McLuhan’s fundamental insight that is “natural” to ground to be “evocative” by providing — or by being — “a free flow of corporate energy” from itself without regard for its “privacy or private identity”. Indeed, it is only because ground has this nature that human beings can follow suit, without blockage from their “privacy or private identity”, in aligning themselves (or finding themselves aligned) with its “free flow”. ↩
  21. Cf “The meaning of meaning … is meaning.” (McLuhan’s LP, The Medium is the Massage, 1968) ↩
  22. This is the second paragraph of Take Today. As is generally the case with any author, special attention must be paid to the beginning and end of McLuhan’s texts. ↩
  23. ‘Sense’ as ‘direction’ is very common in the Romance languages (sens unique, senso unico, sentido único) and in German (Sinn, Richtungssinn). ↩
  24. McLuhan’s observation here expresses in nuce his entire work.  But it also reaches back into the work of the tradition. Kierkegaard, for example, makes the same point in Repetition (Gjentagelse 1843) in a closely related way: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been — otherwise it could not be repeated — but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.” (Hong’s translation, 149) Amplifying Kierkegaard’s expression in the way indicated by McLuhan yields what may be the more helpful statement: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been — otherwise it could not be repeated — but the very fact that it has (come to be as original/originating creativity) makes (its) repetition into something new (original and creative).” ↩
  25. C/M / C-M is McLuhan’s shorthand for ‘centre with marginalization’ and ‘centre without marginalization’. His guiding motivation may be put in these terms as the attempt to be worthy of a centre which maintains itself through marginalization and thus redeems the marginal back to the centre. ↩
  26. McLuhan decisively rejected the reduction of structural oppositions to an over-riding unity — “merger” — as “rationalistic” and “gnostic”.  ‘Nihilism Exposed’ (1955) put the matter as follows: “it is precisely the courage of (Wyndham) 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’.” Six years before, in ‘Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ (1949), McLuhan made the same point: “Analogy institutes tension, polarity, a flow of intellectual perception set up among two sets of particulars. To merge those two sets by an attempt to reduce a metaphor situation to some single view or proposition is the rationalist short circuit. (…) ‘Symbol‘ means to throw together, to juxtapose without copula. And it is a work that cannot be undertaken nor understood by the univocalizing, single plane, rationalist mind. Existence is opaque to the rationalist. He seeks essences, definitions, formulas. He lives in the concept and the conceptualizable (…) his very postulates discourage him from the loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars.” ↩
  27. “The field of attention” here is ambiguous. One the one hand it means the world (“field”) as beheld or attended; on the other it names a peculiar new discipline (“field”) of investigation, one that would study “any kind of attention or center”. That the latter may have been what McLuhan chiefly had in mind may be taken from his use elsewhere in this same letter to Tyrwhitt of the peculiar phrase “the field of nuclei”. The notion is that every sort of human experience implicates a distinctive configuration of the sensus communis or ‘nucleus’. Mapping the range (“field” again) of such “nuclei” would therefore provide a way of investigating experience as a new “field” of exploration. ↩

Subjective and objective genitive 2

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Joyce (Ulysses, Ch. 9: Scylla and Charybdis):

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man, it is a mystical state, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery (…) the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood, amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction.

 

The Beginnings of Gutenberg Galaxy 2 – Carothers

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Philippe Theophanidis in his aphelis blog has an important letter from McLuhan to  J. C. Carothers concerning the writing of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

December 20th, 1963

Dear Dr Carothers:

It was reading your article on “Culture, psychiatry and the written word”1 that decided me to settle down and write the Gutenberg Galaxy. It was published in 1962 by the University of Toronto Press and reprinted by Routledge & Kegan Paul Company.

The mosaic form in which I present the Galaxy has baffled some readers. It is a form that permits a considerable degree of natural relating of matters that cannot be presented in ordinary lineal exposition. I was happy to be able to quote your article extensively.

There is really no excuse for my having delayed so long to express my admiration of your work. It was of great use to me, indeed.

Sincerely, Prof. H. M. McLuhan

Theophanidis supplies context for this letter by citing passages from GG and UM as follows:

GG 22
[Carothers’] great contribution has been to point to the breaking apart of the magical world of the ear and the neutral world of the eye, and to the emergence of the detribalized individual from this split.

GG 35
The concluding observation of Carothers is that genetic studies of human groups offer no certainty and very small data, indeed, compared to cultural and environmental approaches. My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses. Languages being that form of technology constituted by dilation or uttering (outering) of all of our senses at once, are themselves immediately subject to the impact or intrusion of any mechanically extended sense. That is, writing affects speech directly, not only its accidence and syntax but also its enunciation and social uses. (Emphasis added)

GG 278-279
What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age? The new electric galaxy of events has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg galaxy. Even without collision, such coexistence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant. These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media into any society whatever, need special study and will be the subject of another volume on Understanding Media in the world of our time.  (Emphasis added)

UM, 16
Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man is the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease2 (World Health Organization, Geneva, 1953). Much of his material appeared in an article in Psychiatry magazine, November, 1959: “The Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word.” Again, it is electric speed that has revealed the lines of force operating from Western technology in the remotest areas of bush, savannah, and desert. One example is the Bedouin with his battery radio on board the camel. Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action of all of our technology. But with electric media Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native. We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

A previous post has shown that McLuhan was contemplating the Gutenberg galaxy, and doubtless already drafting notes for it, in the early 1950’s. It appears from McLuhan’s letter to Carothers, however, that it was the appearance of “Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word” at the end of 1959 that pushed McLuhan to concentrate on finishing GG at last. Future posts will need to investigate just why this was. At a guess, reading Carothers may have sparked a vision in McLuhan’s mind of “cultural ecology” (GG 35) as the topology of the sensus communis (individual or social) subject to “bicontinuous deformation”3. That is, the sensus communis might be conceived as a complex of lines or shapes where any change in one line or shape would simultaneously effect changes in the others — but would always preserve the “invariants” of (eg) total line length or total area of the shapes. If such invariant properties might represent “human perception” in general, all the different possible configurations of such lines or shapes would represent the different moments (the “innumerable variants” of Take Today, 22) which perception can assume in particular. This would be the sensus communis understood as subject to “bicontinuous deformation” aka “ratios or proportions among all the senses” (GG 35).

In a letter to his closest friend, Bernard Muller-Thym, in February 19th, 19604 McLuhan reported a “break-through in media study” at roughly the same time he must have encountered the November 1959 article of Carothers:

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. That the effect of a medium is in what it omits and what we supply…

As seen in McLuhan’s letter to Pound from July 16, 1952 (Letters 231/232), he was already clear at that time, almost a decade before reading Carothers, that perception was subject to a “transfer of auditory to visual” stress and that this resulted in the “arrest [of experience] for contemplation of thought and cognitive process[ing]” such that “study becomes solitary”. So the influence of Carothers on McLuhan was not the “contribution” reported in GG 22: “[Carothers’] great contribution has been to point to the breaking apart of the magical world of the ear and the neutral world of the eye, and to the emergence of the detribalized individual from this split.” This much had already long been in place. Instead, what McLuhan now saw was, as he wrote to Muller-Thym, “the principle of complementarity” aka “the principle of bicontinuous deformation” embedded in this “contribution”.  He now saw that human perception had certain “topological invariants” — some fixed-in-total relation of elements that were infinitely variable individually. These relations, he suddenly saw around the turn of the year 1959-1960, were subject to “complementarity” such that any change in one would result in all the others being “immediately subject to th[is] impact or intrusion” (GG 35, emphasis added).

The key to this insight is time and specifically the difference between linear (diachronic) and simultaneous (synchronic) times. McLuhan formulated this difference as follows:

The concluding observation of Carothers is that genetic [ie, historical] studies of human groups offer no certainty and very small data, indeed, compared to cultural and environmental approaches. (GG 35)

The mosaic form in which I present the Galaxy has baffled some readers. It is a form that permits a considerable degree of natural relating of matters that cannot be presented in ordinary lineal exposition. (Letter to Carothers, December 20th, 1963)

On the one hand there are “genetic studies” that unfold through “lineal exposition”. On the other there are “cultural and environmental approaches” which have a “mosaic form”. The first “offer no certainty” while the second “permit a considerable degree of natural relating”.

In this understanding, perception is a dynamic homeostatic structure maintained through a synchronic system of complementary “deformations” and thereby subject to lawful definition. For example, as McLuhan wrote to Muller-Thym, the “invariant” configuration of any perception could be called its resolution or its “completion”5. And “completion” could variously be achieved through (what he would come to call) ‘hot’ or ‘cool’ means, aka intense or less intense sensory input. The total “completion” would remain the same, but the relative contribution of its objective and subjective components would vary: “the effect of a medium is in what it omits and what we supply”.6 This variation could be mapped along a spectrum running from ‘all objective input’ (like a sudden thunderbolt) to ‘all subjective input’ (like a psychosis) and the points of the spectrum, in turn, correlated with observed “effects”. The same method would hold for “the cycle of the senses” where the sensorium, or sensus communis, could be studied in terms of the relative contributions to its “completion” of the visual, the oral and the tactile. Here again a spectrum and associated effects could be constructed.

Thus, when McLuhan wrote that “[Carothers’] great contribution has been to point to the breaking apart of the magical world of the ear and the neutral world of the eye, and to the emergence of the detribalized individual from this split”, his interest lay in the dynamic homeostatic form implicated in such “breaking apart”, or “split”, and the correlation of this particular structural configuration with individual, social and historical phenomena like (eg) detribalization.

McLuhan sensed that this model of perception as dynamic topological homeostasis would enable the study of history and of all human activity, individual and social, in new ways. Future posts will look at the development of this notion in McLuhan’s work at just this time on his extensive Report on Project in Understanding New Media on behalf of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters for the US Office of Education.

  1. Carothers’s article appeared in Psychiatry, November, 1959. ↩
  2. Part two of Carothers’s monograph is available here. ↩
  3. “Topology, the study of surfaces, is a branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous deformation (stretching without tearing or gluing); these properties are the topological invariants.” (Wiki) ↩
  4. Cited in Escape into Understanding, 313. ↩
  5. “Completion” entails a process and any process entails time. But the time implicated here is not linear, diachronic, time. It is the synchronic time of (eg) chemistry where the properties of an element ‘result from’ (as we say) its protons, neutrons and electrons ‘coming together’ in a certain way. But this ‘resulting’ and ‘coming together’ cannot be understood as “lineal exposition”. ↩
  6. In another letter to Muller-Thym a few weeks later (March 7, 1960), McLuhan outlined the working of homeostatic “completion” as follows: “any (increased) intensity in the (…) input (ie. High Definition) completely alters the over-all structure as compared with Low Definition. So that, for example, manuscript is low definition for the visual part of writing and the speech within the code, as it were, is in relatively high definition. So that a manuscript is read aloud and in depth. The same materials put in print have the visual code in high definition and the speech goes into very low definition and print is read silently…” (Letters, 262; the first bracketed insertion ‘(increased)’ has been added; the second ‘(ie. High Definition)’ belongs to McLuhan). ↩

Uttering, outering

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McLuhan repeatedly identifies the “uttering” of speech1 (obj and subj gen!) with “outering”2

GG 34
Languages, being that form of technology constituted by dilation3 or uttering (outering) of all of our senses at once, are themselves immediately subject to the impact or intrusion of any mechanically extended sense.

GG 194
The outering or uttering of mind under manuscript conditions, was (…) restricted. The poet or author was far from being able to use the vernacular as a public address system.

GG 199
Closely interrelated, then, by the operation and effects of typography are the outering or uttering of private inner experience and the massing of collective national awareness, as the vernacular is rendered visible, central, and unified by the new technology.

UM 56
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. (…) Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. 

UM 79-80
Speech acts to separate man from man and mankind from the cosmic unconscious.4 As an extension or uttering (outering) of all our senses at once, language has always been held to be man’s richest art form, that which distinguishes him from the animal creation.

Roles, Masks, and Performance (1971)
Was it Piaget who told us that uttering, or the outering that is speech, begins when the child stops clutching its toys and begins to drop them?

LOM 36
Before writing, logos was active and metamorphic (…) words and deeds were related as were words and things. The logos of creation is of the same order: ‘Let there be light’ is the uttering or outering of light.

LOM 116
all human artefacts are extensions of man, outerings or utterings of the human body or psyche, private or corporate. That is to say. they are speech, and they are translations of us, the users, from one form into another form: metaphors.

LOM 126
All human artefacts are human utterances, or outerings, and as such they are linguistic and rhetorical entities. 

  1. As seen everywhere in the citations below, McLuhan regards human speech as a technological artifact — and vice versa. Speech and technological products could therefore each be used to investigate the other. ↩
  2. ‘Extending/extension’ and excluding/exclusion’ belong to the same complex. Each is defined by diachronic time in which one moment extends/excludes the previous one. ↩
  3. With the construction “dilation or uttering (outering)” McLuhan does not mean merely to equate “dilation or uttering (outering)”. Instead, the broader meaning here may be seen by reading ‘breathing in’ (by “dilation” of the mouth or nostrils) and ‘breathing out’ (“outering”). These are opposite but correlated actions. This is explicit in the citation from GG 199 below where “outering or uttering” is said to be “closely interrelated” with a “central, and unified” effect. ↩
  4. Cf Counterblast 1954 and 1969: “Until WRITING was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this dark bog. SPEECH structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space, shrouding the race; it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. Speak that I may see you. WRITING turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.” ↩

McLuhan and Plato 1: strange prisoners like ourselves

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In his 1954 lecture, ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (CHML), McLuhan draws an extended parallel between Plato’s cave and the movies. Plato’s allegory presents an “image of human life” where “existence is a kind of cave or cellar on the back wall of which we watch the shadows of real things from the outside world of reality”. And now today, “the dreaming eye of the movie god casting his images on the dark screen corresponds to that image of human life offered to us by Plato in the Republic“. The allegory drawn by Plato and the modern medium both raise fundamental questions concerning the relationship of image and reality, epistemology and ontology. McLuhan proposes to use a comparison of the two to investigate what occurs “in every instant of perception”1 in “our primary and constant mode of awareness”.2

Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic (514a–520a) is unfolded in an exchange recollected by Socrates between himself and Glaucon:

Socrates: Behold human beings living in an underground cave, which has [its] mouth open towards the light and [reaches deep into the earth]; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing (…) and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised [walk]way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the [walk]way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show their puppets. (…)
And do you see, I said, men passing along [the walkway behind] the wall carrying [figurative objects above them] — all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall [like the puppets in a marionette theatre]? (…)
Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates: Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
Glaucon: True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Socrates: And of the objects which are being carried [along the walkway], in like manner they would only see the shadows? (…)
And if they were able to converse with one another [about the shadow images before them], would they not suppose that they were [discussing real things] ? (…)
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the [figures carried along the walkway]. (…)
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light [of the fire], he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of [the puppet figures of] which in his former state he had seen [only] the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to [the real] being [of the figures] and [since] his eye is turned towards [their] more real existence, he has a clearer vision — what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the [figure] objects as they pass [above the wall of the walkway] and requiring him to name them — will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw were [more real and] truer than the objects which are now shown to him? (…)
And if he is compelled to look straight at the light [of the fire], will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away [back to] the [shadow] objects of vision which he can see [without pain], and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him [in the fire’s light]? (…)
And suppose, once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up [the cave over] a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into [the outside world and into] the presence of the sun itself, is he not likely to be [even more] pained and irritated? When he approaches the [sun’s] light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what [is in the outside world]. (…)
He will require [time] to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see [only] the shadows [of things] best, next the reflections of men and other objects in water, and [finally] the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and [at first] he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day. (…)
Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in water, but he will see it in its own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate it as it is. (…)
He will then proceed to argue that this is [the power] which gives [us] the seasons and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things (..)
And when he remembers his old habitation [in the cave], and the [accepted] wisdom of the cave and [of] his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would [rejoice] in the change [he has undergone], and pity them? (…)
And if [the prisoners] were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the [order of the] passing shadow [images] and to remark which of them [regularly] went before, and which followed after, and which were [regularly] together [with one another]; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future [order of the shadow images from these observations], do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? (…)
Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be placed again in his old situation [in the cave]; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? (…)
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in [investigating] the shadow [images] with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady [in the dark once more](…), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that he went up [in the cave] and [when] he came down [again, he was] without [the use of] his eyes; and that it was [therefore far] better not even to think of ascending [which had left him without his sight in this way]; and if anyone tried to loose another [prisoner from his chains] and lead him up to the light (…) they would put [the one attempting to free the prisoner] to death [as happened to Socrates3].4

In further Plato’s Cave posts, the full CHML passage will be given, and analyzed at length, in which McLuhan discusses Plato’s allegory in relation to the movies. Here only a single sentence will be singled out for particular notice:

the mechanical medium [the movie] has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality. (Emphasis added)

‘A means of proving reality’ here may well be a typo for ‘a means of prov(id)ing reality’:5

the mechanical medium [the movie] has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of providing reality. (Emphasis added)

‘Proving’ is not impossible here since McLuhan was hardly allergic to unusual constructions and the related (originally identical doublet) word ‘probing‘ was a favorite of his. Moreover, it is exactly the central point of CHML that, properly considerered, “modern letters” and modern science may be taken as “proving reality” (rather than being ontologically neutral).6

However, typos are common in McLuhan’s work (he notoriously refused to proofread his texts) and ‘providing’ is a recurrent term in CHML. In fact it appears multiple times in this same sentence.7

Further, the word ‘pro-vide’ itself raises the fundamental matter at stake here, namely, the riddle of what is before (‘pro’) our vision (‘vide’) in space as the question of what is before our vision in time.8 

The great issue for McLuhan both in Plato’s cave and in the movies is exactly whether the images seen in them present “a dream world” which is taken to be real (“a substitute for reality”) or one which is known to result from a particular “means”, or medium, which provides that particular sort of reality (“a means of prov(id)ing reality”).

Between the two, the nature of time is at stake. The first lives exclusively in diachronic time and therefore cannot know its experience as an effect of a prior cause. Its notion of cause and effect is such that what is experienced ‘first’ is cause and what is experienced ‘later’ is effect. In fundamental contrast, the second understands that what is experienced ‘first’ may be the effect of what is experienced ‘later’ as cause.9 In the allegory of the cave, the prisoner who is loosed from his chains and experiences the outside world comes to learn later the cause of his earlier notions of truth and reality now considered as effect.10

In the first case, the medium is unknown, or at least unconsidered, and it is this lack of consideration which then chains human “prisoners” to false ideas of reality and of truth. In Plato’s cave, the prisoners do not know that they are in a cave, they do not know that are prisoners, they do not know that their light comes from a fire, they do not know that the objects they see are shadows, etc etc.  They do not know the medium of their vision any more than fish are aware of water. The thing that is most obvious to their situation, seen from the outside, their “strange” environment, is oblivious to them from the inside.

In the second case, the medium is known. In Plato’s allegory the prisoner who is loosed to leave the cave learns the circumstances which previously determined his vision and his corresponding ideas of reality and truth. He now knows that these were only one “means [among many] of prov(id)ing reality”. He now knows that the medium is the message.

  1. CHML: “In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being. I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we recreate within ourselves the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality.” ↩
  2. CHML: “And as we trace the rise of successive communication channels or links, from writing to movies and TV, it is borne in on us that in order for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness. And the mechanical or mass media of communication must at least parrot the world in order to hold our attention.” For discussion and references see Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1. ↩
  3. The irony of Plato putting this allusion to the execution of Socrates into the mouth of Socrates is rich. ↩
  4. Aside from the interpolations in square brackets, Jowett’s translation has been slightly altered. Where he has ‘den’, here ‘cave’ has been used. And where he refers to the sun as masculine (‘he’, ‘him’ ‘his’ etc), here the neuter ‘it’ and ‘its’ has been preferred. ↩
  5. But all provision of reality rests on a kind of implicit assumption that it is satisfactorily proved in some way. ↩
  6. Providing and proving reality — and not some nihilistic threat to familiar notions of reality like the Catholic tradition. ↩
  7. The full sentence reads: “But whereas cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality.” ↩
  8. The closely related words proving/probing may also be taken to specify the fundamental matter. McLuhan’s point is exactly that ‘probing’, once pursued passionately, becomes a manner of ‘proving’ the real and not one of nihilistic dissolution. ↩
  9. For discussion, see McLuhan and Plato 11 — on the perception of the child (obj gen). ↩
  10. According to McLuhan, all perception, insight and learning works in this way: it is “our primary and constant mode of awareness” (full CHML passage given above in note 2). ↩

McLuhan and Plato 11- on the perception of the child (obj gen)

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Ξένος: ἀλλὰ δὴ τῷ μύθῳ μου πάνυ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, καθάπερ οἱ παῖδες; πάντως οὐ πολλὰ ἐκφεύγεις παιδιὰς ἔτη. (Plato, Statesman 268e. ‘Stranger: Then please pay careful attention to my story, just as if you were a child; and anyway you are not much too old for children’s tales.’)

In McLuhan and Plato 10 – on the child and the child’s perception, the perception of the child is treated as a subjective genitive: this is perception that belongs to the ontological child, the perception that this ontological child has, a mode of perception that is structured by the ontological child’s determination that “reality or the sum of things is both at once”. But what of the perception of this ontological child as an objective genitive? What of the perception of it as the object of experience that you or I might have? Just how are we to experience this ontological child “holding to both” as such?

What is distinctive about the view of the child discussed in McLuhan and Plato 8, 9 and 10 is that it is considered as an ontological power on a par with the gods and giants. If it is asked on what basis such a view of the child is possible as an objective genitive, as the possible object of our experience, the answer must be that this is a possibility that belongs, first of all, and indeed exclusively, to the perception of the child as a subjective genitive. For this experience requires of us — we who are definitively finite or ontic — perception of the child (obj gen) as holding to both the gods and the giants at the ontological level. But the availability of ontological perception to utterly finite beings in this way is something only the ontological child can see.

Each side of the contesting gods and giants in the gigantomachia battles to reduce all existence to its version of seamless singularity — the gods to pure formal ontology “in the heights of the unseen”, the giants to that sheer ontic particularity “which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch”. In fundamental contrast, the ontological child insists on an ontological plurality and complexity that exactly therefore does not hold itself away from ontic expression1: “reality or the sum of things is both at once”.

Only childish perception can experience such an ontological child.

Considered as an objective genitive, fitting experience of the ontological child is itself ruled by the childish determination to “hold to both [ontic/ontological]” and “to choose the mean and avoid the extremes [ontic/ontological] on either side” since “reality or the sum of things is both [ontic/ontological] at once”.2 It emerges in this way that the only means to such experience is its goal. The prerequisite (what must already be in place) for the perception of the ontological child (obj gen) is exactly its end (what seems to be not yet in place), namely, the perception of the child (subj gen). If we cannot already see as the ontological child sees, we cannot come to see the ontological child at all.

The result or effect of such experience must be its cause. The implication is that time must bend around on itself to form a knot — and/or be plural such that the order of tenses in one time does not coincide with their order in another time. In the crossing of such times, time’s tenses would become layered and com-plicated such that what was past in one time is present in another (hence: ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’) or what is present in one time is future in another (hence: “The future of the future is the present, in any age. All you have to do in order to predict the future quite accurately is to look at the present, what‘s under your nose. Wyndham Lewis once said, ‘The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he‘s looking at the present’.” ‘McLuhan reacts to his critics’, CBC Media Archives, 1967).

What is to be experienced in the present and future can equally be the how of experience that is already in place from the past.  What is to be realized as an objective genitive may, even must, already be realized as a subjective genitive.

What is to be seen must already have been seen.

This is a knotted, highly complicated matter. But there can be no doubt that this sort of loop in time was critically important to McLuhan and, on his reading, to the whole western tradition.  As future posts will need to elaborate, this issue is central to such core concerns of his as:

  • the nature of cognition
  • the rearview mirror and the possibility of fresh perception (which turns on the nature of cognition)
  • the nature of the artist and of art (exercising fresh perception)
  • the discovery of discovery (turning on the possibility of fresh perception of fresh perception)
  • the nature of media as necessarily founded in the nature of perception and cognition (including their possible perversions)

The working of the loop in time may be seen in language learning by children.  A newborn child can hear sounds, but not as language. When it begins to hear certain sounds in its environment as significant (sign-ificant), it has begun to filter meaningful sounds from meaningless ones and to associate the meaningful sounds with their objects. Such filtering and such association is, however, already structured by the language which the child does not yet know. The question is, how does a child come to structure its experience in a way that corresponds to what it has yet to learn?  Here the pathway to is somehow defined from the goal that is to be reached.

The same considerations apply in spades to the first use of language by humans. In order to have begun to communicate, humans must have had the ability to take the pathway leading both to and from language. This is the archetypal example of the event that, as McLuhan came increasingly to stress,

in all structures of a simultaneous or acoustic character “effects” always precede “causes”. (‘The Medieval Environment’, 1974)

Plato3 accounts for this possibility of a loop in time by describing the life of the soul between lives in which it is exposed to “true being” (eg, to the forms of “justice” and “temperance”)4:

every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are [therefore only] few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. (Phaedrus 249e-250b, emphasis added)

Plato complicates time by introducing a time between the times of the soul’s plural lives and by appeal to a “recall” through which the diachronic time of souls in their different lifetimes can be broken through by the synchronic vision in depth (as McLuhan would say) “of the holy things which once they saw” in that previous time (which is always also the future time of the ‘next world’). Human experience is taken to consist of “images” and “copies” which appear on a kind of looking glass, a looking glass that obscures as much as it illuminates. Insight (in-sight), like that of the philosopher according to Plato, must penetrate through these images5 to the underlying forms of “true being” in an exercise of “recall” that rides the multi-dimensionality of time.

Plato and McLuhan (to mention only Plato and McLuhan) each followed this same labyrinthine complex which defines the western tradition.6 It is precisely this complex which is at stake in McLuhan’s appeal to “light through” as opposed to “light on”. When it learns language, a child has to “flip” from the latter to the former: it must cease taking sounds in its own way and instead put on its environment in order to begin to hear what is being communicated through those sounds. But as Plato and Aristotle already investigated, and as Thomas reiterated from them, the ground in play here turns on the nature of time. As discussed previously7, McLuhan repeatedly cited a passage from Aristotle which he found in the Summa Theologica. Here is his treatment of it in From Cliché to Archetype:

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs in­stantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics — ”the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”. (160)8

If a child learned language gradually, it would never come to learn it.  Zeno’s paradox would apply. Instead, a moment of illumination must occur in which a new structure of experience is sensed suddenly — a new structure for the child which is the existing structure of the child’s environment. As McLuhan continued the citation of Aristotle (following Thomas) in his letter to Maritain:

et in ultimo instanti illius temporis, quod est primum instans

The last moment of the old time suddenly becomes the first moment of the new.  But this ‘first’ (“primum”) is not only the start of a new diachronic series in correspondence with the child’s environment, it is above all the “recall” of what ‘first’ has to be in place in order for such a new series to be possible at all: the medium of the “both together” (word and object, mind and thing, language and world, speaker and hearer and, in particular here, the child’s old world and its new one). It is this enabling medium, this copula, that is the message.9

McLuhan considered these complications of time especially in his 1974 essay, ‘The Medieval Environment’. The first sentence of this essay declares:

I want to explore a theme concerning a new inter-relationship of past and present.

Such “a new inter-relationship of past and present” implicates that loop in time through which the diachronic order of “of past and present” is reversed:

in all structures of a simultaneous or acoustic character “effects” always precede “causes” (…) Acoustically, causes and effects are “simultaneous” or, in the practical order, effects really precede causes.  (‘The Medieval Environment’)

In learning a language, a child somehow senses its “effects” long before it comes to understand (ie, speaks) the “cause”. Considered diachronically, the language was ‘first’ in place in the child’s environment, indeed as the child’s environment; but what the child ‘first’ experiences are the “effects” of that “cause” (such as the significance of certain sounds like ‘mama’). Considered synchronically, however, the two are “simultaneous” since language is just such “effects”:

The synchronic approach (…) regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied. (…) In synchronic terms (…) the effects [are] exercised simultaneously on whole situations, (‘The Medieval Environment’)

The “full range” or “whole situation” is that plenum of sounds and of rules of association — “language itself” — out of which any particular language represents a selection.  Language use may be imagined, as it was by Saussure and as McLuhan here salutes Saussure in calling “the synchronic approach”, as the ability to follow those structural selections which define any given particular language.10

In ‘The Medieval Environment’ McLuhan speaks of

 The flip from visual to acoustic order, from rational connectedness to intuitive insight.

He was able to predict this “flip” (as following from TV, say) because it had already occurred and, indeed, is always occurring. As the ontological gigantomachia — the dynamic relations of the gods and giants and child — such “flip” between the “colossal” forms of “true reality” is the basis of what will occur because it has occurred; and it has occurred because it always occurs. Language learning (indeed all learning whatsoever) performs this flip through “retrieval” and, since humans are humans through language, it is precisely the nature of human beings to be followers of this flip (as adherents and investigators, but also in the temporal sense).

Such a knotted complication of time and times is treated repeatedly by Eliot in Four Quartets. In ‘The Medieval Environment’ McLuhan cites two passages from the first (‘Burnt Norton’) and last (‘Little Gidding’) poems of Eliot’s cycle:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
(Burnt Norton, i)

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
(Little Gidding, v)

“The end is where we start from” or, as Eliot concludes ‘East Coker’, “In my end is my beginning.”

Not cited in this essay by McLuhan, but central to the knotted complex at stake here, are further passages from Eliot’s cycle like the following:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future. (Burnt Norton, ii)11

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. (Burnt Norton, v, emphasis added)12

That “all is always now” is exactly not a collapse of time into an ‘eternal now’. Such collapse into singularity is what both the gods and the giants fight for — eternally unsuccessfully. Instead, as only the ontological child can see, the “all” that “is always now” is the crossing of times, plural, such that:

If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (Burnt Norton, i)13

Quick now, here, now, always  —
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. (Burnt Norton v)

“All time” does not redeem because it includes incalculably much that required (and requires) redemption — but is now gone. And this will “always” be the case.

As will need to be considered in detail in future posts, McLuhan read Eliot continuously over a period of 45 years. He wrote to his family at some length about Eliot in 193414 and two of his last essays before his 1979 stroke were ‘Rhetorical Spirals in Four Quartets‘ (written for a volume of essays dedicated to Sheila Watson in 1978)15 and ‘The Possum and the Midwife’ (McLuhan’s 1978 Pound Lecture at the University of Idaho which takes its title from the complicated authorship of The Waste Land). Suffice it to note here that the plurality and other knotted complications of time, although conspicuously absent from McLuhan scholarship, were central considerations for him from the mid 1930’s when he began to read Eliot at Cambridge.16

Such complications are “the end and the beginning” of the perception of the ontological child since the child can neither be seen (as object), nor seen with (as subject), apart from the determination that “reality or the sum of things is both at once” (also, or especially, in regard to time and times17).

In the Four Quartets, too, it is the child who shows, or is, the way:

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world (…)
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. (Burnt Norton i)

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

These lines from ‘Little Gidding’ (v, emphasis added) lead immediately to the conclusion of the cycle where “the fire and the rose” may be taken (among other things) as the times which cross in, or indeed, as the present (“Quick now, here, now, always”):

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

This is the vision of the child (objective and subjective genitive!).

  1. The availability of coherent ontological perception at the ontic level has its ground in the event that difference between the ontological and the ontic is a reflex of the difference at the ontological level between the gods, giants and child. And since such fundamental difference is coherent at the ontological level (the position the child maintains against the gods and giants), so is it coherent between the ontological and ontic levels. These dynamic formalities are what McLuhan called “the usual but hidden processes of the present” (Take Today 22). ↩
  2. These citations from Plato’s Republic 619 and Sophist 249 are discussed in McLuhan and Plato 8, 9 and 10. ↩
  3. Cf McLuhan and Plato 1 ↩
  4. These forms are structures of ontological balance as seen in (by) the child ‘holding to both’. As such, “justice” and “temperance” underlie language and communication generally and therefore also human being considered as the being that is defined by language. ↩
  5. McLuhan appealed over and over again, of course, to Alice going ‘through the looking-glass’. ↩
  6. It is no part of these McLuhan and Plato posts to claim that McLuhan was a Plato scholar. He certainly was not. The point is rather that the very different enterprises of the two are to be understood in regard to one and the the same underlying complex. ↩
  7. Chrystall on time 2 ↩
  8. The passage from Aristotle found in Thomas is also cited by McLuhan, in Latin, in his letter to Maritain (May 6, 1969, Letters, 371) and in ‘The Medieval Environment’ (1974): “Aquinas (…) explained this paradoxical reversal of form (…) when he noted that during the preceding time, when anything is moving to a new form, it appears under the opposite form: Et ideo in toto tempore praecedenti, quo aliquid movetur ad unam formam, subest formae oppositae”. ↩
  9. When a child flips into this medium of both-together in learning a language, it retrieves that form through which it was ‘first’ given life from the ‘both together’ of its parents. Their both together, in turn, retrieves the both together of ontological/ontic dispersal which, in its turn, retrieves the ontological child holding to both and the gigantomachia of which the ontological child is both part (as 1 of 3) and whole (as holding together the other 2). ↩
  10. But since language defines human identity and not vice versa, who makes these selections and where and when is this ‘done’? ↩
  11. Lines 3, 4 and 7 of this passage are cited in ‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976. ↩
  12. The lines beginning “Only by the form” down to “stillness” cited in ‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976 ↩
  13. Cited by McLuhan in ‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976 ↩
  14. Dec 6, 1934, Letters 41, discussed in McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er. ↩
  15. Four Quartets also figure prominently in McLuhan’s 1976 essay ‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’. ↩
  16. A year or so after beginning to study Eliot and Pound, McLuhan began reading Wyndham Lewis — beginning with Time and Western Man. ↩
  17. McLuhan argued that historical epochs are above all characterized according to their emphasis on time as synchronic (“tribal man”) or diachronic (The Gutenberg Galaxy) or “both at once” (“the electric age”).  The parallel with Plato’s gigantomachia is clear. But the gigantomachia is “always now” such that these historical epochs were and are cut across by the times of the other epochs. Hence the recurrent possibility of perception that was and is not limited to that of its age: “Other echoes/Inhabit the garden.” So much for McLuhan’s purported ‘technological determinism’. ↩

Subjective and objective genitive

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The difference between the subjective and objective genitive is important for languages, like Greek and Latin, in which the genitive or possessive case has multiple functions. But although little attention is paid to it in a language like English which has lost its nominal cases, this distinction is highly important also in it. The objective genitive answers the question ‘of what?’ For example, ‘the child’ in ‘the experience of the child‘, if taken as an objective genitive, answers the question, ‘the experience of what?’. Here the child is the object of the experience. The subjective genitive, on the other hand, answers the question ‘whose?’, ‘belonging to whom?’ Hence, ‘the child’ in ‘the experience of the child‘, if taken as a subjective genitive, answers the question, ‘experience of whom?’, ‘whose experience?’ Here the child is the subject of the experience.

A related distinction concerns what may be termed weak and strong ambiguity in the genitive. Weak ambiguity may be seen in a phrase like ‘the color of the sky’. Here there is little distinction between the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. ‘The color of what‘ seems to cover both. Presumably this is because the sky may be thought (rightly or wrongly) to exercise little subjectivity (pace William Turner). In contrast, in ‘the experience of the child’, the difference between the objective and subjective senses of the genitive is strong.  Objectively there are a great many different possible experiences of a child.  Subjectively, too, experience belonging to a child varies over a great range.  As a result, definition in a phrase like ‘the experience of the child’ is much more demanding than it appears to be in a phrase like ‘the color of the sky’. The ambiguity of the genitive is stronger because the subjective aspect is marked.

McLuhan and Plato 10 – on the child and the child’s perception

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Ξένος: ἀλλὰ δὴ τῷ μύθῳ μου πάνυ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, καθάπερ οἱ παῖδες; πάντως οὐ πολλὰ ἐκφεύγεις παιδιὰς ἔτη. (Plato, Statesman 268e. ‘Stranger: Then please pay careful attention to my story, just as if you were a child; and anyway you are not much too old for children’s tales.’)

For McLuhan, like Plato, it is the child (and the childish artist like Plato’s childish philosopher) who is able to perceive the “breach” (Take Today, 91) or “gap of ignorance” (Take Today, 103) that is the abysmal medium of ontological — hence also ontic! — complication.

Plato:

It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms [the gods] the doctrine that all reality is changeless, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party [the giants] who represent reality as everywhere changing. Like a child begging for ‘both’, he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once. (Sophist 249)

McLuhan:

We can never see the Emperor’s new clothes, but we are staunch admirers of his old garb. Only small children and artists (…) perceive the new environment. Small children and artists are anti-social beings who are (..) little impressed by the established mores (‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes’, 1966, in György Kepes, The Man-made Object)

When the Emperor appeared in his new clothes, his courtiers did not see his nudity, they saw his old clothes. Only the small child and the artist have (…) perception of the environmental. (‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, 1968, in Through the Vanishing Point, 254, emphasis added).1

Under normal circumstances the emperor’s courtiers have no problem recognizing nudity. When they themselves are naked, they are quick to sense this.  When someone else is naked, they are even quicker on the uptake. What they cannot see is only the emperor’s nudity. In the imperial setting fear and sycophancy and habit work together to prevent the courtiers from perceiving what is directly before them. Only “small children and artists (…) who are (..) little impressed by the established mores” can see that there is nothing there at all: the emperor is butt naked.

The imperial setting concerns the whole — not only some particular environment, but all environments.  And not only all particular (ontic) environments, but all environments per se — ie, the ontological environment (of environments).  This is “the environmental” that “only small child and the artist have (…) perception of”.

Plato makes this point in regard to the interest that characterizes the philosopher as a philosopher:

Hearing of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand acres and more, our philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and say that some one is a gentleman because he can show seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray a dull and narrow vision in those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole (Theaetetus 174-175)2

In the ontological environment gaps and borders are abysmal since there is nothing deeper which could ground them. Ontology is as deep as it gets. Gaps and borders in ontology are black holes that are impossible to frame since they fall through any frame, including the ontological frame.

Now as discussed in McLuhan and Plato 9 – on the plain of oblivion, McLuhan attributes a childish “spirit of play” to the artist:

the artist (…) lives perpetually on this borderland between (…) worlds, between technology and experience, between mechanical and organic form (…) [exercising] the spirit of play which is necessary to maintain the poise between worlds (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, Oct 8, 1959, Letters 257, emphasis added)

Such a “spirit of play” is characterized not only by a subjective freedom of perception, but also by what can objectively be sensed by that freedom, namely, the nudity of the Emperor. Because the artist and the child can assume “the poise between worlds”, they can sense what is there, namely nothing (“nudity”).  Conversely, because they can sense this absence — an absence that is equally a bridge3 — they are able to assume “the poise between worlds”.

The artist and the child are “abcedminded” in one of the good senses of the term4, namely absent-minded in the sense of being mindful of absence. McLuhan attributes this good sense to Joyce in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953):

Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types, the more metaphysical world of the Wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. It is a nightworld and, literally, as Joyce reiterates, is “abcedminded”. (Emphasis added)

The spaces or borders between “the gestures of being itself” are abysmal voids without being (in both senses of ‘without’). They are yet essential to being in that, without them, the plurality and pluralizing of “the gestures of being itself ” could not be. Hence, as McLuhan notes in the same place concerning the artist:

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. (Emphasis added.)

Everything depends upon the perception of an essential absence that is ‘without being’; further, that this absence is transitive or metaphorical, bridging “the gestures of being itself ” with each other and at the same time linking “the [ontological] gestures of being itself ” with their concrete (ontic) expressions; further, that this transitivity cannot be singular5 and that it thereby implicates the intransitivity of the gods and the giants at the ontological level and the explosion of finite — ie, ultimately intransitive — particulars at the ontic level. In sum: “the gap is where the action is”. Or: “the medium is the message”. Or: everything depends on “understanding media”.

McLuhan continues the “abcedminded” passage above from ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ as follows:

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”)6, the frozen, formalized gestures of remote ages of collective experience, move before us in solemn morrice7. 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.

In his last major work, Take Today, McLuhan designates this “adequation of mind and things”, this “adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world”, this “drama of cognition itself” with the term “interplay”: 

Aquinas and Eliot share the classical idea of the “magical” interplay of mutual transformation that occurs between man and his world. (96)

It seems that it will be necessary to have a series of McLuhan and Aquinas posts and another series of McLuhan and Eliot ones. In any case, as the word “interplay” makes plain, and as the word “magical” further emphasizes, what is at stake here, from the classical world to Eliot, is the childish perception that “reality or the sum of things is both at once” aka “the spirit of play which is necessary to maintain the poise between worlds” (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, Oct 8, 1959, Letters 257, emphasis added).

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη (Heraclitus, DK 52)

All time [αἰὼν] is a child playing [παῖς παίζων], playing with the pieces of a game; the kingdom [βασιληίη] is ruled by the child [παιδὸς]

 

 

  1. This passage also appears in ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’, 1966. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s chief point about “the electric age” is that it inherently implicates concern with the whole — the whole of the universe, the whole of nature, the whole of history, the whole of language, the whole of the psyche, etc etc. It thereby pushes us in the direction of Plato’s philosopher and of those childish perceptions which characterize his philosopher. ↩
  3. If the absence were not equally a bridge it would not be between anything, it would not be a gap. ↩
  4. All terms have multiple good and bad senses exactly because, as Plato’s child perceives, “reality or the sum of things is both at once”. ↩
  5. No transitivity can be singular. But especially not that transitivity that is ontological and archetypal of all particular transitivities. ↩
  6. This bracketed interpolation of a quotation from Joyce is McLuhan’s. ↩
  7. Wordsworth, ‘To the Daisy’: “In shoals and bands, a morrice train,/Thou greet’st the traveller in the lane.” McLuhan’s “gestures (…) move before us in solemn morrice” seems to have been taken from Ulysses 2.155: “the symbols moved in grave morrice”. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 9 – on the plain of oblivion

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In McLuhan and Plato 8 Plato’s description from the Sophist is given where he describes ontology aka ontologies as a gigantomachia peri tes ousias:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality (…) On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. (Sophist 246a-247c, empasis added)

The matter of the ‘between’ (Gk ‘meso‘ as in ‘mesolithic’, ‘mesoamerican’ etc) is ‘central’ to Plato, especially in the Sophist. It is the nature of this ‘between’ that is the casus belli between the contesting ontologies described by him there. This gap is “where the action is”. But this action has a peculiar twist. While the gods and the giants eternally disagree as to the nature of “true reality”, and are determined to fight to the death over this issue, they entirely agree with one another that “real being” is singular and undifferentiated. They each hold that the gap between them should not exist exactly because, they assert, it ultimately does not exist. Each of them battles ‘interminably’ (ie, without limit or border) to overcome the other — aka reclaim it back into itself as into a “real existence” or “true being” that is monolithic.  Each therefore also battles ‘interminably’ to eradicate the gap between it and the other. For only if this gap is erased can the other then be merged into its proper reality.1

For the childish philosopher or philosophical child, in fundamental contrast , “reality or the sum of things is both at once” (249c). For this ontological child, the gap between the gods and the giants not only happens to exist (as even the gods and giants find, however unaccountably), it must exist since “real being” is plural in its view and plurality cannot exist without difference and difference cannot exist without borders or gaps between its plural constituents. Indeed, since the borders in this case are ontological, they are truly abysmal gaps in Being itself. They fall outside all the possible varieties of Being and yet hold together those varieties — in Being.

As future posts will need to explore in detail, the ineradicable gaps in human being are isomorphic with these gaps in Being itself. The latter supply the very strange ground to the figures of the former. This is particularly to be seen in that abysmal moment between lives when, according to Plato, humans are exposed to “true being”, aka to the ‘lots’ or destinies of the different ontologies of the gigantomachia peri tes ousias. He describes this exposure as follows:

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. (Republic 618)

The isomorphism between the agon of the gigantomachia and the “agony” of “the supreme peril of our human state” is particularly drawn in the Phaedrus:

this is the hour of agony (!) and extremest conflict (!) for the soul (648a)2

In the face of this moment of “supreme peril” and “extremest conflict”, continues Plato in the Republic,

A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon [such lots as] tyrannies and similar villainies, he do [in the life that results from the choice of such a lot] irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself [both in that life and in the other world after it]; but let him know how to choose [the lot of] the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. (619)

As is clear from Plato’s specification of the “hour of agony” exactly “in this life“, what happens ‘between lives’ is the characteristic action of human being at every moment. Humans are always on their way between the ontological possibilities of Being and their particular being — that is, they are always ‘between lives’. It is this vertical up and down movement constituting the horizontal line of our lives that has been forgotten in the stupendous progress of the latter. A cloak of the secondary has been thrown over the primary. 

Now among the ‘siamese triplets’ of the gigantomachia peri tes ousias Plato ‘sides’ (or doubly sides) with the child in its determination to “hold to both” and “to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side” since “reality or the sum of things is both at once”.  It is this stance, he says, that characterizes the philosopher. Future posts in this Plato series will attempt to specify just how this occurs and why. Suffice it to note here that McLuhan takes up this question in terms of the labyrinth, the vortex and the maelstrom. But Plato, too, considers the strange time and place that is implicated with this “mean” (or ‘medium’) when it falls between ontologies and between lives and between the moments of “this life”. Thus, later in this same concluding book of the Republic, he describes Er’s experience with the souls of the dead preceding their rebirth:

they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink (…) and each one as he drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting. (Republic 621a-b)

These souls between lives find themselves on a “plain of Forgetfulness”, or oblivion, “a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure”. Though this plain flows a “river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold”. When the spirits drink from this river, “each one (…) forgot all things”. Each one then goes to sleep, sinking into “the middle of the night”.

Plato describes an encounter with — nothing. For there is no world “between worlds”, no experience between modes of experience, no life between lives, no place between sorts of places, nothing (no-thing) between varieties of things. There is no possible experience of this nebulous in-between state, no possible language to describe ‘it’.  To experience or describe it would be to frame it — but it falls between frames. Plato’s wonderful observation is exact: this is “water no vessel can hold”.

And yet it is precisely Plato’s point that it belongs to human nature to traverse this plain and to drink this water and to go into this night and to encounter this nothing. Human being belongs to this mean between ontological extremes aka to this medium between. Only so do humans learn and communicate and come to know the truth — for all of these, Plato argues, are derived by recollection of the soul’s exposure to “true being” in its journey through this in-between state:

every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them (Phaedrus 249e-250a)

Now McLuhan, too, attempted communication concerning a “mean” or “medium” or “frontier” or “borderland” whose “water no vessel can hold”:

the artist (…) lives perpetually on this borderland between (…) worlds, between technology and experience, between mechanical and organic form (…) [exercising] the spirit of play which is necessary to maintain the poise between worlds of sensibility (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, Oct 8, 1959, Letters 257, emphasis added)

In this peculiar situation between identities, there is no identity, there is only the “the unperson: the man that never was” (Take Today, 26):

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. Anybody moving into a new world loses identity. If you go to China, and you’ve never been there before, you’re a nobody.  You can’t relate to anything there. So loss of identity is something that happens in rapid change. But everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody. This is what’s called the masked man. The masked man has no identity. (Forward Through The Rearview Mirror, 100)

In fact, there is nothing ‘there’ at all, it is “pure opacity”:

the new frontier is as invisible as a radio wave. There are no tracks (…) The new frontier is pure opacity3 (Take Today, 90) 

  1. McLuhan describes this will-to-merger in ‘Nihilism Exposed’ (1955) as follows: “it is precisely the courage of (Wyndham) 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 (Plato’s giants) , and by sheer abstraction at the other (Plato’s gods). (…) 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’.” (The interpolations of ‘Plato’s giants’ and ‘Plato’s gods’ have been added here.) Six years before, in “Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum” (1949), McLuhan made the same point as follows: “Analogy institutes tension, polarity, a flow of intellectual perception set up among two sets of particulars. To merge those two sets by an attempt to reduce a metaphor situation to some single view or proposition is the rationalist short circuit (…) “Symbol” means to throw together, to juxtapose without copula. And it is a work that cannot be undertaken nor understood by the univocalizing, single plane, rationalist mind. Existence is opaque to the rationalist. He seeks essences, definitions, formulas. He lives in the concept and the conceptualizable (…) his very postulates discourage him from the loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars.” ↩
  2. For discussion, see McLuhan and Plato 3 – the wild horses of passion. ↩
  3. McLuhan often calls the childish “both together” of the third possibility “dialogue” (eg, Take Today 22). In ‘Prospect’ (1962) he notes: “In dialogue (…) you are deeply involved because it is so vague. It is so opaque, so incomplete and you have so many broken components to work with, that you have to pay the utmost attention in order to participate.” ↩

Autobiography 1962

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He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to (…) He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. I think that all human technology and invention has occurred under this kind of anxious pressure. You don’t outer anything (…) until you’re under some dire pressure and fear. But (…) 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 dread that animal, that famine, and so on, but this condition. (…)  Anxiety means utmost alertness, utmost watchfulness, involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare1 

These lines from ‘Prospect’ in Canadian Art (1962) were not written as autobiography. But McLuhan speaks generally here (switching between the first, second and third person) in a way that includes, as he must have been well aware, also himself:

all human (…) invention has occurred under this kind of anxious pressure. You don’t outer anything (…) until you’re under some dire pressure.

According to Carpenter, McLuhan suffered a severe stroke in 1960.2 His condition was acute enough that he received the last rites. This may have been a prodromal sign of the tumor growing in his brain that would be removed seven years later in New York.3 And/or it may have been an effect of the genetic liability to stroke he shared with his mother. It had killed her in 1961, the year before ‘Prospect’, and would eventually kill him as well. But whatever the precise details may have been with McLuhan’s physical health, he certainly knew at this time (age 50) that he was living on borrowed time and that his ability to communicate his message was threatened by more than its inherent conceptual difficulties. The more he felt the importance of relaying his ancient message, at last, the more anxiety he must have felt. 

In his major text from this same year, The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan cites some lines from As You Like It (II, vii):

Give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.

He then comments in words that may be taken as applying also to himself:

Though engaged in this cathartic enterprise, Shakespeare felt the absence of role bitterly. (GG 195)

 

  1. ‘Prospect’ in Canadian Art (1962). Similarly, at the end of the decade: “the story line in the minotaur myth is (…) the confrontation with human identity, which is the monster”. Exploration of the ways, means, and values of museum communication with the viewing public, Museum of the City of New York, 1969 ↩
  2. This 1960 stroke is mentioned without attribution by Coupland (132) and seems to have been general knowledge in the UT community. From this time, McLuhan was known to have changed markedly. Carpenter describes the stroke in detail in unpublished correspondence and mentions it in a long YouTube interview at 13:41ff (where, however, he dates the stroke erroneously to 1957) and again at 40:24ff where he mentions that “Marshal was very sick at the time to the point where they administered last rites”. ↩
  3. See the note in Letters, doubtless from Corinne McLuhan, that prior to McLuhan’s brain tumour operation in 1967 “for eight years before (ie, since 1959) he had been afflicted with occasional blackouts and dizziness” (175). ↩

McLuhan and Plato 8 – Gigantomachia

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In the Sophist, Plato turns to the mythical battle between the gods and giants to portray his vision of ontology as essentially plural: ontology as ontologies:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [gigantomachia peri tes ousias] (…)
One party [the giants] is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. (…)
Their adversaries [the gods] are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. (…)
It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms [the gods] the doctrine that all reality is changeless, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party [the giants] who represent reality as everywhere changing. Like a child begging for ‘both’, he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once.
(Sophist 246a-249c, emphasis added)

The mythical tale of a war between generations of divine beings was ancient even in Plato’s time.1 This battle (Gk machia) is gigantic, not only because it is waged on one side2 by the giants (Gk gigantes), but also, according to Plato, because it takes place peri tes ousias — as a war concerning the nature of reality (Gk ousia3) waged between primordial powers of Being that are all gigantic exactly as ontologies. Each of them has universal claim.4 Each claims to be “real existence” or “true reality” or “real being” or “the sum of things” (as Plato variously expresses the point). And where a war is waged between gigantic powers over gigantic issues, that war is of course also gigantic.

This war is never-ending (“always going on”, as Plato notes) since no one of these powers can ever defeat its rivals: they are all equally fundamental, equally original and equally powerful. Such equality is the condition of the powers persisting in Being as a plurality since, if there were any difference in their power, Being would ultimately be singular. Its weaker forms would not be able to hold out forever against the stronger. (Or, inversely, when they are able to hold out forever, they cannot be weaker.) Further, ontological plurality (hence ontological equality) is the condition of the difference between Being and beings as its ground: beings can be different from Being and yet remain in Being exactly and only because plural Being is different in and from itself. Absent such differentiating-uniting power in Being itself, beings could not come to be nor maintain themselves in being. Deeper than them is the gigantic power to be in difference. Take Today 22 expresses this notion as “the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before”.

The three ontologies envisioned by Plato (each original and originating)  are materialism (aka only what can be touched is real aka the giants), idealism (only what can be conceived is real aka the gods) and both of these together (as held by the childish philosopher or philosophical child). The third is necessary if Being is plural (and not just a lifeless One). But the first and second are equally necessary if the third is their combination or “dialogue”.

McLuhan’s project in one sense was to reprise these points aka (in Whitehead’s phrase) to mount, yet again, “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Here he submits that Being is plural, that it entails contesting “universal forms of experience” and that this contest of “universal forms” is synchronic and “now”:

One of the amazing things about electric technology is that it retrieves the most primal, the most ancient forms of awareness as contemporary. There is no more “past” under electric culture: every “past” is now. And there is no future: it is already here. You cannot any longer speak geographically or ideologically in one simple time or place. Now, today, we are dealing with universal forms of experience. (‘Electric Consciousness and the Church’, 1970)5

Again:

Every medium is in some sense a universal pressing towards maximal realization.” (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’, Expl 2, 1954)

Here he characterizes the contest of “universal forms” (often styled “environments” by McLuhan) as a “war” between “worlds” in which a third form (“a two-way bridge”) is also at work:

There does exist, then, a two-way bridge between the traditional and technological worlds which are at war in Western culture. But it has been officially ignored or condemned. To travel this bridge requires of the traveller an acquaintance with the language and techniques of poetry [aka the ear world] on the one hand, and of the language and techniques of painting, architecture, and the visual world [aka the eye world] on the other. Few are prepared to acquire both languages and so the war between these worlds continues, waged witlessly in classroom and market-place alike (‘Space, Time, and Poetry’, Explorations 4, 1955)

Here he defines the three “universal forms” in the same terms as Plato, the “idealists”, the “practical men” and “dialogue”:

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 (Take Today 22)

The “practical men of their time” are those entrepreneurial “giants” who “drag everything down to earth out of heaven” and who “strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled” or otherwise managed6. “They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.” The “idealists” or “Peter Pans“, in contrast, “are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights” of their ivory towers. Opposed to both, but in such a way as to unite them (as its name implies), is the third position of “dia-logue” holding that “reality or the sum of things is both at once”.

That this war “is always going on”, that “all is always now” (as Eliot has it7) is nicely captured by McLuhan in the title of a 1944 talk (published in 1946 and then reprinted as the concluding chapter of The Interior Landscape in 1969): ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’.

The knot of times, plural, implicated in this vision of the contemporary gigantomachia peri tes ousias, right here, right now, the most ancient and the immediately modern together, is treated extensively by McLuhan:

time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground. (GV 10)

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’, The Medium and the Light, 88)

And over and over again he cited Eliot’s definition of the “auditory imagination” which “fuses the old and obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and the surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality”.8

McLuhan expressed this complicated “fusion” in many ways — the intercommunication of the old and new, but also the interrelation of the eye and the ear, or the “doubleness” of “the written and oral traditions”:    

Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form…9

Always at stake was the fundament — or fundaments — of Plato’s gigantomachia.

 

  1. Further considerations here and here. ↩
  2. ‘One side’ of what Eric McLuhan nicely terms “siamese triplets” (The Medium and the Light, xii). ↩
  3. ‘Ousia’, like ‘onto(logy)’, derives from ‘einai’, Gk ‘to  be’. ‘Essence’ from the cognate Latin verb ‘esse’ is a translation of ousia. ↩
  4. McLuhan: “Every medium is in some sense a universal pressing towards maximal realization.” (‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’, Expl 2, 1954) ↩
  5. The Medium and the Light, 80, emphasis added. As detailed already by Plato and Aristotle, and then as taken up as the central contention of his work by Hegel, “universal forms of experience” and “universal forms of Being ” are mutually implicating. This is because “universal forms of experience” is a dual genitive. These forms belong to, or characterize, experience as a subjective genitive.  What we can know of these forms depends upon our experience of them. But ‘at the same time’ these forms generate experience in being as an objective genitive: it depends on them. The same considerations are at stake in “the forms of Being”. These forms belong to Being as a subjective genitive, but Being belongs to these forms as an objective genitive. The key question, as specified by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and also McLuhan, is whether the “both together” aka “two-way bridge” of this genitive is accorded its fitting weight. ↩
  6. The etymological root of ‘manage‘ is Latin ‘manus‘ = ‘hand’. “One party (the giants) is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled“. ↩
  7. Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, v: “And the end and the beginning were always there/Before the beginning and after the end./And all is always now. ↩
  8. McLuhan cited this passage from Eliot’s 1933 essay ‘The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism’ at least 10 times.  See Comparative philosophy – Masson-Oursel and Crookshank. ↩
  9. ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, Lecture of March 17, 1967 at the University of Toronto, in Understanding Me, pp124-138. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 7 – “a poise between”

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In ‘Technology and Political Change’ (International Journal ,1952), McLuhan described the invention of the Greek alphabet (“the visualization of the word”) as reflected in Plato’s dialogues as follows:

Intellectually, the visualization of the word may have made possible the rise of dialectics and logic as they are found in Plato’s dialogues. And the Platonic quarrel with the Sophists, from this point of view, may represent the clash of the older oral with the new written mode of communication. For the written form of communication permits the arrest of a mental process for private analysis and contemplation [= dialectics and logic], whereas the oral form is naturally concerned with the public impact on an audience [= rhetoric]. The Platonic dialogue may well represent a poise between the aesthetic claims and tendencies of these two forms of expression, between dialectic and rhetoric. 

McLuhan characterizes Plato in two fundamentally different ways in this four-sentence passage. The first three sentences echo the understanding of Plato McLuhan put forward in his PhD thesis and throughout the 1940s.  The last sentence represents a new understanding following his exposure to the work of Harold Innis beginning in 1948 (when UT Press issued Minerva’s Owl1) or, at the latest, 1949 (when Innis and McLuhan participated in a seminar together). Now, by 1952, McLuhan had been reflecting on Innis’ work for some years and had carefully studied both his 1950 Empire and Communications and his 1951 Bias of Communication.

In the first three sentences Plato’s dialogues are seen as operating in a “quarrel with the Sophists”, a “clash” representing “the rise of dialectics and logic” in Plato against the “rhetoric” of the Sophists. Although the emphasis here on the media of communication, oral and written2, was new to McLuhan in the early 1950s, the characterization of Socrates and Plato in opposition to the Sophists is familiar from McLuhan’s work throughout the 1940s. The “clash” of Plato’s Socrates with the Sophists was consistently seen by him as the instigation of a vast historical struggle (set out most fully in his PhD thesis) stretching from 500 BC in Greece to the present day. In the aptly named ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America‘ 3 (1946) McLuhan summarized this drama as 

the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand (…) is the quarrel begun by Socrates against the Sophists, from whose ranks he came. However, the Church Fathers, notably St. Jerome and St. Augustine, made Ciceronian humanism basic training for the exegetist of Scripture. Patristic humanism subordinated dialectics to grammar and rhetoric until this same quarrel broke out afresh in the twelfth century when Peter Abelard set up dialectics as the supreme method in theological discussion. Abelard’s party was opposed by the great Ciceronian humanist John of Salisbury, whose Metalogicus, as the name implies, was aimed against the logicians, who were called the Schoolmen, or moderni. After four centuries of triumphant dialectics, the traditional patristic reaction, heralded by Petrarch, had gathered sufficient head under Erasmus to supplant a scholasticism weakened from within by bitter disputes. But by many channels mathematical, philosophical, theological, and scientific, dialectics has persisted.

It is against this background that McLuhan proposed to treat a contemporary question (like the value of the University of Chicago great books program) as “an episode in a dispute which began in ancient Athens”. This originary “dispute” was “the quarrel begun by Socrates against the Sophists” in which

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

However, as McLuhan protested against the usual portrait of the Sophists,

it is unfair to suppose that the Sophists were merely cynical power and money gluttons. They claimed also to teach the means to wisdom; for wisdom, as well as eloquence, was thought by them, as by Cicero, to be the by-product of erudition. It was this claim which most annoyed Plato and against which he directs his dialectical refutations in the Gorgias and elsewhere.

To correct this unfair supposition it was therefore, necessary to show

how this identity of eloquence and wisdom enters into the work of Cicero, since he, more than any other individual, was responsible for the concepts of humanism which prevailed in the twelfth, the sixteenth, or the twentieth centuries. (…) The origin of this important claim for the inseparable character of eloquence and wisdom would seem to lie in the familiar doctrine of the Logos, which may be supposed to have arisen with Heraclitus. Society is a mirror or speculum of the Logos, as, indeed, are the external world, the mind of man and, above all, human speech. (…) And just as Zeno considered wisdom or prudence “not only as the first of the virtues, but as the foundation of all”, so (…) the Stoics deduced from this doctrine the corollary that “the bond of the state is the Logos (ratio atque oratio)”.

McLuhan’s concluding suggestion in ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ was that peace is possible and desirable between the two parties of this “conflict”:

Between the speculative dialectician and scientist 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,” 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. It would seem to be a matter of distributing time for [both] these studies.

This 1946 article, and its concluding section in particular, suggested a series of questions (to be detailed in a later post) whose consideration would be crucial for McLuhan’s later work. By 1952 and the writing of ‘Technology and Political Change’, McLuhan was at work (with various degrees of consciousness) on these questions as decisively influenced by his exposure to the work of Harold Innis. This turn in his work may be seen in the second characterization of Plato he draws in that essay:

The Platonic dialogue may well represent a poise4 between the aesthetic claims and tendencies of these two forms of expression, between dialectic and rhetoric. 

McLuhan seems to have been well aware of the contrasting takes on Plato presented in this 1952 paper. He refers to the first with the qualification “from this point of view”. The clear implication is that other points of view are possible — especially when McLuhan immediately proceeded to put forward another one himself. In any case, the differences between the two takes are striking and revealing. In the first, Plato’s dialogues are seen as one of the terms of a twofold opposition: Socrates versus the Sophists, dialectic versus rhetoric, writing versus speech, new versus old. In the second, however, both terms fall within the compass of “the Platonic dialogue” such that it, the dialogue, “represent[s] a poise between the aesthetic claims and tendencies of these two forms of [written and oral] expression, between dialectic and rhetoric”. Where the first puts forward an unstable duality (hence the recourse to “subordination” and “control” in an attempt to achieve a stable structure), the second propounds a dynamic trinity whose knotted interplay is its stability (hence the link noted by McLuhan in 1946 “of the Logos (…) with Heraclitus”5 ). Again, the first sets out a conflict of two claims where each purports to represent “the foundation of all” and which are therefore necessarily in irresolvable conflict. But the second sees the possibility of mediation between these claims where the dialogue form functions as a third. Here the unitary and absolutist claims of each of the two sides of the first view are abrogated in favor of a complex structure where “the foundation of all” is somehow plural and therefore strangely discrete and finite.

The key factor differentiating the two takes is time. Both recognize a certain interplay between dialectic and rhetoric.  But in the first take, this interplay is diachronic (there is first the one and then the other) while in the second it is synchronic: the interplay functions as a kind of threefold balance which manifests “innumerable variants”6, but these “variants” are always subject to the structural laws of an underlying equipoise.

The contrast between these two is universal. For the first, time is singular and historical events unfold on a singular plane. For the second, time is plural (both synchronic and diachronic) and historical events unfold on two planes at once.7 For the first, all multiplicity is secondary and deficient. Substantiality and stability depend upon a prior singularity. The great mystery is how and why the one became two. For the second, interplay is original and originating.

The ‘third’ of the two together is later for the first take, earlier (indeed, earliest) for the second.8

The problems latent in McLuhan’s early work before (approximately) 1950, therefore the spur to the marked changes in his work which began at that time, are especially on display in his statement in the 1946 essay:

My explanation (…) is in terms the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand.

Here was a convert to the trinitarian Catholic church, who wrote his extended PhD thesis on the threefold of grammar, logic and rhetoric in the trivium. But at this time McLuhan was manifestly caught up in a series of contesting dualisms. In this 1946 passage “the grammarians and rhetoricians”, instead of functioning in a threefold economy, are brought together as one in a two-sided struggle with the “dialecticians”. In a similar way McLuhan postulated — as he himself admitted — stark dualisms between God and creation and between nature and technology: 

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. (Playboy interview)

The incoherence of this position was especially to be seen in this admission from 1954:

When I wrote The Mechanical Bride some years ago I did not realize that I was attempting a defense of book-culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me… (‘Sight, Sound and the Fury’, Commonweal Magazine, April 9, 1954)

This observation is odd, even comical, since the main contention of McLuhan’s early work (as repeatedly seen above) was that “dialectic” aka “literary values” aka “book-culture” should be “subordinated” to the “Ciceronian humanism” of “rhetoric”. This consistent attack on “writing” was now said to have been “a defense of book-culture”! 

What has happened here is that McLuhan has become conscious of a tendency (first of all in himself and then generally) to conceive9 everything in terms of a dualistic form structured by (a) antagonistic claims (b) necessitating the valorizing or privileging or identification with one of them (exactly on account of their basic quarrel or agon concerning the fundamental nature of reality). In the early 1950’s McLuhan came to call this experiential form ‘gnosticism’ and future posts will need to examine his attempts to investigate this phenomenon in his essays and correspondence between 1950 and 1955. Suffice it to note here that McLuhan was shocked, once he could see this form (instead of seeing with it), both at its extent and influence in the world and at the undisguised manner in which it propagated itself. It was hidden in plain sight in a way which cried out for investigation — but somehow eluded it despite recurrent efforts since Heraclitus and Plato to expose it.

Even more shocking to McLuhan was his rueful recognition that this form was somehow compatible with a highly self-conscious Catholicism like his own, and this even where the “Logos (ratio atque oratio)” was explicitly held to be “the first of the virtues” and “the foundation of all” including “the external world, the mind of man and, above all, human speech” (as McLuhan had written in 1946). Despite all this, the “atque” — the “poise between” — had somehow been missing from his experience and his writing!

With this new insight, writing aka “book-culture” was no longer seen within the terms of antagonistic opposition to an older oral culture (as if it were a matter of material forms in diachronic time). Now it was to be associated with such opposition itself10 — with an “exclusive” or “either-or” dualism — that might or might not be found in some particular sample of writing (like Plato’s dialogues or the Bible) or indeed in some particular sample of oral speech. In this new sense, even McLuhan’s previous pronounced opposition to “dialectic” (aka “writing” aka “book-culture”) could be described as “a defense of book-culture” on account of the oppositional dualistic structure in which it had been formulated. 

This movement away from found objects to their underlying structure had, of course, already been initiated in McLuhan’s earlier work where he had (for example) investigated the course of western history in terms of the interplay of the underlying “studies” of the trivium. But he had not turned such investigation on itself with the reflexive questions: if human experience can be studied through focus on underlying structures, what is the structure which the investigation itself has? and what is the structure which it should have? These questions then precipitated a series of others: what is the nature(s) of time if it is somehow possible to get ‘before’ experience? And: what is the pathway to experience (apparently through very strange times and spaces) that has always already been taken among its possible approaches? And: if this pathway is always being taken, even now, how can it not be recognized? how can it take place in complete oblivion? how can it be forgotten even as it is happening? And: in the attempt to recover the ‘before’ of experience, how avoid the infinite regress of mirror image in mirror image in mirror image (in which the experience of every ‘before’ has its own ‘before’)? 

McLuhan had gained some insight into these deep questions regarding “the potencies of language” and experience in his study of modern French and English poetry in the 1940’s. As he described in his letter to Innis early in 1951 (or, perhaps, late in 1950):

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 such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years (…) One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a [synchronic!] labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences… (emphases added)

But Innis himself had decisively contributed to McLuhan’s changing understanding of these matters at this time around 1950 through his long-standing11 concern with method in the humanities and with the importance of self-reference — aka the examination of “bias” — to method. On the first page of Empire and Communications, for example, Innis observes:

We are immediately faced with the very great, perhaps insuperable, obstacle of attempting (…) to appraise economic considerations by the use of tools which are in themselves products of economic considerations. (…) It is an advantage, however, to emphasize these dangers at the beginning so that we can at least be alert to the implications of the type of bias [in our own observations]. Obsession with economic considerations illustrates the dangers of monopolies of knowledge and suggests the necessity of appraising its [such an obsession’s] limitations.  (1-2)

Through Innis, McLuhan was recalled to his interest in communication that had first been aroused by Henry Wilkes Wright, and particularly by Wright’s book, The Moral Standards of Democracy, at the University of Manitoba twenty years before. It lies close at hand to suspect that McLuhan was further prompted by Innis to examine his own method and bias and to wonder about their limitations. In this context, the striking differences between Innis’s take on Plato’s dialogues and McLuhan’s in his thesis and throughout the 1940s may have played a critical role. Only compare McLuhan in ‘An Ancient Quarrel’ (cited above from 1946) to Innis in 1950 in Empire and Communications:

The character of Socrates worked through the spoken word. He knew that ‘the letter is destined to kill much (though not all) of the life that the spirit has given’12. He was the last great product and exponent of the oral tradition. Plato attempted to adapt the new medium of prose to an elaboration of the conversation of Socrates by the dialogue with its question and answer, freedom of arrangement and inclusiveness. A well-planned conversation was aimed at discovering truth and awakening the interest and sympathy of the reader. The dialogues were developed as a most effective instrument for preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page and Plato’s success was written in the inconclusiveness and immortality of his work. His style was regarded by Aristotle as half-way between poetry and prose. The power of the oral tradition persisted in his prose in the absence of a closely ordered system. Continuous philosophical discussion aimed at truth. The life and movement of dialectic opposed the establishment of a finished system of dogma. (68-69)

A similar point was made by Innis in regard to the Bible in what seems to have been the first work of his read by McLuhan, ‘Minerva’s Owl’13:

With access to more convenient media such as parchment and papyrus and to a more efficient alphabet the Hebrew prophets gave a stimulus to the oral and the written tradition which persisted in the scriptures [of] the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan religions. (Emphasis added)

Several points seem to have proved decisive for McLuhan. First, Innis showed that orality and writing aka rhetoric and dialectic need not be contrasted as material activities situated in diachronic time. Instead, “question and answer, freedom of arrangement and inclusiveness”, typical of oral exchange, might be expressed just as much in writing as in speech:

The dialogues were (…) preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page… 

the Hebrew prophets gave a stimulus to the oral and the written tradition which persisted in the scriptures…

Innis described Plato and the Hebrew prophets in this way just as such figures as Thomas14, Shakespeare and Joyce would later be described by McLuhan. Second, the contrast between orality and writing was therefore seen to extend over a spectrum where privilege independent of linear time might be accorded to one or the other — or both together. Third, once explanation were not limited to material expressions arrayed in diachronic time15, the variety and richness of the tradition could be accounted for in a new way, especially where an author or a text might be seen to reflect multiple forms of privilege — in molecular or compound or even mixed fashion — and not merely some supposedly “closely ordered system”. 

A series of lessons emerged here which would shape the remaining thirty years of McLuhan’s research. In the first place, McLuhan would have to attempt in his own probes always to assume the “poise” of the third position between (as he would come to express it, again as influenced by Innis16) “eye and ear”. This ‘double privilege’ position was always possible for the investigating subject as an approach to experience and in regard to the object of experience represented an inherent respect for (aka correlate privileging of) its value and complexity. In the second place, this position as a way of of “preserving the (…) spoken word on the written page” could not avoid the “inconclusiveness” and “limitation” and “freedom of arrangement” of that form. It could never itself be, or aspire to be, a “closely ordered system”. In the third place, this movement away from dualism could not take place if it retained a dualistic view of dualism itself.  But just how to take a non-dualistic view of dualism (while avoiding it on principle) was and is one of the deepest questions of human existence.

Two decades later, in 1972, McLuhan would express many of these points at once in his concluding considerations to Take Today 22, 

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.

The use of the word “dialogue” here recalls that time 20 years earlier when McLuhan’s research was re-oriented by Harold Innis in several different ways, but perhaps especially by his notion that

Plato attempted to adapt the new medium of prose to an elaboration of the conversation of Socrates by the dialogue with its question and answer, freedom of arrangement and inclusiveness.

From now on McLuhan’s work would eschew that sort of dualism he had previously taken to ground the western tradition in which “the Sophists made logic subordinate to rhetoric or persuasion, since their end was political” and “Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who were all agreed that dialectics should control rhetoric, that knowledge was superior even to prudential action”. These two positions were (as McLuhan expressed the matter 20 years later) “the experienced and practical men” on the one side, and “the idealists” on the other, both of whom shared “the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts” by concentrating on the “clash” between the two of them as well as the “clash” between their past presuppositions and the open future (which each of them solved by subjecting their futures to their pasts via the rear-view mirror to produce “equivalents that merely reflect or repeat the old”).

In fundamental contrast to these two “extremes”, McLuhan would now take up the “poise” of the middle or third position where he would focus on “the usual [ie, constant] but hidden processes of the present” in which the ‘before’ of experience is contested — “the gap where the action is”. And in which the future is met depending on those “processes”.

In doing so, however, he would need to bear in mind that dualism, too, is a powerful form of being (only so its persistent influence) and that it is not only to be considered in dualist — gnostic — fashion as merely opposed to “dialogue”. For dialogue could not be dialogue if it related only to itself via the production of “equivalents that merely reflect or repeat the old”. Therefore the “hidden” way in which dialogue “goes beyond” itself in the direction of what would might seem to be the lesser and the lower — except for the fact that it is only in this way that dialogue can ex-press itself as dialogue.17 Hence McLuhan’s Take Today 22 citation of the I Ching in regard to such “innovation” that it

does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.

The modern world would be able to turn from its sense18 of meaninglessness only by appreciating that meaninglessness, too, has meaning (actually, meanings) qua meaninglessness. For meaning, too, ex-presses that “true strength” — “mobile as it is hidden” — of “creating the new [that] came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”.19 

 

  1. In his introduction to the 1964 reprint of The Bias of Communication McLuhan claimed: “Flattered by the attention that Innis had directed to some work of mine, I turned for the first time to his work. It was my good fortune to begin with the first essay in this book: Minerva’s Owl.” Similarly, in ‘The Fecund Interval’ (1979): “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.” The timing reported here is clearly mistaken since The Mechanical Bride did not appear until more than a year after McLuhan became acquainted, at the latest, with Innis and his work in the ‘values’ seminar of 1949. But it may well be that Minerva’s Owl was the first work of Innis that McLuhan read — it was issued in Toronto by UTP around the time he must have begun hearing about Innis from his old Winnipeg friend and close associate of Innis, Tom Easterbrook. This was 1948, more than 2 years before the publication of The Mechanical Bride, when Easterbrook began organizing the seminar of 1949 in which both Innis and McLuhan were to participate. ↩
  2. The influence of Innis is plain in McLuhan’s identification of the “quarrel” between the Sophists and Socrates with “the clash of the older oral (mode of communication) with the new written mode”. “Dialectics and logic” on this view were enabled through the “arrest” in writing of “mental process for private analysis and contemplation”. In his literary essays at this time McLuhan was similarly concerned with “the aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time” (‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ from 1951). Concern with media was therefore linked from the start in McLuhan’s work with the investigation of the varieties of time — just as Innis urged. in his ‘Plea for Time’ (1950) Innis had put the matter in a nutshell: “it becomes imperative to attempt to estimate the significance of the attitude towards time in an analysis of (…) change”. ↩
  3. The Classical Journal, 41:4, January 1946: “This paper is an extension of an informal address given before a joint meeting of the Modern Language and the Classical Club of St Louis in 1944.” McLuhan emphasized the importance of this paper when he concluded The Interior Landscape with it a full quarter century after its initial delivery. ↩
  4. McLuhan uses ‘poise’ here not to indicate a posture or role, but in the sense of something having weight, something equally substantial with the forms it mediates. The use of the word in this sense probably reflects a sensitivity to French arising from McLuhan’s study of the symbolists in the second half of the 1940s. ↩
  5. In Four Quartets Eliot uses two fragments from Heraclitus as epigrams. He then links stability and movement as follows: ” Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only dance.” ‘Burnt Norton’, ii ↩
  6. Take Today, 22 ↩
  7. All of the physical sciences manifest the second of these structural profiles. In chemistry or genetics or physics, there is the time and level of “innumerable variants” and there is the different time and level of their lawful explanation. The modern world is above all characterized by a determination to withhold from the investigation of human being exactly that approach that is known to provide the only way of understanding anything. ↩
  8. McLuhan describes the latter on Take Today 22  as “dialogue (that) came before”. ↩
  9. ‘Con-ceive’, ie, not to per-ceive. ‘Conceive everything’, ie, experience the world. ↩
  10. Hence, as McLuhan was to capture the point in nuce 20 years later in Take Today (3): “The meaning of meaning is relationship.” ↩
  11. As future posts will need to detail, Innis’s concern with method and bias and self-reference in the humanities went back at least to his 1937 exchange with his colleague and mentor, Edward Johns Urwick: ‘The Role of Intelligence; Some Further Notes’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1:2. Hence his remark at the start of Empire and Communications: “In a sense these lectures become an extension of the work of (…) of E. J. Urwick.” ↩
  12. Innis cites Cornford, Before and After Socrates (1932). ↩
  13. ‘Minerva’s Owl’ was Innis’ presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1947.  It was immediately printed in the society Proceedings for that year and distributed also as a reprint from the Proceedings (pages 83-108) which McLuhan’s old friend, Tom Easterbrook, must have had from his friend and mentor, Innis himself. The next year, in 1948, the address was reprinted by the University of Toronto Press with an appendix, ‘A Critical Review’ (composed of extracts from the address by Innis to the Conference of Commonwealth Universities at Oxford on July 23, 1948). As a later post will describe, ‘A Critical Review’ must have been particularly important for McLuhan’s turn to media. It would therefore be important to learn just when McLuhan first read it. ↩
  14. Here is McLuhan’s contemporary description of Thomas from ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951) : Anyone familiar with the persistent use which Joyce makes of the labyrinth figures as the archetype of human cognition, will have noticed the same figure as it appears in the dramatic action of a thomistic “article”. There is first the descent into the particular matter of the “objections”. These are juxtaposed abruptly, constituting a discontinuous or cubist perspective. By abrupt juxtaposition of diverse views of the same problem, that which is in question is seen from several sides. A total intellectual history is provided in a single view. And in the very instant of being presented with a false lead or path the mind is alerted to seek another course through the maze. Baffled by variety of choice, it is suddenly arrested by the “sed contra” and given its true bearings in the conclusion. Then follows the retracing of the labyrinth in the “respondeo dicendum.” Emerging into intellectual clarity at the end of this process, it looks back on the blind alleys proffered by each of the original objections. Whereas the total shape of each article, with its trinal divisions into objections, respondeo, and answers to objections, is an “S” labyrinth, this figure is really traced and retraced by the mind many times in the course of a single 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. ↩
  15. Alchemy attempted to account for the physical world in this way and it, too, needed to be cast aside in favor of structural elements operating on a different level and in a different time-frame. ↩
  16. Eg in ‘Plea for Time’: “The disastrous effect of the monopoly of communication based on the eye hastened the development of a competitive type of communication based on the ear.” ↩
  17. Therefore, “the way up is the way down” (Heraclitus), which is one of the epigrams to Eliot’s Four Quartets and the “ancient adage” cited by McLuhan in Take Today (283). ↩
  18. Singular! The overcoming of nihilism takes place through the insight that experience is inherently plural and that there is no singlar sense of anything — including meaninglessness. ↩
  19. It is not the case that the ex-pression of meaning is a subjective genitive only! In this case, its expression would have value only for it. Instead, this expression also confers value on the expressed in a refusal of what Innis called “monopoly” and McLuhan “merger”. ↩

Ellul’s Propaganda

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Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda was published in France as Propagandes (plural) in 1962. The English translation was issued in 1965. Passages from it will be given here in a post which will be updated regularly.

Preface:

  • To study anything properly, one must put aside ethical judgments. Perhaps an objective study will lead us back to them, but only later, and with full cognizance of the facts.
  • The reader should know that he is (…) dealing with (…) a work that (…) endeavors to bring contemporary man a step closer to an awareness of propaganda — the very phenomenon that conditions and regulates him. 1
  1. The great question that lies in the background to much of McLuhan’s work is how perception aka insight aka learning is possible at all.  For if experience is always conditioned and regulated, how can something new originate in it?  And yet humans beings do learn new things, beginning with language when they are still infants. How is that humans can and do cross this gap “where the action is”? ↩

McLuhan’s biographical note for ‘An Ancient Quarrel’ 1946

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Marshall McLuhan’s acquaintance with the classical tradition and its history comes from study and teaching in Canada, England and the United States. He was born in Edmonton Alberta and received his B.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1933, followed by the M.A. in 1934. This was followed by study at Cambridge University in England from which institution he received a B.A. in 1936, an M.A. in 1940, and a Ph.D. in 1943. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, St Louis University and is now a member of the faculty at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. (Biographical note for McLuhan’s ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’, The Classical Journal, 41:4, January 1946)

Since even McLuhan’s biography is often mangled in studies about him and his work, a series of autobiographical sketches will be included in this blog. Noteworthy here is his nod to “the classical tradition and its history” just as he was about to begin teaching in Toronto. There he would meet Harold Innis who would influence him in several decisive ways.  Innis in turn was deeply grateful for the stimulation his work received from scholars in the University of Toronto Classics department:

An interest in the general problem was stimulated by the late Professor C. N. Cochrane [1889-1945] and the late Professor E. T. Owen [1882-1948]. (‘Preface’ to Empire and Communications, 1950)

Charles Cochrane and Eric Trevor Owen were leading lights in Classics at UT. Another member of the department at the time was Eric Havelock whose Preface to Plato would be cited by McLuhan repeatedly after its publication in 1963.1

  1. Havelock’s work was a decided influence on McLuhan from the late 1940s — see here. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 6 – Theuth

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In The Gutenberg Galaxy (24-25) McLuhan cites Plato’s report in the Phaedrus of a mythical exchange between King Thamus of Egypt and Theuth (or Thoth)1, the Egyptian god of wisdom:

If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same. The interplay among our senses is perpetual save in conditions of anesthesia. But any sense when stepped up to high intensity can act as an anesthetic for other senses. The dentist can now use “audiac”— induced noise — to remove tactility. Hypnosis depends on the same principle of isolating one sense in order to anesthetize the others. The result is a break in the ratio among the senses, a kind of loss of identity. Tribal, non-literate man, living under the intense stress on auditory organization of all experience, is, as it were, entranced.
Plato, however, the scribe of Socrates2 as he seemed to the Middle Ages, could in the act of writing look back to the non-literate world and say:
“It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” [Phaedrus, 274-5]3
Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor did anybody else in his time or later. Before his time, the myth-makers, poised on the frontiers between the old oral world of the tribe and the new technologies of specialism and individualism, had foreseen all and said all in a few words.

This extended citation from 1962 had been preceded in McLuhan’s work by a series of shorter citations and references ten years earlier, beginning with his essay in the first issue of Explorations in 1953, ‘Culture Without Literacy’:

Faced with the consequence of writing, Plato notes in the Phaedrus:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation.

Then in the next year, in 1954, in his ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ lecture, McLuhan noted in passing that

Plato regarded the advent of writing as pernicious. In the Phaedrus he tells us it would cause men to rely on their memories rather than their wits.

The formulation “Plato regarded the advent of writing as pernicious” is shorthand for ‘Plato regarded Socrates regarding Thamus regarding the advent of writing as pernicious’. The endless mirroring at stake here will be discussed below; it recalls McLuhan’s dictum that the content of any medium is always another medium.

In ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’, also in 1954, McLuhan continued to stress the importance of this exchange:

Manuscript technology fostered a constellation of mental attitudes and skills of which the modern world has no memory. Plato foresaw some of them with alarm in the Phaedrus:
“The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing;  they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Plato is speaking for the oral tradition before it was modified by literacy. He saw writing as a mainly destructive revolution. Since then we have been through enough revolutions to know that every medium of communication is a unique art form which gives salience to one set of human possibilities at the expense of another set. Each medium of expression profoundly modifies human sensibility in mainly unconscious and unpredictable ways. 

Finally, still in 1954, McLuhan reverted to this same exchange in ‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’ which appeared in Commonweal Magazine:

recall that in the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worse. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialectic of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. It was as if he foresaw the library of Alexandria and the unending exegesis upon previous exegesis of the scholiasts and grammarians.

This last passage is noteworthy in several respects.  For one thing, it records a positive use of “dialectic” and a negative use of “grammarians” which should give pause to those who would characterize McLuhan as an anti-dialectician and pro-grammarian tout court. In fact he was anti-dialectic and pro-grammar only in certain senses of these terms and everything depends upon the clarification of these certain senses. For another, the phrase “unending exegesis upon previous exegesis” shows that McLuhan was fully conscious of the mirroring implications of the exchange in the Phaedrus and therefore of Derrida’s caution (mistakenly directed against McLuhan) that “instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, (…) we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing.” Lastly, in his reference to “the true dialectic of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation” McLuhan not only returned to an idea of his own going back to the 1930s (an idea that future posts will need to document and to discuss in detail), but he also returned to a fundamental idea in the work of Harold Innis with whom he worked in 1949 and began to read via Tom Easterbrook, it seems, in 1947 or 1948.

It was probably Innis who called McLuhan’s attention to the exchange between King Thamus and Theuth.4  In the ‘Preface’ to his 1946 collection of essays, Political Economy in the Modern State (which McLuhan seems to have read shortly after its publication), Innis already cited this story from the Phaedrus:

The most dangerous illusions accompany the most obvious facts including the printed and the mechanical word. Plato refused to be bound by the written words of his own books. He makes Socrates say in Phaedrus regarding the invention of  writing, ‘this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.’ Since this was written the printing press and the radio have enormously increased the difficulties of thought. The first essential task is to see and to break through the chains of modern civilization which have been created by modern science. (vii)

He then cited it again at length in Empire and Communications, 1950, which McLuhan had read by the time of his March 1951 letter to Innis (discussed here):

Greek civilization was a reflection of the power of the spoken word. Socrates in Phaedrus reports a conversation between the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of letters, and the god Amon5 in which the latter remarked that “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Socrates continues:
“I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence, and the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.”
He continued with a plea for a better kind of word or speech and one having far greater power. “I mean an intelligent word graven6 in the soul of the learner which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.”  (67-68)7

Ultimately, McLuhan (also Innis) must be understood as attempting new answers to this complex question “and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious”.

Postscript

In The Medium is the Massage (1967), in the middle of a discussion of oral and visual space, and of the revolution in Greece from the first of these to the second, McLuhan paraphrases this same passage from the Phaedrus:

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.  (…) You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes [!] of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. (113)8

  1. One of the ads featured in the 1970 Culture is Our Business (297) is for the “Random House Sweatshirt of the English Language”. And one of the definitions from the dictionary shown in the ad as available from Eagle Shirtmakers on a sweatshirt (along with ‘drop-out’, ‘flower’, ‘lover’, ‘peace’, ‘woman power’ and ‘yin and yang’) is “Thoth: Egyptian Religion, the god of wisdom, learning, and magic, the Inventor of numbers and letters, and scribe of all the gods, represented as a man with the head either of an ibis or of a baboon: identified by the Greeks with Hermes.” ↩
  2. By characterizing Plato as “the scribe of Socrates”, McLuhan formulates a complicated figure in which he, McLuhan, transcribes Plato’s transcription of Socrates transcribing (or at least describing) a dialogue concerning transcription between King Thamus and the god of transcription, Thoth. Derrida’s influential discussion of this Phaedrus exchange in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ (originally in Tel Quel, 1968) may have been sparked by McLuhan, either here in the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy and/or in McLuhan’s earlier discussion of it in 1953 in Explorations (to which Derrida seems to have subscribed). In any case, Derrida’s dismissal of McLuhan as a logocentrist (as discussed in note 7 below) is simply lazy. In fact, on McLuhan’s analysis, it is Derrida who is the logocentrist since “merger” may be effected either by final consolidation or by final deferral (aka, anti-consolidation). McLuhan, in fundamental contrast, would inquire about the natures, plural, of the gap at play between these (merger/deferral) — “the medium is the message”. ↩
  3. McLuhan uses the Jowett translation. ↩
  4. While McLuhan refers to the Phaedrus before his encounter with Innis, particularly in his 1943 PhD thesis, he does not discuss the exchange between King Thamus and Theuth. It may well be that his particular interest in it was ignited by Innis just as Innis was igniting his (McLuhan’s) interest in communications media more generally. (For discussion, see McLuhan on first meeting Innis.) But before Innis’ 1946 and 1950 citations of the Theuth story, McLuhan may well have encountered it in the “platonist” Rupert Lodge’s philosophy classes at the University of Manitoba and/or in John Ruskin’s twelfth letter from May 1, 1872, in his Fors Clavigera (‘letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’) where it is quoted at length. (McLuhan began reading Ruskin as an undergraduate in Winnipeg and cited him extensively throughout his career beginning already with his Manitoban articles in the early 1930s.) ↩
  5. This should, of course, be King Thamus and not “the god Amon”. It may be that the text is corrupted here and should read “the priest of the god Amon”. Innis seems to have identified Thamus as Thutmose III, probably correctly, and says of the latter in ‘The Problem of Space’: “In the eighteenth dynasty a concern with the problem of time was accompanied by the subordination of all priestly bodies to the high priest of Amon. A priest of Amon became Thutmose III in 1501 BC and destroyed the Hyksos army at Megiddo in 1479.” ↩
  6. “An intelligent word graven in the soul” is a momentous phrase which the whole tradition may be thought to have been at work attempting to plumb and that yet remains unplumbed and unplumbable. Suffice it to note here that the Greek — logos gegrammenos — combines the oral and the written and that the fitting English translation of ‘graven word’ retains this combination while adding the combination of the living and the dead (through the fact that the ‘graven’, like a ‘grave’, is an excavation for a repository, the first of a meaning or image, the second of a corpse). ↩
  7. The phrase Innis uses here, “a better kind of word or speech”, shows that he (and the same is true of McLuhan), did not simply oppose speech and writing (as Derrida would have it) and therefore he (also McLuhan) was not forced to privilege one or the other (as Derrida would have it). Instead, both looked to a third power — “a better kind of word or speech” — a third power that McLuhan called logos or “dialogue” or “inclusion” among many other names. Through this third power, speech and writing (aka, ear and eye) might be perceived to communicate originally (“the medium is the message”). Now this perception would necessarily be a replay (retrieval, re-cognition, etc) since it would depend on the third power, not the third power on it. The great question implicated here, already posed explicitly by Plato, concerns how it is that human perception can relate to such fundamental powers (pace Derrida), aka, how it is that media do not simply mirror other media indefinitely (“the overwhelming extension of writing”), aka, how it is that a diachronic process like learning can come to understand a synchronic process, like the contest of the fundamental powers, that ‘always already’ powers it. ↩
  8. The last sentence here might seem to be an acute critique of McLuhan’s fellow Albertan and UT professor, Jordan Peterson. But Peterson was only 5 at the time. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 5 – Peter Pan

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Although only indirectly, McLuhan also pointed to another Greek mythological figure to augment his analysis of Narcissistic experience (discussed in McLuhan and Plato 4 – Narcissus). This was Icarus, who met his demise by flying too close to the sun with the wings fabricated for him by his father, Daedalus. While McLuhan never seems to have discussed Icarus specifically, he did refer to Daedalus as the “the inventor of flight” (Take Today, 70) and he had a lot to say about that modern day Icarus, Peter Pan.

The first paper he published after he obtained his first fulltime teaching position, at St Louis University in 1937, was titled ‘[Saint] Peter or Peter Pan’ (Fleur de Lis, 37:4, May 1938).  The paper begins with a citation (not identified by McLuhan) from Nikolai Berdiaev’s 1936 Dostoievsky: an Interpretation:

When he has reached an extremity of inner division and is psychologically unbalanced, with all the customary land-marks wiped out and no new ones in sight, then man hears the call of Anti-Christ.

McLuhan comments (in a moralistic tone which he would later come to mock in himself):

Europe and America have heard the call of Anti-Christ without alarm, for it is the voice of Peter Pan1 (…) The complexity of life ha[s] begun to frighten people. (…) And the mists of Never-Never-Land begin to obliterate the landmarks and frontiers of civilized life.

This fear and obliteration combined to precipitate, in McLuhan’s view, a desire to escape with Peter Pan “from the ‘gwate bid world’ of mature responsibilities”.

Still, he could see the black humor in the fact that “life grows as solemnly farcical as the pageant of the Emperor’s new clothes”.2 And he could vaguely make out as well that he was just the man to document that farce, as he was to do more than a decade later in The Mechanical Bride:

A book might easily be filled if one were simply to list the means adopted in the past five years to knock away the last props of personal life.3

Ten years later, now in Toronto, he continued in the same vein in ‘Time, Life and Fortune’ (View Magazine, 1947):

Perhaps the most persistently risible feature of T.L.F. [Time, Life and Fortune] is the assumption of “god-like heights of observation.” It is an inseparable feature of paranoid megalomania shared by every Dagwood who dreams of flying his own plane or leading an expedition to the top of Mount Everest.

Similarly in The Mechanical Bride (23):

The reader is to be habitually soused with sex and violence but at all times protected from the harsh contact of the critical intellect. This comment leads one smack up against a door marked “Peter Pan, Inc.,” behind which sit the amalgamated forces of Henry Luce, the Comic Books, and the syndics of the book clubs.

And similarly again in the 1954 Counterblast:

The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. (‘Media Log’)

Fourteen years later, in Through the Vanishing Point (1968), Peter Pan still figured as the archetype of too tender experience:

The Waste Land (…) presents a disconnected space, psychologically and socially, of anguished Peter Pans. (235)

Culture is our Business (1970), one of McLuhan’s last books, brought this regression to childhood into connection with the new media environment of advertising and TV:

Today, through ads, a child takes in all the times and places of the world “with his mother’s TV.” He is gray at three. By twelve he is a confirmed Peter Pan, fully aware of the follies of adults and adult life in general. These could be called Spock’s Spooks, who now peer at us from every quarter of our world. (…) Four years old may already have become the upper limit of tolerable emotional maturity. (7)

“Spock’s Spooks” aka “the paralyzed child” would appear again in Take Today (1972, 260). But precisely these themes of the appeal of childishness and the corresponding need for a rigorous critique of media had already been present more than three decades before in ‘Peter or Peter Pan’:

For almost a century now, the intelligence of the ablest men has been systematically bought and set to work to exploit the weakness and stupidity of the rest of mankind. This is the exact reverse of the traditional procedure of all civilizations. Hitherto the ablest men have been selected to govern, to educate, rather than to exploit, the others. Today however, copywriting and luxurious advertisement displays swallow up the best artistic talent of several countries.
But this is only one of the techniques of the anonymous masters of our civilization. One hundred and seventy years ago4, Edmund Burke detected an even wider range of symptoms: “The revolutionists leave nothing unchanged. The consequences are upon us; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance by the revolutionary harpies sprung from night and hell.” 5

 

 

  1. This rather strange identification of Peter Pan with the Anti-Christ might have been mediated by the passage in Isaiah 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!”, where Luci-fer as the light-bringer and harbinger of the dawn as the morning star might be thought to equate with Peter Pan + Tinker Bell. ↩
  2. McLuhan would still be writing about “the Emperor’s new clothes”, as well as the Emperor’s old clothes, forty years later. Everything depended on whether experience was tied to the rear-view mirror (in which only “the Emperor’s old clothes” could be seen) or had gone “through the looking-glass” with Alice and could therefore perceive his “new clothes” aka his nakedness. ↩
  3. This and the citations above all come from ‘Peter or Peter Pan’. ↩
  4. Sic: 140 years ago. McLuhan may have been thinking of Burke first taking his seat in Parliament which did date to “one hundred and seventy years ago”. ↩
  5. As with his initial citation from Berdiaev, McLuhan does not identify his source. It is from Burke’s ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord’, 1796, with emphasis added here, not by McLuhan. With his “revolutionary harpies sprung from night and hell” Burke may have been alluding to Pope. As discussed in a prior post, McLuhan would use Pope’s memorable description of “Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old” to conclude The Gutenberg Galaxy 25 years later. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 4 – Narcissus

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I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. (…) This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present. (Playboy interview, 1969)

Like Plato, McLuhan turned to myth, indeed to Greek myth, to articulate the drama of the soul’s formation1 as — or into? — or from? — this or that “mode of awareness”.  Narcissus2 provided him with the archetype of this process in modern times3.

Especially after 1960 the Narcissus myth came to play a major role in McLuhan’s thought. Understanding Media (1964) has a complete section dedicated to it, ‘The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis’ (41-47), where this overview is to found:

The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience. As the word Narcissus indicates, it is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. (…) He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (Understanding Media, 41)4

A 1962 article, ‘Prospect’, which appeared in Arts Canada, considered the matter as follows:

Narcissus fell in love with an “outering” (projection, extension) of himself. And people always fall in love with the latest gimmick or gadget that is merely an extension of their own bodies. But Narcissus means “numb”, dead, narcosis. He was completely unaware that it was himself that he’d fallen in love with. And when reading or when in the motor car or watching TV or listening to the radio we are pretty unaware that we’re merely obsessed, fascinated with a little bit of ourselves, stuck out there, in another material. I think it is very important to know that it is a bit of yourself out there because otherwise you are never going to get off the hook5. You’re always going to be a servo-mechanism. The servo-mechanism is the perfect feedback.  You echo exactly the thing that’s out there like a thermostat jumping to the heat variations. When we are completely unaware of the nature of television or radio or telephone, we are merely servo-mechanisms of those forms. We respond to them in the immediate mechanical way that they demand of us. In this way, each of us is merely a Narcissus dancing around in love with his own image. I take it[, however, that] we consider it more desirable for human beings to have some autonomy, some independence of the gimmicks. 

Similarly, the next year in ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’ (Location, 1963):

As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves. This provides, I think, a fairly good image of all of our technologies, and it directs us towards a basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness. (Emphasis to ‘not’ and to ‘idolatry’ added)

McLuhan often asserted that “all our artifacts are in fact words” (Global Village, 7) so that “the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language” (Global Village, 27). But if technology is language and is also “idolatry” (as the worship of the work of our own hands) it follows, as McLuhan put it in a letter to Sheila Watson’s husband, Wilfrid, that “sin (…) is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering”.6 Such a sense of unlawful “self-exhibitionism” and its resulting conscious or unconscious “agenbite” forms the background to McLuhan’s further explication of the Narcissus myth in Understanding Media:

amplification [aka extension] is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man’s image is a self-amputation7 or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition. (42)

Already in The Mechanical Bride (1951, but written years earlier) there is a section (141-144) called ‘The Tough [Guy/Gal] as Narcissus’. In fact, The Mechanical Bride as a whole describes the narcissistic life situated, as McLuhan puts it in a wonderful turn of phrase, “inside the totem machine” — that is, the ‘life’ of the soul insofar as it dedicates itself to “totemistic worship” in the ‘interior landscape’. Such “worship” is the soul’s identification, driven by an “inner panic”, with “pseudo-simplicities” supplied by “nation-wide agencies of education, production, distribution, entertainment, and advertisement”8 (aka “nation-wide agencies of mental sterilization”) whose interest lies in the “monopolistic” organization of both society at large and of the psychic life of its individual members.9 Narcissus provides an image of “this trek toward the voluntary annihilation of our individual humanity”.10

To understand the “individual humanity” McLuhan was determined to help preserve (“It’s to escape this Narcissus trance that I’ve tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man”), it is necessary to interrogate that “inner panic” aka “irritating pressures” which motivate “totemistic worship” as a “counter-irritant”.11 In his 1969 Playboy interview, McLuhan addressed himself to just this question:

This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger — the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large.

“The attendant pain of such comprehension”, a pain which “self-amputation” avoids by preventing “self-recognition”, is correlate with guilt (“agenbite”) and with a certain fear12:

Fear is the primary motive in [the allure of] toughness. Fear easily gives rise to hate, which intensifies brutality. And the numerous variants on straight-arm tactics, from lynch law to the third degree, all reduce to inner panic as their origin. It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness (…) those who are confused or overwhelmed by a machine world are encouraged to become psychologically hard, brittle, and smoothly metallic. The slick-chick and the corporation executive, as they now register on the popular imagination, are already inside the totem machine.13

This unacknowledged but “attendant” pain and guilt and fear arise before finitude:

For the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness, or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold. (Understanding Media, 19)

If the forms of perception aka media are “diverse and discontinuous” (therefore discrete and finite among themselves) and if those forms determine how and what we are able to experience14 (so “that we become what we behold” of them), then we are subject to a double finitude. Our awareness depends upon forms which are finite and does so in a way that is itself finite, not only as dependent, but also in the sense that it has no “fixation” to any one of them (pace Narcissus).

In ‘Stylistic’ (1956), one of McLuhan’s Renascence contributions, he noted that:

it is only [by] standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control [aka, insight and freedom] consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. 

It is fundamental to “our individual humanity” that we are capable of “standing aside” from the forms of experience (obj gen!) aka “modes of awareness” — forms which already (when?) ‘stand aside’ from each other. These gaps between us and the forms, and between the forms themselves, provoke Sartrean “nausea” (as a compound “panic” mixture of guilt, fear and pain)15 and motivate Narcissus to collapse them into experience that is ‘all him’. This is a merger which reflects only himself since he himself has determined himself to its singularity — however “completely unaware [he was] that it was himself that he’d fallen in love with.” 

Narcissus has effected this “unaware” identification in order to prevent his recognition that it has determined him — with its “attendant” exposure to his finitude, guilt and pain. It is “self-protective escape mechanisms” of this sort, such “self-amputations”, which reduce us to “servo-mechanisms” of our own creations:

Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. (‘Agenbite’)

each of us is merely a Narcissus dancing around in love with his own image.  (‘Prospect’)

Combining these texts from the 1950s and 1960s, the contention is that “our individual humanity” consists in the capability of “standing aside from any structure or medium” thereby “avoiding [the] subliminal state of Narcissus trance” aka identification with “pseudo-simplicities”. This demands our becoming “sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms” and therefore to the finitude, guilt and pain implicated in that discontinuity.  And this is just what McLuhan claimed (in a letter to Joe Keogh, July 6,1970, Letters 412-413) to be doing:

 I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.

Interest “in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities” demands a twofold recognition: that the forms are plural and that they have a “life” aka “evocative power” that determines us (not we them). The road to these recognitions, according to McLuhan, lies in an interrogation of our subjectivity which would recall (replay, recollect, retrieve, etc) the journey of the soul through the “other world” (right here, right now) through which the shape of our experience has been determined in such a way that the marks of that journey may be read in it if we dare probe for them:

it is very important to know that it is a bit of yourself out there because otherwise you are never going to get off the hook. (‘Prospect’, 1962)

Getting off the double hook through which we are trapped in ourselves by ourselves — “the zombie stance” — demands that we “grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious” process of psychic formation. Such probing is the only way to confront the “basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness” and this, in turn, is the only way “for human beings to have some autonomy, some independence of the gimmicks”. 

 

 

 

  1. In the citation from his Playboy interview given at the head of this post, McLuhan speaks of “the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible”. The usual reading takes this to be a “point” in diachronic time when some new technology (like the wheel or the smart phone) somehow takes over the (the?) experience of some or all of mankind. But this reading is senseless on many grounds (as future posts will continue to document). Instead, as the Plato posts suggest, this “point” of awareness-shift takes place, usually in an “invisible” manner, in synchronic time and concerns the drama of the individual and social sensus communis aka “sensory balance”. And the “media” which “induce” this “transmogrification” are not empirical technological devices (which function more like catalysts) but are the fertile “words” (see “Language itself”) churning “in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” which exercise an “evocative power” (TVP 33) on the soul in the “interior landscape”. That this process is “invisible” to the very persons undergoing it is a great mystery which thinkers like Plato have considered without visible effect for millennia now. ↩
  2. As later posts will detail, Peter Pan as a kind of Icarus figure also played an important role in this regard for McLuhan. ↩
  3. Modern times are the epoch of “our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture” — “The Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!” (Understanding Media, 41) ↩
  4. In all of the great many published editions of Understanding Media the first two sentences of this passage read: “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness.”  It is typical of the poor editing nearly all of McLuhan’s books received from his publishers that this error has not been caught and corrected. ↩
  5. This is a tip of the hat to McLuhan’s student and friend, Sheila Watson, and to her 1959 novel The Double Hook. ↩
  6. McLuhan to Watson, summer 1965, cited by Andrew Chrystall at the MOM site here. The full sentence reads: “Eric has worked out that the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering.” ↩
  7. “Self-amputation” is McLuhan’s shorthand for the fact that “people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves” (‘The Agenbite of Outwit’). ↩
  8. McLuhan would later emphatically add ‘war’ to this list. ↩
  9. McLuhan never gave up the social critique broached here. In Understanding Media he observes: “As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, “I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose.” We have leased these “places to stand” to private corporations.” (68) ↩
  10. All of the citations in this paragraph come from ‘The Tough as Narcissus’ section of The Mechanical Bride, 141-144. ↩
  11. McLuhan much admired Wyndham Lewis’s analysis of this “panic” movement of the soul in The Art of Being Ruled (1928), a book which is cited extensively in McLuhan’s 1944 essay on Lewis, ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’. In Sheila Watson’s thesis on Lewis, directed by McLuhan, The Art of Being Ruled is quoted describing “the anxiety of the disillusioned person to escape from the self and to merge his personality in things (or in) the non-human, feelingless, thoughtless”. Watson comments: “The gap between the subject and the object is closed.” Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism (1964), 305, n274 ↩
  12. Sheila Watson in Double Hook: “He doesn’t know you can’t catch glory on a hook and hold it, That when you fish for glory, you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory, you hook twice the fear”. ↩
  13. The Mechanical Bride, 141 ↩
  14. When McLuhan emphasized that “the medium is the message/massage”, he was trying — completely without success — to reverse the anxiety-provoking assumption that the object depends on the subject in favor of the insight that the subject depends on the object.  Hence the very first remark of the very first commentary in Through the Vanishing Point (33): “The word itself as evocative power, not a sign.” ↩
  15. As future posts will detail, all human experience implicates, in McLuhan’s telling, a “nobody” or “masked man” who is a creature of the “frontiers” and gaps which must be navigated in the “interior landscape” on the way to “awareness”. Paradoxically, Narcissus would distance himself from this anxiety-provoking “nobody” by collapsing all distance in his experience. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 3 – the wild horses of passion

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In From Cliché to Archetype (72) McLuhan refers to “the classical passage from the Phaedrus of Plato on the wild horses of passion1“. This passage appears immediately before the one discussed in McLuhan and Plato 1 (Phaedrus 249-250) concerning the exposure of souls to “true being” and the causes of their forgetting that exposure. The two Phaedrus passages form a continuous narrative and with the related myth of Er from the Republic constitute a kind of Platonic de anima in myth.

Phaedrus 246a-248b
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite — a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses (…) of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. (…)
When perfect and fully winged [the soul] soars upward (…) whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground — there, finding a home, she receives an earthly [bodily] frame (…) and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. (…)
And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings! The wing is the (…) element [of a mortal creature] which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away.
Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all;  (…)
But the others [the human charioteers] labour, for the vicious steed [of their pairs] goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained: — and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul2 (…) Of [these] other souls, that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer [even though he is] troubled indeed by the steeds, and [therefore only] with difficulty beholding true being; while another [charioteer] only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see, by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world (…) but not being strong enough they are carried round below (…), plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon [earthly] opinion.

McLuhan, too, held that human being is always a “composite” of two factors3:

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)4

visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic. 5

every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes. 6

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…7

Plato calls these factors the two horses of a chariot or two wings of the soul or (combining these) “winged horses”. But because they “have innumerable variants or parti-colored forms”, as McLuhan says, there must be a third factor at stake which accounts for this variety.

In his mythological de anima, Plato approaches this question in two ways. On the one hand, he distinguishes between the “descent” and “breeding” of the horses of the gods and of mortals:

Now the winged horses (…) of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.

The difference here has to do with the coordination or relationship of the two horses.  While the two horses can never be one horse, they can act as one in a coordinated way. This sort of coordinated movement characterizes the chariots of the gods (or the wings of their souls) and it is what allows them to circulate in the region of “true being”. The horses of mortal creatures, by contrast, are ill-matched: one of them is “ignoble” and “has not been thoroughly trained” and is therefore “vicious”. The resulting “unruliness of the steeds” prevents human souls from rising to the divine region of “true being” and binds them to the earth and to mortality.

This Platonic contrast between divine pairs of horses and human pairs appears in McLuhan as the difference between the “complementary” and the “incommensurable” (as in the Global Village 45 passage above), or as “inclusive” relation versus “exclusive”, or as “both-and” versus “either-or” (cf Global Village 31). These are all two varieties of “the gap where the action is”, the former reflecting the metaphorical nature of the gap, the latter rejecting it.

On the other hand, the “innumerable variants” between the performance of the two horses may be referred to the “charioteer” who drives them. Plato speaks, for example, of “the ill-driving of the charioteers” and says in regard to the pairs of unruly steeds that “the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble”. Not only the “descent” and “breeding” of the horses determines the sort of relation they have, then, but also how they are driven and controlled and trained relative to one another by their “charioteer”.

In McLuhan, the “charioteer”, the third factor, appears as the sensus communis which produces, or reflects, a certain “sensory closure”:

Consciousness (…) may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia, corresponding generally with the ancient definition of common sense. Common sense is that peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all other senses and presenting the result as a unified image of the mind.  Erasmus and More said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality. (Global Village 94)

The “charioteer” may also be called “the utterer” as when McLuhan speaks of “the utterer as the etymology” (Global Village 7). The mystery of human being is such that it is never clear if the human soul is the cause of its mode of awareness or an effect of it (or, somehow, both cause and effect at once). However the case may be, the “the utterer” can be called “the etymology” since the ratio of the senses (aka “mode of awareness”) cannot be accounted for aside from the role of the sensus communis, be it active and/or passive. (McLuhan regularly identifies the common sense with the sense of touch and it is noteworthy that touch is both active and passive at once.)

As already noted in different respects above, the key question concerns the nature of the gap between the horses or between wings of the soul or between the senses of eye and ear8. For both Plato and McLuhan, these ratios depend in turn upon insight into the nature of “being itself” as metaphorical (“Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all“) and into the resulting implication that an inclusive relation of the horses/wings/senses is both possible and proper to humans as reflecting such “true being”. Because “being itself” is metaphorical, it is possible for humans to relate metaphorically to it. And because they can relate metaphorically to it, it is possible for them to order their awareness after it metaphorically as well. It is just this, according to Plato in this same section of the Phaedrus, that characterizes the philosopher:

intelligence (…) is the recollection9 of those things which our soul once saw while following God — when. regardless of that which we now call being [aka opinion], she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has [coordinated] wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which, He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into [their] perfect mysteries (…) But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired. (249c-d)

The many deep parallels between Plato’s mythological de anima and McLuhan’s analysis of the modes of awareness (aka “understanding media”) are remarkable. The conclusion is hard to avoid that little progress has been made in communicating these matters over the intervening two and a half millennia. An important aspect of McLuhan’s concern with communication therefore had to do with the question of how these matters were at long last to be communicated such that they might play a regulative role in human governance (individual and collective).  He called this the needed transformation of the ivory tower into the control tower and the key to this transformation, he saw, was the initiation of science, or sciences, in the human domain. 

  1. “Passion” here may be understood not only in the sense of ’emotion’, but also in the sense of ‘passivity’, as in the Easter ‘passion’. This sense would refer to the fact that the human soul is determined by the coordination of these horses such that it appears passive in relation to their active role in-forming it. ↩
  2. See Republic 618c: “And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state”. As will be discussed in later posts concerning Plato’s gigantomachia (aka agon-y) and McLuhan’s “ancient quarrel”, both hold “true being” to be plural and dynamic. The exposure of the soul (obj gen!) to this “extremest conflict” (“extremest” because belonging to “true being” itself) is synchronic so that this “hour” (in ” time not our time”, a time “that is and was from the beginning”, therefore “ancient”) is, as Eliot says, “always now” (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton v). McLuhan’s aim was exactly to thematize this agon-izing synchronic exposure of the soul in an epoch — the world’s night — when human experience had become captured by the Narcissistic denial of it in a planetary numb/dumb. ↩
  3. In his 1967 interview with Gerald Stearn, McLuhan notes that “It’s very difficult to have a structure of any sort without polarities, without tension. (…) Without polarities, without contraries — this is Blake’s whole notion of hateful contraries — without polarities, there is no progression, no structure. (But) for a literary person who likes things to move along in one direction on one plane, polarities are distressing.” ↩
  4. Take Today 22 ↩
  5. Global Village 55 ↩
  6. Global Village x ↩
  7. Global Village 45 ↩
  8. In the myth of Er in the Republic at 614d, in preparation for his becoming “the messenger who would carry the report of the other world to men”, Er is instructed to “hear and see all that was to be heard and seen in that place”. ↩
  9. For McLuhan, too, the role of recall, retrieval, replay, recognition, etc etc, together with its implication of multiple times, is central. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 2 – When is myth?

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Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. The little self-conscious (…) area in which we live today has nothing to do with the problems of our faith. Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas today. (McLuhan from Windsor to his former SLU Jesuit students, Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, December 23, 1944, Letters 166)

In McLuhan and Plato 1, passages from Plato’s dialogues Phaedrus and the Republic are cited as being essential to McLuhan’s project.  But how so?  Are there really essential connections between it and a myth of the “other world” where a process of reincarnation or metempsychosis takes place between the serial lives of souls making their way through a chain of repeated deaths and rebirths?

To answer this question a series of further questions must be posed. This post, will consider one of them: when does myth occur? McLuhan addressed this question directly in his 1959 essay ‘Myth and Mass Media‘ (Daedelus, 88:2):

Writing, in its several modes, can be regarded technologically as the development of new languages. For to translate the audible into the visible (…) 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 (…) myth is (…) a single snapshot of a complex process (…) a complex process (…) 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.
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.
If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness. But when such a new codification has reached the technological stage of communicability and repeatability, has it not, like a spoken tongue, also become a macromyth? (…)
Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio can also be considered with preliterate myths as static models of the universe. But do they not tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action? As such, languages old and new would seem to be for participation rather than for contemplation or for reference and classification.

McLuhan makes a series of points here whose understanding, individually and collectively, is indeed essential for an understanding of his project:

  • the time of myth is now — the character of “myth is to reduce a complex historical affair to an inclusive timeless image”, it presents “the confrontation of multiple relationships at the same moment” in a “multilayered montage or transparency”1
  • the timeless now of myth is not the absence of time, or the stilling of time, it is the pluralization of time, time as inherently times: “the confrontation of multiple relationships at the same moment”, “the multilayered montage or transparency” of the “static” and the “dynamic” together and at once in “inclusive collective2 awareness”
  • the topic of myth is “the development of new languages”, “word-making”, the forging of “modes of awareness”, of “new codification[s] of experience”
  • the end result recorded in myth is the “dynamic (…) reshap[ing of] every aspect of thought, language, and society” exactly through “word-making” and “new codification of experience collectively achieved”
  • and since humans have their being in “thought, language, and society” only such a “multilayered” approach to “word-making” and “new codification” can originate “models of the [human] universe in action” for investigation

Such models cannot be constructed via the rear-view mirror of accepted “reference and classification” since what is at stake in them is the investigation of the very constitution of “reference and classification” — including that of the models themselves. To refer all the different possibilities for the “codification of experience” to a somehow privileged one3 of them would be exactly to refuse the investigation proposed by McLuhan. Yet this is just how the world proceeds on its iron way.  Forgetting that our “modes of awareness” have been produced in a process subject to a double oblivion — we forget that we have forgotten — we take over the reins of the planet in a movement that proceeds faster and faster, in a more and more uniform manner, with greater and greater effect, all utterly blindly. Of course the result will be disastrous, especially for coming4 generations — if there are any.

It is grim irony that this occurs at a time when we know, via anthropology, linguistics, psychology, computer science (etc etc) more and more about the variety of our “modes of awareness” such that, as McLuhan says, having reached “the technological stage of communicability and repeatability” we can now produce “new media” at will.  The fundamental fact about contemporary history is that we do not know — and are determined not to know — what we are doing even now.

McLuhan’s project was therefore just that of Freud in regard to dreams and other unconsciously produced phenomena, but applied to “languages old and new”, to “modes of awareness”, to — media.  

Since we cannot know in advance how to approach the investigation of “modes of awareness” and “codification[s] of experience”, all we can do is “probe”:

Most of my work in the media is like that of a safe-cracker. In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test — until the tumblers fall and I’m in. That’s the way I work with all these media. (Stearn interview, 1967)

I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open. (Playboy interview, 1969)

Languages cannot be approached except in language.  Probing therefore involves trying on different “modes of awareness” (aka “languages old and new”) until ones are found that return interesting results. This is the process that produced all our existing sciences and is what can produce new sciences in the human domain — if it is tried. It is just such an exercise of courage and freedom in regard to human awareness that McLuhan describes in the concluding paragraph cited above:

Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio (…) tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action (…) for participation…

To participate in different “modes of awareness” demands revisiting and renewing the process of “word-making” through which “the development of new languages” takes place. This requires freedom and courage because it necessarily involves letting go of existing modes of “reference and classification” and taking the pathless path between “modes of awareness” — “not in movement but abstention from movement” — in order to participate in another:

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future, 5

As specified by McLuhan above and as described by Eliot in Four Quartets, this implicates a kind of vertical time which cuts across horizontal time at every instant:

And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.6

It is this “time not our time”, “a time older than the time of chronometers (…) that is and was from the beginning”, that McLuhan saw recorded in myth:

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 (…) myth is (…) a single snapshot of a complex process (…) a complex process (…) 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.
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.7

 

 

  1. These Platonic myths, for McLuhan, are therefore tales in which a synchronic drama in depth concerning the constitution of “awareness” is expressed as diachronic action in extended space (“the other world”) concerning rebirth. But it may well be that these are matters which require such special expression (like myth or poetry or song) and that they become distorted when stated prosaically. It may be, then, that especially religion cannot be understood without acknowledgement of this requirement — once sung, twice said, as Augustine noted. ↩
  2. “Collective awareness” here must be understood as describing the collective object of awareness and not, or not only, the collective subject of awareness. ↩
  3. See McLuhan and Plato 4 – Narcissus ↩
  4. The disaster is hardly only something to be awaited in the future, of course. It is rolling over us as we speak. We are exterminating plant and animal species, indeed whole environments, at an astonishing rate. Entire cultures and languages disappear daily, including our own. Richly, we call this “conservatism”. The planet has been given over to Alfred E Neuman, the great new man of the modern world. ↩
  5. Four Quartets, Burnt Norton iii ↩
  6. Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages i ↩
  7. The painting of Icarus by Peter Breughel the elder is a wonderful illustration of contemporaneity of myth – and of its obliviousness to the fishermen, farmers and shepherds of practical life. ↩

McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er

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In Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead famously observes that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” This is true in spades of McLuhan.

The dialogue that McLuhan most often (and most influentially) considered was the Phaedrus. He returned over and over again to the exchange in it concerning the value of writing between King Thamus and its divine inventor, Theuth (or Thoth)1. This exchange and McLuhan’s discussions of it will be considered in a later post.

But another section of the Phaedrus is arguably even more central to McLuhan’s project, although he directed little attention to it2. This section is, however, cited at length by his daughter, Teri, in The Way of the  Earth (1994), a book dedicated to her father “in loving memory”:

Phaedrus 249e-250b
every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and [even] they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are [therefore only] few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. (The Way of the  Earth, 217)

The myth of Er, in the final book (x: 614-621) of the Republic, tells a related story of a man chosen:

to be the messenger who would carry the report of the other world to men, and they [the judges seated “in an intermediate space” between the doors of heaven and earth] bade him hear and see all that was to be heard and seen in that place. Then he beheld and saw (…) the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth. [614d, emphasis added]

These circulating souls journey in “the other world” to a place where they must choose a certain lot in their coming life on earth.  Socrates specifies:

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. (…) A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon [such lots as] tyrannies and similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him know how to choose [the lot of] the mean [ie, justice] and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. [618c-619b]

Both symbolizing and grounding the lots which are offered to human souls in this way is the axis mundi in the double form of a rainbow and spindle, which supports the chain of being:

a line of light, straight as a column, extending right through the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour resembling the rainbow, only brighter and purer; (…) and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the chains of heaven let down from above: for this light is the belt of heaven, and holds together the circle of the universe, like the under-girders of a trireme. [616b-c]

The rear-view mirror often seems to be an important factor in this selection process:

the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their experience of a previous life [619e-620a]

But this is mis-leading for the souls since what is at stake for them is not continuous between lives:

there was not, however, any definite character in them [the lots], because the soul, when choosing a new life, must of necessity become different [618b]

Just as in the Phaedrus, the conclusion of this process in the Republic is that the souls which have passed through it become numb and forget all about it:

and when they had all passed [through the selection process “into the form of man”], they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink (…) and each one as he drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting. [621a-b]

Here the forgetfulness of human souls of their exposure to the forms of “true being” is, so to say, objective: it belongs to the constitution of the human condition to have drunk from “the river of Unmindfulness”. In the Phaedrus, by contrast, forgetfulness is more subjective, resulting from

having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they (…) lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. [250a]

Probably both factors are at work in every human life. In any case, like Er,

few only retain an adequate remembrance of [“the holy things which once they saw”] [250a]

McLuhan was one of these few. Hence it was that he felt himself called to a certain office:

to be the messenger who would carry the report of the other world to men3 [Republic 614d]

But this report would carry an all-important proviso: that the other world is right here right now.

Here is how, at the age of 23, he was already able to express the point in a letter to his family from Cambridge:

Of late I have been wayfaring among the work of T.S. Eliot. He is easily the greatest modern poet, and just how great he is remains to be seen, because he has not produced his best yet. However the poems I am reading4 have the unmistakable character of greatness. They transform, and diffuse and recoalesce the commonest every day occurrences of 20th century 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, behind life) is miraculously suggested. (Dec 6, 1934, Letters 41; brackets have been added around the phrase “yet, to all save the seer, behind life” to highlight McLuhan’s point that this world and “the other world” are synchronous5 and inextricably knotted together — while remaining irreducibly different from “the other”. The contrasting emphasis to ‘in‘ and ‘beyond‘ is original.)

The “seer” reacts against two conceptions of “the other world” (which ultimately amount to the same thing)6: the conception that the other world is elsewhere, “behind life”; and the conception that the other world is illusory. In deep contrast to both, the “seer” can “see double indeed” and so experiences “the extremely unthinkable character” of “reality” such that both “the glory and the horror” are beheld as bound together “in life”.

“The other world” may be taken to specify the transitive “gap where the action is” in two senses. It may be taken as the critical point of trans-formation between the fundamentally different experience of the “seer” (who experiences “the glory and the horror” together “in life”) and of the “all” (who experience “glory”, if at all, only “behind life”)7. It is just such critical juncture ‘between lives’ that Plato describes in mythical form in the story of Er:

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state…

This crossroads is ‘located’ in “the other world” because it is prior to experience, a priori, but only in myth can such location be described as belonging to some “other” space and time. In fact, the experience of space and time is subject to it. And just as “the glory and the horror” are experienced by the “seer” as together “in life”, so also with this world and “the other world” — however “extremely unthinkable” this may be “to all save the seer”.

“The other world” as the transitive “gap where the action is” may also be taken to specify the relation between “the glory and the horror”. This relation is inherently plural as subject to different ways of experiencing ‘it’ (“in life” or “behind life”, say). The determination of the particular nature of this relation may therefore be said, in mythical fashion, to take ‘place’ in “the other world” — because that nature is always strictly correlate with the de-cision made at the critical point of trans-formation between the different modes of experience of the “seer” and the “all” and is therefore just as a priori as that de-cision is.

The gap between or without different modes of perception is isomorphic with the gap experienced within different modes of perception.  So it is that the latter may be taken to map the former (one of the keys to McLuhan’s new sciences) and so it is that what is definitively out of experience as prior to it (in “the other world”) is just as much decisively in it.

McLuhan was already at work on his 1936 Chesterton paper (completed in mid 1935) at the time of this December 1934 letter to his family. A future post will show in terms of it that McLuhan was fully conscious of these points. In 1937, a little over two years hence, they would be decisive to his de-cision to convert.

 

  1. McLuhan used both of these transliterations. One of the ads featured in Culture is Our Business (297) is for the “Random House Sweatshirt of the English Language”. And one of the definitions from the dictionary available from Eagle Shirtmakers (along with ‘drop-out’, ‘flower’, ‘lover’, ‘peace’, ‘woman power’ and ‘yin and yang’) was “Thoth: Egyptian Religion, the god of wisdom, learning, and magic, the Inventor of numbers and letters, and scribe of all the gods, represented as a man with the head either of an ibis or of a baboon: identified by the Greeks with Hermes.” ↩
  2. But see McLuhan and Plato 3 – the wild horses of passion ↩
  3. The subtitle of Philip Marchand’s biography of McLuhan, The Medium and the Messenger, is well chosen. ↩
  4. Poems 1909-1925 ↩
  5. See McLuhan and Plato 2: When is myth? ↩
  6. As Nietzsche recounts in ‘History of an Error: How the true world became a fable’ and as discussed here. ↩
  7. Once “the glory and the horror” are (seen as) ultimately divided, all sorts of permutations of them are possible.  So, eg, “the glory” may be seen “in life” and “the horror” behind it (rather than vice versa as McLuhan has it in his letter). ↩

Through the Vanishing Point 3 – Yeats

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In Through the Vanishing Point (44) McLuhan cites from W.B. Yeats’ Byzantium (1928):

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

It is on the other side of this night (“now that my ladder’s gone”) where (indeed, also when) the “midden heap” — aka “language itself” — is to be found.  Here is “where all the ladders start”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

McLuhan cited these lines from Yeats’ The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1938) over and over again in his late texts: in Take Today, in ‘Man as the Medium’ (the introduction to his 1976 commentary on Sorel Etrog’s film, Spiral) and, especially, in From Cliché to Archetype where they are cited twice, along with the first lines of the poem:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.1

 
  1. Yeats’ “circus animals” –those ideas and creations through which he obtained social attention — may be taken to correspond to the meaningful sounds of any particular language (“those masterful images” of “pure mind”). These are selected (in a collective process that is deeply mysterious) from the complete range of possibly meaningful sound that is “language itself” aka “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”.  McLuhan’s great interest was twofold: (a) how is it that any and all utterly finite sound (or other sensory input) is potentially meaningful? (b) how is it that the sounds (or other sensory input) of any particular language are able to retain this potential in actualizing it (a capability only humans can realize)? Both of these interests pointed him to the fundamentality of the medium in which these are situated. Together these questions ask: how is it that there is such a thing as communication? ↩

“Language itself” 2 – Wallace Stevens

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At the start of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, the concluding essay of Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan cites a passage from Esthétique du Mal by Wallace Stevens:

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound,
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur.
Merely in living as and where we live.1

These 1944 lines from Stevens may be considered a foreshadowing amplification of McLuhan’s claim thirty years later in his 1972 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 (…) eye and ear… (22)

“Language itself” is the range of relational possibilities between the eye and ear (“what one sees and hears”) accounting for

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.

So it is that we may observe (following McLuhan in Through the Vanishing Point, 191):

the individual as a montage of loosely assembled parts.

These are not spare parts or any sort of mechanical bits and pieces; they are stage parts — roles, perspectives, identities (“so many selves, so many sensuous worlds”) — that an individual “puts on”:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts2

McLuhan’s suggestion, comparable to Stevens in Esthétique du Mal, is that the different possible relationships between the eye and ear (“what one sees and hears”) structure all the different “parts” we play: “the meaning of meaning is relationship” (Take Today, 3); “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (Global Village, 55). The study of human experience therefore requires focus on the manifold of such eye/ear relationships or ratios. For it is not only “the individual” who “plays many parts”: any family or society or language or culture, too, is just (just!) such a “a montage of loosely assembled parts”.  

McLuhan’s central question has to do with “the air, the mid-day air” (echoing Shakespeare’s “mid-way air“) in which such ‘loose assemblages’ are possible and actual: “the medium is the message”. For it is through such a medium, alone, that “their exits and their entrances” can take place. No part or assemblage can achieve such “exits and (…) entrances” on its own, let alone its transitions to other “parts”. Unlike Baron Münchhausen, who extricated himself and his horse from a mire by pulling himself up by his own pigtail, each of these requires ground on the basis of which, alone, such assemblages and “flips” or “metamorphoses” between assemblages may take place at all. Each must originate in, and eventually return to, what grounds them.

2500 years ago Anaximander put it like this:

Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained; for they [must] make reparation and satisfaction to one another for the injustice according to the appointed time.3

  1. Esthétique du Mal (1944), xv. This passage appears in Through the Vanishing Point on p 237. ↩
  2. As you like It, 2.7. See the discussion here. ↩
  3. κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν. Diels-Kranz 12A9. The translation is from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. “Injustice” is distance from ground. The great mystery is how it is that ground as justice de-cides upon such unjust distance “beyond” itself. This is ‘the main question‘. ↩

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 3 – On the existence of knowledge

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Around 1950, McLuhan’s attitude toward popular culture and modern media changed fundamentally. He described this change in his Playboy interview twenty years later:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride1, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.
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 [it] could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend its impact on man, but even there some of my old literate “point of view” bias crept in.

Compare McLuhan’s contemporary description from 1954:

When I wrote The Mechanical Bride some years ago I did not realize that I was attempting a defense of book-culture against the new media. I can now see that I was trying to bring some of the critical awareness fostered by literary training to bear on the new media of sight and sound. My strategy was wrong, because my obsession with literary values blinded me to much that was actually happening for good and ill. What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. (‘Sight, Sound and the Fury’)

In the Playboy passage McLuhan reverts to one of the central points in CHML:

the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience…2

For McLuhan an important implication of the notion that “ordinary experience” is “the basis of modern science and technology”, aside from the fact that they had a “basis”, was that “values” could be explicated independent of “any particular culture or [of] any one mode of communication”. For “ordinary experience” is, of course, common to all cultures and to all modes of communication.

But in these passages McLuhan also touches on another — seemingly obvious — matter which was decisive for him (as it had already been decisive for Mallarmé more than 50 years before). This decisive matter was the realization that in the face of modern applications of art and science (like the new mass media of communication), it could hardly be denied that knowledge exists and that human beings really can know things.

Beyond the new mass media, the definitive proof of the reality and (potentially terrible) efficacy of human perception lay, for McLuhan, in the development — and use! — of atomic weapons. ‘The Southern Quality’ (1947) begins as follows:

There is a sense in which at least literary and artistic discussion may benefit from the advent of the atom bomb. A great many trivial issues can now, with a blush, retire from guerrilla duty and literary partisans can well afford to cultivate an urbane candor where previously none had been considered possible. (…) La trahison des clercs may come to an end since the atom bomb has laid forever the illusion that writers and artists were somehow constitutive and directive of the holy zeitgeist. In colossal skyletters the bomb has spelt out for the childlike revolutionary mind the fact of the abdication of all personal and individual character from the political and economic spheres.3

In the present context, the key point from these widely separated 1947 and 1969 texts is:

the new environment that imperiled literary values (…) could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. (Playboy Interview)

This realization was decisive because Nietzsche, largely restricting himself to the literary tradition, had indeed “dismissed” not only “the new environment”, but the whole world, real and apparent, tout court4. And the basis on which he had done so was the notion that human knowledge is “an illusion” which tells us nothing about “the things themselves”:

we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. (…) Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions…5

In future posts it will be necessary to compare and contrast Nietzsche and McLuhan on the nature of metaphor. Suffice it to note here that for Nietzsche metaphors “correspond in no way to the original entities” and are therefore secondary and defective “illusions”; while for McLuhan metaphor does “correspond (…) to the original entities” — but in a “making” way, not in a “matching” way! — and is therefore necessarily “efficacious”6 exactly because it is primary. (But when is the primary?)

Ultimately, it is a position like Nietzsche’s that is accused by McLuhan of la trahison des clercs: “the illusion that writers and artists were somehow constitutive and directive of the holy zeitgeist.” In a letter to Wilfred Watson from October 4, 1964, McLuhan formulated this point as follows:

Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle [and the Dithyrambic Spectator, Wyndham Lewis, 1931] just now, I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental. (…) Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. (…) I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. (…) The environment as ultimate artifact.7

Following Mallarmé, McLuhan turns the table on Nietzsche.  Where for the latter, “truths are illusions”, for the former it is instead exactly this nihilist position that is “the illusion”, one which only rebellious children might hold:

In colossal skyletters the bomb has spelt out for the childlike revolutionary mind the fact of the abdication of all personal and individual character from the political and economic spheres. (‘The Southern Quality’)

These concerns provide the background to McLuhan’s observation in his 1951 letter to Innis:

Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items [aka “metaphor”] made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the word “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form8, but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose. Politics were becoming musical, jazzy, magical.

The “magic” at stake here is the original power of metaphor, aka of the “juxtaposition of unrelated items”, aka of “sym-ballein“. Modern art and science had learned to tap into this original “magic” of correlation, eventually giving humans such “great power” that they could come to take over the entire planet and even to project that power beyond the planet in a “satellite environment” (as McLuhan would note after Sputnik). It was because human knowledge was a “replay” or “playback” of this original power that “its very technological form was bound to be efficacious”.

Now Mallarmé and McLuhan were in complete agreement with Nietzsche that human society remains almost entirely oblivious to the implications of a deep archaeology of knowledge:

In his Shop-Windows (Etalages), while analyzing the aesthetics of the commercial layout, [Mallarmé] considers the relations between poetry and the press. A shop window full of new books prompts his reflection that the function of the ordinary run of books is merely to express the average degree of human boredom and incompetence, to reduce to a written form the horizon of the human scene in all its abounding banality. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press, 1954)

For Nietzsche (here following Schopenhauer) this “numb” was a protective stance against the horror of the recognition of the utter futility of human knowledge and of human existence generally; for Mallarmé and McLuhan, on the contrary, even “numb” was the result of the practical application of knowledge in the production and use of mass media (beginning with language and reaching new heights, or lows, in the nineteenth century book and newspaper press). “The human scene in all its abounding banality” was therefore a paradoxical expression of the original power of correlation.

Human beings could be “numb” only in the context of their unique power to extend themselves via media into the larger environment. But whenever they did so (and being human means nothing else but to do so) the price to be paid was a necessary and inevitable partiality:

the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering.9

The great danger was the confusion of some particular content of some particular extension with “truth”.10 The saving was the re-call that all human insight, although necessarily limited and finite, is the “play-back” of an original metaphoric power to which humans have been gifted access — in however a limited way.

McLuhan would later attempt to explicate human “numb” as a kind of hypnosis where one sense organ, be it the eye or ear, would inhibit the functioning of the other. Considered the other way around, this same process could be seen as a sort of “auto-amputation” of a part of the total (eye/ear) field of sense, resulting in experience as “referred pain”.11 In either of these two versions of “numb”, the negative aspect was correlate with a positive one and the positive aspect was correlate with a negative one: the wondrous power of humans to extend themselves into the world in order to engage it successfully was always also a source of blindness (or deafness) and therefore equally a potential for disaster.12

Hence McLuhan’s recommendation (citing Mallarmé):

Instead of deploring this fact [viz, “the human scene in all its abounding banality”] as literary men [like the author of The Mechanical Bride?] tend to do, the artist should exploit it: “The vague, the commonplace, the smudged and defaced, not banishment of these, occupation rather! Apply them as to a patrimony.” (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press, 1954)

Even (perhaps especially) human “numb” needed to be understood as the expression of a prior power which grounded both successful communication and its failure:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the change of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today, 22)13

 

 

  1. The Mechanical Bride was published in 1951, but seems to have been written for the most part before 1948. ↩
  2. For discussion and citations, see CHML: “The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery.” ↩
  3. As discussed in a previous post, with “the abdication of all personal and individual character” in this passage, McLuhan reveals his emerging interest in Mallarmé and Joyce. ↩
  4. See Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 2: What Mallarmé saw ↩
  5. See Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 2: What Mallarmé saw ↩
  6. For “efficacious”, see the 1951 letter to Innis cited below. Regarding the quarrel about the nature of metaphor, about its power to ‘reach across’ or not, note that Joyce captures the issue in nuce in Ulysses when Stephen characterizes Kingstown pier as “a disappointed bridge”. ↩
  7. Cited in Andrew Chrystall, The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan, Massey University PhD thesis, published online, p 79 ↩
  8. By “a rational form”, McLuhan means a form structured by matching and connection. In fundamental contrast, “a magical one” is a made form structured over a gap by a lack of connection. ↩
  9. McLuhan letter to Wilfred Watson in the summer of 1965. ↩
  10. Hence McLuhan’s remark in the October 4, 1964 letter to Winfred Watson cited above, that for a would-be “Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood” like Nietzsche or Lewis, and even like Yeats, Joyce and Pound, “art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever.” The great point is that where some insight is known to be the content of some particular manner of experience, it cannot be mis-taken for unlimited, capital-T “Truth”. Instead it will be seen as a relative figure whose ground must be sought elsewhere and elsewhen. ↩
  11. See Through the Vanishing Point, 233: “Of the several kinds of space in the first eighteen lines of The Waste Land, the dominant space is the peculiar aloneness and isolation created by pain itself. Neurologists and biologists are quite ready to admit that pain is a mystery, but they agree that it originates in cerebral rather than sensory areas. Hence, the theoretical possibility of experiencing pain in amputated limbs or in parts of the body where there is no cause for pain, so-called “referred pain.” The world of 1922 knew much of “referred pain” and hallucinated anguish. Millions had died in 1914-18.” ↩
  12. Almost universally ignored in McLuhan ‘scholarship’ is his “simultaneous” understanding of human extension as an open “replay” of a previous (in what time?) order of creation (therefore its potential for success) and as closed conceptualization (therefore its potential for disaster). There is a sense, then, in which all human experience is necessarily “numb”: “the sin (…) is language itself” (which, however, is exactly that which enables consciousness and perception in the first place). For McLuhan, everything turns on an appreciation of both of these aspects together and at once. Contemporary history, in McLuhan’s analysis, is the time when “numb”, aka “dumb”, gets misunderstood as “human genius”. ↩
  13. “Dialogue” which did not “create the new” and merely “reflected or repeated the old”, which did not “go beyond”, would not be “dialogue” in and with difference.  It would be the repetition of the same. The enabling of “numb”, the breakdown of dialogue, is therefore what first enables dialogue to be genuine dialogue and to be dialogue as creative. ↩

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters – Introduction

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The ideas set out in McLuhan’s March 1954 lecture, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, are like an archipelago composed of the peaks of a mountain range which is otherwise submerged. In order to understand the relationships of these island ideas to each other, indeed even to understand them individually, the submerged parts of the landmass must be investigated. This is what will be attempted in a series of commentaries on the lecture beginning here.

The potential importance of McLuhan’s lecture for us today, 60 years after the event, can hardly be overstated. By “modern letters” McLuhan designated what would become, decades later, mostly after McLuhan had died, post-humanism, postmodernism, post-structuralism (etc etc).1

His peculiar claim was that “modern letters”, when thought deeply, that is, “though the vanishing point”, lead back to the tradition and to “Catholic humanism”.  Critical to this claim was an investigation of the sort of time, or times, implied by the modern (cf, Latin ‘modo’, ‘just now’, hence à la mode).

Today, everything — politics, commerce, culture — exists in a state of soft nihilism.2 What we do and think has no ground; but this is not pursued because — it has no ground.  The controlling idea is that we must remain on the surface3 even if this implies endless war, the annihilation of all cultures, including (especially) our own, and the destruction of the planetary environment. So fearful are we of taking thought that might lead below. As Edgar observes for blind Gloucester in King Lear (and as McLuhan cites in introducing The Gutenberg Galaxy as discussed here):

I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.4

The potential for manipulation in this situation is unlimited.  That things cannot be thought through to their ground entails that we live in what McLuhan styled (in a 1953 article of this name) “the age of advertising”. Everything takes place though prompting. But how prompting works, and who works it, and why, cannot be investigated because this would lead beyond appearances — and beyond appearances, nothing is there.

Soft nihilism exists, like cancer, on a residue of life that it has not yet consumed. When it has fully supped, it, too, will die. The simple goal of soft nihilism (but behind its back, since it is essential to it not to know itself) is to be the last one out the door. 

The remarkable significance of McLuhan’s enterprise is that he attempted to think against this logic of death. But the “age of advertising” is such that his work is even now being consumed in the maw of modernity in the guise of “extending McLuhan”.

A commentary on Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters can have no other goal than the attempt to re-institute its radicality. For this it is necessary to probe beneath the surface of the waters surrounding its multiple island ideas to their inter-communicating5 substructure below.

 

 

  1. The linearity of much of the thinking at stake here is evident in the ubiquity of ‘post’… ↩
  2. “Soft nihilism” is a condition in which there is no truth, only bullshit. But since this would be alarming or otherwise inconvenient, this is not admitted nor, of course, investigated. Instead, like everything else, it is put to use. Customized ‘truth’ is produced for every occasion like a Hallmark card. ‘Truth’ becomes what is “trending”. The deep tie between soft nihilism and “the age of advertising” lies in the role of advertising (aka “news”) in supplying (via “prompting”) the truths which are needed for political and economic manipulation aka “progress”. ↩
  3. As Nietzsche showed, and as discussed here, the notion that surface can be thought aside from ground is senseless. “With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!” ↩
  4. King Lear 4,6 — Edgar will “look no more” and Gloucester cannot look. ↩
  5. “Intercommunication” was the central topic in the work of Henry Wilkes Wright, one of McLuhan’s most influential teachers at the University of Manitoba. ↩

Through the vanishing point 2 – Shakespeare

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All of Shakespeare exists in auditory depth… (Verbi, Voco, Visual Explorations, 16)

When we say, therefore, that Shakespeare draws his people in the round, we are noting the auditory depth with which his music invests the least gesture or intonation of his characters. The complexity of his characters is often the effect of all the other characters being simultaneously present in the auditory space provided by the music of his language. (Printing and Social Change, 25)

The Shakespearean moment (“that time of year”) includes several times at once… (Through the Vanishing Point, p 103)

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (As you like It, 2.7)1

The Gutenberg Galaxy is typical of McLuhan’s work in turning repeatedly to Shakespeare to explicate his project.2 He introduces his central concern in it, referring to Shakespeare, as follows:

His theme in Lear is that of John Donne in An Anatomy of the World3:
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix… (13)

McLuhan cites Lear itself in naming the controlling problem of that theme:

The breaking of “the most precious square of sense”…4 (13)

He then turns to Troilus and Cressida to specify the sure sign of the breaking of sense — “mere oppugnancy”:

O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy5. (19)

The reconstitution of sense requires that thought and identity go “through the vanishing point” and this is again described by a citation from Lear:

Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air6
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.7  (16)

McLuhan poses the questions: when (in what time) is the string of the world tuned? how can we attend such tuning? how are we to understand it in relation to the lack of tuning that is manifest everywhere? why does a pathway pursuing these questions lead “through the vanishing point”? how does this take us beyond “mere oppugnancy”?

The goal (“Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps”) is taken from Troilus and Cressida and is cited in Understanding Media, Take Today, and Laws of Media: 

The providence that’s in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus’ gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.8

The dark that must be confronted in going “through the vanishing point” into “the uncomprehensive deeps” (as discussed previously in regard to McLuhan’s use of Milton and Pope) is an ineradicable aspect of human existence that must have a central place in any fitting consideration of it.  Again, it is Shakespeare who supplies the definitive rendition of such “death’s second self” in Sonnet 73, which McLuhan cites in full both in Through the Vanishing Point (102) and in Voices of Literature (1.181):

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.9

A speech from As you like It (2.7), included in Voices of Literature (1.135), and discussed in Through the Vanishing Point, is called by McLuhan “The Seven Ages of Man”.  Here “mere oblivion (…) sans everything” is seen as the concluding “part” of the different roles a person “plays” in a lifetime:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.10 

  1. Cited in full below from Voices In Literature (1.135). ↩
  2. It is note-worthy (although ignored by most academic research) that McLuhan turns back to the tradition in this way to explicate the path thought must take in “understanding media”. Indeed, the indirection and multiplicity of time is one of McLuhan’s fundamental themes. ↩
  3. 1611 ↩
  4. King Lear 1.1 ↩
  5. Troilus and Cressida 1.3 — also cited in the 1948 ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’, but omitting there, strangely, the last 2 great lines : “And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts/In mere oppugnancy.” ↩
  6. See Wallace Stevens “mid-day air” here. ↩
  7. King Lear 4.6; this same text is cited in the introductory chapter (“Sensory Modes”) of Through the Vanishing Point, p 14, and later again in the same text on p 74. ↩
  8. Troilus and Cressida 3.3; on the same page (13) of The Gutenberg Galaxy cited repeatedly above, McLuhan speaks of “the very constitution of rationality”. For the correlation of “the uncomprehensive deeps” with the “dumb cradles” of thought, see “The Seven Ages of Man” cited below where Shakespeare brings together “oblivion” and “second childishness”. That humans cannot escape first and “second childishness” may be taken to reveal an unbreakable bond with the pluripotent springs of “language itself” (also discussed here). ↩
  9. McLuhan also cites this sonnet in part in ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’ (1955)  and in From Cliché to Archetype, 84, In ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’, he comments on the first 4 lines of the sonnet as follows: “Here the time of year, designated as a mental state, is visualized swiftly in three different ways in the second line and then a fourth and fifth time in the third and fourth lines. First, bare boughs as choirs for birds of the air, and then ruined abbey choirs, as former scenes of the choirboys’ efforts, provide a superimposed visual image. The rapid transition of brief visual shots creates a kaleidoscopic sense of speed and complexity which is controlled only by the solemn music of the lines.” ↩
  10. When “The Seven Ages of Man” are considered synchronically, “all at once”, they may be taken to define the spectrum of “language itself” as the repository of the possibilities of human existence: “one man in his time plays many parts”. In Through the Vanishing Point (65) McLuhan comments on these lines: “The mode of song and of festival is inclusive, all-at-onceness. As a means of creating involvement and participation, nothing seems to rival a simple catalogue. Compare ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ in As You Like It.”
    See the wonderful evocation of this spectrum or “catalogue” by Wallace Stevens in Esthétique du Mal. ↩

Through the vanishing point 1 – Milton and Pope

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As broached in regard to CHML, McLuhan’s thought goes “through the vanishing point” with Nietzsche’s. His work is anything but the sort of naive positivism that would pick out various objects (the wheel! the alphabet! the telephone!) or collections of objects (the information environment!) for detached academic research into “media ecology”. When he cites Pope at length at the very end of The Gutenberg Galaxy, or Milton in From Cliché to Archetype, it is clear that he was fully conscious of a deep dark that is an ineradicable aspect of human existence and that must play a central role in any consideration of it.

Any fitting reading of McLuhan must go “through the vanishing point” along with him and with the great poets he cites like Milton and Pope:

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 16681

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs, and by confusion stand.

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, 17432

In vain, in vain,—The all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
As Argus’ eyes3 by Hermes’ wand opprest,
Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

  1. Book II, cited in From Cliché to Archetype, 44. ↩
  2. Dunciad B, IV, cited at the closing of The Gutenberg Galaxy, 263, and also of the unpublished Typhon from 15 years before GG. See Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. The first 11 lines are cited in From Cliché to Archetype, 189-190. ↩
  3. Argus panoptes ↩

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 2: What Mallarmé saw

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In his Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters (CHML) lecture from 1954 McLuhan describes Mallarmé’s innovative theory of “the poetic process” as a matter of time:

Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was impossible. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. (…) But Mallarmé saw deeper. (CHML)

Although it will be necessary to show that a highly complicated (“deeper”) notion of time is in play here — namely, time singular as inherently times plural — it is not entirely mistaken to read this passage as referring to a moment in or out of singular linear time. On this reading, the difference between “the Romantic poets” and Mallarmé would be, on McLuhan’s account, that the former attempted to express “a moment out of time”, while the latter saw “the poetic process” as necessarily unfolding only in time. “Pure poetry was impossible” — that is, the contamination of poetry by time was unavoidable.

In 1951 McLuhan had already described how:

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 rhyme.” In other words Mallarmé discovered that the aesthetic moment of arrested cognition can be split up into numerous fractions which can be orchestrated in many discontinuous ways. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

McLuhan termed such “discontinuous” poetry the “prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé” (ibid). Like a prism exposing the rainbow of color in a beam of light, “the aesthetic moment was, like the band of the spectrum, an affair of zoning” (ibid). Faced with the “fractions” of an idea or “aesthetic moment”, like the different color “fractions” of a spectrum, poets were left with the task of “orchestrat[ing]” them “in many discontinuous ways” to produce their creations. More fundamentally considered, even the ‘colors’ which were the building blocks of such poetic creations, were already the result of the “zoning” activity of perception on the “the band of the spectrum” before it. Thus it was that perception itself had to be interrogated in regard to its central role in human experience and especially in “the poetic process”:

Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. (CHML)

Essential to such investigations of “the poetic process” was the symbolist discovery of the “fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness”1, of the “fractions” into which any idea could be analyzed. And as McLuhan observed in this same place, “in art as in physics fission preceded fusion”. It followed that no amount of fusion resulting in a purported “moment out of time” could obviate the prior “fission” that “preceded” it. Time was not subject to the “fusion” of poets and artists; far rather, their “fusion” was subject to time and to time’s prior “fission”.

The symbolists arrived at this insight through an intense analysis of the romantic “moment of arrested consciousness”:

Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practiced the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. (CHML)

“Their personal happiness” was at stake because the analysis of “the aesthetic moment” turning on its prior “fission” into “fractions” had the effect of relativizing it in multiple ways. Any such moment could be seen to depend upon a whole collection of social and individual factors such as language, fashion, place and tradition (on the social side) and mood, courage, happenstance and inspiration (on the individual side). All these inevitably ‘colored’ perception and did so in such fundamental fashion that they could not be recalled — except at the unacceptable price of recalling perception itself.

Where insight captured in “the aesthetic moment” was held to be the key to truth, meaning and, indeed, reality (for these had to be perceived as truth, meaning and reality), the intensely felt result of such relativizing analysis was the suspicion that these were arbitrary. And since ‘arbitrary truth’ may well seem no different from ‘no truth’, the further suspicion dawned that life lacked these “esteemed commodities” (as Beckett would later have it). These suspicions were buttressed at the time (beginning around 1860) by Darwin’s discoveries in biology, Marx’s investigations in economics, the beginnings of archaeological and anthropological studies of remote cultures, and the initiation of depth psychology culminating in Freud. Everything began to point to the idea of truth as a construction.

Mallarmé’s life (1842-1898), like that of his close contemporary, Nietzsche (1844-1900), spanned the period of these developments. It was Nietzsche who drew the rigorous nihilistic conclusion from them. If perception was now seen to result from “grouping”, “rhym[ing]”, “orchestrat[ing]” and “zoning”, as Mallarmé’s had it, and if truth, meaning and reality were matters of perception, it was imperative to establish the basis on which poets and artists carried out these defining activities. Since all these techniques amounted to the administration of a kind of glue within perception, how did poets and artists have access to this glue in the first place? Where did it come from? And what reality did poets and artists themselves have, as such orchestrators? For this reality, too, namely their own reality, would — like any other reality — itself have to be “orchestrated” through “zoning”. 

Surely the required glue could not result from its own application (like Baron Münchhausen extricating himself and his horse from a mire by pulling on his own hair). As a result, either the glue of fusion, as subject to time’s fission, was a fortuitous historical development in the evolution of the human species, or the glue “preceded” humans in some prior time of archetypal “fission” and “fusion” such that perception and “the poetic process” (as a special case of perception) amounted to a “retracing” of it. In the former case, human knowing is ground and everything known is a figure on that ground; in the latter case, human knowing is a figure on the “deeper” ground that enables it.

McLuhan opted for the latter possibility, of course, and further posts on CHML will need to detail just how he re-constucted this process. Suffice it to note here only that his views on the multiplicity of time as times, on the fundamentality of “language itself“, on “dialogue” as both “before” all else and yet as “beyond” itself, on the elementary role of media in human life, and, indeed, on the truth of the Catholic tradition, all these must be located in relation to a deep archaeology of the glue of “fusion” in human experience.2

The first possiblility, specified by Nietzsche, was that the glue of fusion, as subject to time’s fission, is nothing but some peculiar historical development associated with the evolution of the human species. A key text here is his early unpublished fragment, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense‘ from 1873:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe (…) there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die3. One might invent such a fable, and yet it still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. (…) It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.4

On this view “the human intellect” is an adaptation strategy that has nothing to do with ‘truth’:

we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things –- metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. (…) What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions…5

Fifteen years later, just before his collapse into silence for the remaining decade of his life, Nietzsche drew the consequences of this view in the two final stages of his 6-stage overview of the western tradition, ‘How the “true world” finally became a fable: the history of an error‘ (in Twilight of the Idols):

5. The “true” world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (…)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!6

Nietzsche had come to realize that if we do not “know something about the things themselves” and instead have only “illusions” about ‘them’, the acid of this insight cannot be withheld from our words (as a variety of “things themselves”) — or, indeed, from the users of words, namely from ourselves (as another variety of “things themselves”). Via this general dissolution, of “things”, “words” and finally of our own selves, not only (only!) “the ‘true’ world” is “abolished”, but also “the apparent one” along with ‘it’.

No amount of construction can produce even an apparent world if the only available constructors themselves require construction.

Nietzsche’s nihilism goes decidedly “through the vanishing point“. But the question arises (if pursued with sufficient passion), whether a critique able to effect the utter abolition of the world, even the “apparent” one, can be wielded without implosive effect on its own postulates. In this case, Nietzsche’s nihilism might act as an important way marker, perhaps even as a necessary and unavoidable one, but — like Wittgenstein’s arrows — this would be a way marker potentially pointing in another direction, or other directions, from the one it purports to indicate.

Although not specifically naming Nietzsche, McLuhan was thinking along these lines by 1949 at the latest and, as will be shown below, already associated his take on this complex with Mallarmé:

Existence is opaque to the rationalist. He seeks essences, definitions, formulas. He lives in the concept and the conceptualizable. Ideally in a world of essences, actually in a world of complete inanition. Cut off from the nutriment of existence, his very postulates discourage him from that loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars. (Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum, 1949)

While it may well seem odd to characterize Nietzsche as a “rationalist” who “seeks essences, definitions, formulas” and who “lives in the concept and the conceptualizable”, Heidegger, too, considered Nietzsche a sort of upside-down metaphysician. For what Nietzsche required of the substantial perception of truth and reality was a demonstrable matching. The dissolution of truth and reality which occurs in his nihilism is able to occur only given this demand.

In ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951) McLuhan remarks that:

“Le Démon de l’Analogie,” by Mallarmé, (…) revealed the proportion that is between knowing and making.

McLuhan’s ever-repeated insistence later in his career on the critical difference between matching and making is already at work here. Matching is the realization of identity between a human activity (like making a certain noise or having a certain idea) and an object. When such an identity is realized, the noise becomes a communicating word and the idea becomes “true”. Nietzsche accepted the necessity of this equation and then pursued the consequences of its breakdown. In fundamental contrast, making is a finite activity of finite beings that yet achieves communication and truth without the realization of identity. Indeed, making has a certain “proportion” with “knowing” only given a fundamental difference between it and its products that can never be recalled or obviated. For it is only (only!) the environment or medium of this difference — a medium that exposes itself above all in the mediating “gap where the action is” — that first of all en-ables whatever making achieves.

In 1954, the same year as CHML, McLuhan described the work of Mallarmé as follows:

His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. [Mallarmé’s 1897] Un Coup de Dés illustrates the road he took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power7, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence (…) But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)

The medium is the message here in the all important sense that it provides the possibility of relation — aka communication — across fundamental difference. Where Nietzsche held that “clever beasts invented knowing”, here “knowing”, indeed perception of any sort, is enabled by the ontological medium or “framework” in the context of which it occurs: “the primal harmonies of existence” (subj gen!). Hence McLuhan’s insistence, over and over again, that the activity of knowing, whether in the arts or in the sciences, is always only (only!) a “retracing” (re-cognizing, re-playing, re-tracking, re-trieving, re-presenting, etc etc) of what already takes place in any and all human perception — namely, “gestures of the mind” which are “magically adjusted” to objects in the world, and to words spoken by and to it, because they are first of all “magically adjusted to the secret powers of being” (subj gen!). Since it has — even ‘is’ — these “secret powers” as possibilities of “adjustment”, and since it de-cides to issue them “beyond” itself, so are we able to relate successfully with the world via “retracing” in all the ways to be seen from the most ordinary perception to the most esoteric art or science. Thus (again):

Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. (CHML)

Here “knowing” does not belong to human beings as their invention and especially does not belong to any individual poet or scientist:

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)

To supply connections would be to provide what is already there — as if they were not already there . Art (indeed also science and any human activity) therefore had no more important function than the withdrawal of pseudo-connections in favor of existing ones: “the release of the life in things”. The essential act of poets, or indeed of scientists, was thus seen to be to retreat in favor of existing “transitional” possibilities8 reflecting the “secret powers of being” and “primal harmonies”. But:

the price he must pay is total self-abnegation. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)9

In Mallarmé’s attention to the waters of intelligibility which first enable poetry as an exemplary mode of perception, McLuhan found an articulation of the Catholic tradition — even though Mallarmé himself had no such intent:

In Mallarmé the Word has no theological overtones. It is rather a return to the pre-Christian doctrine of the Logos which included ratio et oratio and was the element in which all men were thought to move and have their being. (Review of Eleven Eliot Books 1950)

the poetic process as revealed by Poe and the symbolists was the unexpected and unintentional means of reestablishing the basis of Catholic humanism. (CHML)

This complete absence of doctrinal intent was, in fact, an essential aspect of Mallarmé’s contribution:

Mallarmé did not approach this question as a speculative one, but as a practical matter of poetics. It was the poetic experience of his time that reconstituted this doctrine and not the other way around. (Review of Eleven Eliot Books 1950)

To follow Mallarmé along this way, it was necessary to go “through the vanishing point” — and this in a double respect. It was necessary in the first place to expose the way of matching as a cul-de-sac10 that, once pursued with sufficient passion, dissolves into nothing  (the lesson of Nietzsche). In the second place it was necessary through this sort of “total self-abnegation” to activate a “loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars”. This was an attitude that was possible — indeed, actual11 — for all “gestures of the mind” through the prior fact that they are “magically adjusted to the secret powers of being” far “beyond” their own powers of matching. 

 

 

 

  1. The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry ↩
  2. Readers of McLuhan have attempted to understand him absent the drama or contest of perception (subj gen!) he saw to be always at stake in human experience. But as he wrote to Joe Keogh, “I am not a ‘culture critic’ because 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” (July 6, 1970, Letters 413). “Metaphysics” on this view is exactly an interest in “the life of the forms and their surprising modalities” and this “life”, in turn, can be investigated only at the deepest levels of human experience as excavated by thinkers like Nietzsche. Reading McLuhan first of all requires the passion without which these levels of human experience remain inaccessible. ↩
  3. It is noteworthy that, up to a point, McLuhan accepts Nietzsche’s view: “Historic man may turn out to have been literate man. An episode.” (‘Culture Without Literacy’, Explorations 1, 1953) ↩
  4. ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn‘: In irgendeinem abgelegenen Winkel (…) Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Tiere das Erkennen erfanden. Es war die hochmütigste und verlogenste Minute der »Weltgeschichte«; aber doch nur eine Minute. Nach wenigen Atemzügen der Natur erstarrte das Gestirn, und die klugen Tiere mußten sterben. – So könnte jemand eine Fabel erfinden und würde doch nicht genügend illustriert haben, wie kläglich, wie schattenhaft und flüchtig, wie zwecklos und beliebig sich der menschliche Intellekt innerhalb der Natur ausnimmt. Es gab Ewigkeiten, in denen er nicht war; wenn es wieder mit ihm vorbei ist, wird sich nichts begeben haben. Denn es gibt für jenen Intellekt keine weitere Mission, die über das Menschenleben hinausführte. Sondern menschlich ist er, und nur sein Besitzer und Erzeuger nimmt ihn so pathetisch, als ob die Angeln der Welt sich in ihm drehten. Könnten wir uns aber mit der Mücke verständigen, so würden wir vernehmen, daß auch sie mit diesem Pathos durch die Luft schwimmt und in sich das fliegende Zentrum dieser Welt fühlt. (…) Es ist merkwürdig, daß dies der Intellekt zustande bringt, er, der doch gerade nur als Hilfsmittel den unglücklichsten, delikatesten, vergänglichsten Wesen beigegeben ist, um sie eine Minute im Dasein festzuhalten. ↩
  5. Ibid. “Wir glauben etwas von den Dingen selbst zu wissen, wenn wir von Bäumen, Farben, Schnee und Blumen reden, und besitzen doch nichts als Metaphern der Dinge, die den ursprünglichen Wesenheiten ganz und gar nicht entsprechen. (…) Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch gesteigert, übertragen, geschmückt wurden und die nach langem Gebrauch einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dünken: die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind, ↩
  6. Götzen-Dämmerung — Wie die “wahre Welt” endlich zur Fabel wurde — Geschichte eines Irrtums: (…) 5. Die “wahre Welt” – eine Idee, die zu nichts mehr nütz ist, nicht einmal mehr verpflichtend – eine unnütz, eine überflüssig gewordene Idee, folglich eine widerlegte Idee: schaffen wir sie ab! (…) 6. Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht?… Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft!! ↩
  7. McLuhan to Pound, June 12, 1951: “I’m interested in such analogies with modern poetry as that provided by the vacuum tube, The latter can tap a huge reservoir of electrical energy, picking it up as a very weak impulse. Then it can shape it and amplify it to major intensity. Technique of allusion as you use it (situational analogies) seems comparable to this type of circuit.” (Letters, 224) ↩
  8. The whole history of science is a series of such retreats in favor of existing “transitional” possibilities. So Galileo gave up the prior conception of how bodies fall for the perception of how they actually do so. And chemistry requires the retreat from alchemical conceptions in favor of perception of the actual relations of physical materials. ↩
  9. Compare Joyce in Portrait: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” ↩
  10. Cf, Through the Vanishing Point (55): “The three-dimensional illusion of depth has proved to be a cul-de-sac”. ↩
  11. The knot of possibility and actuality is the fundamental concern of Take Today 22. The relationship between the two is the “true strength” of “dialogue” that “goes beyond”. ↩

Mallarmé: “a competition for the foundation of the popular modern Poem”

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Between 1949 and 1954 McLuhan’s thought underwent a profound revolution. Primarily through his readings of the French symbolist poets — especially Mallarmé — in connection with his ongoing work on Eliot and Joyce, McLuhan came to see that incarnation must be experienced and expressed against any attempt to consider it in some supposedly special moment of time or in some supposedly oceanic feeling or in some supposedly pure thought.

Considered originally, as first principle, incarnation necessarily rebounds on any experience of it (subj gen!)1. If incarnation is fundamental, any and all experience of it must be incarnated (ie, later than incarnation) and therefore informed by it and therefore particular and finite. There can be no special experience of incarnation (obj gen!).

This rebound (in league with the nihilist thrust culminating in Nietzsche) at once negates any supposedly foundational pier of the western tradition depending on special experience and points to a foundational complex (“dialogue [that] came before, and goes beyond”) dynamically supporting that tradition even, or exactly, in its weaknesses and failures. For incarnation is just (just!) the dynamic release into weaknesses and failure that yet sustains2.

In ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ (1954), McLuhan formulated this turn as follows:

Moral and aesthetic horror at the ignobility of the popular scene gave way to an opposite attitude (…) and Mallarmé is, before Joyce, the best spokesman of the new approach.

This was a “radically democratic aesthetic” where “democratic” refers to the utter lack of privilege (whether sensual, conceptual or institutional) prompting it. And it was Mallarmé who first began to map the labyrinthine terrain:

The author of Ulysses was the only person to grasp the full artistic implications of this radically democratic aesthetic elaborated by the fabulous artificer, the modern Daedalus3, Stéphane Mallarmé.

It was this “radically democratic aesthetic” which lay behind the decided animus McLuhan developed at this time against ‘gnosticism’ (even — or especially — when he found it in any of his literary heroes like Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lewis) and which grounded his new positive valuation of the mass media, precisely in the face of his previous — especially in The Mechanical Bride — and continuing [!] critique of them.

Incarnation, limited in any way by moral view or distaste or doctrinal conviction, is not incarnation.

The following texts from this period highlight the role of Mallarmé in this revolutionary process through which McLuhan became the theorist of all media.

Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum, 1949
in the library section of Ulysses (…) Joyce (…) presents (…) Mallarmé as his Hamlet who walks the world only to read “the book of himself”. This image is the exact opposite of the activity of Joyce and of the Mallarmé that Joyce at that time knew better than anybody else. To read not in the book of the self but in the book of the existent and subsistent world, the world of the incarnate logos (…) was the esthetic task (…) “Symbol” means to “throw together”, to juxtapose without copula. And it is a work that cannot be undertaken or understood by the univocalizing, single plane, rationalist mind. Existence is opaque to the rationalist. He seeks essences, definitions, formulas. He lives in the concept and the conceptualizable. Ideally in a world of essences, actually in a world of complete inanition. Cut off from the nutriment of existence, his very postulates discourage him from that loving and disciplined contemplation of existence, of particulars. (…) 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.

Review of eleven Eliot books 1950
In Mallarmé the Word has no theological overtones. It is rather a return to the pre-Christian doctrine of the Logos which included ratio et oratio and was the element in which all men were thought to move and have their being. Mallarmé did not approach this question as a speculative one, but as a practical matter of poetics. It was the poetic experience of his time that reconstituted this doctrine and not the other way around.

Review of Essays in Criticism 1920-1948, ed R W Stallman, 1950
Poetry is made with words not with emotions, feelings, or ideas — it is that perception of Mallarmé [subj gen!] that has changed first poetic and then critical practice in the past seventy years. (…) Poems such as Mallarmé’s Igitur or Un Coup de Dés are great symbolist structures which made possible the metapoetic orchestration of Ulysses, The Cantos, Finnegan’s Wake, and Four Quartets. (…) Beginning with Mallarmé, poetry once more embraced the entire diversity of civilized interests. (…) Superficially, the first Romantics had rejected the formal methods and content of the encyclopaedic arts and sciences. But the last Romantics, such as Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats, Rilke, and Eliot, have joined poetry once more to theology, metaphysics, history, and anthropology.

Letter to Innis, 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 such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the word “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose. Politics were becoming musical, jazzy, magical.

Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951
“Le Démon de l’Analogie,” by Mallarmé, (…) revealed the proportion that is between knowing and making. (…) The Stephen of The Portrait, (probably named after the Dedalian Stéphane  Mallarmé) understands Aquinas via Mallarmé whereas Joyce the artist [in contrast to Stephen Daedalus,] while led to Aquinas by Mallarmé and the symbolists, finally was able to complete the work of the symbolists because he discovered [through reversal] how to perfect their insights by means of Aquinas.

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
With Joyce words syntactically ordered to statement yielded to words as pantomime, as ballet, and especially as static landscape. Mallarmé, in his Coup de Dés, 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. 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, as I have shown elsewhere, behind Ulysses, with its date-line Thursday, June 16, 1904. The shape of Ulysses is that of the city presented as the organic landscape of the human body. The shape of the Wake is the same, save that the landscape of the human mind and body is presented more intimately and under a much greater diversity of forms, landscape taking over even the functions of “character”. What Mallarmé and Joyce exploit in landscape technique is its power of rendering an inclusive consciousness in a single instant of perception. (…) Earlier than Mr. Eliot or Joyce, Mallarmé, pointing to the intimate connection between the ultimate artist and nature, insisted that fragments of the great work were constantly being written by the many who are as Nature to the hero-artist (…) For them [Joyce, Pound, and 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 rhyme.” In other words 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 through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. And this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior [viz, by Mallarmé] discovery for the technique of fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness. And landscape plays an indispensable role in every stage of both fission and fusion. In art as in physics fission preceded fusion.

Review of Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling, by F G Townsend, 1952
Ruskin was (…) seeking always the collective center of the poetic process but finding only the peripheral effects in the individual or the society. (…) [the symbolist (namely, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry)] view that the art process is the analogue of cognition itself, is metaphysical. But it provides all those insights into the poetic process and into the social role of the poet which Ruskin never stopped seeking.

James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953
Modern linguistic theory is quite sympathetic to the semi-magical views of the ancients. Our idea of language as gesture, as efficacious, and as representing a total human response, is a much better base for a study of the figures and arts of speech than any merely rationalistic approach can provide. But for Mallarmé, Valery, Joyce, and Eliot the figures of rhetoric are discriminated as notable postures of the human mind. The linguistic studies of Edward Sapir and B. L. Whorf have lately shown that language is not only the storehouse of scientific thought. All actual and potential scientific theories are implicit in the verbal structure of the culture associated with them. By 1885 Mallarmé had formulated and utilized in his poetry these concepts about the nature of language uniting science and philology, which nowadays are known as “metalinguistics.” However, these views of languages were commonplaces to Cratylus, Varro, and Philo Judaeus. They were familiar to the Church Fathers, and underlay the major schools of scriptural exegesis. If “four-Ievel exegesis” is back in favor again as the staple of the “new criticism,” it is because the poetic objects which have been made since 1880 frequently require such techniques for their elucidation.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was impossible — a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. The pre-Raphaelites had pushed this doctrine as far as they could. But Mallarmé saw deeper (…) It is a crucial matter for us to understand in the age of the so-called mass media. 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.

Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press, 1954
But 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. Un Coup de Dés illustrates the road he took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation. (…)
Moral and aesthetic horror at the ignobility of the popular scene gave way to an opposite attitude in the symbolists, and Mallarmé is, before Joyce, the best spokesman of the new approach. In his Shop-Windows (Etalages), while analyzing the aesthetics of the commercial layout, he considers the relations between poetry and the press. A shop window full of new books prompts his reflection that the function of the ordinary run of books is merely to express the average degree of human boredom and incompetence, to reduce to a written form the horizon of the human scene in all its abounding banality. Instead of deploring this fact as literary men tend to do, the artist should exploit it: “The vague, the commonplace, the smudged and defaced, not banishment of these, occupation rather! Apply them as to a patrimony.”
Only by a conquest and occupation of these vast territories of stupefaction can the artist fulfill his culturally heroic function of purifying the dialect of the tribe, the Herculean labor of cleaning the Augean stables of speech, of thought and feeling. Turning directly to the press, Mallarmé designates it as “a traffic, an epitomization of enormous and elementary interests (…) employing print for the propagation of opinions, the recital of divers facts, made plausible, in the Press, which is devoted to publicity, by the omission, it would seem, of any art.” He delights in the dramatic significance of the fact that in the French press, at least, the literary and critical features form a section at the base of the first page. And even more delightful:
“Fiction properly so called, or the imaginative tale, frolics across the average daily paper, enjoying the most prominent spots even to the top of the page, dislodging the financial feature and pushing actuality into second place. Here, too, is the suggestion and even the lesson of a certain beauty: that today is not only the supplanter of yesterday or the presager of tomorrow but issues from time, in general, with an integrity bathed and fresh. The vulgar placard, bawled (…) at the street corner thus sustains this reflection (…) on the political text. Such experience leaves some people cold because they imagine that while there may be a little more or less of the sublime in these pleasures tasted by the people, the situation as regards that which alone is precious and immeasurably lofty, and which is known by the name of Poetry, that this situation remains unchanged. Poetry (they suppose) will always be exclusive and the best of its pinions will never approach those pages of the newspaper where it is parodied, nor are they pleased by the spread of wings in our hands of those vast improvised sheets of the daily paper.”
Mallarmé is laughing at these finicky and unperceptive people [McLuhan may be thinking here of the author of The Mechanical Bride] for whom the press appears as a threat to “real culture”; and continues:
“To gauge by the extraordinary, actual superproduction, through which the Press intelligently yields its average, the notion prevails, nonetheless, of something very decisive which is elaborating itself: a prelude to an era, a competition for the foundation of the popular modern Poem, at the very least of innumerable Thousand and One Nights: by which the majority of readers will be astonished at the sudden invention. You are assisting at a celebration, all of you, right now, amidst the contingencies4 of this lightning achievement!”
The author of Ulysses was the only person to grasp the full artistic implications of this radically democratic aesthetic elaborated by the fabulous artificer, the modern Daedalus, Stéphane Mallarmé. 

  1. The ‘experience of incarnation’ is necessarily a subjective genitive (i.e., experience belongs to incarnation) exactly where incarnation is taken originally, as cause and not as effect, as subject and not as object, as ground and not as figure. But at the same time it is essential to incarnation that it submits itself to experience as its object. The mystery is the knot of these two genitives together (‘at the same time’): the absolute release as ground is figured in the relative capture — since only (only!) such capture IS such release! ↩
  2. Sustains — because it is the grounding first principle. And because its release is not its loss of itself but its fulfillment of itself. Like time, incarnation could not be what it is without going out from itself. ↩
  3. As frequently remarked by McLuhan, Daedalus was the creator of the labyrinth of King Minos in Knossos, with its minotaur. Not incidentally, since the design of the labyrinth was the key to human discovery, he also found a way for his son, Icarus, to fly. ↩
  4. The last page of Hegel’s Phenomenology (1807) enacts this “celebration” of (dual gen!) finite spirits, whose finitude is the “hidden” way in which the “true strength” of the infinite ex-presses itself. ↩

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1

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In a letter to Ezra Pound from December 21, 1948 (Letters 207) McLuhan writes:

the principle of metaphor and analogy [is] the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD (…) relations in four terms (…) I am trying to devise a way of stating this (…) Until [the principle of metaphor and analogy is] stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist (…) 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 [dialectical] state of mind.

McLuhan’s most sustained attempt at stating “the principle of metaphor and analogy” was made a little over 5 years later in a lecture he delivered in March 1954 at St Joseph Seminary in Hartford, ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (= CHML1 hereafter). Here he begins by asserting the central concern of his lecture: the fundamental relation between metaphor and language:

When we look at any situation through another situation we are using metaphor. This is an intensely intellectual process. And all language arises by this means. (154)

Language, in turn, is said to be the channel or medium of all human experience:

language itself is the principal channel and view-maker of experience for men everywhere. (154)

More than 20 years later, at the end of McLuhan’s career, the same observation appears as follows:

language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as [of] communication. (‘Alphabet Mother of Invention’, 1977)

McLuhan’s point here is not that an individual language structures the way in which all its speakers perceive the world2. Instead, this “medium” of “thought and perception as well as [of] communication” is “language itself” as the repository of the possibilities of meaningful combination (like the table of elements in chemistry). McLuhan’s concern was rather with the fact that a human being has language at all and thereby “thinks and perceives the world”. This is the “miracle” he set out to explore:

As language itself [as “the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication”] is an infinitely greater work of art than [particular works of art like] the Iliad or the Aeneid, so is the creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. (157)

In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves.  (165)

What happens in perception is that “the exterior world” is apprehended or “recreated” in our interior world. These two ‘worlds’ are at once different3 and yet correlated and it is exactly the “principle” of such correlation over fundamental difference that is the “miracle”. As an example, consider language learning in a child. Although it hears sounds as soon as it is born, and presumably even before it is born in the womb, it must learn the particular sorts of correlation between sound and meaning instantiated in its native language.  This requires a certain distance from the noises it hears so that meaningful sound may be distinguished from random sound and the rules governing the former gradually recognized and reproduced. But this sort of recognition of a correlation between particular sounds and their meanings presupposes a deeper one between the child and the possibility of language learning and this deeper correlation is not subject to learning or any kind of assembly — it is what must already be in place in order for language learning to take place at all. Similarly, the correlations between sound and meaning in the language learned by a child are necessarily given, not created by it.

The “poetic or creative process” of correlation is at work in everything humans do. In language, a finite sign is correlated with meaning and a finite speaker with a finite hearer. In experience, finite perception is correlated with the finite particularities of the external world. And art, according to McLuhan, is so concerned with such correlation as “the principle of metaphor and analogy” that, “until it is (…) recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist”4

McLuhan set out to discover the origin and basis of such correlation by working backwards from it as effect “by way of sympathetic reconstruction“5. Here he took Poe and the symbolist poets as his models:

the road to this wisdom is by way of sympathetic reconstruction, involving the abeyance of personal prejudice and preconception6. This method of reconstruction (…) appeared first in the Romantic poets of the later eighteenth century, and it went with a conscious concern with the creative process in the arts. (155-156)

Poe saw that poetry should be written backward. One must begin with the effect (…) and then seek out the means for obtaining that effect and no other effect. Thus the same insight which enabled Poe to be the inventor of symbolist poetry also make him the inventor of detective fiction. For the sleuth works backwards from the effect of the event to reconstruct the circumstances which produced the particular event or murder. (156)

The ef-fect (< ex-facere) or e-vent (< ex-venire) which the symbolists and especially Mallarmé set out to reconstruct was perception itself or “human cognition”. What was at stake was therefore the re-cognition of cognition:

The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. (157-158)

If cognition is the general dis-covery of the world, McLuhan would follow Poe, the symbolists and Whitehead in attempting “the discovery of (…) discovery itself”. Like them, he would work backwards from particular modes of discovery to their enabling principles, but the goal would not be the discovery of any sort of “technique” developed by humans and owned by them to dispose of as they would. Rather, the goal was the dis-covery of the underlying “principle” of correlation (aka “metaphor and analogy”) in Being itself — that ground on the basis of which something like cognition is first possible at all:

the drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, [it is] the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being (158)

cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being (165)

This sense of Being 7, in turn, is said to point to the “basis” from which “Catholic humanism” springs:

the poetic process as revealed by Poe and the symbolists was the unexpected and unintentional means of reestablishing the basis of Catholic humanism. (157)

The key matter here is “incarnation”: 

And as we trace the rise of successive communication channels or links, from writing to movies and TV, it is borne in on us that in order for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness. And the mechanical or mass media of communication must at least parrot the world in order to hold our attention. (169)

each of us in perception or cognition incarnates the external world of experience. But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability. Our words are analogies of the miracle by which we incarnate and utter the world. I suggest that our faith in the Incarnation has an immediate relevance to our art, science, and philosophy. (169)

“Incarnation” implicates at once both distance and correlation, far and near8. It is like language — or is “language itself” as Logos — as that correlation of finite particularity with meaning that McLuhan called “the principle of metaphor and analogy”.

As already seen above, McLuhan held that “the road to this wisdom is by way of sympathetic reconstruction [of the poetic process], involving the abeyance of personal prejudice and preconception”. This is a “road” on which a fundamental turn of 180° is required from “light on” (“personal prejudice and preconception”) to “light through” (“the miracle”, “the principle of metaphor and analogy”). He describes the genesis of this notion in the modern arts and sciences as follows:

The whole of nineteenth century art and science is charged with the implications of the poetic process and its discovery. Our own century has seen that process put to work in the so-called mass media. Before Poe and Baudelaire the impressionism of Romantic art had taught the artist to pay minute attention to his perceptions, to their mode and inner effect. These experiences he practiced to arrest and to fix in external landscapes as we see in Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins. Romantic impressionism unexpectedly opened the door to the creative process by developing new resources of introspection. Impressionism was the parent of symbolism. And impressionism and symbolism alike insisted on attention to process in preference to personal self-expression. Self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded the discovery of the creative process. Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practiced the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was impossible — a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of a moment of perception. For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. The pre-Raphaelites had pushed this doctrine as far as they could. But Mallarmé saw deeper… (160-161)

As with language learning in a child, indeed with learning of any kind, “the road to this wisdom is by way of sympathetic reconstruction, involving the abeyance of personal prejudice and preconception”. So the first step here, taken in “impressionism and symbolism alike”, was “attention to process in preference to personal self-expression”: “self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded9 the discovery”. This step backward as the only way forward — the way up as the way down10 — already illustrated (and itself presupposed) that correlation whose investigation was underway.  But the decisive step, or turn, was achieved when “it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was impossible”.

What happened in this decisive — or catastrophic11 — moment was that Mallarmé turned against a knotted notion of time, structure and reality which the best poets of the century before him had formulated:

For some of the Romantic poets the doctrine of the aesthetic moment as a moment out of time — a moment of arrested consciousness — had seemed the key to all poetry. The pre-Raphaelites had pushed this doctrine as far as they could. But Mallarmé saw deeper…

What Mallarmé saw will be treated in a series of further posts here and here.

 

  1. Page numbers refer to the reprint of this lecture in The Medium and the Light. ↩
  2. McLuhan was well aware that perception varies fundamentally between individuals speaking the same language. Indeed, one of his major concerns was the failure of perception in those he was addressing in their common language. ↩
  3. The difference between what McLuhan calls the exterior and interior worlds is evident socially in all the different cultures of historical time and contemporary space and individually in our different moods. To survive, each must relate to a common world; to be recognizably different from each other, each must distinguish itself from a common world. ↩
  4. McLuhan to Pound from December 1948 as cited above. Emphasis added. With the phrase “stated and publicly recognized” here, McLuhan does not mean, absent these,  that no “poetry and the arts” can exist at all. Clearly, they can. Instead he means something like: “Until (the principle of metaphor and analogy is) stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t (properly) exist”, that is, poetry and the arts can’t be seen (or for that matter produced) as what they really are. Therefore he adds: “mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical”. “Exposure to the arts”, even where it “does nothing”, requires that they be present in some sense, however deficient a sense this may be. ↩
  5. Emphasis added. ↩
  6. Until a child practises “the abeyance of personal prejudice and preconception”, it cannot begin the separate meaningful sound from noise.  Only then can it begin to learn language “by way of sympathetic reconstruction”. ↩
  7. The nature of the genitive in “this sense of Being” is the great question. The genitive is both subjective and objective and the riddle within which human life is situated has to do with the correlation between these. This is the “dialogue” that “came before, and goes beyond” of Take Today 22. ↩
  8. The primary signs of Incarnation in Christianity are the Nativity and the Cross. They reveal an utter finitude of coming to be and of ceasing to be that is meaningful, indeed supremely meaningful, because they remain fundamentally correlated with God — despite (or exactly through) the absolute release implicated in them. The knot of such absolute release with the equally absolute hold of God in and with it is the mystery. ↩
  9. With “preceded” a complication of time is introduced here which is essential. ↩
  10. McLuhan cites this fragment from Heraclitus in Take Today. Eliot uses it as one of his mottoes for Four Quartets. ↩
  11. “Catastrophic” in the etymological sense of the word as an overturning, originally of the soil in ploughing. ↩

The Waters of Intelligibility – Mis-taking McLuhan

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Reading McLuhan has yet to begin on account of a series of mis-takes which disable it from the start. These mis-takes include:

  • It is supposed that McLuhan considers the history of media (first speech, then writing, then printing, then photography, then radio, then television, etc) when he in fact considers the history of our knowledge of media. This is the same difference as between a history of the chemical elements (in the first milliseconds of the big bang, say) and a history of our knowledge of the elements eventuating in chemistry. Neither McLuhan’s new sciences nor chemistry can start until their elements are finally isolated as synchronic structural forms: “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (GV 55, emphasis added).
  • It is supposed that McLuhan considers natural or literal ‘things’ instead of formal structures. So (for example) ‘space’ in McLuhan is taken to refer to physical space or, at least, to the different experience of physical space in different ages or places. Or ‘the brain’ and its two ‘hemispheres’ are taken to refer to what he called our pulsating mass of grey matter. These ideas ignore McLuhan’s stricture that “failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the program “content” of our media while ignoring the form” (UM, 209). McLuhan was interested only in such forms and used a term like ‘space’ exclusively to characterize them — and not to refer to some supposedly natural or literal objective thing.  As he wrote to Joe Keogh: “I am not a ‘culture critic’ because 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.” (July 6, 1970, Letters 413)
  • It is supposed that singular words or things can ‘make sense’ aside from the formal ratio from which they have whatever significance they have: “Erasmus and More said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality” (GV 94). Therefore the need in examining different rationalities to realize that “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (GV 55) and that “no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres” (GV 62). What is at stake is not “visual space” or “acoustic space” or even “space” at all (and not “left brain” or “right brain” or even “brain” at all), but the structural forms or ratios which are in play in any and all human experience.
  • It is supposed that a gradual approach may be made to ‘media ecology’ aside from the articulation of its essential focal structure, its elements and the field it would investigate in terms of these. As if chemistry (say) might be initiated aside from insight into its elements and their field of expression. Instead, media analysis necessarily begins suddenly and necessarily begins with work which is already focused in these ways — however much the required structure, its elementary expressions and their field will forever be subject to further research and revision.

In all these ways, the keys to the study of human experience are formality and synchronicity. But how can our finite intelligence, which never knows more than some part of a formal whole possibly come (diachronically) to initiate such intelligibility? McLuhan’s answer to this question, as broached previously, is that intelligibility is not some invention of humans, but is given to humans for retrieval/replay/recognition/retracing/retracking.1

 

  1. Just how McLuhan conceived this to occur is described in his lecture, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters — which will be examined from this perspective in a later post. ↩

The Waters of Intelligibility

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An important factor in McLuhan’s religious faith was his determination that intelligibility cannot be invented or otherwise cobbled together (by human genius or by raw chance), but must be given. He expressed this association of his faith and the datum of intelligibility (dual genitive!) in a letter to Martin Esslin: “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.” (Sept 23, 1971, Letters 440)

Human “thought and perception” on this view do not somehow develop intelligibility, but instead result from it1, and our various ways of exercising intelligence, especially our language use, result in turn from the synchronic irruption of “language itself” into our diachronic lives.2 To be human on this view means to stand (knowingly or unknowingly) in the “light from” this source and to derive (knowingly or unknowingly) one’s inevitably particular “light on” any matter from it.

A series of points comes together here, all of which must be discussed at length in future posts:

1. The constant synchronic address of humans in their linear history by “language itself” reveals the inherent plurality of time. Knowingly or unknowingly, humans as humans always stand in two essentially different times: “Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary (…) [humans have] a foot, as it were, in both” (GV 45).3

2. “Language itself” is exactly not some particular language that speaks in the way a particular language speaks. Instead, it is the range of possibility of all language and of all individual and collective intelligibility. McLuhan understood Finnegans Wake as a portrait of this dynamic spectrum of possibilities in its synchronic address to everyone (HCE) in every moment of our always particular diachronic lives: “James Joyce used language itself as the index of these modifications and explored them fully in Finnegans Wake.” (Laws of Media 221, 1978?)

3. Like fish in the sea, humans are usually oblivious to this medium of intelligibility4 even though we are completely dependent on it as that environment without which we cannot be. It is above all this medium which is the (missed5) message.

4. The archetypal power of this fundamental intelligibility is at once the great danger (in the missing of the message in its take-over) and the saving (in its re-calling). When the original might of intelligibility is taken over by humans as by its source and owner, its power is such that we come to assume control of the entire planet, replacing nature by art6. This both threatens the environment which is needed by humans for life (an environment that is both natural and intelligible7 at once) and contradicts the very nature of that power which consists in the “true strength” of dis-owning. This is the original refusal of take-over, hence the originality of “dialogue” as creation. This is “dialogue” understood as going “beyond” even, and exactly, itself (such that even its take-over by us is enabled by it in its out-reach): “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). Along with the “colossal” power of intelligibility, able to take over the planet in the retrieval/replay/recognition/retracing/retracking of “language itself”, humans are thus also given in this way the deeper power of dis-owning. When humans dis-own the “light on” of their take-over of intelligibility in the memory of “light from”, this danger is perceived to be the saving.8

5.  The take-over of intelligibility by humans is itself an ex-pression of the “true strength” of “language itself” aka Logos. Hence, even the danger belongs to the saving qua saving, but in such a way that the danger is a danger (“beyond” saving) and may indeed eventuate in the destruction of the planet. The saving could not be the saving if the danger were ultimately to threaten it. But, just as much, the saving could not be the saving unless the danger were real and somehow “beyond” its control. For human beings there is no de-finitive answer to the question of how these belong together. Instead, humans stand in the questionability of these matters. To be human means to be caught up in their wake and to know the ebb and tide of both at once.

6. When fish come to experience the existence of a different environment, they die: “Fish don’t know water exists till beached” (Culture is Our Business, 191).  But being beached is native to humans: “the gap where the action is”. Knowingly or unknowingly, humans always stand in the gap between times and between the particular intelligibility they happen to have at any time and the general intelligibility of “language itself“. The danger lies in the rejection of the gap through fear or pride (aka, rejection or identification); saving lies in the re-call of the originality of the gap in “dialogue”9. Or again: the danger lies in confusing some particular intelligibility (the only sort of intelligibility humans have) with intelligibility itself; the saving lies in the “mememormee” of the wild fertility and utter peculiarity of the springs of intelligibility in “language itself” as seen (for example) in Finnegans Wake: “James Joyce used language itself as the index of these modifications and explored them fully in Finnegans Wake.” (Laws of Media 221, 1978?)

7. Because humans are constantly exposed to the address of “language itself” and because it is “given” to them to be capable of retrieval/replay/recognition/retracing/retracking of it, we can “examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.” This applies to the modes of intelligibility themselves, particularly since humans constantly cross from one sort of intelligibility to another in their general state of being “beached” (which is the only way an environmental medium can be illuminated). We can come to understand our environmental media of intelligibility via “pattern recognition” as a finite exercise of “retrieval” (etc) of (dual genitive) “language itself”. This is different from what Joyce was up to in Finnegans Wake. Where Joyce composed a kind of cubist portrait of “language itself in action” in its dynamic universality/particularity, “understanding media” is an investigative science which depends upon (like chemistry and genetics) the isolation of an elemental structure, the mapping of the elementary expressions of that structure and the investigation of the ways in which these elements combine to produce all the myriad phenomena of individual and collective intelligibility throughout all history. As McLuhan writes in Take Today 22:

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)

What McLuhan calls “the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear)” here are components of an elementary structure like protons and electrons in the chemical elements or like the ACGT bases in DNA. His suggestion was that the universe of “human organization”, from individual experience to social cultures, may be understood through focus on this structure: “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (GV 55).

8. In his repeated attempts at communication, McLuhan called the components of the elementary structure of intelligibility by many names: “eye and ear”, “visual and acoustic space”, left and right brain (or hemisphere), figure and ground, print and speech, “the civilized and the tribal”, diachrony and synchrony, etc etc. None of these may be taken literally as referring to a natural object! Each has its meaning for McLuhan exclusively within a structural context:

Failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the program “content” (…) while ignoring the form (UM, 209)

9. In ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ (1951) McLuhan claims that Theodore Lipps “is of special importance for an understanding of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot” and cites him as follows: “the simple clang represents to a certain extent all music”10. This observation must be understand from both of two directions at once.  On the one hand, “the simple clang” may be taken as a single note of sound. This implicates “all music” because a note has meaning only within a certain scale and a certain scale has meaning only within a system of scales. The intelligibility of a single note as a single note implicates “all music”. In the same way, a gold nugget implicates the entire physical universe insofar as it must be understood within chemistry and chemistry is the investigatory schema of that universe. On the other hand, all music may be understood as the unfolding of “the simple clang” of the Word or thunderstroke in the beginning: the sound of one hand clapping11. This is the singular ray of “light through” towards us that, in the prism of finite particularity, shows itself as a rainbow spectrum — what McLuhan in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953) calls the “discontinuities or aspects of the single Word”12.

 

  1. As discussed in a previous post, McLuhan puts this point with Robert Logan as follows: “If one must choose the one dominant factor which separates man from the rest of the animal kingdom, it would undoubtedly be language. The ancients said: “Speech is the difference of man”. Opposition of the thumbs and fingers and an erect stature were certainly key developments in the separation of man from animals, but the great quantum leap of intellectual capacity took place with speech. The work of Whorf and Sapir shows that the spoken language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication. (‘Alphabet Mother of Invention’, McLuhan and Logan, Et Cetera 34, 373-83, 1977, emphasis added) ↩
  2. “One cannot but see Language itself as the supreme literary masterpiece, since every creation in this order reduces itself to a combination of forces in a given vocabulary, according to forms instituted once and for all.” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953, quoting Valery with emphasis added here). ↩
  3. Cf the end of Finnegans Wake: “Yes, tid. There’s where. First.” Tid is ‘time’ in Danish, hence English ‘tide’, which is essentially twofold and bi-directional, ebb and flow, end and beginning, back and forth. As Joyce goes on to put the point succinctly: “Us then.” ↩
  4. “Medium of intelligibility”: a subjective and objective genitive at once! This is a medium which first of all belongs to intelligibility aka “language itself” — subjective genitive. But at the same time intelligibility gives itself over to humans through this medium — objective genitive. ↩
  5. How the missing of the message relates to Being and to “language itself” is the great question. In McLuhan’s view, this is the “beyond” of “dialogue” — aka of “language itself” — considered as both a subjective and an objective genitive. ↩
  6. “Blast Sputnik for enclosing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.” Counterblast, 85 ↩
  7.  ‘Intelligible’ in the sense first of all of its being, of its inherent animation and psyche, not of our conception of it. This is the ‘intelligible’ in its full sense, not in our always finite notion of it. ↩
  8. The end of Finnegans Wake continues: “Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous-endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given!” “Take” becomes “Given” as memory works against “me-me-mor(e)-mee” in the recall of an original plurality where “thous” “end” singular “thee”, just as in a kiss (“keys” “Bussoftlhee”) the singular ‘I’ is lost in the giving/receiving action of the two or four “Lps”. This is “The keys to. Given!” ↩
  9. Recall neither rejects the gap nor identifies with it. It situates itself in a fitting distance from it but just as much also towards it. ↩
  10. Compare (as discussed in “language itself“): “The spoken word instantly (…) 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, 1953). ↩
  11. Cf Counterblast (1969) 13: “a cosmic invisible architecture of the human dark”. Interesting that the word ‘clap’ appears in these two contexts. ↩
  12. Note that this (the “discontinuities or aspects of the single Word”) is another way of describing McLuhan’s Take Today 22 point 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”. ↩

Language itself

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“Every letter is a godsend,” wrote Joyce. And, much more, every word is an avatar, a revelation, an epiphany. For every word is the product of a complex mental act with a complete learning process involved in it. In this respect words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective. The conventional meanings of words can thus be used or disregarded by Joyce, who is concentrating on the submerged metaphysical drama which these meanings often tend to overlay. His puns in the Wake are a technique for revealing this submerged drama of language, and Joyce relied on the quirks, “slips,” and freaks of ordinary discourse to evoke the fullness of existence in speech. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

Take Today 22 speaks of “the usual but hidden processes of the present”. These “usual” or constant “processes” are the medium for all individual human experience and for all collective social and cultural experience as well — like water for fish and all their various pods and schools. As “the principle of intelligibility” — that which originates and grounds all intelligibility — this “hidden” medium may be called “dialogue” and is said in this same place to be “a process of creating the new [that] came before, and goes beyond”. It is a ferment whose dynamism is so fundamental (“came before”) that it is plural not only ‘in itself’ as “dialogue”, but also “beyond” itself: it “goes beyond the exchange of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old.” Thus it is that the fundamental “principle of intelligibility” inherently generates intelligibilities — plural — even as it hides its singularity. As McLuhan cites Theodore Lipps below, it is “the simple clang [that] represents to a certain extent all music.”

This singular/plural medium, the underlying “discontinuous juxtaposition” (as McLuhan wrote to Innis in 1951), was McLuhan’s standing topic from start to finish. Often, as reflected in the following series of texts from 1938 to 1978, he called it “language itself“:

  • Donne, and the later Shakespeare, on the one hand, and the Romantics on the other, have been read at Cambridge as though they were contemporaries of Mr. Eliot — which of course they are. For the continuing life of the language itself is such as to constitute a medium in which they are all contemporary. (The Cambridge English School, 1938) 
  • The origin of this important claim for the inseparable character of eloquence and wisdom would seem to lie in the familiar doctrine of the Logos, which may be supposed to have arisen with Heraclitus. Society is a mirror or speculum of the Logos, as, indeed, are the external world, the mind of man and, above all, human speech. (An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America, 1945)
  • 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)
  • [Theodore] Lipps [1851-1914] is of special importance for an understanding of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot: “The simple clang represents to a certain extent all music. The clang is a rhythmical system built up on a fundamental rhythm. This fundamental rhythm is more or less richly differentiated in the rhythm of the single tones.”1 (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951) 
  • Language itself (…) at once the greatest mass medium of communication and also the greatest time-builder of cultures and civilizations. (The Later Innis, 1953)
  • To glance in brief succession at the trivium and quadrivium in Joyce is to begin with grammatica or philology. This involves speech itself, which has been properly named as the main protagonist of every work of Joyce. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)
  • The first work of Adam in the Garden, says Bacon, was the viewing of creatures and the imposition of names. Such is the work of Stephen, poet and philologian, on the strand — the binding of Proteus, the reading of signatures and evocation of quiddity by the imposition of names. Some power more than human, says Socrates in the Cratylus (a dialogue named for the grammarian who was Plato’s teacher) gave things their first names. In the Wake the origins of speech as gesture are associated with “Bigmeister Finnegan of the stuttering hand.” This seems to tie up with Vico’s view that the earliest language was that of the gods of which Homer speaks: “The gods call this giant Briareus” of the hundred hands. The idea of speech as stuttering, as arrested gesture, as discontinuities or aspects of the single Word, is basic to the Wake and serves to illustrate the profundity of the traditional philological doctrine in Joyce. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)
  • Paul VaIery (Variety V) expresses our contemporary sense of these matters: “It is the domain of the ‘figures’ with which the ancient rhetoric was concerned and which today has been almost abandoned by pedagogy. This neglect is regrettable. The formation of figures is inseparable from that of language itself, in which all ‘abstract’ words are obtained by some abuse or transfer of signification, followed by oblivion of the primitive meaning. . . . Moreover, in considering these things from the highest point of view, one cannot but see Language itself as the supreme literary masterpiece, since every creation in this order reduces itself to a combination of forces in a given vocabulary, according to forms instituted once and for all.” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)
  • language itself is the greatest of all mass media. The spoken word instantly (…) 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. The artist is older than the fish2. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)
  • language itself is the principal channel and view-maker of experience for men everywhere. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)
  • language is the great collective work of art transcending all individual works (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954)
  • For language itself is an acoustic medium which incorporates gesture and all the various combinations of sensuous experience in a single medium… (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956)
  • 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’.” (The Little Epic, late 1950s, unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive)
  • 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 3. The particular technology of a time releases some of that inexhaustible store of analogical intuition and experience which IS language. (Communication Media: Makers of the Modern World, 1959)
  • The culture-hero as conceived in our time by James Joyce (Stephen Hero) is he who has learned the technique of intercession between the profane and the divine. He is the inventor of language4, the one who can capture in his net the divine powers. (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)
  • language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience (GG 1962) 
  • the notion of the medium of the language itself as a public trust rather than [as an exploitable resource] of the reader as private consumer. (GG, 1962)
  • symbolism strove to recover [language itself as] the unified field of being (GG 1962)
  • the alphabet and kindred gimmicks have long served man as a subliminal source of philosophical and religious assumptions. Certainly Martin Heidegger would seem to be on better ground in using the totality of language itself as philosophical datum (GG, 1962)
  • language itself [is] the accumulated store of perception to which the writer owes the deepest responsibility. That is why Pope made such an issue of dullness, for he saw the hack writers as people not only without perception, but as creators of a collective opacity in language, which is the very instrument of perception. (The Functions of Art, 1963) 
  • It [UM] explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at them anew, accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. (UM, 1964)
  • In our time, study has finally turned to the medium of language itself as shaping the arrangements of daily life, so that society begins to look like a linguistic echo or repeat of language norms. (UM 1964) 
  • For language itself is the collective mask of a culture, even as its resources and powers for channelling perception are the prime concern of the poet. With language, the poet assumes the corporate mask. (Masks And Roles And The Corporate Image, 1964)
  • In Vico and in the Wake language Itself becomes the memory theatre and the scene of dramatic action and change. (McLuhan to Sheila Watson, December 8, 1966.)
  • Folklorists and anthropologists had recovered the tribal and social memories of whole cultures at the same time that the symbolist poets had come to regard language itself as the inclusive storehouse of racial memories. (‘The Memory Theatre’, 1967)
  • No matter how the specialist of language or science strives to isolate his studies, he will find them resonating with the patterns and intensities of fields remote from his own. And is not the ground and existence of the common and shared measures of the language itself a main reason for this shared consciousness? (Roles, Masks, and Performance 1971)
  • The world that Yeats alludes to as “A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street” is endlessly alluded to as the “midden heap” in Finnegans Wake. In Beckett’s Breath it is the global theatre “littered with miscellaneous and unidentifiable rubbish.” Each of these artists handles his “midden heap,” his “Waste Land“, in a unique way. Beckett’s world is managed by both narrative and drama. Joyce presents it as “language itself in action.” (‘Man as the Medium’, 1975) 
  • as the very informing principle of cosmic action, it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. (‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976)
  • the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language5. (GV 1978)

 

  1. McLuhan cites from the 1926 translation of the second edition (1905) of Lipps’ Psychologische Studien: “Der einfache Klang repräsentiert in gewisser Weise das Ganze der Musik. Der Klang ist ein rhythmisches System, aufgebaut auf einem Grundrhythmus. Dieser Grundrhythmus wird in den Rhythmen der einzelnen Töne mehr oder weniger reich differenziert.” ↩
  2. “The artist is older than the fish”: McLuhan here cites Lewis from Men Without Art (as he did repeatedly). The idea is that the artist swims in the first and oldest medium, that of “language itself”. ↩
  3. See ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types the more metaphysical world of the Wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. (…) They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages of apprehension, that Joyce found the archetype of poetic imitation. He seems to have been the first to see that the dance of being, the nature imitated by the arts, has its primary analogue in the activity of the exterior and interior senses. Joyce was aware that this doctrine (that sensation is imitation because the exterior forms are already in a new matter) is implicit in Aquinas. He made it explicit in Stephen Hero and the Portrait, and founded his entire poetic activity on these analogical proportions of the senses. (…) The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama.” ↩
  4. “The inventor of language” is primarily a subjective genitive — an inventor that first of all belongs to language itself. ↩
  5. Again a subjective genitive. ↩

McLuhan and Leavis: For Continuity

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When McLuhan began his MA studies in Cambridge in 1934, he was exposed for the first time to close consideration of great modern figures like Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lewis. While these writers were generally in the air at the time, in Cambridge if not in Winnipeg, McLuhan’s initiation to them, and to engaged attention with them, came especially through the quarterly literature journal, Scrutiny, which was published at Cambridge, beginning in 1932, by F R Leavis (1895-1978). 

A collection of Leavis essays, nearly all from Scrutiny, were published in 1933, just before McLuhan’s arrival. The title of this collection, For Continuity, captured a life-long fascination of McLuhan. While he was in process then of developing a fundamentally different notion of the nature of continuity from that of Leavis1, Leavis’s view of it did resonate with McLuhan and came to exercise a decided influence on him, especially over the next 10 to 15 years of his career.

The following texts from For Continuity illustrate Leavis’s sense of continuity which McLuhan took upon himself to think together with somewhat related, but ultimately incompatible, ideas from Chesterton, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lewis and Maritain. 

4
we — those of us who (…) deduce the need to work very actively for cultural continuity….
 
17 
Change has been so catastrophic that the generations find it hard to adjust themselves to each other, and parents are helpless to deal with their children. It seems unlikely that the conditions of life can be transformed in this way without some injury to the standard of living (to wrest the phrase from the economist [and therefore to mean something like the ‘spiritual standard of living’]): improvisation can hardly replace the delicate traditional adjustments, the mature, inherited codes of habit and valuation, without severe loss, and loss that may be more than temporary. It is a breach in continuity that threatens: what has been inadvertently dropped may be irrecoverable or forgotten.
 
49
social changes (…) have virtually broken continuity. The standards that, maintained in a living tradition, constituted a surer taste than any individual as such can pretend to, have gone with the tradition; there is now no centre and no authority, so that Mr. Eastman, Mr. Nicolson, Mr. Priestley or Mr. Walpole can assume authority without being in the eyes of the world ridiculous.
 
64
It is to the culture that transcends the individual as the language he inherits transcends him that we come back; to the culture that has decayed [along] with tradition. The standards maintained in such a tradition (…) constitute a surer taste than any individual can pretend to. And it is not merely a matter of literary taste. The culture in question, which is not, indeed, identical with literary tradition but which will hardly survive it, is a sense of relative value and a memory — such wisdom as constitutes the residuum of the general experience. It lives only in individuals, but individuals can live without it; and where they are without it they do not know what they miss. And the world, troubled as it is, is unaware of what is gone. So nearly complete is the gap in cultural consciousness…
 
65
To revive or replace a decayed tradition is a desperate undertaking; the attempt may seem futile. But perhaps there will be some agreement that no social or political movement unrelated to such an attempt could engage one’s faith and energy. The more immediate conclusions would seem to bear upon education. No one aware of the problem will entertain easy hopes, for, inevitably, the machinery of education works in with the process of the modern world…

65
Unhappily, the connotations of the term “academic” are of ill augury: the concern for “tradition” that I have in mind will not be that commonly associated with formal education. Everything must start from and be related to the training of sensibility, that kind of training in which Mr. Richards2 [1893–1979] was a pioneer.

76-77
Mass-production, standardisation, levelling-down — these three terms convey succinctly, what has happened. Machine-technique has produced change in the ways of life at such a rate that there has been something like a breach of continuity (…) for the tradition has dissolved : the centre — [Mathew] Arnold’s ” centre of intelligent and urbane spirit”3 which, in spite of his plaints, we can see by comparison to have existed in his day — has vanished. 
 
143
Civilised life is certainly threatened with impoverishment by education based on crude and defective psychology, by standardisation at a low level, and by the inculcation of a cheap and shallow emotional code.
 
146
[D H Lawrence’s] crude hope of picking up (for he certainly believed a casting-back to be necessary) the lost continuity here, or there, in this or that primitive people.
 
147
It is plain from his books that [Lawrence] was not able to maintain steady confident possession of what he sought — wholeness in spontaneity; a human naturalness, inevitable, and more than humanly sanctioned; a sense, religious in potency, of life in continuity of communication with the deepest springs, giving fulfillment in living, “meaning” and a responsive relation with the cosmos
 
158
“Thank God,” said Lawrence, “I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.” While he said also, “Unless from us the future takes place we are death only,” it was in the past that he was rooted. Indeed, in our time, when the gap in continuity is almost complete, he may be said to represent, concretely in his living person, the essential human tradition4; to represent, in an age that has lost the sense of it, human normality, as only great genius could.
 
188
We assume an “inner human nature,” and our recognition that it may be profoundly affected by the “economic process” persuades us that it must rally, gather its resources and start training itself for its ultimate responsibility at once.
 
217-218
It is an order that is gone (…) and there are no signs of its replacement by another: the possibility of one that should offer a like richness of life, of emotional, mental and bodily life in association, is hardly even imaginable. Instead we have cultural disintegration, mechanical organisation and constant rapid change.
 
218-219
We have poets in our own day, and James Joyce wrote Ulysses. For how long a cultural tradition can be perpetuated in this way one wonders with painful tension. Language, kept alive and rejuvenated by literature, is certainly an essential means of continuity and transition — to what? We are back at the question, which has been raised in Scrutiny before and will be again, if Scrutiny performs its function, whether there can be a culture based on leisure, and if so, what kind. We can demand no more than the certitude that there are certain things to be done and cared for now.
 
 

 

  1. Where Leavis regretted any “gap” in continuity and urged its repair, McLuhan would come to emphasize the gap as fundamental to continuity — a difference between the two which was ultimately religious. ↩
  2. I A Richards, arguably the leading figure in English studies in Cambridge during McLuhan’s time there, influenced McLuhan in many ways which will be considered in future posts. See his Meaning of Meaning (with C K Ogden) and Practical Criticism. ↩
  3. Leavis cites from Arnold’s 1864 “The Literary Influence of Academies” ↩
  4. Lawrence increasingly came to represent “the essential human tradition” for Leavis. This valorization hinged on Lawrence’s supposed integrity. The difference between Leavis and McLuhan on this point mirrors that later between Mailer and McLuhan as regards what Mailer called “alienation”. In the video see especially 24:05ff. ↩

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 3: “McLuhan is a charlatan”

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At the end of the 1960s, McLuhan’s trajectory through the heights of acclaim began a precipitous decline which lasted until his death a decade later — and then continued for further decades beyond that. Even today, 35 years after his death, McLuhan’s reputation remains decidedly clouded by charges that his scholarship was shoddy at best and that he was a complete “charlatan” at worst with no scholarship at all.

One of those who dismissed McLuhan out of hand was Carroll Quigley (1910-1977), an influential professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington. Quigley was a conservative Catholic who may have found McLuhan particularly distasteful as a traitor in the ranks. Here are some excerpts from a review — ‘McLuhan as a Global Verbalizer‘ — which Quigley published in the Washington Star for September 15, 1968:

It is quite evident that McLuhan cannot think, and there is considerable evidence, as I shall show, that he cannot read (…) McLuhan is not interested in communication either as transmitter or receiver (…) McLuhan neither knows nor cares to know how electronic systems really operate. Instead he pounds away at these misconceptions (…) McLuhan ‘s ignorance is monumental, almost total. (…) How could a man like this win the fame and fortune our society provides to him?

A  month later Quigley followed up this review with a letter to the Washington Post (October 20, 1968) — ‘One page of McLuhan’ (given below his Washington Star review on the same page of a website maintained in Quigley’s memory). Here he stated for the record that “McLuhan is a charlatan” and made his case for this charge by fact-checking “one page of McLuhan”. Quigley showed in his letter (and in less detailed fashion also in his review) that page 25 of War and Peace in the Global Village is full of assertions which are either false on their face or are at least highly questionable (though presented by McLuhan in his usual never-in-doubt fashion). He then asked:

What are we to make of scholarship like this? Is this deliberate fraud, or is McLuhan unable to read? I think that the latter may well be the case. At least it is more charitable. But let us not call work like this “scholarship”.

It must be admitted that much of Quigley’s case is not far off the mark. With the possible exception of his selected criticism in The Interior Landscape, not a single one of McLuhan’s 151 or so books qualifies as “scholarship” in its usual sense. The Gutenberg Galaxy is generally thought to have been the best of them and won a Governor General’s award –- but around a quarter of it consists of citations which are sometimes very long and often hard to identify as citations. Just like The Mechanical Bride, Through the Vanishing Point and Culture Is Our Business, The Gutenberg Galaxy is more a series of commentaries on the work of others than it is a work of sustained scholarship. Verbi-Voco-Visual, Medium is the Massage, War and Peace in the Global Village and Counterblast are all books which attack the form of the book and perhaps especially the form of the scholarly book. Four of his remaining books are strikingly uneven collaborative efforts, two of them posthumous assemblages from notes, dictations and recordings left behind at his death.

In fact, all of McLuhan’s books after The Gutenberg Galaxy show clear signs of hasty construction. Sustained argument is almost unknown. Contradictions or at least hazy conceptions abound: “electric technology” may be presented as a saving or as a damning development; the visual era may be presented as lasting 2500 years (since the invention of the alphabet) or 400 years (since Gutenberg) or 200 years (since the industrial revolution); the Gutenberg galaxy may be presented as ending with the telegraph or with television or as continuing in and through them; the “tribal age” may be presented as a lost day of innocence or as a continuing night of violence; media may be presented as characterizing whole epochs, or various cultures, or some societies, or different individuals, or single works of art or aspects of single works of art — as well, of course, as both instruments of communication and all their various products like photographs, recorded music and film. Further yet, all of McLuhan’s books after The Gutenberg Galaxy are tiresomely repetitive. The supposed “Balinese saying” that “We have no art, we do everything as well as possible”, to take only one example, appears in Understanding Media and then in practically every one of his books thereafter as well as in many of his essays and lectures.

The undeniable impression is that McLuhan wanted to get stuff out the door and didn’t much care how it stacked up in terms of scholarship. He notoriously refused to proof his work or even to correct mistakes when they were pointed out to him. He frequently maintained that ordinary conversation is the only standard for genuine communication and noted that it does just fine without much attention to grammar or facts or logic. So why bother with these in books?

McLuhan’s poor health after his 1960 stroke, and particularly after his 1967 brain operation, may be thought to have played an important role here. He may no longer have been capable of the sort of sustained attention he had previously brought to his work. Further, both his parents died in the 1960’s, his mother following a stroke, and he himself had at least these two very close calls with the grim reaper. He may well have thought that speed of production was more important than quality control. Another complication in these years was his turn to a kind of academic showmanship. This both busied his schedule and further distanced him from traditional scholarly roles and goals. (Not that he had ever been comfortable as a scholar!  For at least two decades following the start of his academic career in 1937 McLuhan repeatedly expressed his determination to find another vocation.)

The result of all these factors has been that McLuhan research remains restricted to the remote borders of academic respectability. While he did indeed seem to see things — arguably very important things — which scholars of his time missed (so that his work remains alive in ways theirs does not), it is a painfully open question how to relate his insights to the strange form in which we have them. 

Contemporary McLuhan researchers like Lamberti or Marchessault rightly emphasize the importance of attention to how McLuhan said or wrote what he had to to say or write. But attention of this sort is invariably directed to purportedly positive aspects of his “rhetorical practice”. Hence the attraction of the idea that McLuhan authored “menippean satire”. Sure, McLuhan seems to have had his faults, so the argument runs, but these faults were in the service of an ancient style, or anti-style, in terms of which they may be seen as contributing virtues. Contradictions, gaps, repetitions, bombast, uneven construction — all money in the bank for such capitalists of scholarship!

The contrary suggestion here is that literally everything depended for McLuhan on the perception that faults as faults exist within a saved world — and that they are even the special sign of it. As he wrote in a letter to Joe Keough (July 6,1970):

I have no interest at all in the academic world and its attempts at tidying up experience. (Letters 448)

For McLuhan, “tidying up experience” included not only the rituals of scholarship, but also and far more importantly all those correlations and retracings through which humans have remade the world. This was a process which began with language as “the discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items” (as he wrote to Innis) and thus with that “thought and perception” which this power of “discontinuous juxtaposition” first enabled in human being (thereby initiating us as human beings). The power thus given to human beings then developed exponentially in our hands and eventually culminated in the “electric age” with its “proscenium arch” of satellites and its abolition of nature in favor of art:

The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation. (GV 93)

Now “tidying up experience” in this way is one of the wings which carry humans in their being. The alphabet as “mother of invention”, the “Gutenberg galaxy” and the “satellite surround” are all reflexes of this uncanny power and represent our gradual extension of it around the earth and finally into the heavens themselves. All re-present a retrieval or retracing of the power of that original “resonating bond” which may be called “dialogue” or language or Logos. Human being is in this way one-half characterized by the fact that this power has unaccountably been given over to it to imitate (via retrieval, retracing, replay and recognition) in such a way as to direct and even control it.

But this power is subject to a triple forgetfulness in regard to the other wing of2 human being: particularity and utter finitude. It forgets in the first place that human language, and hence thought and perception, are possible only as inflections of finitude3. And it forgets, in the second place, that inflections of finitude can constitute and convey meaning, and so enable “thought and perception”, and thereby initiate human being, only on the basis of a prior “resonating bond” to which this chain of possibility owes literally everything. And lastly, in the third place, it forgets that it has forgotten these things.

For McLuhan, emergence from the prison-house of the “hominization of the planet” depended on the re-call of this triple forgetfulness. Only by recalling their ineluctable finitude could humans understand the enabling condition of language, thought and perception and thereby of themselves as humans. And only by recalling the sway of such finitude in this way could humans then recall that unaccountable prior “resonating bond in all things” (Take Today 3) through which language — and hence thought and perception and hence human being — are first of all constituted.

A “saved world” cannot be saved in part. It must be saved as a whole or not at all. This presents the Gutenberg galaxy with an unsolvable problem. Try as it might, it cannot see the two wings of human being, meaning and finitude, as mutually implicating. In its foundational “one at a time” lineal fashion, it is driven to see finitude and meaning as ultimately contradictory. The origin of things and the end of things, if thought is ever given to these extremes, are conceived as some variety of monolithic merger (“chaos”, “nothing” and “darkness” are now in fashion where “order” and “being” and “light” have also had their day).  More usually, only the unconscious reflexes of such fundamental determinations are in place in a present where the incompatibility of meaning and finitude presents all sorts of staggering problems and especially prevents (what is imagined of) “belief”.

McLuhan could see that what is fundamentally at stake here is a question of the approach to experience. His work from start to finish was therefore an attempt to expose the plurality of approaches to experience — media — to which humans are subject. But the key to an understanding of this question lay in the matter of finite particularity. Only if finite particularity were valued utterly without cosmetics and deodorants could it be seen as belonging together with meaning. And this on several grounds. In the first place, if media as approaches to experience are plural, the “selection” of one or another of them is itself inherently particular and finite. Secondly, if finite particularity were experienced in some deodorized fashion, this would not only reflect a prior selection of some approach to it, it would also change it into something else. It would not be finite particularity at all. Thirdly, the foundational role of language in the constitution of human being, indeed of all being, could be understood only where the necessity of finite particularity to it were acknowledged.

So McLuhan’s task was a difficult twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to expose the fact that human nature is just as intelligible as physical nature has proved to be.  On the other, he needed to emphasize the finite particularity of both the objective and subjective sides of such investigation.

In this context, the faults of McLuhan’s scholarship may be seen in a new light — or in a new direction of light, “light from” rather than “light on”. These are real faults.  But he seems to have gone out of his way, not only not to exclude them, but to highlight them. And now it can be seen why.  The valuation of finite particularity, indeed of outright faults, already determines whether or not escape velocity from the Gutenberg galaxy has or has not been achieved.

  1. Because of the unusual nature of his books and the various collaborations represented by them, even their number is hard to specify. Janine Marchessault gives it, not as 15, but as 8! (Cosmic Media, xv) ↩
  2. Gen obj! ↩
  3. Gen obj and subj! ↩

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 2: on “true strength”

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What has happened to the planet in its trajectory through the Gutenberg galaxy is that it has become “trapped in an assumption about the nature of reality” (GV 77) which is especially blinding:

In the left hemisphere [type of experience], formal cause is translated into a kind of Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material. (GV 78)

This is an outlook that cannot break itself free from a force-field in which vision is restricted to “an abstract sequence or movement isolated from ground” (GV 80). Within this fixation, limitation and cliché are taken as negative markers indicating insignificance and lack of substance and reality. No particular instance is perceived to be “realized”, let alone “perfectly realized”. Perfect realization is held instead to characterize only an “abstract ideal” which does not actually exist and which could not actually exist. And yet it is this dead hand that is conceived to shadow all that would otherwise seem existent and alive. (This is the gnostic gambit, to be treated in later posts…)

Further, in accord with Blake’s dictum, often cited by McLuhan, that “they became what they beheld” (eg, GG 265/272), this outlook necessarily views itself in the same way as it views everything else. It senses that it, too, is “isolated from ground” and is just as unreal and dead as everything else. (One aspect of this topic is McLuhan’s thesis that the “content of any medium is always another medium” (UM 8). Far more important than the re-use of books in film or of film in TV is the implication here of the “fly in the fly-bottle” predicament. This problem will be treated in detail in later posts. Suffice it to note here that the force of this concern turns on the subject of the present post: namely, the death grip of a “Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material”. The predicament of the fly in the fly-bottle is exactly that it conceives of form (the fly-bottle) in opposition to content (the ‘outside’) and therefore cannot get to the latter on account of the former. But the fly-bottle ceases to imprison as soon as the fly realizes that form and content may be mutually implicating rather than mutually exclusive.)

Now what alone energizes this force-field is the subject’s own hold to the idea that “ideal form (…) is never perfectly realized in any material”. To break with this hold is difficult precisely because of the subject’s own (owning!) identification with it. Although it is an outlook and vision by which it itself is ultimately stripped of all reality, the subject cannot loosen its grip since this ideal appears to it to be the standard of genuine being and, therefore, all that it itself has and is.  But the strength of this hold to an “abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material” is the Gutenberg galaxy!

As discussed in The Innis Letter of 1951 (2), what is necessary in this situation is for the subject to go through its own lack of reality in which “where you are is where you are not” (as Eliot puts it following San Juan’s “para venir a lo que no eres / has de ir por donde no eres”).  Of course, this is just where the subject already is — or is not! But the modern superman cannot face this dark night of unknowing and prefers instead to flail about destroying everything alive in the name of its dead ideal. It is not able — because lacking the courage to attempt?  because caught in a net of despair? because confusing light with darkness? because taking dumb to unprecedented heights? — to attempt what McLuhan suggests over and over again:

like Alice, he must pass through the vanishing point, to see both sides of the mirror (GV xii, emphasis added)

What then comes into view for the first time is the relativity of Gutenbergian vision:

Alice went through the vanishing point into the “total field” that bridges the worlds of visual and acoustic, civilized and primal spaces. (Take Today 9-10, emphasis added)

Alice in Through the Looking Glass. Before she went through the looking glass, she was in a visual world of continuity and connected space where the appearance of things matched the reality. When she went through the looking glass, she found herself in a non-visual world where nothing matched and everything seemed to have been made on a unique pattern. (Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 253)

Where “everything seemed to have been made on a unique pattern“, the relation of form to content aka material realization is seen not to be fixed but to be endlessly variable. What Alice learned by her experience “on both sides of the looking glass” (Take Today 121) was that “realization” is not singular but plural and that, in order to appreciate “realization”, the first thing necessary is to appreciate that plurality.

approaching letters and words from many points of view simultaneously (…) minus the assumption that any one way is solely correct. (GV 64)

Hence McLuhan’s refusal to endorse any point of view.

The end of page 22 of Take Today reads as follows:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.

“Dialogue as a process of creating the new that came before” is an original “combination” or plurality that re-peats itself (“goes beyond) into further pluralities. This is a repetition, however, that does not “merely reflect or repeat the old”, but instead is the power of “a process of creating the new” — it is that most peculiar sort of original plurality that “goes beyond” itself in such a way as to free radical difference(s) from itself: “the new”. But what is “beyond” plural dialogue in the sense of radical difference from it is only the sort of singularity for which “abstract ideal form (…) is never perfectly realized in any material” — exactly because lacking “dialogue” with it! It thus comes into view that original “dialogue” as original “dialogue” requires its own oblivion as the only way in which it can be the sort of radical plurality required by it as original and as “dialogue”.  Only so can it effect its own repetition in difference as its way of “creating the new”…

Earlier on TT page 22, McLuhan cites the I Ching on the rule of such original “innovation” (what “came before”) as “dialogue”. It is that which lies hidden in what it itself brings forth from itself in “creating the new”:

innovation “does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.”

This is “true strength” because it is both decided and able to replicate itself as what it is not. Hence it is that what seems to be its absence is in fact its “mobile” ex-pression of itself out of itself.  This is why it remains “hidden” and is never “outwardly visible”. At the same time, this absence from itself is exactly its strength and the way it is able to “guide all happenings, but (….) never behaves outwardly as the leader.”

 

GV and TT p22 — Commentary 1: “the great quantum leap”

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The selection of GV texts given in GV and TT p22 concludes with this one:

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. (GV 16)

This short passage goes to the very heart of McLuhan’s thought.

TT 22 and GV concern the structural form which McLuhan perceived as grounding all particular examples of human experience, individual and collective.  This structural form of media in human experience is comparable to the structural forms of the element in chemistry and of DNA in genetics.  Further commentaries on GV and TT p22 will examine this structural form, the range of its expression and its uses in the humanities and social sciences which could have the effect of reinstituting them on this new basis.

But an understanding of McLuhan’s insight must begin with an understanding of its particularity and its acknowledged fallibility. Neither what McLuhan saw nor how he saw it were de-finitive.  Just as was the case with initial insight into the formal structure of the chemical element in the nineteenth century and with initial insight into the formal structure of DNA in the twentieth, both the what and the how of McLuhan’s perception will forever be subject to adjustment, revision, correction and even revolution.

The decisive question has nothing to do with the match between McLuhan’s perception — the how — with the purported reality or truth of what he perceived. Instead, as subjectively and objectively finitive (= not de-finitive1), McLuhan’s insight was nothing more than cliché as regards both how it envisioned and what it envisioned:

It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché.

The matter of finitive particularity or cliché is explained by McLuhan and Watson (as formulated by Eric McLuhan?2) as follows:

The function of (…) cliché is to select for use one item or one feature out of a vast middenheap of (…) materials. (…) The function of (…) cliché depends upon the suppression of huge quantities of unconscious (…) materials. (…) A mind has many rationales; a cliché probe stresses only one of these at a time. The others are dismissed into the unconscious. (From Cliché to Archetype, 39-40)

A cliché is both arbitrary and utterly partial. The great question is: how is it that at the same time it can reveal?

McLuhan found it astonishing that his contemporaries could not understand this question in regard to the humanities — and especially not in regard to religion — at the same time that admittedly partial insight was spectacularly successful in the hard sciences in exploring all aspects of the physical universe and even in creating atomic weapons and going to the moon. In this respect no different from the physical sciences, of course religion is cliché — but how else, McLuhan must be understood as asking, could it possibly be?

To be anything at all is to be particular and finite! But as we know very well in our own experience, and as we know especially from the successes of hard science in the last 200 years, particular ways of addressing particular questions can indeed reveal what is going on in them.

The key to the GV p16 passage cited at the head of this post lies in the word “retrieved”: that passage has to do with “retrieved awareness or consciousness”, with “a retrieved combination”. “Retrieved” (from re-trouvé or ‘re-found’) appears over and over again in McLuhan’s work as “re-play”, “re-tracing”, “re-cognition”. What is retrieved (re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) is that initial, indeed initiating, “awareness or consciousness” through which humans first appear as humans.

Such “awareness or consciousness” is initiated by and through language:

If one must choose the one dominant factor which separates man from the rest of the animal kingdom, it would undoubtedly be language. The ancients said: “Speech is the difference of man”. Opposition of the thumbs and fingers and an erect stature were certainly key developments in the separation of man from animals, but the great quantum leap of intellectual capacity took place with speech. The work of Whorf and Sapir shows that the spoken language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication. (‘Alphabet Mother of Invention’, McLuhan and Logan, Et Cetera 34, 373-83, 1977)

Both “thought and perception”, without which humans would not be human, are enabled by language.  But language itself functions esentially through the finitive. The human ear can recognize a broad range of sounds (though not as broad as the more intelligent dog), but every particular language, even every particular dialect, recognizes only a selection of these. The repertoire of sound used in any language represents only a finite selection of the sounds potentially available to it. Further, and yet more importantly, the particular sound associated with a certain meaning in any language is arbitrary: the sound of ‘tree’ is no more fitting to its meaning than is ‘Baum’ or ‘arbre’. Further yet, the grammatical structure of any language is again arbitrary and subject to wide variation relative to other languages and even relative to itself over time: English once had cases and genders, but now it does not. This does not mean that a language might do without grammar or that grammar doesn’t matter; it means that grammar is made, not matched. Only as a result of these different finitive factors do humans speak at all and in thousands of different languages.

Language is utterly finitive and yet it is exactly through such finitude that it constitutes itself and thereby constitutes human “thought and perception”. McLuhan agreed with Heidegger that humans do not invent language — since there is no “thought and perception” prior to it and therefore no human being to do the inventing! Humans are, therefore, not the primary speakers of language. Rather, it is “language itself” that first of all speaks itself and thereby invents (= ‘brings in’) humans: die Sprache spricht.

language itself is an infinitely greater work of art than the Iliad or the Aeneid, (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, M&L 157, 1954)

it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. (‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976)

James Joyce used language itself as the index of these modifications and explored them fully in Finnegans Wake. (Laws of Media 221, 1978?)

When language speaks, and when humans, consequently, have “thought and perception” and thereby first appear as humans, what results is ‘world’ — a ‘world’ which always appears in some correspondingly structured fashion and which is definitively limited by that structure:

  • The pre-neolithic art of making stone tools moved man out of the process of evolution and into a world of his own making. (GV 93)
  • The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation. (GV 93)
  • language as ground biases awareness (GV28)
  • We are all trapped in [some] assumption about the nature of reality (GV 77)

The limitation here which can be described as “bias“, or even as our being “trapped”, is also what at the same time illuminates and frees. Formation and deformation belong together here and each is as necessary as the other in bringing a world to modulated light.  ‘World’ without delimiting structure is as little possible as language without delimiting structure (such as the recognition of some particular range of audible sounds, a particular grammatical structure and particular sounds correlated to particular meanings).

When humans come to understand something, a fitting relation clicks into place between a particular way of looking and a domain.  A particular way of looking may be called ‘cliché’; a domain may be called the ‘archetype’, since it is the “overarching (…) milieu” of what is at stake in that domain. It is in relation to the archetype that a cliché must be evaluated; but at the same time only cliché can reveal a domain since only human perception, never more than finitive and so never more than cliché, can reveal domains for continued exploration. Exactly because no cliché can ever reveal an archetype fully, however, also what is known of the archetype is also finitive and is therefore itself cliché:

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. (GV 16)

The archetype is the full or “overarching” domain — for example, the chemical nature of physical materials. No human understanding of this domain is able to comprehend it fully (which is why we can investigate it forever) and to this extent our understanding is never more than cliché in regard to it — just as it itself remains cliché in comparison to its “overarching” fullness as archetype.

The great mystery is that humans can and do come to understand. Everything in the modern world testifies to this — except our striking ignorance of what the hell we ourselves as humans are up to.

McLuhan attempted to begin an exploration of our ignorance of the human domain through the preliminary identification of the elementary structure of human experience. Of course, for him and for all following investigation forever, this would always remain cliché. But cliché can and does have an essential relation with truth exactly as retrieval.

What is “retrieved” (re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) when cliché reveals an entrance-way into a domain is that founding relation between finitive sound and finitive meaning that first manifests language and communication. Such re-traced relation to the founding relation of language (subjective genitive!) is what McLuhan calls the “retrieved combination”. Its relation of signal and meaning grounds our “retrieved combination” with it and, consequently, our own combinations yielding meanings and discoveries in language and knowledge. Relating to it, we are able to relate things as speakers and to relate to domains as investigators. 

The founding relation of language is what first constitutes “thought and perception” and thereby human being and ‘world’. What McLuhan calls “the mythic milieu” (GV 16) is the story of these developments which do not occur in historical time, but are what first enables historical time. This is the story of how the “great quantum leap” initiating “the second phase of the original creation” is first of all enabled through the “great quantum leap” of “the original creation” itself:  the archetypal “great quantum leap”. It is this original power which occurs as re-play in all language use and in all practical and theoretical knowledge — and especially in our insight into new domains. 

This “great quantum leap” which initiates “the second phase of the original creation” is itself the “retrieved combination” with “the [first] phase of the original creation”. Because the beginning is already repetition3 or dialogue, and because that origin continues to power all subsequent history, so can it be re-peated (re-trieved, re-played, re-traced, re-cognized) by us. As McLuhan notes at the end of Take Today 22:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond…

So it is that within historical time, cliché can and does open new domains.  McLuhan contended that the “electric age” was the time when “cliché probe” would at last open the human domain. And it would do so, he further contended, by consciously aligning itself through retrieval with that original “quantum leap” or “magic”,  as he often described it, through which utterly arbitrary sound was first heard to communicate meaning.

it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. (‘Empedocles and T. S. Eliot’, 1976)

  1. De-finitive’: one of the uses of the common prefix ‘de‘ is to act as a privative, negating what follows: hence ‘defrost’, ‘defuse’, ‘definitive’. Compare ‘dis’ in ‘dishonest’, ‘disallow’, etc. ↩
  2. From Cliché to Archetype was published in 1970 and supposedly written by McLuhan and Wilfred Watson. But Watson claimed to have had little to do with the final form of the book and McLuhan himself was in no shape to have much to do with it following his brain surgery in 1968 — this aside from his increasing reluctance to play the role of the scholarly, but utterly ineffectual, academic. Philip Marchand and Fred Flahiff, a student and later colleague of McLuhan in the English department at St Mike’s, attribute the completion of the book to Eric McLuhan. ↩
  3. Repetition, cf repeat: “to say what one has already said”, from Old French repeter “say or do again, get back, demand the return of” (13c, Modern French répéeter), from Latin repetere “do or say again; attack again”, from re– “again” + petere “to go to; attack; strive after; ask for, beseech”. See petition: early 14c., “a supplication or prayer, especially to a deity”, from Old French peticion “request, petition” (12c., Modern French pétition) and directly from Latin petitionem (nominative petitio) “a blow, thrust, attack, aim; a seeking, searching”, in law “a claim, suit”, noun of action from past participle stem of petere “to make for, go to; attack, assail; seek, strive after; ask for, beg, beseech, request; fetch; derive; demand, require”, from PIE root *pet-, also *pete– “to rush; to fly” (cognates: Sanskrit pattram “wing, feather, leaf”, patara– “flying, fleeting”; Hittite pittar “wing”; Greek piptein “to fall”, potamos “rushing water”, pteryx “wing”: Old English feðer “feather”; Latin penna “feather, wing;” Old Church Slavonic pero “feather”; Old Welsh eterin “bird”). As may be seen in this etymology, the association of saying with wings is very ancient: Homer uses “winged words” over and over again.  This “combination” of words and wings is doubly significant. On the one hand, wings are always two: a bird with only one wing cannot fly. So a word must be both uttered and understood. On the other hand, the wings of words work through an intermediary space between a speaker and a hearer and between a sound and a meaning: between the two is “the gap is where the action is”. Absent this gap, twofold words with their two wings cannot fly — since without it they cannot be two and there is no medium for their back and forth. ↩

GV and TT p22

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Take Today page 22 (titled “OFF-Again — ON-Again — FINN-Again”) presents the quintessence of McLuhan’s thought, a distillation of his life’s work.  All the rest of his work may be read as commentary in various modes on this single page. Using some tags from The Global Village, the distillation and its commentary might be called:

the utterer as the etymology (GV 7)

Or:

consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added)

Or:

 percept instead of (…) prior assumptions. (GV 139)

 Here is TT 22 in a somewhat shortened version:

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, whether in business or in politics or in entertainment. Hence the anarchy of the contemporary world where all these forms coexist.

Dependent upon the materials and hence the technologies available to mankind, the pattern of social organization and management swings violently from stress on the entrepreneur and the virtues of the lonely individualist to the close-knit and emotionally involved group. In the diversified scope of modern business structures, these extremes can express themselves at different levels of the same organization. (…)

By the law of change, whatever has reached its extreme must turn back. (I Ching)

It is explained in the same context of this 4,000-year-old management manual [I Ching] that innovation “does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.” What is actually visible in new situations is the ghost of old ones. It is the movie that appears on TV. It is the old written word that appears on Telex. The hidden force of change is the new speed that alters all configurations of power. The new speed creates a new hidden ground against which the old ground becomes the figure (…)

All management theories and political ideologies follow an involuntary procedure. 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.

The Global Village, like all the rest of McLuhan’s work, may be read as an exegesis of this page.  Reordered and refocused on TT 22, here is an abbreviated version of it:

  • The first humanoid uttering his first intelligible grunt, or “word,” outered himself and set up a dynamic relationship with himself, other creatures, and the world outside his skin (…) a tool to reconstitute nature (…) to translate one form into another. (GV 93)
  • all words are metaphors (GV 30)
  • Structurally speaking, a metaphor is a technique of presenting one situation in terms of another situation. That is to say it is a technique of awareness, of perception. (GV28)
  • language (…) is an attempt to manipulate as well as interpret the world. (GV 130)
  • the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground, are forms of language. (GV 27)
  • all our artifacts are in fact words. All of these things are the outerings and utterings of man. (GV 7)
  • The pre-neolithic art of making stone tools moved man out of the process of evolution and into a world of his own making. (GV 93)
  • The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation. (GV 93)
  • language as ground biases awareness (GV28)
  • We are all trapped in an assumption about the nature of reality (GV 77)
  • The dominance of the left hemisphere (analytic and quantitative) — and by dominant we mean the ability of the left brain to lead the right brain in the context of Western culture — entails the submission or suppression of the right hemisphere…(GV 62)
  • dominance [means] controlling the principal problem-solving of the brain at any one time (GV 55)
  • the power to function asymmetrically (GV 50)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) the user as ground (GV 10)
  • Final cause (that which is the end or purpose of a process), inherent in a thing from the outset, came to be misinterpreted in left-hemisphere terms only as the end point of a whole series of efficient causes. (GV 78)
  • In the left hemisphere, formal cause is translated into a kind of Platonic abstract ideal form that is never perfectly realized in any material. (GV 78)
  • Angelism, sometimes called discarnatism (…) floats in the abstract clouds, without any relation to ground, or environment — the besetting sin of academic hypothesis. (GV 12)
  • Angelism is being chained to a fixed point of view, without ground.
  • Angelism (…) ensures a rigidity of point of view which is largely a consequence of linear and visual logic. It is best characterized as promoting confrontation and fragmentation, some of the chief elements in the illusion of objectivity. One emphasizes the eye over the ear. (GV 69)
  • The idea of the role was gradually lost sight of — that is, the multiple holding of partial jobs signifying one’s authority over a household. The specialist can always be seen to have one salient characteristic: he is quite willing to trade his freedom of action for the security and the stability of a closed system. (GV 96)
  • Whenever two cultures, or two events, or two ideas are set in proximity to one another, an interplay takes place, a sort of magical change. The more unlike the interface, the greater the tension of the interchange. (GV 4)
  • At this stage of greatest intensity of development, there will be an unanticipated reversal: the simultaneous will emerge from the sequential, the mythic from the historic, acoustic from visual space. The old ground rules of point-to-point logic will break down. And holism will then emerge as a dominant form of thinking,.. (GV 107)
  • “what may well be the most important distinction between the left and right hemisphere modes is the extent to which a linear concept of time participates in the ordering of thought”. (GV 74, citing “The Other Side of the Brain” by Joseph Bogen)
  • time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground. (GV 10)
  • approaching letters and words from many points of view simultaneously (…) minus the assumption that any one way is solely correct. (GV 64)
  • the ability to be equally empathetic in many areas at once. (GV 57)
  • The left hemisphere of the brain is figure against the ground of the right brain in Western culture and the opposite for the Oriental. (GV 71)
  • All individuals, their desires and satisfactions, are co-present in the age of communication. (GV 94)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added)
  • For use in the electronic age, a right-hemisphere model of communication is necessary, both because our culture has nearly completed the process of shifting its cognitive modes from the left to the right hemisphere, and because the electronic media themselves are right-hemisphere in their patterns and operation. The problem is to discover such a model that yet is congenial to our culture and its residua of left-hemisphere orientation. Such a model would have to take into account the apposition of both figure and ground (left and right hemispheres working together and independently when necessary) instead of an abstract sequence or movement isolated from ground. (GV 80)
  • Electric man loses touch with the concept of a ruling center (…) based on interconnection. (GV 93)
  • We must teach ourselves to abandon the tendency to view the environment in a hierarchical and totally connective way, to center ourselves instead in the arena of interplay between the two modes of perception and analysis, which is comprehensive awareness. (GV 47)
  • The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space  (GV 4)
  • Connections are visual: there is actually no connection between figure and ground but only interface. (GV 21)
  • A border is not a connection but an interval of resonance (GV 149)
  • the alignment of two actions without interconnection performs a kind of magical change in the interacting components. (GV 164)
  • there is no continuity or connection in the figure-ground relationship. Instead, there is an interface of a transforming kind (…) metaphorical positioning. (GV 23)
  • we should focus on the relationship between the cortical hemispheres (GV 52)
  • the relationship between the cortical hemispheres (…) is the projection of consciousness [obj gen!], consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52)
  • Consciousness (…) may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia, corresponding generally with the ancient definition of common sense. Common sense is that peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all other senses and presenting the result as a unified image of the mind. Erasmus and More said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality. (GV 94)
  • the utterer as the etymology (GV 7) (…) consciousness being the sum interaction between one’s self and the outside world. (GV 52, emphasis added) 
  • Anyone who has been involved in gestalt [psychology], or studied primitive societies — once he or she gets over the impulse to measure these societies with Western templates — is aware that either/or is not the only possibility. Both/and can also exist. (..) the “uncivilized,” can easily entertain two diametric[ally opposed] possibilities at once. (GV 39)
  • “yes” and “no”, the essence of the excluded middle (…) allows no consideration of opposites of equal power… (GV 107)
  • either-or [vs] both-and (…) matching [vs] making (…) logic and dialectic [vs] poiesis (…) concept [vs] percept (GV 31)
  • 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…(GV 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. (GV 48)
  • every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes. (GV x)
  • within each of man’s inventions (extensions of himself) left- and right-hemisphere modes of thought struggle for dominance (GV 102)
  • No matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres… (GV 62)
  • visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic. The latter is the invisible counter-environment that forms the background against which the civilization of the written word is seen. (GV 55)
  • The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our predecessors lived with the figure-minus-ground. (GV 26)
  • 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. (GV 16)

McLuhan to Innis 1951 (2)

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Continued from Part 1 of McLuhan’s letter to Harold Innis from March 14, 1951 (with italics and bold added except where noted):

Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the word “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious [emphasis from MM] far beyond any informative purpose. Politics were becoming musical, jazzy, magical. The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. S. Eisenstein’s Film Form and [V.I. Pudovkin’s] Film Technique explore the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology.1

McLuhan here restates the point made repeatedly in the opening of his letter: that time is plural and multi-directional and that the overlap of times is even now to be seen everywhere in contemporary life: “a return via technology to [the] age-old”. Here it is cinema that provides a further example:

the montage [in depth] of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language (…) to the common basis of [the ancient] ideogram [and] modern art, science and technology.

Once again, “perception” must not only discern such overlap. but must itself be it. For in order to focus such “montage”, It must itself first of all be “symbolist perception”, as McLuhan puts it here, or “double simultaneous perspective” (as McLuhan has it in his Sept 23, 1950 letter to Walter Ong). So it is that “symbolic landscape” names not only the exterior landscape of nature and city, but also a corresponding interior landscape. McLuhan’s later characterization of his selected criticism from 1943 to 1957 as The Interior Landscape (Baudelaire’s “paysage interieur” from Fleurs du Mal) therefore describes not only what was to be seen in his essays, but also how it was seen by him and, therefore, how it was to be seen by anyone who understand them.

But now, continuing his letter to Innis, McLuhan turns from exemplary illustrations of such “landscape” in “modern art, science and technology”, and even, indeed, in our “collective consciousness”, to a structural description of it. Both in regard to the perceived object and the perceiving subject, it is a “discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items“.

Heidegger maintains that every genuine thinker has only a single thought. If so, this is McLuhan’s single thought: the “discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items”.

This is a thought against which the assertion of the nihilist that we lack relation to reality is powerless. Similarly with the assertion of the atheist that we lack relation to God. Similarly with the assertion of the materialist that mind lacks the foundation that only body has, or the assertion of the idealist that body lacks the foundation that only mind has. In each of these assertions, connected relation — what McLuhan calls “matching” — is presupposed as the only proper evidence of coherence. But for McLuhan, it is rather “making” as the “discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items” that characterizes coherent relationship and only so is it that “the ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship” (Take Today, 3).

The suggestion that to be unrelated is to be related is, of course, supercilious “foolishness to the Greeks” (as St Paul has it).  This is why McLuhan repeatedly calls it “magical” in the passage above and throughout his work. This characterization is intended to call frank attention to the strangeness of the claim, as well as to the invisible and unconnected manner of operation which is proposed as being in play here.

The earnestness of the conception (Hegel’s Ernst des Begriffes) is to be appreciated, however, only where ‘to be unrelated’ is taken in its full finitude and utter emptiness. It is one thing to laugh at what seems to be nonsensical impossibility; it is quite another to enter into that dark night in which the ramifications of unrelation are borne into one. Eliot2 follows San Juan de la Cruz (in Subida al Monte Carmelo) in putting it this way (in ‘East Coker’):

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.3  

It is solely in and through such a vacuous gap that it may first be appreciated how “the gap where the action is” . The gapped object, be it in “modern art, science and technology” or in our “collective consciousness”, may be perceived only by the vacuously gapped subject — by “symbolist perception” aka “double simultaneous perspective”.

To describe the form at stake here, McLuhan repeatedly uses the term “magical”, but also, again repeatedly, “musical”. And like ‘magic’ and ‘magical’, the recourse to ‘music’ and ‘musical’ is made over and over again in his texts, from first to last. For example, here he is in his wonderful essay, ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ from 1951, the same year as his letter to innis:

Whereas in external landscape diverse things lie side by side, so in psychological landscape the juxtaposition of various things and experiences becomes a precise musical means of orchestrating that which could never be rendered by systematic discourse. Landscape is the means of presenting, without the copula of logical enunciation, experiences which are united in existence but not in conceptual thought. Syntax becomes music … (Essays in Criticism 1:3, emphasis added)

In the next year, in a letter to Pound he writes:

With landscape comes necessary musical adjustment of all parts of poetic composition. Juxtaposition of forces in field rather than continuous statement. (July 16, 1952, Letters 231/232, emphasis added)

Twenty years later, the central matter to be treated in Take Today is described as follows:

The interval or gap constitutes the resonant or musical bond in the material universe. This is where the action is. [Take Today, 3, emphasis added.]

 

 

  1. McLuhan’s reference to Russian formalist theory in cinema cites Film Form (essays written between 1928 and 1945 by Sergei Eisenstein, 1898 – 1948) and Film Technique (1929) by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893 – 1953). Film Technique was first issued in English translation in 1935; Film Form in 1949. ↩
  2.  McLuhan studied Eliot intensely, but with very ambiguous reactions, over a period of almost 50 years. Eliot’s art and criticism were central to his Cambridge studies, especially via Leavis, and two of his last essays before his 1979 stroke, both from 1978, were ‘Rhetorical Spirals in Four Quartets‘ and ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land‘. Around the time of his 1951 letter to Innis, McLuhan wrote ‘Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ (Renascence 2:1, Fall 1949) and was at work, sometimes jointly with Hugh Kenner, on a book on Eliot which was never completed.  Both published and unpublished essays on Eliot were to appear in The Great American Vortex which was assembled in 1949 but never published. The McLuhan papers in the National Archive of Canada have a very sizable number of Eliot files, unpublished typescripts and notes from all periods of McLuhan’s career. ↩
  3. Para venir a gustarlo todo,
    no quieras tener gusto en nada;
    para venir a saberlo todo,
    no quieras saber algo en nada;
    para venir a poseerlo todo,
    no quieras poseer algo en nada;
    para venir a serlo todo,
    no quieras ser algo en nada;
    Para venir a lo que no gustas,
    has de ir por donde no gustas;
    para venir a lo que no sabes,
    has de ir por donde no sabes;
    para venir a poseer lo que no posees,
    has de ir por donde no posees;
    para venir a lo que no eres,
    has de ir por donde no eres.
    Cuando reparas en algo,
    dejas de arrojarte al todo;
    para venir del todo al todo,
    has de dejarte del todo en todo,
    y cuando lo vengas del todo a tener;
    has de tenerlo sin nada querer.
    (San Juan de la Cruz, Subida al Monte Carmelo, 1.xiii.11) ↩

McLuhan to Innis 1951 (1)

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A fragment of McLuhan’s 1951 letter to Harold Innis has been cited in Why Science? In this and following posts, a detailed commentary will be made of this letter. It will be seen that the central pieces of McLuhan’s mature position were already in place at this early date.

By way of background, McLuhan was 40 in 1951. He had now been at UT (St Michael’s) for 5 years. As earlier described, he had begun to read Innis in the late 1940’s through the instigation of his old Winnipeg friend, Tom Easterbrook (who may also have been his conduit to Chesterton almost 20 years earlier)1. Easterbrook, in turn, had been a doctoral student of Innis in the UT Political Economy department in the 1930s and was now his colleague and close friend there. Along with Easterbrook and Innis, McLuhan had participated in The ‘Values Discussion Group‘ which the Rockefeller Foundation had sponsored at UT in 1949. At the same time, as set out in The Beginnings of Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan was already at work in the early 1950s on what would be published as The Gutenberg Galaxy a full 10 years later. And, finally, he was continuing to publish at an astonishing clip. In 1951 his first book, The Mechanical Bride, finally appeared (it was written in the 40s). In the same year, McLuhan published major essays on Joyce and Pound and Tennyson and continued to provide his usual regular contributions to Renascence edited by his old friend, John Pick.2

In the passage cited below from McLuhan’s letter to Innis March 14, 1951, Letters 220-223, emphasis has been added, except where otherwise specifically noted as stemming from McLuhan.3

I think there are lines appearing in Empire and Communications, for example, which suggest the possibility of organizing an entire school of studies. Many of the ancient language theories of the Logos type which you cite for their bearings on government and society have recurred and amalgamated themselves today under the auspices of anthropology and social psychology. Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these “magical” notions of language. But 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 [MM emphasis] of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years.

Later in the letter McLuhan proposes the production of “a single mimeographed sheet to be sent out weekly or fortnightly to a few dozen people in different fields (…) illustrating the underlying unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye”. As just seen from the beginning of his letter, McLuhan pointed to “underlying unities of form” between “the ancient language theories of the Logos type” and contemporary “anthropology and social psychology”. Further “underlying unities of form” were said to exist between “working concepts of ‘collective consciousness’ in advertising agencies” and such ancient “magical notions of language”. Further yet, “underlying unities of form” were claimed for “the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists (…) which 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”.

All these examples display, as McLuhan puts it later in this same letter to Innis, “a simultaneous focus of current and historic forms”.  Now this “simultaneous focus” or “double perspective” was far from being a new topic and stance for him in 1951. This is just what his 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis had considered, and itself used as its method, in tracing different configurations of the classical trivium between the Greeks and Thomas Nashe over a period of 2000 years. And this is precisely the topic named in the title of his 1946 essay, “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America”.

In a letter to Walter Ong from the previous year, 1950, McLuhan called this technique “double simultaneous perspective”:

Hope to go to work on Thesis re-write during term this year. It has rewritten itself via my work on Eliot Joyce Pound Valery etc. So I can now write it in double simultaneous perspective from Cratylus to Joyce and from Valéry to the Timaeus. (Sept 23, 1950, Letters 216)

“Perspective” and time are depicted as correlate here.  Time is plural, running both forwards (“from Cratylus to Joyce”) and backwards (“from Valéry to the Timaeus”), and these are not “one at a time”, but “simultaneous”.  Human “perspective” then follows this complex pattern of time/times, as “double simultaneous”.4

McLuhan’s 1951 letter to Innis, both as a “mimeographed sheet” and as repeatedly “illustrating (…) underlying unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye”, is itself an instance of the very proposal made by it.  The declared aim of the letter is to “suggest the possibility of organizing an entire school of studies” on the basis of focus on such “underlying unities of form”. Here again there is decided self-reference. For in order to communicate this possibility to Innis and to others, McLuhan’s language required the “potency” to reach across from his intent to their understanding of it. More, it required the further “potency” to provide focus for a school investigating such matters as “government and society”, “esthetics”, “collective consciousness” and even “advertising” in a new field of “communication study in general”.

In all these ways, then, McLuhan’s letter to Innis, both in itself and in its suggestions, was a “probe”.  And this is just what he writes in it:

As Easterbrook may have told you I have been considering an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter.

 Commentary on the Innis letter continues here.

  1. Derrick de Kerckhove tells this story from around 1930: “McLuhan was browsing for books with his lifelong friend, the economist Tom Easterbrook. Easterbrook told me that when both came out of the store, they compared what they had bought. Marshall had a textbook of economics and he (Easterbrook) had picked up, not exactly knowing why, Chesterton’s WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Both looked at their books and then at each other, and Easterbrook said to Marshall, handing him the Chesterton: “This feels more like your kind of stuff; why don’t we swap?” They did just that and Marshall proceeded to read the book at once, and everything else he could find by Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other controversial Catholics.” ↩
  2. Pick and McLuhan were fellow teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin in 1936-1937. When McLuhan was received into the Catholic Church in March 1937, Pick was his sponsor. See McLuhan’s February 1, 1939 letter to Corinne Lewis, a few months before their marriage in Letters, 108. ↩
  3. The editors of Letters note (220n) concerning this March 14 date: “The manuscript of this letter is headed in the upper-left corner: ‘Rewrite of letter for mimeograph HMM’. The original letter was written some weeks (? or months?) previously because it was acknowledged by Innis on February 26 with apologies for not answering earlier. Innis said he had been ‘very much interested’ in McLuhan’s letter and that he would like to have it typed and circulated to ‘one or two of our mutual friends’, adding that he wished to receive the ‘mimeographed sheet’ referred to. Innis wrote over the body of the letter: ‘Memorandum on humanities’.” ↩
  4. Later in his career, McLuhan would come to see that the nature of ‘following’ in this sense is fundamentally misunderstood when it is taken as exemplifying efficient causality.  He would therefore begin to stress the importance of formal causality which differs from efficient causality above all in regard to time — efficient causality being linear and formal causality being simultaneous. There is no first-then relation between the chemical structure of gold and a gold ring. Strangely, as McLuhan frequently pointed out, contemporary humans have no trouble understanding the formal relationship of, say, DNA or chemical structure with material instances of them. Formal “pattern recognition” of this sort makes the world go round. But when it comes to ourselves, we inexplicably, and with devastating consequence, are blind to the formal structures at work in our own actions and experience — even though (or exactly because) we put them to use in advertising, entertainment, commerce and, indeed, everywhere. In fact, even our failure to recognize patterns in our own behavior and experience follows archetypal patterns. ↩

The Beginnings of Gutenberg Galaxy 1

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In letters to Ezra Pound and to Walter Ong in 1952 and 1953, McLuhan set out a vision of what would become The Gutenberg Galaxy ten years later in its 1962 published form. In both letters, the contemporary revolution beyond Gutenberg — beyond the cultural environment of print communication — is highlighted. Indeed, the working title of the book at that time was ‘The End of the Gutenberg Era’, a topic eventually covered in the book only in a short (15 page) concluding section: ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’. McLuhan’s many essays in the 1950s, particularly in Explorations, would increasingly turn to a consideration of this electric revolution and these thoughts, in turn, would find their book form above all in the 1964 Understanding Media.

McLuhan to Ezra Pound July 16, 1952 (Letters 231/232; the formatting has been changed to aid clarity, but the word order is unchanged):

I’m writing a book on “The End of the Gutenberg Era”.

Main sections:

[a] The Inventions of Writing [&] Alphabet.

  • Transfer of auditory to visual.
  • Arrest for contemplation of thought and cognitive process.
  • Permits overthrow of sophist-rhetoric-oral tradition

[b] Invention of printing.

  • Mechanization of writing.
  • Study becomes solitary.
  • Decline of painting music etc in book countries.
  • Cult of book and house and study.
  • Cult of vernacular because of commercial possibilities.
  • Republicanism via association of simple folk on equal terms with “mighty dead”.

[c] Telegraph ultimate stage of mechanization of writing.

  • Creates newspaper form.
  • Simultaneity of many spaces = simultaneity of many different eras = “abolition” of history by dumping whole of past into the present.
  • Rimbaud

[d] Radio-telephone-cinema-TV

  • mechanization of speed.
  • mechanization of total human gesture.
  • Last 2 stages too steep for present day adjustment.

Since Rimbaud the newspaper as landscape enters all the arts.1 With landscape comes necessary musical adjustment of all parts of poetic composition. Juxtaposition of forces in field rather than continuous statement.2 With mechanization of speech and gesture and swamping with visual-auditory3 matter after print-created drought we come to age of semi-literacy, at best.

McLuhan to Walter Ong, January 23, 1953 (Letters 234, emphasis added): 

Am working on a book whose theme is The End of the Gutenberg Era. Tracing impact of print, and now, the switch to media which rep[resents] not the mechanization of writing but of word and gesture (radio movies TV). Necessarily a much greater change than from script to print.

A later letter to Wyndham Lewis (July 11, 1955) shows McLuhan continuing to work on the same themes:

Am spending summer on a book on The Gutenberg Era — an attempt to assess the pre-literate, the pre-print, and post-print eras of culture. (Letters, 248)

  1. McLuhan has a question mark here. His intent was presumably to elicit Pound’s expert opinion on the matter. ↩
  2. “Juxtaposition of forces in field rather than continuous statement.” Here McLuhan formulates the contrast he will later draw between “the principle of complementarity” and “lineal exposition”.  In 1952 he was thinking of this contrast in terms of the arts and especially poetry. Over the next decade leading up to The Gutenberg Galaxy he would come to see it as specifying different kinds of space (acoustic vs visual) and different kinds of time (synchronic vs diachronic). Even more importantly, he would come to see that the “juxtaposition of forces in field” characterizes scientific specification and that its application to the individual and social (and, indeed, ontological) sensus communis would thereby enable the inauguration of a series of new sciences in the human domain. ↩
  3. McLuhan is thinking of ads, comics and their associated culture or cultures here. It is a good example of how he did not begin to contrast the eye and ear until the later 1950s. ↩

Why Science?

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As described in Eric McLuhan’s introduction to Laws of Media, in the last decade of his life McLuhan became increasingly interested in establishing his work on a scientific basis. There were many reasons for this.

In the first place, the initiation of scientific investigation in any field represents successful communication. Instead of the assertion and counter-assertion that characterize pre-scientific activity, science works on the basis of some accepted framework (Kuhn’s “paradigm”) within which problems may be defined and progress made.  This represents successful communication in two ways.  First, the initiation of science presupposes that the possibility of such focus has been communicated and accepted. Second, on the basis of this founding communication, a new sort of communication becomes possible and this new sort of communication is science.

McLuhan therefore became interested in establishing a science of media as a way of communicating his work and of continuing that work after his death. By the 1970s, he had already suffered a series of strokes. The first of these apparently occurred already in 1960 and was serious enough that the last rites were administered (Coupland 1321). Then in 1961 his mother died of a stroke. His brain operation in 1967 and a further serious stroke in 1970 produced marked further declines in his health. The handwriting was on the wall and the question of his legacy necessarily imposed itself.

It should not be thought, however, that it was fear of death that motivated McLuhan’s search for a way in which his work might survive him. Instead, McLuhan had a calling and it was in response to that calling that he sought colleagues with a similar calling or, at least, who would work within a new field, or new fields, initiated by it.

His frustration in these efforts may be seen in a letter he wrote to Sheila Watson (26 January 1976,  Letters 516): 

There is no way in which serious work can be promoted without team effort. In isolation, it is ground to powder. My own position here at the University of Toronto is no better than yours at the University of Alberta. Total isolation and futility!

In any case, McLuhan had always wanted to establish some sort of collective research effort. His letter to Harold Innis from March 1951 is typical of this ambition (which McLuhan already entertained by the middle 1940s at the latest):

As Easterbrook may have told you I have been considering an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter in suggesting means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common features. This method has been used by my friend Siegfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture and in Mechanization Takes Command. What I have been considering is a single mimeographed sheet to be sent out weekly or fortnightly to a few dozen people in different fields, at first illustrating the underlying unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye. Then it is hoped there will be a feedback of related perception from various readers which will establish a continuous flow. (…) the organizing concept would naturally be “Communication Theory and practice.” A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period. 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 common study today seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa. There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. (Emphasis added throughout.)

Communication — “the actual techniques of common study” — had always been the topic of McLuhan’s concern and the way in which he attempted to initiate investigation of that topic. His confidence in the power of the word motivated him in both senses.  His turn to science in the last 10 or so years of his life simply represented another way in which he attempted to instigate the sort of community which would both illustrate and investigate such communication in action.

  1. Coupland doesn’t annotate his source here, but Ted Carpenter has described this early stroke and the administration of the last rites (in unpublished correspondence) and was probably Coupland’s source. Marchand and Gordon do not mention the event, but Corinne McLuhan may have alluded to it in an editorial note in Letters, 175: “McLuhan’s twelve-month tenure (at Fordham), beginning at the end of August 1967, was seriously interrupted in November (of that year) by a long operation for the removal of a brain tumour. For some eight years before (ie, since 1959) he had been afflicted with occasional blackouts and dizziness…” ↩

The Proscenium Arch (3)

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In The Proscenium Arch (2), the claim is made that:

the “Global Electric Theatre” is the apotheosis of Gutenbergian “single perspective”.

But how so? McLuhan uses “the electric” as one of the terms in a series which also includes “inclusiveness”, “allatonceness”, “dialogue”, etc — all of which designate “double perpespective” (a=≠b).  Now this series is just what the Gutenberg galaxy rejects or at least deemphasizes and ignores:

the medieval stage had been cyclic and simultaneous in presenting many scenes and episodes at once like a three-ring circus. Whereas the new humanist theater developed the proscenium arch with its single perspective (‘Printing and Social Change’, Printing Progress, 1959)

It would seem that McLuhan intended to contrast the image of a “Global Electric Theatre” with that of the “humanist theater”. So how can the “Global Electric Theatre” represent the apotheosis of the Gutenberg galaxy and its theater and not a fundamental break from them?

Everything depends on the perspective — or perspectives! — in which and for which the “Global Electric Theatre” is taken to be. That is, everything turns at this point on ontology.

The Gutenberg galaxy everywhere eventuates in an appreciation of the equation.  And the equation serves to specify an identity between unequals. In E = mc2, for example, Einstein’s point is not that matter and energy are ‘the same’ in such a way that they might be merged in some all-encompassing master concept, Instead, the two are held to be fundamentally different, but yet related via the speed of light squared. Their equation sets forth this highly complex relationship. In literature, similarly, symbolism developed the notion that surface and depth in textual expression could be fundamentally different, but yet related in a certain manner of experience which it was the goal of the poet or artist to articulate. Here the artistic vision might be compared to the speed of light needed to correlate mass and energy in physics. In both these examples (and everywhere in the explosions of insight in all the arts and sciences following on the Gutenberg revolution) what is at stake is the universal potential for equation where discrete unequals are investigated as related in complex ways. Hence McLuhan’s general formulas:

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship. (Take Today 3)

The gap is where the action is (Take Today 81)1

Now the great question urged by McLuhan is: what is the state of perspective for which such equation represents the real? 

The danger is that equation as the relationship of unequals is taken to be a power or form exercised from the “single perspective” of humans:

The Apollo age has scrapped Greek Nature as we assume full responsibility for orchestrating our total environment on human scales  (‘The argument: causality in the electric world’, Technology and Culture, 14:1, 1973)

In this case, the “double perspective” entailed by equation would be a secondary expression of human “single perspective” and the “Global Electric Theatre” would therefore be the apotheosis of the Gutenberg galaxy. As will be discussed in future posts, McLuhan frequently compares this development to the event of atomic power coming into human hands. In both cases, the danger is that an unlimited, more than human power comes to be exercised on the basis of limited human insight. More, as foreseen by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, such gigantic power comes to be exercised by that limited human insight which has been set utterly free by the nihilism and amoralism entailed by our ownership of the gigantic equation form. Where there is no truth, “everything is permitted”.

The situation is that of a gigantomachia in which the mis-shapen giants of the earth have succeeded in their assault on Olympus and the gods.

By contrast, where “double perspective” is foundational, not secondary to a prior singularity, humans are called to recognize not only some other incidental perspective, but a divine one.  Here humans, instead of grounding equation as figure, are figured on its ground.

McLuhan often treats this contrast as one of “light on” (coming from our “single perspective”) versus “light through” (coming to our perspective from another one). Here is a typical discussion from The Gutenberg Galaxy (106-107)

any medieval person (…) would assume that the reality looked through at us, and that by contemplation we bathed in the divine light, rather than looked at it. The quite different sensuous assumptions of manuscript culture, ancient and medieval, from anything since Gutenberg, obtrude from the ancient doctrine of the senses and the sensus communis.

Armed with this principle that there is a ratio or rationality in the senses themselves, Panofsky is able to move freely among the ratios that are between medieval scholasticism and medieval architecture. But this principle of ratio in the senses as light through Being is everywhere in study of the senses of scripture as well. But all of these matters became much confused by the growing demand for light on, rather than light through, as the later technology set the visual faculty in ever sharper separation from the other senses. (…) After Gutenberg the new visual intensity will require light on everything. And its idea of space and time will change to regard them as containers to be filled with objects or activities. But in a manuscript age when the visual stood in closer relation to the audile-tactile, space was not a visual container. (…) There was scarcely any furniture in a medieval room, as Siegfried Giedion explains in Mechanization Takes Command (p. 301):

And yet there was a medieval comfort. But it must be sought in another dimension, for it cannot be measured on the material scale. The satisfaction and delight that were medieval comfort have their source in the configuration of space. Comfort is the atmosphere with which man surrounds himself and in which he lives. Like the medieval Kingdom of God, it is something that eludes the grasp of hands. Medieval comfort is the comfort of space. A medieval room seems finished even when it contains no furniture. It is never bare. Whether a cathedral, refectory, or a burgher chamber, it lives in its proportions, its materials, its form.

 

  1. Also Take Today, 60-61: “That the gap is where the action is, is now acknowledged as the basis of chemical and physical change.”  And: McLuhan, ‘The Gap is Where the Action is’, Ontario Dentist (The Journal of the Ontario Dental Association), 53:6, 1976. ↩

The Proscenium Arch (2)

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In his first proscenium arch passages from the 1950s, McLuhan establishes an equation between the proscenium arch and singular perspective. A theatre with such an arch provided a specialist space for “a single audience looking at a single scene”. It was a set-up enabling a “single perspective such as a single page presents to a reader” and therefore could be termed by him “the pure projection of the form of the printed page”. The medieval stage, In contrast, “had been cyclic and simultaneous in presenting many scenes and episodes at once like a three-ring circus”. (All citations in this post are from the passages given in The Proscenium Arch 1.)

The proscenium arch was, then, an educational medium teaching the use of intense “single perspective” focus to a medieval world previously dominated by multiple perspective. It functioned as a kind of catalyst promoting the latter relative to the former. But it was not, as future posts will elaborate, a technology which originated or caused or invented “single perspective” — an absurdity into which all too many readings of McLuhan fall when explicating his take on comparable media like the alphabet or the book.

When McLuhan in his later texts refers to “the proscenium arch”, his earlier definitions must be borne in mind.  This would guard against the frequent mistake of understanding his “Global Electric Theatre” as some kind of break from the Gutenberg galaxy. Rather, when “Sputnik put the globe in a ‘proscenium arch’, and the global village [was] transformed into a global theater”, “single perspective” came to dominate as never before. Here “doing one’s [own] thing” (aka “single perspective”), at the expense of “public space” (aka multiple perspective “like a three-ring circus”), amounts to the “simulation of [the] human condition”, the substitution on a planetary scale of “the proscenium arch and stage lighting” for the “ambient light” of the real world and the real condition of humans in it. The “Global Electric Theatre” is the apotheosis of Gutenbergian “single perspective”!

This is an apotheosis which has eventuated in “our awareness of planet Polluto — a limited figure against the ground of limitless space”. Such awareness is exactly nihilism since “a limited figure against the ground of [the] limitless” is, of course, nothing at all — for the “limited” has no “ground” or foundation or reality where these are taken as lacking limit, as not recognizing limit, as “limit-less”.1

The relationship of “single perspective” with multiple perspective on “many scenes and episodes at once like a three-ring circus” is not linear. As regards such essentials, there is no appeal to progress in McLuhan, either positive or negative.  Humans qua humans are always and everywhere subject to the range of possible perspectives and this range (while of course always subject to further specification just like the table of chemical elements) has itself no history2.

 

  1.  Cf GG, 259: “Print, with its uniformity, repeatability, and limitless extent, does give reincarnate life and fame to anything at all. The kind of limp life so conferred by dull heads upon dull themes formalistically penetrates all existence.” (Emphasis added) ↩
  2. No history in the sense of sharing our history. But it has its own history which is the springboard of ours. ↩

The Proscenium Arch (1)

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McLuhan’s repeated allusions to the proscenium arch illuminate his views and techniques in interesting ways. The following passages, given in chronological order, will be discussed in subsequent posts:  

The very idea of a single audience looking at a single scene or action through a proscenium arch, so typical of the Renaissance, so unmedieval, is the pure projection of the form of the printed page into drama. (…) By contrast the medieval stress was for cycle plays simultaneously performed as at a circus.  (Explorations 8, 1957)

the medieval stage had been cyclic and simultaneous in presenting many scenes and episodes at once like a three-ring circus. Whereas the new humanist theater developed the proscenium arch with its single perspective such as a single page presents to a reader. Concern for the dramatic unities naturally emerges with the proscenium arch. It is a major difference between the styles of Dante and Milton. (‘Printing and Social Change’, Printing Progress, 1959)

Duccio’s discovery of how to place these figures in an architecturally enclosed space moved toward theatricality and the proscenium-arch space in painting. The sense of the downward thrust of weight generated by perspective strengthens the simulation of a human condition. (Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1968)

The isolated moment moves us toward photographic stress on visual realism. Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval. No ambient light — the world of the proscenium arch and stage lighting.  (Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1968)

Since Sputnik, the planet has become a global theatre under the proscenium arch of man-made satellites. (Culture Is Our Business, 1970)

Since Sputnik put the globe in a “proscenium arch,” and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally, is the use of public space for “doing one’s thing”. (From Cliche to Archetype, 1970)

When Sputnik went around the planet in 1957 the earth became enclosed in a man-made environment and became thereby an “art” form. The globe became a theatre enclosed in a proscenium arch of satellites. From that time the “audience” or the population of the planet became actors in a new sort of theatre. (‘Roles, Masks and Performances’, New Literary History 2:3 1971)

Since Werner Heisenberg and Linus Pauling, the only remaining material bond is resonance. All physical, psychic, and social processes merge in constant play and replay. There are no more spectators in lab or life, only participants in the Global Electric Theatre. Sputnik created a new proscenium arch that transformed our awareness of planet Polluto — a limited figure against the ground of limitless space. The Apollo age has scrapped Greek Nature as we assume full responsibility for orchestrating our total environment on human scales beyond ideologies. (‘The argument: causality in the electric world’, Technology and Culture, 14:1, 1973)

Today, causing and explaining and predicting merge while teacher-student, consumer-producer, and audience-actor unite in new roles for the Global Electric Theatre [with its proscenium arch of satellites]. The future is not what it used to be… (‘The argument: causality in the electric world’, Technology and Culture, 14:1, 1973)

Peace in difference

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Continuing Assmann on the battle between Horus and Seth …

The gap between earth and sky is fundamental. It is what first gives space for the unfolding of human being. This unfolding is human history. The possibility of such unfolding history is therefore given in the prior history of the relations between earth and sky when it is de-cided that they will forever part from one another (and to this extent forever struggle with one another), but also continue always to relate to one another in a difficult peace (a peace that is difficult exactly on account of their fundamental parting).  

The earth and sky part. Each becomes a separate part of the cosmos on its own; but each also remains at peace with the other piece. The second of these, as much as the first, is what gives space for human unfolding. More, the aboriginal peace in difference of earth and sky is what gives form to human life. Humans relate to the gods and to reality in general, not because they are ever able to match them in their thoughts or deeds, but because their ineluctable difference from them in their making is subject to the prior power of the difficult peace between earth and sky. It is this power that McLuhan terms “the resonating bond in all things”, “the gap where the action is”.

Much of mythology and religion is dedicated to a consideration of this prior drama “in the beginning” when space between heaven and earth was first opened for human time.

McLuhan returned again and again to the work of Mircea Eliade, particularly to The Sacred and the Profane, in an ever-renewed effort to think through how he agreed with it — and how he differed, from it. Later posts will take up this topic in detail. Suffice it to cite here Eliade’s view that

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time. (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries)

McLuhan was allergic to any suggestion that humans can match or merge with or “imitate” the sacred. His bent was therefore to problematize Eliade’s account in an attempt both to better understand the “magic” in question and to relate it to the contemporary world of advertising, movies and the new media. His discussions of “magic” will need to be considered in many different contexts in future posts.

As regards the relation of earth and sky, McLuhan’s take on the electric age was that it is the period when earth-bound humans populate the sky with satellites and generally collapse nature into art1, turning the earth and sky into an enclosed stage with its “proscenium arch“:

When Sputnik went around the planet in 1957 the earth became enclosed in a man-made environment and became thereby an “art” form. The globe became a theatre enclosed in a proscenium arch of satellites. From that time the “audience” or the population of the planet became actors in a new sort of theatre. (‘Roles, Masks and Performances’, New Literary History 2:3 1971)

This collapse or merger portends, in his view, either unprecedented disaster, perhaps the end of human being (which cannot be without the gap of earth and sky) or new insight into the nature of this gap as a “resonating bond”.

 

  1. The complexity and depth of McLuhan’s project has always been underestimated. As an example, the collapse of nature into art, one of McLuhan’s more frequent topics, is another way of addressing nihilism — Nietzsche’s ‘no facts (nature), only interpretations (art)’. So it is that McLuhan’s work is first of all ontology and all the rest of it must stand or fall with his success or failure on this fundamental front. ↩

Brothers’ broil

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Joyce has an interesting take on the question of time and times:

Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! (FW 52)

Exactly contrary to McLuhan’s usual practice (although not to his intent), vision is here taken in synchronic fashion (since vision can see difference “all at once”) and hearing is taken diachronically (since hearing can hear difference only over time, first one sound and then another, “one at a time”).

The doubling (Dublin) of vision here — Let [our eyes] be seen! — implicates simultaneity (aka “double perspective“) as method: a method to be used in understanding vision as much as the relation of vision to hearing as much as the relation between the brothers in their broil. “Let them be seen!”

It would seem/seen that synchrony and diachrony, vision and hearing, are each both.

The ancient bond of guest-host-enemy

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Contemporary research into human origins is achieving astonishing results through genetics. But research into the mind of early human species is currently limited to the interpretation of artifacts like stone tools and beads and, beginning something like 50,000 years ago, of carvings, flutes and then, somewhat later, cave paintings.

Mythology in written texts, like the Egyptian battle between Horus and Seth, is first available from around 5000 years ago. Historical linguistics can also reach back to this same time-frame with its investigations of the proto-Indo-Europeans. Calvin Watkins has this interesting note in the third edition (2011) of his Dictionary of Indo-European Roots:

The basic meaning of the Indo-European word ghos-ti was “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality”. In practical terms it referred to strangers in general [Greek xenos, ‘stranger’, descends from ghos-ti] as well as to both guests and hosts (both of which [English words] are [etymologically] descended from [ghos-ti]). The word ghos-ti was thus the central expression of the guest-host relationship, a mutual exchange relationship highly important to ancient Indo-European society. A guest-friendship was a bond of trust between two people that was accompanied by ritualized gift-giving and created an obligation of mutual hospitality and friendship that, once established, could continue in perpetuity and be renewed years later by the same parties or their descendants. The bond created by guest-friendship resembled kinship. A famous example is the story of the Trojan warrior Glaucus and the Greek warrior Diomedes in the Iliad who agree not to fight one another when they discover that Glaucus’s grandfather Bellerophon had been a guest of Diomedes’s grandfather Oeneus many years before. (…) Strangers are potential guest-friends, but also potential enemies; note that the Latin cognate [= likewise descended from ghos-ti] of English guest, namely hostis, means ‘enemy’ [which we have in the other meaning of host in English as ‘army’ (eg, ‘the attacking host’)]. (32)

The ambiguity of I-E ghos-ti recalls the ambiguity of the non-IE relationship of Horus and Seth conceived as both mortal enemies and as friends, indeed as close relations (sometimes brothers, sometimes nephew-uncle). Similarly, in the gigantomachia, the battle between the gods and the giants is waged between relatives (all are descended from Gaia, the Earth) and is subject to various kinds of resolution (in Plato, unsurprisingly, to philosophical resolution).

The same questions of time are implied again and again. When is the institution of the guest-host rule of friendship even to strangers and potential enemies? Is this a rule that is defined in and by linear history or a rule that defines history from a time prior to it? When is the battle between divine generations and when is its resolution? Are all these one-at-a-time or are they somehow simultaneous? And if simultaneous, how is this to be understood?

A reflex of these questions may be seen in the arguments in the early Church concerning the relationship of the Father and the Son. Doctrines which defined their relationship in linear fashion — first the Father and then the Son in some way — were declared heretical. Instead, the Church in council decreed that the Father and the Son are different as only original difference can be different; but at the same time they are also one — originally one.

The great question was, and is, when are the Persons of the Trinity in dynamic community? And if the time of that dynamic community is essentially different from our time, though in community with it, what sort of transparency is there between the two?

As reflected in McLuhan’s Catholicism, his peculiar claim is that new developments in contemporary history, like electronic media and their effects, can be understood only against this deep background, only as “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America”.  His 1946 article of this title begins “The battle of the books has broken out again” and it concludes:

Between the speculative dialectician and scientist who says that “the glory of man is to know the [synchronic] truth by my methods,” and the eloquent moralist [and rhetorician] who says that “the bliss of man is good government carried on [diachronically] by copiously eloquent and wise citizens,” 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. It would seem to be a matter of distributing time for these studies.1

In 1969, following the publication earlier in the decade of McLuhan’s most influential books, Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, and more than 20 years after its initial publication, this essay was not only included in The Interior Landscape (223-234), but chosen to conclude it.

  1. ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’, The Classical Journal, 41:4, January 1946, 156-162, emphasis added. ↩

Assmann on the battle between Horus and Seth

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Jan Assmann, retired from Heidelberg University and now at Konstanz,1 is widely considered to be the dean of contemporary Egyptology. His translation of coffin text #7 includes a note-worthy question mark:

Beendet ist der Kampf, zuende der Streit,
gelöscht die Flamme, die herausgekommen war.
Beweihräuchert (=besänftigt?) ist die Rötung (=Zorn) vor dem Tribunal des Gottes.2

The battle is over; strife is finished,
the flame that emerged is put out.
Censed (=calmed?) is the reddening (= wrath) before the tribunal of the god.3 

Assmann suggests (but wonders about his own suggestion) that the use of incense as a way of marking holy power is intended here in reference to the ending of the conflict between Horus and Seth. His interpolation of “=besänftigt?)” or “(=calmed?)” would seem to indicate that the conflict itself could not be regarded as holy. The conflict in this view is only negative and, in contrast, something positive, something holy, something like “justice”, is to be achieved only as a result with its resolution or calming.

Assmann’s suggestion depends upon a take on time as singular and linear. First there was the struggle, then its resolution. Time’s arrow is thought in some way to explain and to cure.  He does not consider that time might be multiple and that explanation might therefore lie, not in the result of some supposedly calming resolution as brought about in linear time, singular, but in the overlap of times, plural.

Chemistry explains by seeing through any sample of material stuff to the rule governed interaction of the elements composing it.  The life of the material stuff and the life of elements must be understood as decisively different from one another, each with their own time, but as mutually pointing to the other. Material stuff is the expression of elementary interaction. Elementary interaction is the explanation of material stuff. Everything depends on a layered difference between the two which is yet transparent or, as McLuhan usually puts it, “metaphorical”.

Where ontology has its own time, where as Plato says, “an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps”, the power of resolution is envisioned and emphasized in a new way. Here resolution holds in the conflict, not beyond it.

This reading throws new light on the first lines of the text:

Aufgehackt ist die Erde, nachdem die beiden Gefährten gekämpft haben,
nachdem ihre Füße den Gottes-Teich in Heliopolis aufgegraben haben.

The earth is hacked up after the two companions [ie, Horus and Seth] have battled
after their feet have dug up the divine pond in Heliopolis.

When is “nachdem” (“after”) here? Have the feet of Horus and Seth in their battle disturbed the earth and “the divine pond in Heliopolis” so that they require restitution? Require some kind of calming back to a prior state of rest? Or have their feet created the condition for the fertility of the earth, a disturbance which needs to be repeated endlessly in seasonal ploughing? Is “the divine pond in Heliopolis” their creation in the same way? Have their feet first (and always) created its basin? Is that pond therefore a reflection4 of a divine struggle which “is always going on between the two camps” and whose “justice” is both dynamic and wondrous exactly because it is in that struggle and not beyond it?

McLuhan’s emphasis on the plurality of time as times and on the power of “simultaneity” must be understood in this truly ancient context.

 

  1. Assmann died in February, 2024. ↩
  2. Assmann, Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten, 2003, 374. Assmann discusses this text in many of his books. ↩
  3. Assman, Death And Salvation In Ancient Egypt, 2005, 283. ↩
  4. The divine pond in Heliopolis is of the earth, but reflects the sky. It does not merge the two, but is a representation of their peace in difference. Hence:
    The battle is over; strife is finished,
    the flame that emerged is put out.
    Censed is the reddening (= wrath) before the tribunal of the god     ↩

Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 2)

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As seen in Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 1), “creative freedom” — McLuhan’s “primary value” according to Kroker — is the movement “where ‘fixed perspective’ drops off” and “double perspective” takes over such that “everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite”. The present post will look at what is at stake (enjeu in the precise French expression) in this dynamic.

Kroker’s most important contributions have been made as a reader of McLuhan and of Canadian intellectual history in general. If this seems to rate his contributions in the 1980’s higher than his later work, the impression would not be wrong. But this evaluation should be taken to regard his early work very highly indeed, not to regard his later work as insignificant. In fact, Kroker’s nose for fundamental issues is acute and even his wrong turns are usually indicative of topics which will repay close consideration.

In the view taken here, Kroker’s importance is, however, not at all limited to Canadian intellectual history considered in isolation. Instead, his great contributions in this area (especially Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant from 1984 and his wonderful essay Augustine as the Founder of Modern Experience: The Legacy of Charles Norris Cochrane from 1982) investigate Canadian thought in reference to a complex which has dominated the western tradition for 2500 years since Heraclitus and Plato (and arguably for another 2500 years before that since the dawn of recorded history in early dynastic Egypt). In this perspective, Canadian intellectual history has its meaning as a particularly revealing figure against this deep background and of this deep background. And the peculiar fit of Canada to this role has to do with its founding two nations and with its self-conscious status as a margin (or margins) that would both establish itself on its own and relate itself to an acknowledged centre (or centres) — elsewhere. Kroker’s turn in his later work to the three Germans, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx (in The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, 2004), may be understood as situating his matching three Canadian figures, namely, McLuhan, Grant and Innis (in Technology and the Canadian Mind 20 years earlier) on this prior ground.

Kroker’s analyses of Cochrane (1889-1945), Innis (1894-1952), McLuhan (1911-1980) and Grant (1918-1988) bring structural opposition marked by “privilege” together with ontology. This methodology may be seen at work in the following passage from his ‘Digital Humanism‘ essay on McLuhan:

McLuhan’s intellectual preference was to privilege the question of technology over all other aspects of social experience, including the economic foundations of society. (emphasis added)

Preference or privilege is the valuation of one term of an opposition (here, technology/economics), relative to the other, in a way that is held to be characteristic of the experience of a particular thinker, like McLuhan, and may thus be regarded as a certain style of ‘identification’ (= both ‘identity formation’ and ‘recognition’) that has ontological implications for the experience in question. In this short passage Kroker is thereby able to characterize McLuhan’s kind of experience as ‘technology/economics’ (where the underlining indicates all three of “preference”, ‘identification’ and ontological type) and to characterize his own differing type as ‘technology/economics‘ and to indicate his valorization of the latter relative to the former through his use of the term “foundations” for it. McLuhan’s experience, in poor contrast, is said to be “over” and the implication is that McLuhan has confused what is “over” (precisely through his “preference” or “privilege” of it) with what is properly ‘under’, namely foundations. McLuhan’s experience in Kroker’s view is, so to say, ‘downside up’ and Kroker would correct it by turning it ‘upside down’. At the other end of the western tradition, it will be recalled that Aristophanes similarly critiques Socrates as being, ludicrously, in the “clouds”.

Kroker would reverse McLuhan’s preference or privilege from ‘technology/economics’ to  ‘technology/economics‘. Now the possibility of this reversal lies in “creative freedom”. McLuhan was entirely free to exercise the preference or privilege attributed to him by Kroker. But exactly therefore, he remains just as free to exercise it differently. “Creative freedom” has, then, always already been at work in the formation of experience, Kroker’s as much as McLuhan’s, yours as much as mine,  But the additional claim made by Kroker is that his own “creative freedom” is, so to say, doubled or tripled, in ways McLuhan’s is not. However McLuhan may have been self-conscious of his manner of privilege in the formation of his experience, Kroker’s is purported to be exercised at least one level better in his critique of it.

For the moment, the question of the accuracy of Kroker’s critique may be left aside in favor of a consideration of the genealogy of his method. His treatment of structural oppositions is explicitly ordered along a vertical axis: in this passage, “technology” is envisioned as “over” and economics as “foundations” or ‘under’. But “technology” and “economics” are not the same for McLuhan (‘technology/economics’) and for Kroker (‘technology/economics‘) either individually or relative to the other. “Technology” privileged as foundational ground is not the same as “technology” considered as a figurative epi-phenomenon. The same is true for “economics” or for anything else. So it is that the vertical axis of “technology” over “economics” is better imagined as ‘technology/economics’ over ‘technology/economics‘. And since the “preference” or “privilege” made with one side or the other of the ‘technology/economics’ opposition may be made with greater or lessor fervor, with greater or lessor antagonism between the terms, it is possible to imagine a whole range of ‘technology/economics’ formations between ‘technology is everything and economics nothing’ at the top of the vertical axis to ‘economics is everything and technology is nothing’ at its bottom.  Between these extreme formations, “preference” or “privilege” of gradually increasingly irenic flavor towards the midpoint of the axis may be imagined. (McLuhan often characterizes this sort of variation in “preference” as difference in the level of “stress”.)

Such a vertical axis represents not only the range over which “technology” and “economics” may be experienced relative to the other, it also represents the range of “creative freedom”. Indeed, every formation on the axis represents one and the same exercise of “creative freedom” (regardless of whether an additional self-conscious or critical level of “creative freedom” has been exercised relative to the “primary” exercise of “preference” or “privilege).

The deep background of this analysis appears in a fragment from Heraclitus: hodos ano kato mia kai houte. This fragment from around 500 BC was used by Eliot 2450 years later as one of the twoepigraphs, both from Heraclitus, for his Four Quartets. It is often cited — as it is by McLuhan in Take Today (283) — as “the way up is the way down”. The Greek is more like: “The way up and the way down are one and the same”. While Heraclitus certainly identifies the way up and the way down, he also differentiated them as seen in the river fragment below. In any case, one of the many possible readings of the fragment is that it describes the action of “creative freedom” over the range of its exercise along the vertical axis as described above. This exercise is always the same and yet always different as it is concretely realized in the different positions along the range of the axis. As Heraclitus has it in another fragment (which we have as cited by Plato): “You could not step twice into the same river”.

The issues at stake in Kroker’s reading of Canadian intellectual history — namely, structural relations marked by privilege indicating individual identity formation and ontology — were already subject to brilliant analysis by Plato. The notion attributed by him to Socrates that no one knowingly does evil may be understood to specify the relation between identity and ontology. Since ontology implicates not only what is most real but also what is most good, if identity is a factor of ontology, no one — absent a change in identity — can do anything other than the good as delimited by that ontology.

Plato was fully self-conscious that this only deferred the question of ethics to the question of ontology. In the Sophist he poses the question of ontology in terms of the even then ancient mythological theme of the battle between the gods and the giants, the gigantomachia:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [gigantomachia peri tes ousias]1 (…) One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. (…) Their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. (…) It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless and exclusively immaterial, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing and as only material. Like a child begging for ‘both’, he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once. (Sophist 246a-249c)

Plato’s tale wonderfully enriches the ‘technology/economics’ axis described above to include such further oppositions as sky/earth, light/dark, up/down, head/hand, still/moving, one/many, being/becoming, clouds/rocks, Parmenides/Heraclitus, etc, as well as the gods and the giants. But it also specifies a mode of “preference” or “privilege” which may already have been intended by Heraclitus in saying that “the way up and the way down are one and the same”, and even by Parmenides in describing the two horses of the chariot on the path of truth, but which here in the Sophist is stated plainly: “Like a child begging for ‘both’, [the philosopher] must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once”.  That is, “preference” or “privilege” need not be confined to one side of a structural pair, as argued (and fought to the death for) by the gods and the giants, aka idealists and realists, but may be made with both. This possibility, too, lies on the vertical axis, indeed exactly at its mid-point, and “creative freedom” may, perhaps even must, be exercised in regard also to it (in affirmation or rejection).

2500 years before classical Greece, around 3000 BC, a variation of Plato’s take on the gigantomachia is described in the battle between Horus and Seth as recorded in the Egyptian ‘coffin texts’:

The earth is hacked up after the two companions [i.e., Horus and Seth] have battled
after their feet have dug up the divine pond in Heliopolis.
Thoth comes, equipped with his rank,
after Atum has distinguished him with (the requirements of) power
and the two Great Ones (ie, the Enneads) [= councils of the gods] are satisfied with him.
The battle is over; strife is finished,
the flame that emerged is put out.
Censed (=calmed?) is the reddening (= wrath) before the tribunal of the god
so that it is seated to speak justice before Geb.
(Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, 283)2  

Detailed exposition may be left to a later post. Suffice it to note here that Horus as the hawk or falcon and as descended from the sky, Nut, is a god of the sky, while Seth is associated with the red earth of the desert and portrayed as a jackal with a forked tail suggesting association with the snake, Their battle is a gigantomachia as regards both the divine combatants and the ontological issues at stake. Peace is brought about between them by Thoth, the philosopher god, whose work has been enabled and then certified by the gods in council who represent in their assembly another image, like the treaty between Horus and Seth itself, of complex peace or “justice”.

Egypt as “the two lands”, upper and lower, strung out along the Nile, styled itself as “justice” in this sense. There is a parallel with the confederation of upper and lower Canada strung out along the St Lawrence.

For the 5000 or 6000 years of recorded history, which is all we have, the complex which forms the background against which Kroker reads Canadian intellectual history has been at work. “Creative freedom” is a central feature of this complex. But so also is “justice” and the next post will consider the “resonating bond” between these two.

McLuhan may be read as asserting the common truth of this ancient ontology of “justice”. he maintained that Western civilization beginning with the Greeks, but accelerating with the renaissance and Gutenberg, disturbed this balance in a way which culminated in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But only if this massive disturbance of balance is somehow itself balanced can the ancient ontology be justified. Just such a theodicy is the central aim of McLuhan’s work.3

  1.  Heidegger cites this phrase in Greek on the first page of Sein und Zeit and then again on its last page in German translation.  At the middle of the book, in the 42nd of its 83 sections, he gives a mythological treatment of the theme in the fable of Cura. What Heidegger understands by Sein (Being) is exactly the always outstanding question of “justice”. ↩
  2.  Assmann: Tod und Jenseits im alten Ägypten, 374:
    Aufgehackt ist die Erde, nachdem die beiden Gefährten gekämpft haben,
    nachdem ihre Füße den Gottes-Teich in Heliopolis aufgegraben haben.
    Thot kommt, ausgerüstet mit seiner Würde,
    nachdem Atum ihn ausgezeichnet hat mit (dem Bedarf der) Kraft
    und die beiden Großen (Neunheiten) zufrieden sind über ihn.
    Beendet ist der Kampf, zuende der Streit,
    gelöscht die Flamme, die herausgekommen war.
    Beweihräuchert (=besänftigt?) ist die Rötung (=Zorn) vor dem Tribunal des Gottes,
    so daß es Platz nimmt, um Recht zu sprechen vor Geb. ↩
  3. See ‘the main question‘. ↩