Author Archives: McEwen

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‘. ↩

Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 1)

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Arthur Kroker’s insightful essay, Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan (from his 1984 book Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant), concludes with a final section in which he treats “McLuhan’s Blindspots“. Here the heart of Kroker’s critique lies in the charge that McLuhan lacked a “primary” sense of justice. This lack, according to Kroker, bound McLuhan to “technological society” in a way which rendered him indifferent to its “barbarism”:

McLuhan’s primary value was, of course, creative freedom, not “justice”; and his political preference was for a universal community founded on the rights of “reason”, not for the “ethic of charity”. This is to say, however, that McLuhan’s “historical sense” already embraced, from its very beginnings, the deepest assumptions of technological society. (…) Thus, it was not with bad faith but with the curious amorality of a thinker whose ethic, being as it was abstract freedom and reason, and who could thus screen out the barbarism of the technological dynamo, that McLuhan could associate with the leadership of technological society. (This, and all citations below from Kroker, are taken from ‘Digital Humanism‘)

But this is a peculiar charge in many ways. For example, it ignores McLuhan’s early (age 23) commitment to distributionism and to the central role played by its vision of economic and social justice in his life-defining conversion to Catholicism (topics to be treated in later posts). For present purposes here, however, the central point is that it ignores McLuhan’s characteristic turn in any situation towards an analysis of the structural balance or lack of balance — ie, of the justice or lack of justice — displayed by it. This was the very fulcrum of his thought: his ever-repeated dictum that “the gap is where the action is” was intended to highlight that boundary which is never absent from human experience and which holds the balance, in a range of possible ways, between difference and unity in it. Thus it is, as Kroker nicely has it:

To read McLuhan is to enter into a “vortex” of the critical, cultural imagination, where “fixed perspective” drops off by the way, and where everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite.

Hence Kroker’s description of McLuhan’s “specific strategy” as a “constant resort to paradox, double perspective, to a carnival of the literary imagination”.  Hence his citation of McLuhan referring to “the coalescing of inner and outer, subject and object” (from Through the Vanishing Point). This is a “coalescing”, however, that does not result in merger as the purported escape from oppositions in experience (like “subject and object”). Instead, such oppositions remain decisively different from each other — gapped — but what was “subject” is now “object” and what was “object” is now “subject”:

where “fixed perspective” drops off by the way, and where everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite

Such “passing over”, “coalescing”, “resort to paradox” and “double perspective” is indeed the work of “creative freedom” and it does indeed operate as a “primary value” in McLuhan’s thought. [See Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 2) for elaboration of “creative freedom” as the movement “where ‘fixed perspective’ drops off” and “double perspective” takes over such that “everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite”.]

But “creative freedom” does not at all work in contradiction to “justice” or against an “ethic of charity” as Kroker charges.  Far rather, “creative freedom” is able to be “creative” and “free” exactly because it operates in an ontological environment where an original “justice” — “the resonating bond in all things” (Take Today 3) — both allows and supports it.  Only so can it be that “everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite”, The “creative freedom” that is “privileged” in McLuhan’s work is, then, only (only!) an attempt to follow this original dynamic of “justice” itself. [See Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 3) for elaboration of the ineluctable relationship between “creative freedom” and “justice”.]

In fact, Kroker provides many illustrations of this complex dynamic in McLuhan’s work. For example, he cites McLuhan’s thesis that: 

the outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a new invention compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium. (UM 252, emphases added)

Or again, shortly before his discussion of “McLuhan’s blindspots”, he observes:

McLuhan often noted that “the function of the body” was the maintenance of an equilibrium among the media of our sensory organs. And consequently, the electronic age is all the more dangerous, and, in fact, suicidal when “in a desperate (…) autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism”, the central nervous system itself is outered in the form of electric circuitry. McLuhan inquires, again and again, what is to be the human fate now that with the “extension of consciousness” we have put “one’s nerves outside, and one’s physical organs inside the nervous system, or brain”. For McLuhan, the modern century is typified by an information order which plays our nerves in public: a situation, in his estimation, of “dread”. (Emphasis added. For more on dread in McLuhan see Exploring ignorance (9) – The Concept of Dread and Exploring ignorance (12) – “mechanization of total human gesture”)

This hardly seems to have “embraced (…) the deepest assumptions of technological society”. Instead, Kroker nicely formulates McLuhan’s concern that the “suicidal” event of the total displacement of nature by art in the electric age (“our nerves in public”) has broken down the required “maintenance of an equilibrium” in such an extreme way that it must lead either to unprecedented disaster or to a novel healing (or perhaps both). Later posts will examine how it is that Kroker could rightly see McLuhan’s insight into such “dread” but also hold to the seemingly contradictory idea that:

everything in McLuhan’s thought strained towards the liberation of the ‘Pentecostal condition’ of technology (…) the vision of ‘processed information’ as somehow consonant with the perfectibility of the human faculties.1

For now, the not unrelated matter concerns the inherent interplay between “creative freedom” and “justice” in McLuhan’s thought. Kroker’s contention is that the former is allowed — or forced — to trump the latter and that this points not only to limitations in McLuhan’s sense of “justice” and “ethics”, but also to a series of further problems.  The most important of these concerns “ontology, the locus of his world vision”:

McLuhan’s political value may have been the creation of a universal community of humanity founded on reason, his axiology may have privileged the process of communication, and his moral dynamic may have been the “defence of civilization” from the dance of the irrational; but his ontology, the locus of his world vision, was the recovery of the “poetic process”.  (Emphasis added)

Here “poetic process” is the same as “creative freedom” and Kroker’s problem is not so much that this particular “ontology” is wrong-headed, as he certainly believes, but that it dissembles the fact that no ontology remains viable for “technological experience”:

In the face of the incipient nihilism of the technological experience, McLuhan dangled that most precious of gifts: a sense of historical purpose (the age of communications as “cosmic consciousness”); and an intellectual justification (the technological imperative as both necessary and good).

This again raises the problem of the dynamic between the danger and the potential saving in the electronic age (which will be elaborated elsewhere). Suffice it to note here only in passing that nothing could be further from McLuhan’s “double perspective” in which “everything passes over instantaneously into its opposite” than that whole series of fundamental mergers and consolidations attributed to him by Kroker: his “primary value” as “creative freedom” only and not also “justice”; his supposed notion of “the age of communications as cosmic consciousness” only (and not also as unprecedented unconsciousness and blindness); his purported view of “the technological imperative as both necessary and good” only (and not also as willful and utterly demonic).

What seems to be fundamentally at stake here is the notion (the central “metaphysical” notion according to Heidegger) that ontology and consolidation hang together: ‘matching not making’ (to reverse the point made repeatedly by McLuhan following both Heidegger and Gilson). Future posts will therefore need to consider how it is that for McLuhan, by giving up the desire for matching and merger, ontology is possible, even necessary; while Kroker, in fundamental contrast, by maintaining the “metaphysical” standard, ‘matching not making’, judges it to be impossible and fraudulent.

When these positions have been elaborated, it will then need to be asked how judgement might be made between them. Even if ontology is a viable project for finite human beings once the ideal of matching and merger is left aside, is a critique of ontologies, plural — including Kroker’s “nihilism of the technological experience” — viable?

McLuhan notes that

THE VIABLE IS ALWAYS INVISIBLE (Take Today, 285)

It will be seen in later posts that this dictum has multiple readings. Not least among them, it may be taken to posit a gaping darkness at the heart of the viable that renders consolidation impossible while mandating and supporting “double perspective” aka “justice”.

* Later posts will elaborate how it is that Kroker mistakes McLuhan’s take on the dynamic between the danger and the saving in the electric age. Kroker rightly sees that there is an important ambiguity here, but what he takes to be McLuhan’s saving — an electric utopia — is just what McLuhan takes to be the danger. While the danger, for McLuhan, lies exactly in making this mis-take.

 

 

  1.  Later posts will elaborate how it is that Kroker mis-takes McLuhan’s take on the dynamic between the danger and the saving in the electric age. Kroker rightly sees that there is an important ambiguity here, but what he takes to be McLuhan’s saving — an electric utopia — is just what McLuhan takes to be the danger. While the danger, for McLuhan, lies exactly in making this mis-take. ↩

Mis-taking McLuhan (Overview)

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Although interest in McLuhan’s work has certainly revived in the last decade or two, investigation of it remains fundamentally limited by debilitating mis-takes. These will be examined here in a series of ‘Mis-taking McLuhan’ posts which will look at the ways particular scholars have distorted, often violently, what he was up to.

Certain obvious failures appear over and over again.  For example, little McLuhan ‘scholarship’ has bothered to read, let alone consider, all or even most of his astonishing output.  Even highly influential readings of McLuhan — like that of James Carey — are based on superficial acquaintance with only a few of his texts.  This sort of shoddy scholarship is especially surprising where it frequently leads to the charge that McLuhan’s scholarship was shoddy.

More fundamentally, all existing McLuhan scholarship examines his work in what he termed the rear-view mirror (RVM).  That is, presuppositions are brought to the reading of his work which render his object of examining presuppositions null and void.  This reflects a certain despair which McLuhan lacked.  As seen in his frequent recourse to Poe’s maelstrom, McLuhan was not only not frightened at the thought of his own presuppositions contesting in a sea of rival ones, he was convinced that this was the only way in which serious thought about the nature and destiny of human being could fittingly be pursued.

For McLuhan, the gap or boundary between presuppositions is a “resonating bond” (Take Today 3).  Where presupposition is not questioned, not allowed equal plausibility with rival ones, that is eo ipso to institute the RVM and to betray a fearful despair that such a gap is nothing but an “empty (…) vacuum” (Take Today 3).

McLuhan’s concern for “simultaneity”, “dialogue”, “past times”, “inclusivity” (etc etc etc) simply cannot be understood where presuppositions of any sort are privileged.

More fundamentally still, no existing McLuhan scholarship re-cognizes the passion he brought to the investigation of human being — beginning with his own.  He was willing to swim in the sea of presuppositions, even when these formed a maelstrom, for the simple reason that this is the only way for the open investigation of human being to be initiated.

For McLuhan, the question of human being is the question of privilege. This is a matter which cannot be investigated from any privileged position. But allowing a questioning distance to one’s own presuppositions demands a passion which McLuhan ‘scholarship’ has thus far utterly failed to muster.

Henry Wilkes Wright 2

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Increasingly we come to confront ourselves, when we are confronted by change in our institutions.  (NAEB Project ’69’, “Materials Developed By Project”)

The ‘common sense’ was for many centuries held to be the peculiar power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality and may in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach the condition of [external] consciousness. Yet such a condition would necessarily be an extension of our own consciousness as much as the wheel is an extension of feet in rotation. (UM, 60)

Sometime in the early 1930s, probably in association with one of Henry Wright’s courses in the philosophy department (often taught together with R. C Lodge, each taking a term), McLuhan bought Wright’s 1925 book, The Moral Standards of Democracy, and studied it thoroughly. His heavily annotated copy remains in his library which the McLuhan family has donated to the rare book collection of the University of Toronto.

The following passage appears on pages 86-87 (all emphasis added):

in modern society association by direct personal contact has been supplemented and, so far as social organization is concerned, has been largely replaced by impersonal association and indirect contact. Now these activities of indirect contact and communication proceed through the intermediation and instrumentality of mechanical agencies. And these agencies themselves are extensions in the physical world of those bodily organs of intercommunication and personal association (…) possessed by every human being; namely, those of oral and written speech, of practical contrivance and construction, and of aesthetic perception and artistic creation. Hence these three activities of intercommunication, (…) are fundamental in the double sense of determining both the direct personal association of human individuals with one another, and also the indirect association of millions of individuals as fellow citizens and fellow workers [via the aforementioned “mechanical agencies”]. (…) Moreover such chance as there is of giving personal value to indirect and impersonal contacts brought about by modern large scale social organization, and thereby making it a means for realizing that comprehensive social community for which democracy stands, depends altogether upon our understanding this social machinery as an extension into the physical world of the three activities of personal intercommunication: discussion and cooperation and imaginative sympathy.

When McLuhan turned the focus of his work to the media of communication in the 1950s, the immediate impulse of this turn was his encounter with Harold Innis’ research into ‘the bias of communication‘. But this new turn in his work was also a return to that nexus of ideas which McLuhan had imbibed from Wright two decades before at the University of Manitoba when McLuhan was still an undergraduate. As seen in the passage from The Moral Standards of Democracy above, that nexus brought together notions whose elaboration would now occupy McLuhan, beginning in the early 1950s, for the remaining three decades of his life:

  • that human being, both individually and socially, is fundamentally characterized by “intermediation” and “intercommunication”;
  • that the course of human history has seen the development of “mechanical agencies” of communication effecting “the indirect association of millions of individuals”;
  • that this development has effected a spiritual and social crisis in modern humans (discussed here);
  • that the fitting use of these “mechanical agencies” of “intercommunication”, hence also the understanding of a world dominated by them, “depends altogether upon our understanding this social machinery”;
  • that such understanding, in turn, “depends altogether upon” research into them as “extensions in the physical world of those bodily organs of intercommunication (…) possessed by every human being”.

In 1960, three decades after his first encounter with these ideas at the University of Manitoba, McLuhan will state:

in all these situations we confront only ourselves and extensions of our own senses. (NAEB Project, “What I Learned On The Project 1959-60”)

And in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage (26):

All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical.

On “things most common”

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Writing to Walter Ong on May 31, 1953, McLuhan observes:

Reading St. Tho[ma]s De Trinitate Q VI a 2 objection one and reply thereto, a very Ramistic text, ‘whether in spec[ulating] on divine things imagination must be altogether relinquished: “It may be answered: sacred Scripture does not propose to us divine truths under the figure of sensible things in order that our intellect should remain there, but that from these things it should mount up to such as are invisible”: “Wherefore use is made of things most common, that these may be even less occasion for remaining at their level,” as says Dionysius (Coel. Hier. ch. 2)’. My eyes bugged out! And Thomas is not quite 1/3 right on this point I think. (Letters, 237)

McLuhan does not hesitate to criticize Thomas Aquinas, even to a Jesuit like Ong, where he feels that the revelatory power of “sensible things” and “things most common” has been slighted. On account of the “resonating bond in all things” (Take Today 3), a bond which works through discontinuity and disconnection, not continuity and connection, it is exactly distance from meaning which most points to it.

Distance works to emphasize the gap over which it extends. Emphasis on the gap, in turn, poses the question of its nature. Is it an “empty (…) vacuum” (Take Today 3) or a ”resonating bond” (Take Today 3)?

This question forms the entry way to McLuhan’s “critical vision“.

 

Henry Wilkes Wright

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The media can be viewed as artificial extensions of our sensory existence (McLuhan, ‘A Historical Approach to the Media’, 1955)

In modern society association by direct personal contact has been supplemented and, so far as social organization is concerned, has been largely replaced by impersonal association and indirect contact. Now these activities of indirect contact and communication proceed through the intermediation and instrumentality of mechanical agencies. And these agencies themselves are extensions in the physical world of those bodily organs of intercommunication and personal association (…) possessed by every human being. (Henry Wright, The Moral Standards of Democracy, 1925, emphasis added)

Henry Wilkes Wright (1878-1959) was one of McLuhan’s professors (in the combined philosophy-psychology department) at the University of Manitoba during his years of study in the English department there (1929-1934).  A case might be be made that Wright was the single most important influence on McLuhan as he sought, and then made his way along, his life’s pathway.1

As discussed here, it was from Wright, and specifically from Wright’s 1925 book, The Moral Standards of Democracy, that McLuhan first took an interest in communication (often called “inter-communication” by Wright and, following Wright, also by McLuhan).

Long before McLuhan’s conversion (first broached to Fr Gerald Phelan at St Michael’s in November 1936 as noted, presumably from McLuhan’s diary, in Letters 93), Wright provided a link to St Michael’s and hence to Fr Phelan and to Etienne Gilson who, in turn, were to prove decisive for McLuhan’s spiritual and intellectual life. Some of this story has been told in the bias of communication; more of it will follow in later posts.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of where McLuhan got the idea of media as extensions of human faculties . R.W. Emerson, Buckminster Fuller and E.T. Hall have been put forward on the basis of McLuhan’s own ascriptions. In fact, the idea may have been in the air in the early twentieth century, but it was almost certainly from Wright that McLuhan first received news of it. Here is Wright in ‘Mechanism and Mind in Present-Day Social Life’, which he contributed to Manitoba Essays: Written in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the University of Manitoba (1937):

  • Machine technology and the mechanical instruments it has devised for facilitating the outward activities and inter-play of human individuals on a large scale have had the effect of externalizing the interests and activities of man to such a degree that his inner, personal life is becoming impoverished and his spiritual faculties atrophied through disuse.
  • The enormous enlargement which radio and film have given to the scope and range and diversity of sensory stimulation is too obvious to need illustration. The same may be said of the effect of automobile, aeroplane, machine tools, electrical appliances, etc., upon man’s powers of outward action and motor performance. But no such adventitious aids have been supplied by the arts of technological invention to the inner interpretative processes of rational reflection and creative imagination. Thus, in a generation preoccupied with new ranges of sight and hearing, and fascinated by a variety of new mechanical tools and toys, these inner activities have for the time at least been relegated to the background and allowed to wither from neglect.
  • No more urgent or pressing problem confronts modern society than [the question] of the influence of mechanism and mechanical intermediaries upon the character and relations of men.
  • What measures it is practically wise to adopt, however, will depend upon the relation of mechanism and mechanical instrumentalities to the nature of man.
  • The characteristic activity of the human organism is not mechanical, topographical, and aggregative, but is rather dynamical, configurational and organismic.
  • The question (…) of the influence on present-day social life and personal development of the newly invented machinery of social interaction and inter-communication
  • The question (…) of how the technological instruments which in their great and amazing variety dominate our civilization and differentiate it from every previous stage of human history are related to human nature and the personal associations of men.
  • these technological instruments which have revolutionized the social life of man, from telephone and radio to automobile and aeroplane, from electrical household appliances to automatic machinery for (…) manufacture of economic goods and the reproduction of art products, are extensions through physical forces and mechanical intermediaries of man’s bodily organs
  • Consider in the first place all mechanical devices for the transmission of fact and opinion: telegraph and telephone and radio, the newspaper and colour-press, billboard, illuminated sign, and news-reel. These are all of them means of of increasing through physical intermediaries the range both in space and time, and the social influence, of man’s powers of articulate speech, oral and written.
  • These are one and all mechanical means for making available for popular appreciation and enjoyment on a practically unlimited scale the products of man’s powers of emotional expression and aesthetic perception. Now if this is a fact, and I do not see how it can be denied, there follow from it consequences of genuine, far-reaching social importance. The products of modern science and invention are not correctly understood as belonging to another, alien world, a world of matter and mechanism, forever separate and divorced by essential nature from that other inner realm in which alone are realized the distinctively human and truly personal values, such as truth, practical goodness and beauty, the “imponderables” of the spirit. On the contrary, they, like the organic agencies whose power and range they enormously augment, are in veritable fact projections of human personality itself and means of satisfying the distinctively personal interests of man.
  • these mechanical instruments and devices which dominate the modern social scene (…) are veritable extensions of the powers of human personality and effective means for the co-operative realization [or not] of the most comprehensive and enduring values of personal and social life.

What is characteristic of Wright, and would later be so of McLuhan in turn, is the coupling of the idea of human extension through technology with the question of its effect on our “spiritual faculties”.

It may be that this is a frontier concern, native to a place like Winnipeg, or indeed Canada, which was exposed to the explosive changes of modernity, but in a belated, unfree, and often decidedly negative way. This forced change on the margin (Innis) to what was not necessarily for the better, and in some ways was certainly for the worse, excited raw perceptions of alienation (which they still do today). McLuhan, following Wright, took these to raise great questions regarding the nature and destiny of human beings and, ultimately, regarding the relation of human beings to God.

  1. A late picture of Wright, age 70, is available at an Ontario history website: he taught in Ontario for a few years after he retired from UM. ↩

Exploring ignorance 12 – “mechanization of total human gesture”

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Continuing Exploring ignorance 8 – “Nothing completely packaged” . . .

In The Mechanical Bride McLuhan observes:

The magic that changes moods is not in any mechanism. It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic. (87)

The word ‘mood’1 in this passage must be taken in the wide sense implicit in its etymology:

Mood: “emotional condition, frame of mind,” Old English mod “heart, frame of mind, spirit; courage, arrogance, pride; power, violence,” from Proto-Germanic *motha- (cf. Old Saxon mod “mind, courage,” Old Frisian mod “intellect, mind, intention,” Old Norse moðr “wrath, anger,” Middle Dutch moet, Dutch moed, Old High German muot, German Mut “courage”).

What is at stake here for McLuhan is not only (only!) changes in our feelings or emotional states, but changes to our “frame of mind”, to our whole way of being and to the paradigmatic ways according to which we view the world and act in it. Therefore his characteristic attention to the different global understandings of societies organized via orality or manuscript or print or electric media.

When humans change moods in this wide sense, this does not take place through some further mood. There is no mood between moods. Such a supposition would institute an infinite regress since the intermediary mood of change from one mood to another would itself require further moods to differentiate it from the moods between which it is supposed to operate. Such a supposition cannot answer the question of how a transition from mood to mood occurs. In fact, instead of answering the question, it merely postpones it indefinitely — a popular remedy to a great many problems in today’s ‘fast paced’ world. Change between moods does not require further explanation where recourse is made to some infinitely partitioned evolutionary process. Here the frontier to be crossed from one mood to another becomes smaller and smaller as more and more intermediary moods are added to the linear picture. In the end, the ever shrinking gap of change itself elicits no notice and therefore no wonder.

Instead of this evolutionary perspective, mood change according to McLuhan must be perceived to transpire in that border or gap or “resonating bond” which both differentiates moods and yet also joins them in “metaphorical” fashion. But this gap (“where the action is”) is necessarily “hidden” since it falls only between one “frame of mind” and another. Functioning between moods in this way, this magic is not itself perceptable within any one of them. Instead it manifests itself only (only!) as a kind of withdrawal through which moods (plural!) appear in their resonatingly bonded assembly and which are thereby subject to change (since housed in this magic, since figured on this ground).

“The magic that changes moods”, but which “is not in any mechanism”, can seem to be “nothing”. But it is attention to this “hidden” power (Take Today 22), aka “nothing”, which characterizes that “critical vision” which “alone . . . can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic”. Here again the etymology is of ‘critical’ importance:

Crisis: early 15c., from Latinized form of Greek krisis “turning point in a disease” (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), literally “judgment, result of a trial, selection”, from krinein “to separate, decide, judge”, from PIE root *krei– “to sieve, discriminate, distinguish” (cf. Greek krinesthai “to explain;” Old English hriddel “sieve;” Latin cribrum “sieve,” crimen “judgment, crime”, cernere [cf, discern] (past participle cretus) “to sift, separate;” Old Irish criathar, Old Welsh cruitr “sieve;” Middle Irish crich “border, boundary”).

McLuhan’s “critical vision” is that sort of perception which discerns through focus on the “turning point”, “border” and “boundary”. It concentrates on the gap “where the action is” — even though this gap is necessarily “hidden” and can well appear to be no more than “nothing”.

It is through his focus on the “resonating bond” that McLuhan rejects “merger”. In another passage from The Mechanical Bride note should be made of the repeated contrast drawn between “orchestrating” and “fusing”, between “discontinuity and endless variety” on the one hand and “the universal imposition of . . . one social or economic system” on the other, between “harmony” and the “unilateral, monistic, or tyrannical”:

The symbolist esthetic theory of the late nineteenth century seems to offer an even better conception than social biology for resolving the human problems created by technology. This theory leads to a conception of orchestrating human arts, interests, and pursuits rather than fusing them in a functional biological unit, as even with Giedion and Mumford. Orchestration permits discontinuity and endless variety without the universal imposition of any one social or economic system. It is a conception inherent not only in symbolist art but in quantum and relativity physics. Unlike Newtonian physics, it can entertain a harmony that is not unilateral, monistic, or tyrannical. It is neither progressive nor reactionary but embraces all previous actualizations of human excellence while welcoming the new in a simultaneous present. (MB, 34)

Everything depends for McLuhan on the initiation and exploratory development of the “critical vision” which is here associated with “orchestrating”, “discontinuity”, “endless variety” and “harmony”. Each of these is structured by a fundamental gap across which “the magic that changes mood” transpires. But in modern times, this “critical vision” becomes lost exactly through, strangely enough, its extended application — through the use of “the magic that changes moods” within such “mechanisms” as the movies and television and, above all, advertising.

In a surprisingly early note to Ezra Pound on Jan 5, 1951 (which will require extended consideration in a later post), McLuhan is already mulling over these ideas:

Basic modes of cognition on this continent not linguistic but technological. (…) Present procedure is to slap an alien culture over the actual one. The real one is killed and the alien one is worn as a party mask. (Letters 218)

Then, in another letter to Pound from July 16, 1952, outlining what would become The Gutenberg Galaxy a full decade hence, McLuhan writes of the “mechanization of total human gesture” by “radio-telephone-cinema-TV” (Letters, 232). Similarly some months later, January 23, 1953, to Walter Ong:

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[resent] not the mechanization of writing but of word and gesture (radio movies TV) Necessarily a much greater change than from script to print. (Letters 234)

McLuhan calls modernity “the age of advertising” (the title of an important article he wrote for Commonweal magazine in 1953) because advertising in the sense of the manipulation of moods characterizes all aspects of modern life. As he shows in The Mechanical Bride, and again in Understanding Media 15 years later, politics, news and entertainment all turn on mood manipulation as much as advertising itself does.

The key to advertising in this broad sense is its operation under the cover of manifest ubiquity. Like water to fish, advertising is the last thing we notice exactly because it is everywhere present and everywhere efficacious: it is the air modernity breathes.

Further, advertising functions by putting this “magic that changes moods” to use. It is “nothing completely packaged”, the “mechanization of total human gesture”. Here (as McLuhan wrote to Pound in 1951) the “basic modes of cognition” become surface figure instead of foundational ground: the “procedure is to slap an alien culture over the actual one”. This transfer of the “hidden” power of change from the essential gap between moods as ground, to functionality within a defined purpose as figure, obscures the nature of this magic exactly through its illumination and application.

“The magic that changes mood” is therefore in oblivion today for 3 distinct reasons:

  • In the first place, this “magic” is “hidden” by nature. As McLuhan cites the I Ching in Take Today, “[the Creative] does indeed guide all happenings, but [it never becomes manifest;] 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 (22);
  • In the second place, this “hidden” power has become ubiquitous in an entire “age of advertising” and this ubiquity makes it just as difficult to discern as water to fish;
  • In the third place, this “magic” has become displaced from the “hidden” gap between one “frame of mind” and another, to use within a single “frame of mind”. Such use makes this power visible only as what it is not and thereby invisible as what it is.

But there is also a fourth reason. The “magic” which is the “resonating bond” between moods would expose our radical finitude if we were to become consciousness of our ever-repeated transitions through it. This does not occur, in part because of its natural obscurity and its unnatural use, but even more (since consciousness and obscurity are not necessarily opposed and especially consciousness and unnatural use are not opposed at all) because ‘mood’ is correlate with identity and with the perceived world and to appreciate the finitude of the former (mood) would be to appreciate the finitude of the latter (identity and world) along with it.

Dread forbids this.

Advertising has been able to harness this magic power of change and metaphor only by partnering with our dread to suppress awareness of the true nature of such change. It rivets our attention, as one says — rivets it to surface effect away from the ground of its own action and of the action it is all too successful in precipitating in us.

 

  1. Great phrase: ‘word mood’! The definition of language! ↩

Exploring ignorance (11) – Mystical Unity?

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In Exploring Ignorance 8, McLuhan’s observation from the first page of Take Today — “Nothing has its meaning alone” — was read as the injunction that the original hidden power (aka “nothing”) should not be figured or framed in human definition and use, but allowed — acknowledged — “its meaning alone”. But would this not install merger (that which is “alone”) at the very heart of reality?  How, indeed why, critique merger elsewhere if this sort of mystical unity “came before” and may therefore be taken as a, or the, standard “in all things” (Take Today 3)?

At this ‘point’, it is imperative to note the full context of McLuhan’s appeal to priority (to what “came before”, to the a-priori):

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).

After specifying the priority of “dialogue” as what “came before”, McLuhan immediately adds that it “goes beyond”.  In the classic terms of Hegel, he is saying that the ‘in-itself’ of the original hidden power (aka “nothing”) is to be ‘for-itself’. As the fundamental “process of creating”, it is already complex in the beginning. It is therefore “dialogue” and “the creative” (as the I Ching has it), not as an after-thought, but in its essence!

The essential plurality of time is implicated here.  The ontological as “dialogue” is already plural and dynamic and therefore timely. Our historical times result from that original timeliness exactly because it is “a process of creating the new” that refuses to “reflect or repeat the old” and therefore issues into times, our times, which are fundamentally different from its time.  And yet are held to it in its need for “innovation”.

The “hidden” bond of our times with the original power, our pointing to it in being closed off from it, has its ground in this original “innovation”. Our closure from it reflects its hold to and with us as fulfilling its need to be creative of “the new”. Our inferiority is essentially related to its superiority as being the only way for it to be that “innovation” which it is “in the beginning” as that which “came before”.  Its way down is our way up.

This dynamic between the ontological and the ontic, between its open “dialogue” and our closed “merger”, rests on, and so reveals, “the resonating bond in all things” (Take Today 3).

Exploring ignorance (10a) – Rembrandt

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‘Human being is a sign that points in its closure beyond itself.’

This knot has been illustrated in wonderful fashion by Rembrandt (1606-1669) in his painting of Peter denying Christ from ca 1660.

The woman’s hand obscures the light source but thereby points above.

Peter is shown with one hand veiled and the other open. It is the hand exposed to the light which is veiled — which denies. It is the hand extending into the dark which is open.

Peter is the closure (denial) that points beyond itself.  The reversed sign. The life there is in death.

 

 

 

Exploring ignorance (10) – the dialogue of being

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In Exploring ignorance 8 and Exploring ignorance (9), the first sentence of Take Today is cited, together with passages from later in the same first paragraph:

The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. (…) To naïve classifiers [however] a gap is merely empty (…) With medieval dread they abhor vacuums.

Such “naïve classifiers” dedicate themselves and their world to merger.

But there is something strange here. For if merger is the state of “all boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209), it would seem either that “the resonating bond” does not exist “in all things”, namely, not in merger — in which case “all things” would not be “all things”; or that merger somehow does implicate “the resonating bond” and therefore is included “in all things” — but how could it then be merger?

McLuhan was very much aware of this problem.  In fact, it forms the sole entrance-way into his thought.

So far from invalidating the perception of “the resonating bond in all things”, merger qua merger (merger exactly as merger, merger as “all boundaries now gone”) is that without which fundamental dialogue (“the resonating bond”) could not be fundamental dialogue!

As discussed in Exploring ignorance (6), Take Today 22 concludes as follows:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the change of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.

“Dialogue” is fundamental: it “came before”. But if “dialogue” as “creating” were only the replication of itself as more and more “dialogue”, it would be no more than “the change of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”. And it would not be “dialogue” in the deep sense of “creating the new” and different. It would not , therefore, be that which earlier on Take Today 22 is called “innovation” and which, in a passage from the I Ching cited on that same page, is called “the Creative”.

Merger is needed by “dialogue” in order for it freely to ex-press itself as “creating”. Merger is that fundamental other to “dialogue” in the creation and continuing sustenance of which “dialogue” reaches out from itself to relate to that which is decisively other than it. In this way, and in this way only, is “dialogue”, in a fundamental way, “innovation”. But since merger is exactly the absence of dialogue, “all boundaries now gone”, this free need of “dialogue” at the same time renders it “hidden”. Its “creating” is a way of stepping back from visibility. Hence, as McLuhan cites the I Ching:

[The Creative] does indeed guide all happenings, but [it never becomes manifest;] 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 hiddenness of “the Creative” does not result from it being closed; it results from it being open! “Dialogue” does not merely (merely!) relate to merger without ceasing to be “dialogue”, it relates to merger in order to be “dialogue”!

To “naïve classifiers [= merger moguls] a gap is merely empty”. They see gaps merely as “vacuums” which “with medieval dread they abhor”. Such inability to relate to the essential power which “does indeed guide all happenings” might seem to be merely negative. In stark opposition to “dialogue” which “concentrates on the work” of creating and sustaining fundamental difference, merger “concentrates” only on itself and never “goes beyond the change of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”. But exactly this closure is the sole need of “dialogue” and is, therefore, the unique sign of “dialogue” (subjective and objective genitive)!

This closed sign is nothing other than human being.

Human being is a sign that points in its closure beyond itself.

As will be detailed in future posts, it is exactly this “hidden” and “resonating bond” of “dialogue” even or especially with merger which enables “understanding media”.  For it is this “hidden” way which enables investigation to change from merger to “dialogue” and so exposes the common structure of media — “the resonating bond in all things” — in and through which intelligibility in general, and new sciences in the human domain in particular, are possible.

As McLuhan remarks early in Take Today:

Alice [in Wonderland] went through the vanishing point into the “total field” that bridges the worlds of visual and acoustic, civilized and primal spaces. (10)

“Understanding media” must take this same way. So it is that McLuhan remarks later in Take Today:

Explanations that ignore the perceptual complementarity of eye and ear lead to conceptual conflict — the divorce of rhyme and reason. (140)

McLuhan’s goal was to describe the movement from the conception of “conflict” between “rhyme and reason” (a conception of “conflict” which leads to the supposed ‘peace’ of merger and “rhyme”) to the perception of their differentiated “complementarity”.  This occurs at that moment when the “dialogue” or “the resonating bond” between merger (the “visual” goal of the perspectival “eye”) and other possibilities of communication (“the worlds of [the] acoustic”) is beheld as the “hidden” way and ground between them. And this occurs when merger recognizes itself, qua merger, as the peculiar closed sign of the “resonating”1 of that original/originating “bond” (subjective genitive).

  1.   In regard to “resonating”, cf “acoustic” and “ear” in the Take Today passages (10/140) immediately above. ↩

Exploring ignorance (9) – The Concept of Dread

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In Exploring ignorance 8, the first sentence of Take Today is cited: “The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things.” (3)  But McLuhan goes on to note in the same place that:

To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty (…) With medieval dread they abhor vacuums.

Where gaps are (held to be) no “resonating bond”, but only “empty (…) vacuums”, merger becomes the order of the day: “All boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209). This is the only form of coherence that remains a possibility. All other possible forms of coherence1 are articulated in some way and “classifiers” therefore consider them (if consideration is made at all in the general “numb”) to be fundamentally illegitimate and, at best, secondary.

For “classifiers” such complex forms are infected by a vacuous and dreadful emptiness at the axis of their purported connections and “bonds”. Indeed, difference and coherence are held by them (knowingly and unknowingly) to be mutually exclusive in a fundamental sense: the im-possibility of the conjunction of fundamentally different relata dominates their experience “in all things”.

The power of the urge to merge in the “electric age” is manifested in three world-historical developments:

  • The gapped bond of ontology/ontical is collapsed into the ontical only. ‘Echology’ and intelligibility are lost. The very idea of human beings having an essential relation to truth and reality becomes laughable. “Fear of the Lord” becomes obsolete, something humans have grown — extended themselves — far beyond.
  • The gapped bond of human beings and nature is collapsed into human beings only: “We have put the brains and nerves of man around the globe.” (‘Prospect’ 365); “When Sputnik went around the planet, nature disappeared, nature was hijacked right off the planet, nature was enclosed in a man-made environment…” (Florida State University lecture, 1970; cf Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 35)
  • As humans in a state of Narcissistic narcosis fixate on their own image in and as the “man-made environment”, the fractures and differences of human fin-itude are collapsed and humans become generic automatons only: “we are merely servo-mechanisms” (‘Prospect’  365);  “each of us is merely a Narcissus dancing around in love with his own image” (‘Prospect’ 365); “THE UNPERSON: THE MAN THAT NEVER WAS” (Take Today 26).

These three momentous reductions of the complex to the simple are like Poe’s maelstrom, forming a vortex: the descending gyres whirl in circles which are increasingly smaller, faster and more violent. First the macrocosm, then the cosmos, then the microcosm collapse into themselves, one after the other, like so many black holes. Dante’s inferno has the same conical architecture as the maelstrom but with stationary circles: there the downward momentum is energized by our souls, not by its gyrations. But both the maelstrom and the inferno gravitate to a merged point of doom.

In ‘Prospect’ McLuhan enlarges on this merged state of Narcissistic narcosis as follows:

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 hook. 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. (‘Prospect’ 365, emphasis added)

Merger, which McLuhan saw as a, or the, form of madness is the structural energy, the fateful dynamic, at work here. The collapse of the ontological gods and powers and of nature into a collapsed human being results in a state of “perfect feedback” where “you echo exactly the thing that’s out there” — and what is “out there” is “the brains and nerves of man” (‘Prospect’ 366). We come to function “like a thermostat jumping to the heat variations” where there is no “gap” of consideration between the external “variations” and our response to them.  We react simply “in the immediate mechanical way that they demand of us”.

When, especially in Take Today (but in general everywhere), McLuhan is concerned to probe “the nature” of media “by directing perception on (…) interfaces” as “prime sources of discovery”, he is above all concerned with restoring what he calls the “evitable” dimension (Take Today 6) of human being:

I take it we consider it more desirable for human beings to have some autonomy, some independence of the gimmicks. (‘Prospect’ 365)

To free himself from servitude to his own artifacts has become the main program of the new ecological age that began with Sputnik. (Take Today 7)

Restitution of human “evitability” out of servo-mechanical “servitude” to “gimmicks” depends on a threefold re-cognition.  First there must be recognition of the possibility of change. No such recognition, no foundation and no motive from which to attempt to act evitably. This requires, In turn, re-cognition of the plurality of the possible states from and to which change might be made.  No such plurality, no possibility of change. And this requires, finally, re-cognition of “boundaries” and “gaps” between such states. No such boundaries, no such plurality and no such possibility.

Hence McLuhan’s ever-repeated attention to “boundaries [as] areas of maximal abrasion and change”, as “where the action is”. Here alone is where evitability can start.

But these restorative re-cognitions must begin in the “electric age” with human being, because, as seen above, literally everything (even itself) has collapsed into human being. There is nothing else. “We have put the brains and nerves of man around the globe” (‘Prospect’ 366); “nature [has] disappeared” (Florida State University lecture, 1970; cf Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 35). “The Viewer is Monarch of All He Surveys” (Take Today 142). “The user of the electric media, whether radio, telephone, movie, or TV, has a powerful sense of being king and emperor, since he is the content of a total environment of electric services.” (Take Today 144)

Ontology and nature and human nature itself have all collapsed into Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man” (published in the same year as Understanding Media, 1964), McLuhan’s “UNPERSON”.

Hence the imperative to expose boundaries and gaps in human nature as the “areas of maximal abrasion and change” where, alone, evitability might be reborn. Hence the need to reconsider Finn MacCool and Huckleberry Finn as exemplary types of “Finn-again” — as types of human fin-itude whose limitations and boundaries are fundamental and therefore revelatory (in the first place of evitability).

The need is to relearn ana-lysis of discrete “bits”:

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 hook. (‘Prospect’ 365, emphasis added)

McLuhan thought, or rather hoped (in way that tended with experience more to faith than to expectation), that the investigations in geology, biology, anthropology and psychology, which had been vastly extended in time and space beginning in the nineteenth century, would bring re-cognition of the fin-itude of human being (objective genitive) by exposing its incredible variety. No finitude, no real variety. And conversely, if real variety, then real finitude. The exacting analysis of language and of the social environment to which McLuhan was exposed in Cambridge, especially by Richards and Leavis, could spark a similar hope. How consider, for example, “Seven Types of Ambiguity” without a sharp appreciation for the discrete and finite? Then In Toronto, the focus on “bias” that McLuhan found in Harold Innis could be thought to have related promise. If all human action and experience is necessarily biased, how not acknowledge its fin-itude?

And once fin-itude were deeply acknowledged, “evitability” might relaunch.

But the fin-itude of human being could not be, cannot be, re-cognized on account of an intervening curtain of dread:

With medieval dread they abhor vacuums. (Take Today 3)

The boundaries which constitute fin-itude are taken to be “empty (…) vacuums” and this emptiness, as Pascal already saw, excites a repulsive horror and a general state of “anxiety”:

when you put the nervous system outside [and equate it with all there is], 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. (‘Prospect’ 366)

Anxiety and dread are “total” and “pervasive” and exclusively concern “the condition of man” because, on the one hand, human being in the “electric age” is all there is; on the other hand, this “all there is” must be taken in a “total” and “pervasive” way — it must lack all variety and borders and any sort of specificity in order to avoid that fin-itude and dread-ful vacuity that all “gaps” and borders entail. “You no longer dread that animal, that famine, and so on” because these are discrete forms of life, discrete happenings, discrete threats, and it is exactly the discrete with its implicated borders and limits and difference that is dreaded.

It is just because “all boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209) that human being can expand into being “all there is”. Conversely, only some featureless “all there is” can be without borders: if there were anything else, anything specific or discrete, borders would be required. The condition of such nebulous inflation (Hegel’s night in which all cows are black) is at the same time, however, the condition of — that which introduces — “total anxiety” and dread. On the one hand, the whole construct is a rickety “gimmick”; on the other, any change from it, even any genuine consideration of it, is so dreaded (since these would implicate borders) as to be im-possible. This pathetic state of being trapped in a gigantic construction which we ourselves have jerry-built, and then locked ourselves into, constellates “total anxiety”.

Our whole existence is known to be a sham and yet any movement from it is blocked by our own dread. We suffer mortally from a kind of metaphysical incarceration that we yet know to be fatally flawed and doomed.

McLuhan describes it as follows:

when we put our nerves outside, we become of course vulnerable to the nth degree; in fact, we barely survive from day to day. Mere existence becomes one of perpetual anxiety. (…) We now have an unimaginably harassed [‘life’] by putting our nerves outside ourselves; it is like living without a skin. So what we do is go numb. When we put our nerves outside we can only survive by anaesthesia. And so we live in the unconscious. This is the age of the unconscious because it is the age when the nervous system is totally exposed. (…) Man is now in a somnambulant state because this offers him his only possibility of survival and sanity. He couldn’t bear a fully conscious existence under the frenetic conditions that he is exposed to by his own technology. He could not register these terrible shocks directly and survive. He’d go mad. (‘Prospect’ 366)

Again:

man lives in total anxiety in the age of electricity. Anxiety means (…) involvement and therefore of course a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare (‘Prospect’ 366)

This “mad (…) nightmare” is not only (only!) the loss of feeling at home in this skin and on this earth.  It is not only (only!) the torture humans impose on themselves and on all the creatures of the earth. It is not only (only!) the ceaseless warfare that must be waged against any and all difference. It is also an ontological conflict where what is at stake is the very nature of being itself, the very nature of “all that is”.

Where “gaps [are the] prime sources of discovery” (Take Today 3) and yet “gaps” are fundamentally rejected in favor of “merger”, no “dis-covery” is possible absent fundamental change. But fundamental change cannot be contemplated because the gaps between essential forms, to which and through which fundamental change would need to be made, are what are dreaded most of all. These are the most abysmal “gaps” and the ones whose consequences are the most ‘earth shaking’. (Here again, the relationship  may be noted between McLuhan’s work and that of his University of Toronto colleague, Tuzo Wilson, on plate techtonics.)

McLuhan predicted a world in which private (aka discrete) identity would disappear and what it means to be a human being would be dictated from some unquestionable and unconsiderable source. In a state of “total anxiety”, ‘security’ would demand that we all “echo exactly the thing that’s out there”. Take Today…

 

  1.  The table of media elements set out in ‘On the new opening of a domain‘ represents an attempt to specify the range of the elementary forms of media on the basis of a variable atomic structure of coherence. Recognition of something like this range represents the only possible first step out of merger. ↩

Exploring Ignorance (8) – “Nothing completely packaged”

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In Exploring Ignorance (7) a first look was taken at McLuhan’s view that, as it was expressed there, ‘modernity is the time in world history when humans press their case for merger, especially — and first of all — the merger of ontic or phenomenal reality with itself, in such a way that its essential relation with the ontological fails to be observed. This fulcrum falls into obscurity and the world enters its night.’

The strangest thing about this night of the world (subjective genitive!) is that it manifests itself as light. It is a time in which the light of human understanding and inventiveness is projected as never before onto — indeed, ultimately as — the entire planetary environment.  The old night of the world in which the stars supplied “light through” the distance between them and human beings is transmogrified into a new night in which the stars go dark in the human projection of artificial “light on” the heavens. Satellites replace the stars, night becomes day.

In a prescient 1962 article simply called ‘Prospect’, McLuhan probed this light-night of the world in interesting ways: 

In our time, instead of putting out this or that organ such as feet into wheels or (…) our skin into city walls, we have projected our brains and nerves outside. Telegraph, radio, television, telephone really are extensions of our central nervous system, not of our physical organs. We’re putting our central nervous system, our most intimate selves, outside (…) We have put the brains and nerves of man around the globe. (‘Prospect’, Canadian Art, issue 81, September/October 1962, 363-366, here 365-366)

What powers this gigantic revolution is exactly what has always powered everything, namely that “dialogue as a process of creating the new [which] came before, and goes beyond”, that “innovation” which “does indeed guide all happenings, but (…) never becomes manifest”. (Take Today 22 as discussed in Exploring ignorance 6)  But here, just as occurs with nuclear energy, this original/originary force (“dialogue […] before”) becomes re-packaged for human purposes such that what was ground is itself now subjected to new “ground rules”:

These new forms — television and radio — are new languages. They’re huge extensions of ourselves which enable us to participate in one another’s lives, much as a language does. But these forms lay down their own ground rules (‘Prospect’ 365, emphasis added)

McLuhan uses television to illustrate this imposition of new ground (which implicates the rescission of the old ground):

The scrabbled bits of information that come on TV are like symbolist poems or pointillist paintings. They have to be completed at every moment by the reader or viewer. There is nothing tied in. Nothing completely packaged. And this is what gives the TV image its tremendous power, as compared with radio, which gives a sharp, high definition image (‘Prospect’ 364).

“There is nothing tied in. Nothing completely packaged.” These observations must be read in two ways. In one way they refer to the “completion” which humans supply in their “cool” or “low definition” use of television. They have to ‘fill in’ the gaps through which the medium operates: they have to ‘connect the dots’ of its images. In the other, more fundamental way, these observations refer to the human mobilization (“tied in”, “packaged”) of that original hidden power (aka “nothing”) which, “mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible” (Take Today 22, citing the I Ching). Its “hidden” mobility comes to be re-placed by — through being put to use within — our manifest mobilization. “Nothing completely packaged.“

The endpoint of this process is approached as the essential gap de-fining original “dialogue” is not only abrogated between ontology and the ontical, but is even progressively subject within the latter — on account of that abrogation — to ” filling in” or “completing” by “new technology”:

The character of the present television image is determined by the curious mosaic created by the scanning finger. This could change in time. Technologically the mosaic could end. There could be a filling in, a completing of it by some totally new technology. (‘Prospect’ 364)

Indeed, this mobilization of manifestation of ours comes to dominate the entire planet such that “nature disappears”:

When Sputnik went around the planet, nature disappeared, nature was hijacked right off the planet, nature was enclosed in a man-made environment and art took the place of nature. Planet became art form. (Florida State University lecture, 1970; cf Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 35)

When Sputnik went around the planet in I957 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. Mallarmé had thought that “the world exists to end in a book.” It turned out otherwise. It has taken on the character of theatre or playhouse. Since Sputnik the entire world has become a single sound-light show. (‘Roles, Masks, and Performances’, New Literary History 2:3, 1971, pp. 517-531, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #12, 3-26, here p 22, emphasis added)

In 1957 Sputnik put the planet inside a man-made environment for the first time in human history.  When Sputnik went around the planet, creating a new information environment, the planet was transformed and Nature ceased to exist.  The planet then became an art-form, and to use Bucky Fuller’s phrase it became “Spaceship Earth” where everybody is a crew-member and there are no passengers.  Now, Spaceship Earth has to be totally programmed. (…) The idea that everything on the planet must be controlled and programmed was born at the moment of Sputnik, and this manifested a new hidden ground of information which has transformed the figure of the planet.  (Address to The Festival of Life 1977, emphasis added)

The old natural “hidden” ground of original “dialogue” or “innovation” (aka “nothing”) becomes figure(d) within human designs.  At the same time, human designs which used to be figure(d) in relation to that original “dialogue” or “innovation” become the “new hidden ground of information” (subjective genitive) — “The idea that everything on the planet must be controlled and programmed...”. 

That McLuhan’s project was the quixotic attempt to reverse this profound reversal is explained on the first page of Take Today:

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 relationship. (3)

Once again, “Nothing has its meaning alone”, must be read in two ways. In one way it expresses the syntactical complexity of all things: everything has its meaning in context. There are no bare facts, only interpretations. In the other, more fundamental way, it expresses the need that the “hidden” power, aka “nothing”, not be framed in human definition and use, but allowed — acknowledged — “its meaning alone”.

The previous paragraph from this first page of Take Today, the very first paragraph of the book, explains how McLuhan would attempt this reversed reversal:

The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. All boundaries are areas of maximal abrasion and change. The interval or gap constitutes the resonant or musical bond in the material universe. This is where the action is. To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty. [They think there is ‘nothing’ there.] They will [therefore] look for [hardware] connections instead of [investigating those “resonant or musical”] bonds [which seem to them “empty”, but are actually the “hidden” recesses of fundamental power]. (…) With medieval dread they abhor vacuums. But by directing perception on the interfaces of the processes in ECO-land, all gaps become prime sources of discovery. (3)

The keynote here is to be found in the phrase “the resonating bond in all things“. It is because the “the resonating bond” is always already implicated “in all things” — ie, as their ontological foundation — that it is “reveal[ed]” in “the art and science of this century” and in fact in “all boundaries” as “areas of maximal abrasion and change” — areas which reflect in this way that original boundary which “came before, and goes beyond” (as Take Today 22 has it).  For this same reason, all “interfaces” and “gaps” in the “processes in ECO-land” can “become prime sources of discovery” once they are perceived as belonging to that original “resonating bond in all things”. The key to the new sciences of this ecology is this echology.

“Nothing completely packaged” is continued in Exploring ignorance 12.

Exploring ignorance (7) – Humpty Dumpty

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Exploring ignorance (6) continued

In McLuhan’s view, modernity is the time in world history when humans press their case for merger, especially — and first of all — the merger of ontic or phenomenal reality with itself, in such a way that its essential relation with the ontological fails to be observed. This fulcrum falls into obscurity and the world enters its night.

This failure of observation has many forms which future posts will need to analyze. Suffice it to note here that it is subject to a range of expression varying from outright rejection of the possibility of ontological-ontical relation to unconsidered lack of notice. Nearly always it is subject to a fateful sort of double forgetfulness where the forgetting is itself forgotten.

In any case, the gap between the two, “where the action is”, becomes displaced — if not erased — within the phenomenal.  So, as seen for example in Chrystall’s suggestion for exploring ignorance, “dialogue” (although always presupposing some kind of gap between different persons and different views) is not seen as an original power to which humans are subject, but as a “resource” which humans can and should turn to advantage.

A strange kind of humpty-dumpty effect occurs where humpty, instead of falling into the inherent fractures of human being — fractures which, once passionately explored, are revelatory of ontological relation — instead rises into an ethereal unity with himself.

Humpty-dumpty becomes a satellite, Sputnik.

In such gravity-defying flight, the one thing which might save — falling, fracturing — is what is most feared. And the one thing that is unavoidable is what is to be avoided “at all cost”.

Exploring ignorance (6)

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Exploring ignorance (5) continued…

(f) What does all this have to do with exploring ignorance?

Section (e) of the exploring ignorance series discusses a passage from page 22 of Take Today:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the change of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (italics added)

Earlier on this same page “dialogue as a process of creating the new” is called “innovation” and “innovation”, in turn, is described through a citation from the Richard Wilhelm translation of that “4,000 year-old management manual”, the I Ching:

[The Creative] does indeed guide all happenings, but [it never becomes manifest;] 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 bracketed portions of the citation are omitted by McLuhan.  The second one — “it never becomes manifest” — seems to have been skipped in error since it is not marked by ellipses and, moreover, it is easy to see how such an error might have been made through the repetition in the passage of “it never be-“. Indeed, there was good reason to include this clause since the citation continues, as if repeating it, that this power “never behaves outwardly”, “is hidden”, and “concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible”.

Now it is imperative at this point to ask: is this power “hidden” and not “outwardly visible” essentially (such that any attempt to illuminate it would be deformative and distorting) or is it accidentally “hidden” (such that it can and perhaps should be illuminated)? Or again, If this power “never becomes manifest” is this because of the way it is, retreating in favor of its relata, or is this because of some failure on our part to unveil it?

There are important reasons to come down in favor of the first of these alternatives and to hold that this power is essentially hidden on account of the way it “guide[s] all happenings”:

  • If “dialogue” is first of all the dialogue of the ontological with the ontical, the power relating them cannot ‘be’ the one or the other. Even to call such a power “hidden” seems to make more than is fitting of ‘something’ which is neither in Being or in being, which is neither ontological nor ontical, but between them.
  • If “dialogue” in this sense is ground, any attempt to frame it would convert it to figure, to, that is, what it essentially is not. 

When McLuhan specifies that “dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the change of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”, he implicates a power of which we are essentially ignorant. Not on account of some weakness or inability on our part, but on account of its ‘concentration’ (as the I Ching has it). “Ignorance” here is not a term of subjective blame; it is a term of objective depth.

Perhaps, then, the exploration of ignorance is above all a subjective genitive: not the exploration of what (= objective genitive), but the exploration of whom (= subjective genitive).  Because it can never fittingly belong to us as some kind of object within our media, the need is for us to find a way for our media to belong to it.

To be continued in Exploring ignorance (7)….

 

Exploring ignorance (5)

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Exploring ignorance (4) continued …

(e) why is ontological/ontic inter-communication (aka dialogue, inclusivity, interface, metaphor, mosaic, etc) the fundamental relationship for McLuhan?  why does all perception need to start from it?

This gets to the meat of Chrystall’s question.  He wants to know why we can’t start with a known fact — viz, McLuhan’s consulting work.  The short answer is that McLuhan agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations.  Starting with any ‘fact’ is to start with the RVM. (Why? Because the RVM supplies a direct relationship to something. Once indirection is allowed, once the question of interpretation is allowed, the RVM is relativized and this shatters it. Relativity and the RVM are incompatible.)

Where McLuhan diverges (or reverses) from Nietzsche (like Eliot in this respect) is his finding that the ubiquity of interpretation leads into the tradition rather than out of it. Most of the howling from McLuhan’s critics about his deficiencies has its root just here. Unable or unwilling to probe their own positions with radical questioning, therefore unable to follow him in this reversing maneuver, attention is directed instead at certain ‘facts’ which are alleged to disqualify his perceptions: he contradicted himself or did other bad things. (Those with no ethical position can always find ethics when a stick is needed to beat a competing view.)

Once it is allowed that there are no facts, only interpretations, the question arises (or can arise, if questioning is pursued with sufficient passion, that is, once all questions are allowed): if interpretation is (ex hypothesi) not only not contradictory to truth, but essential to it (as does indeed seem to be the case in the sciences and in practical know-how as well), what could account for this strange relationship? How is it that human beings can successfully relate to truth via interpretation which is never more than partial?

McLuhan’s answer (which he got from Wright, Chesterton, Leavis, Maritain and Gilson) is that ontological/ontical inclusivity precedes all else:

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, italics added)

Take Today 22 is one of the most important pages McLuhan ever wrote, and this passage (which concludes the page) is one of the most important ones on it.  Later posts will need to unpack the page as a whole: suffice it here to unpack only this key concluding passage…

– “dialogue (…) came before“: dialogue does not arise as some combination or blend of things which are prior to it, but is itself prior to the relata conjoined by it.

– “dialogue (…) came before, and goes beyond“: dialogue does not come first and then stop; rather, dialogue is the continuing power both in the beginning and throughout the history founded by it.

– “dialogue (…) goes beyond” also in the sense that it goes beyond itself: it is “a process of creating [and sustaining] the new“. This “process” is not merely the creation and sustenance “of equivalents” of itself, it does not “merely reflect or repeat the old“, it is “dialogue” in the deep sense of conjunction between fundamentally different relata. As such deep dialogue, there can be no supposed resolution of it in the merger “of equivalents“; it is a gap which never closes and never fails to conjoin, and is exactly therefore “where the action is”.

Now it can be seen how human beings can successfully relate to truth via interpretation which is never more than partial. The “dialogue” between fundamentally different terms is prior to humans and its power is deeper than them. McLuhan’s problem is therefore to investigate how humans might come back from their “extensions” to its.

It is the “medium” which is the “message” exactly as being prior to all our media and all our messages.

McLuhan’s repeated insistence that truth is making, not matching, has its foundation in these considerations. From this prior power of dialogue, human beings, too, are called to ‘create the new‘ and ‘go beyond‘, not in some “lineal” way. but “through the looking glass”, both via its primordial power and into its opening-holding “extension”.

In sum, the deepest form of such primordial dialogue, ontological/ontic dialogue, is fundamental as first, as continuing, as freeing and as sustaining. McLuhan’s confidence in “intelligibility” is anchored in it. And every word of Marshall McLuhan must be understood as issuing out of, and being directed back to, this original complex.

To be continued in Exploring ignorance (6)….

 

 

 

Exploring ignorance (4)

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Andrew Chrystall’s question to Exploring ignorance (3) is important. He asks if that post (perhaps along with the previous Exploring ignorance posts) is “forgetting or willfully ignoring all McLuhan’s consulting gigs and his work with Ideas Consultants?”

In order to answer this question fully, it must be teased apart into a series of further questions (which will be answered individually inline):

a)  didn’t McLuhan, like any university professor, have enough to do with his teaching and research?  why did he also involve himself himself in areas (like consulting) where he didn’t have any experience at all? and, arguably, little competence?

McLuhan was attempting to communicate ideas which have been known forever.  As discussed in Take Today, he found them in (eg) the I Ching and the pre-socratics.  Beyond ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ and ‘though wisdom is common to all, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own’ and (therefore) ‘the way up is the way down’, he had little of fundamental import to add. But, on the one hand, these ideas had gained little traction in human affairs over the millennia and, in the modern era, increasingly less.  This at a time when contrary ideas were exploding across the world with ever-greater speed and with terrible efficacy. So it was (on the other hand) that McLuhan had a duty to God and man to attempt what he could, quixotic as it might seem. The astonishing amount of writing he did (the bulk of it either unpublished or little noted in McLuhan bibliographies) is testimony to the seriousness with which he took this duty. Similarly with his rushing around to ‘consult’ when this produced little result and much mirth.

b) why would McLuhan’s ideas have application beyond the ivory tower in the “control tower” of business, government, education administration, etc?

As cited and discussed in Centre and Margin 2 and Centre and Margin 3, McLuhan’s January 4, 1961 letter to Claude Bissell notes that media study has application to any field of perception:

… there is nothing in any management structure (…) which differs from an educational structure, a biological structure or an art structure. Any field of perception is a structure of center-marginal interplay, (Letters, 279-280, italics added)

So “McLuhan’s consulting gigs and his work with Ideas Consultants” simply exemplified his claim that business was one of the areas where his ideas had application.

At the same time, however, McLuhan had the notion through friends like Bernie Muller-Thym and Peter Drucker that business executives were on the lookout for new ideas in organization in ways which politicians, church leaders, education administrators and, in particular, academics were not. So commercial application could stand in the service for McLuhan of communication: perhaps here, for the first time in millennia, and in the very dynamo of modernity, traction could be found for ideas which were both the most important for the human project to heed — and the least heeded.

c) wouldn’t successful application of McLuhan’s ideas in (eg) business organization show that they were a type of management theory (however odd)? 

Centre and Margin 2 discusses this question in the following way:

As noted elsewhere (RVM or through the looking glass?) “management structure” is not (or is not only) a commercial term for McLuhan. It applies, as he specifically notes in his letter to Bissell, to “any field of perception”. So ‘McLuhan for Managers’ can be misleading in the same way as ‘chemistry for metallurgists’ might be. Of course chemistry has enormous application in metallurgy. But since chemistry is much broader than metallurgy, its application there depends upon first mastering the wider field. So with McLuhan and business management. His work was directed to the wider field of media research from which applications to organizational management, for instance, might be derived. But reading his work as business theory, even though he often cited people like Drucker and Muller-Thym, and even though he considered developments in business highly important, and even though he wondered if his thinking might better be communicated to business executives than to academics, is a category mistake.

d) why criticize an attempt to show application of McLuhan’s work even if in an admittedly restricted area?

The essence of McLuhan’s thought lies in the attempt to think through the implications of inclusivity (which he could characterize as “auditory”, “electric”, “dialogue”, etc) as opposed to exclusivity (“visual”, “print”, “point of view”, etc). Now inclusivity is originally plural and is above all expressed in the “inter-communication” (a term always echoing Henry Wright in McLuhan’s work) of the ontological with the ontic.  Just as chemistry has known for 200 years that there is no ontic stuff (like a glass of water) without a corresponding ontological designation (H2O), so for McLuhan’s media study any discussion of the ontic alone without its ontological designation is an ominous distortion, even a kind of madness:

Reconciliation is not merging. (‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’, 79).

Any field of perception is a structure of center-marginal interplay, and when the center usurps margin, the patient is in an hypnotic trance; or alternatively,  mad. ( January 4, 1961 letter to Claude Bissell, Letters 279)

When the individual is entirely at one with his world or organization, he is headed for a hang-up of merging and unconsciousness, which is sterility in life or in business. (Take Today, 282)

Note may be made that these citations come from three different decades of McLuhan’s career.  A good argument could be made that he never talked about anything else. Certainly (as the posts on McLuhan’s language attempt to show), in “reading McLuhan, everything depends on whether his texts are seen in the RVM or ‘through the looking glass’.” Chemistry is simply the reading of nature ‘through the looking glass’ (H2O may be seen through water) and it was McLuhan’s conviction that a similar intelligibility lies in the nature of media.

To be continued in Exploring ignorance (5)….

 

Exploring Ignorance (3)

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Another indication that Chrystall’s treatment of “ignorance” is amiss is that he explicitly treats it as a kind of “resource” (‘Ignorance as Resource for a Dialogic Community and Discovery’) which can and should be be subjected to mining and manipulation: “opened up [for] the possibility of organising”, as he says.

Now McLuhan could speak in similar terms, but only with deep and rueful irony, since this would displace the grounding power of nescience to use within human figuring. The parallel to atomic weaponry was clear to McLuhan as may be seen in his frequent resort to the images and vocabulary of nuclear physics and warfare.  What is at stake in each of these is the attempt to turn something fundamental to human use, an attempt replete with global danger.

McLuhan’s thinking here is close to Martin Heidegger’s critique of Technik as reducing everything to Bestand (usually translated as ‘standing reserve’) and, indeed, McLuhan’s close friend and colleague, Tom Langan, was a Heidegger scholar of some note in the ’60s and ’70s. His book, The Meaning of Heidegger, A Critical Study of an Existentialist Phenomenology was first published in 1959.

Langan, like McLuhan, once taught at St Louis University. He came to the philosophy department at the University of Toronto in 1967 after working with Etienne Gilson on his 4 volume history of philosophy project. Langan is presumably the source of McLuhan’s not infrequent references to Heidegger (as well as a spur to his Catholic activism in the 1970s).

It is possible that Langan gave McLuhan the idea of applying Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner line — We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea — to his own work. As Langan must have known, and as he may have told McLuhan, Heidegger’s younger brother and archivist, Fritz, applied this same line to Martin.

 

 

 

 

Exploring ignorance (2)

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In Chrystall’s exploring ignorance proposal to the MEA, he uses the word ‘extend’, innocuously enough perhaps , As a general rule, however, whenever words like ‘extend’, ‘extension’ etc are used in reference to McLuhan to indicate a desirable end (as in Robert Logan’s title [!] Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan), there is something amiss.  For McLuhan, ‘extensions’ are not a good thing (or, for that matter, a bad thing), they are a problematic thing. They are at work to further only at the generally unconsidered expense that they are at work at the same time also to limit. So, eg, no increased sight without an implicated blindness. Similarly for any other sense or for all the senses together.

More is always also less for humans — ‘odos ano kato. (“The way up is the way down” from Heraclitus, which Eliot uses as one of his mottos to the Four Quartets and which McLuhan cites in Take Today (283) as an “ancient adage”).

Especially in the context of ‘exploring ignorance’, no mention of ‘extending’ should be proffered in McLuhan scholarship without counter-balancing acknowledgement of its inevitable shadow side.

 

Exploring ignorance (1)

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Andrew Chrystall submitted a suggestion to the Media Ecology Association for a panel at its 2012 conference which would explore ignorance. Unfortunately — since nothing would be more important for media ecology to explore than the topic of fundamental ignorance — his suggestion was not taken up.

Chrystall ties his suggestion to two points:

Much of the emphasis McLuhan places on ignorance here appears to extend from: (a) the fact he regarded the sharing of ignorance and an examination of specialists’ ignorance as the starting point for dialogue, and (b) that the practice opened up the possibility of organising ignorance for discovery…

While not entirely wrong, these points do not get at the heart of MMs ‘doctrine of ignorance’. And for McLuhan everything depends on starting with and from that beating heart: “the medium is the message/massage” and “the gap is where the action is” are two ways of pointing to this fundament of “ignorance” whose dynamic life is “preliminary” to all history and experience.

Because Chrystall’s points miss the heart of what McLuhan was attempting to get at, they actually revert to POB perspective — exactly what McLuhan was attempting to get away from. They situate ignorance as a figure on the ground of human action. It is (taken to be) what results from our limited perspective, or from our hasty presupposition, or from our failed sympathy, etc.  But for McLuhan, “ignorance” is that border or interval or gap whose dynamic life (“where the action is”, “the massage”) is first of all ontological. It is that abysmal gap through which ontological possibilities can first be plural because bordered or gapped by ‘im-possibility’. It is the “medium” (between fundamental possibilities) which is “message” exactly on account of this originality. It is this strange ground on which human action and experience secondarily figures.

The dynamic power of ignorance in human life has its spring-board in this foundation. Properly perceived,  ignorance provides the bond via which the social is generated and maintained.  Since ignorance/impossibility both holds apart and bonds the fundamental possibilities of being, so can its gap bond humans with God, individual with individual, one generation with the prior generation and with the next generation, one people with another people, humans with nature, and so on.

It is this power which first enables language and which McLuhan treats over and over again in terms of logos.

Fitting relation to such fundamental ignorance requires beginning again with it and from it. This requires a gap from one’s existing experience and presupposition, reach to original ignorance and re-newed ex-pression of it (subjective and objective genitive!) — all of which receive their potentiality and power from the original gap. Because it is original power, so are we em-powered — a ‘delivery system’ McLuhan often describes in terms of “metaphor” and “light through”.

 

Menippean satire 3

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Further pro menippean satire (PMS) texts given at the Winnipeg school site are:

[McLuhan:] “I don’t have A Theory of Communication” and “I don’t use theories in my work”

These are taken from Eric McLuhan’s lecture, ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg‘ where they are cited as “Marshall McLuhan’s classic refrains”.

A whole series of questions comes together at this juncture, the most important of which (to be treated in later posts) concerns perception and conception in McLuhan’s work.

Here three points may be made.

First, Eric McLuhan is well aware that ‘theory’ is not only something which his father didn’t have and didn’t use. Here is Eric in this same lecture:

When Stephen Hawking discusses his own theory of communication, it becomes immediately obvious that one function of a theory in the hands of a scientist is to prod reality into revealing itself. “[W]e cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory,” he writes. A good, elegant theory will describe a wide array of observations and predict the results of new ones. “Beyond that, it makes no sense,” he points out “to ask if [a theory] corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory” (Hawking, [Black Holes and Baby Universes], 1993: 44). A theory is a way of seeing and as such a formal cause of reality. (28)

In this sense of ‘theory’, Marshall McLuhan not only did “use theories”, he could not not use them.

Second, as H-G Gadamer often pointed out, the Greek root of ‘theory’ (which we also have in ‘theatre’) is only one of many different words the Greeks had for different kinds of ‘seeing’. Others we retain in English include ‘idea’ (cognate with Latin and English ‘video’), and ‘panorama’, ‘optometry’, and ‘ophthalmology’ (all cognate with English ‘aware’ and ‘wary’). The kind of seeing reflected in theory and theatre can be called ‘participatory seeing’ and was applied by the Greeks above all to the exercise of sight in divine ritual. Here the object seen in-forms the subject such that a kind of receptive passivity is necessary to ‘see what is going on’. Gadamer’s point is interesting in itself and also supplies an etymological footing to Hawking’s point above.

Third, it is insulting both to McLuhan and to menippean satire itself to think that something like ‘avoiding theory’ could supply a non-distorting mirror in which — on the basis of which — media analysis could then be pursued.  (Not that huge amounts of energy are not wasted in just this way!)  The RVM is nothing but perspective that is anchored in some way. But McLuhan’s thought necessarily goes “through the looking glass” since its study is of anchors, plural.

 

 

 

 

 

Menippean satire 2

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The Toronto School Of Communications fb page offers some counterblast to the idea that the importance of menippean satire in McLuhan’s work is overrated. McLuhan is cited as follows:

I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements …There is no other way of getting attention at all. I mean you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them; dislocates them.

This is from a talk McLuhan gave before a panel studying ‘The Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario’ (January 19, 1967). It was published in print in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970. The preceding sentence reads: “Here is another thought for you that is very controversial.” So McLuhan was offering a “controversial” thought about his “controversial statements”. This might be thought similar to satire about menippean satire. But would this be an endorsement or a rejection? Neither? Both?

At any rate, McLuhan was hardly an advocate of shock. In fact, he might well be imagined as addressing the difficult question of how to wake people up from the repeated shocks of modernity without resorting to the contradictory and doubtless useless strategy of attempting to administer one more dose of it.  We have shock jocks and shock and awe and today a thousand more shocking things/girls/boys/songs/images/movies/events etc etc will join the previous billions of them. Shock and somnambulism have become so merged that unimaginable violence against everything is not only the new normal, it is the fervently endorsed new normal.

The mean level of stupidity in the world has never been so high and there have never been so many people around to exercise it. The prospects are shocking.

Another pro menippean satire text cited is:

The urgent effort of the poets to gain a hearing for their intuitions is always lost on the public.

This is from ‘The Crack in the Rear-View Mirror‘ which appeared in the first issue of the McGill Journal of Education in 1966. But instead of offering a questionable historical description of the “urgent effort of the poets to gain a hearing”, or giving the questionable advice that poets turn their attention to publicity instead of their writing, perhaps McLuhan was thinking here of something more like the “urgent need of the public to give poets a hearing”? His dictation ‘writing’ all too often came out like this.

In this same paper from the McGill Journal of Education, McLuhan concludes by expressing the counterfactual hope that:

In the jet age there are some indications that the rear-view mirror as a notification device is losing its monopoly.

Earlier he had given the “only conceivable” way in which this might eventuate:

The only conceivable defence against the distorting effects of the new environments created by new technologies is a patient and total understanding of their powers and influences.

 

Oscar Hijuelos

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Oscar Hijuelos died this weekend (Oct 12, 2013). His Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir (2011) provides an excellent account of McLuhan’s New York City life when he (McLuhan) visited during the 15 or so years after WW2. McLuhan is mentioned only in passing, but Hijuelos grew up on W 118th St between Columbia and Morningside Park right across the street from the large (eight kids) Muller-Thym family.  His best friend was Richard Muller-Thym.  So the Muller-Thyms and their complex life is front and center throughout the memoir.

Bernard Muller-Thym and his wife Mary had been close friends and role models for McLuhan and his wife Corinne, since standing as their witnesses in their last minute 1939 marriage. A letter McLuhan wrote to them when Muller-Thym was on his death-bed in 1974 fondly recalls their years in St Louis together, from 1938 to 1942 or 1943:

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 very rich and heady brew that formed and was shared by your delighted friends. I pray that other other such centres exist even now, and that others will be as lucky as I in sharing them. The fact that you [Mary] and Bernie had such a wonderful musical background [she was a pianist whose father was the conductor of the Kansas City Symphony and he was an accomplished violinist], to say nothing about your knowledge of SLU, the Jesuits, and the city of St Louis, was like knowing James Joyce himself! (June 11, 1974, Letters 498)

Muller-Thym regarded his activities as a business consultant (which he had begun already in St Louis when he was teaching at SLU as a means of supplementing his meager professor’s salary) as applied Thomism. Since McLuhan was well aware of the deficiencies in his knowledge of classical philosophy and of scholasticism, and knew nothing about business organization, Muller-Thym became his adviser and muse on all these fronts. The considerable role these topics play in McLuhan’s work testifies to Muller-Thym’s extraordinary influence on it from the late 1930s onwards.

McLuhan stayed with the Muller-Thyms whenever he was in New York. His stash of The Mechanical Bride (purchased at considerable discount from the publisher when it was decided to pulp it) was kept there and John Muller-Thym (whose bed McLuhan took over on his visits) remembers pushing grocery cart loads of it up to the Columbia University Bookstore whenever The Bride was featured in some course.

Hijuelos’ memoir provides a touching entrance into this small world, as well as the larger one in which it was embedded.

Chrystall on time 2

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It needed the clash of two worlds to see one. (TT 38)

As already seen in Chrystall on time 1, Chrystall’s reading of McLuhan sometimes remains wedded to a sense of history — of time — that is singular and linear. To this extent his reading remains print-oriented since it is fundamental to the difference between print and electric media that the former are “lineal”, “one at a time” and “exclusive”, while the latter are “complex”, “all at once” and “inclusive”. While a sort of complexity is hardly unknown to “visual” print media, their exemplification of the complex is secondary and derivative, not primary and constitutive as it is for “auditory” electric media. McLuhan treats this difference in characteristic fashion in this GG passage:

The study of the Bible in the Middle Ages achieved conflicting patterns of expression which the economic and social historian [viz, Innis and Giedion] is also familiar with. The conflict was between those who said that the sacred text was a complex unified at the literal level, and those who felt that the levels of meaning should be taken one at a time in a specialist spirit. This conflict between an auditory and a visual bias. . . (112)

The contrast McLuhan draws here between “conflicting patterns of expression” concerns “an auditory (…) bias” in which the “complex” is already present “at the literal level” and “a visual bias” for which  the “complex” is compounded as a linear effect from the aggregation of “one at a time”. In the former, the “literal level” follows from the complex which is prior and already “united” with it — which is why the “complex” may be read from it. In the latter, the complex follows from the movement of “one(s) at a time” which are prior — which is why the complex must be fabricated “one at a time in a specialist spirit”.

Now time is exactly that which is per se complex. So the fundamental question or “conflict” addressed in McLuhan’s GG text above is whether there is a time which is prior to that of linear history. Or, as this may equally be put, is time singular or plural? Or, as it may be put in yet another way, is the complex first as cause, or is it third (once a prior first and second are in place) as effect? (A later post will detail how these questions are exactly those addressed in Bernard Muller-Thym’s thesis, The Establishment of the University of Being — a text which McLuhan must have studied in great detail with Muller-Thym during their SLU years, a study which probably began even before Muller-Thym’s thesis was issued in print in 1939.)

The importance of these questions for an assessment of Chrystall’s reading of McLuhan may be seen in the following passage from ‘A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion‘:

Juxtaposition of plot and subplot, McLuhan states in “Double Plots in the Poetry of Pope”, is never a blend but means of revealing both plus the third thing — the ineluctable. McLuhan also discusses this effect, via use of the double plot or juxtaposition of two momentary environments or digressions, in terms of hendiadys—one by means of two (“Joyce’s Use of Epyllion”).

In the first sentence, “the ineluctable” (which Chrystall follows Joyce and McLuhan in using as much to mean ‘the ineffable’ as ‘the necessary’), is first precisely as the ineffable and the necessary. As such, even though it may be called “the third thing” (reflecting its order of discovery, not its order of being) it is “never a blend”. It follows that the “juxtaposition of plot and subplot” (and equally the “Juxtaposition” of any other duality) arises ‘ineluctably’ as a reflex of this prior medium. It is the “means of revealing both”. In the second sentence, however, Chrystall rewrites the first, reversing it. Here the “revealing” from the first sentence is termed “this effect” and the hendiadys is said to arise “by means of two”. Here “the third thing” is “third” in every sense and it is not, above all, “the ineluctable” first in the order of being. Instead, it is exactly some kind of sequential “blend”.

In and between these two sentences, the question of the plurality of time(s) is at stake. The “ineluctable” causal “means” in the first becomes an “effect” of prior “means” in the second. The first “means” implicates not only a time of its own exactly as prior and as a — or the — “means”, but also a time of reaching out from itself to our “literal level”. In contrast, the second “means” is that of “momentary” history from whose movement the hendiadys arises now as “the third thing” in a fundamentally different, strictly “lineal”, sense.

This question of the plurality of time(s) comes to its head in Chrystall’s essay in the following passage:

In and through his use of the epyllion McLuhan both involves the reader and simultaneously creates detachment — a space-time for the reader that is, in a sense, outside history. To be involved and detached simultaneously is, of course, a paradox. But it is also the crux and precisely what McLuhan is offering in and through these two works [GG and UM]. By having the reader involve themselves with media forms and reconstruct the flux of history within themselves, again and again, the reader is “liberated” from history and comes to see the extent to which their own biases are historically conditioned.

Time is implicated throughout.  Chrystall refers to (a) “space-time (…) that is, in a sense, outside history”), (b) “the flux of history”, (c) liberation “from history” and (d) the ways in which “biases are historically conditioned”. Time is plural in (a) and (c) (which clearly puzzles Chrystall, hence the cautionary “in a sense” and the scare quotes around “liberated”) and decidedly singular in (b) and (d). Chrystall senses that something important is at stake here, even “the crux” of what McLuhan was up to, but he does not thematize time as that which inherently “both involves (…) and simultaneously creates detachment”. For time remains itself — is what it is — in detaching itself from itself: evolution as involution and involution as evolution.

Chrystall observes that “to be involved and detached simultaneously is, of course, a paradox”. But why “of course”? And just when is “paradox”? Is it first or third? What sort of time or times does it implicate? As first, it would govern how the “involved and [the] detached” are to be understood. They would then be “paradox” in an original, archetypal sense. As third, its understanding would be governed by how we first understand the “involved and [the] detached”. It would then be cliché, “of course”.

The former, “paradox” as first, is what is seen “through the looking glass”. The latter, “paradox” as third, is what is seen on the surface of the RVM.

Chrystall is an acute enough reader of McLuhan that his analyses raise these questions. Suffice it to note here only that “paradox” is indeed “the crux” and that it must be allowed its questionability if McLuhan is to be considered fittingly. Only note that in the “Paradox” section of From Cliché to Archetype (1970), paradox is brought together with the eloquence of the doctus orator, a theme from McLuhan’s 1943 thesis, and with Chesterton, the subject of McLuhan’s first scholarly paper in 1936 and the most important influence on his 1937 conversion:

Chesterton’s entire vision was paradoxical because it was based on perception as process. (CA 159)

In the same place, McLuhan links paradox specifically to the question of time:

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”. (CA, 160) (The passage from Aristotle used by Thomas is cited again by McLuhan in Latin in ‘The Medieval Environment’ from 1974.)

In a postscript to his May 6, 1969 letter to Jacques Maritain (Letters, 371), McLuhan cites all of this same text, but in Latin, and importantly includes its continuation as follows:

et in ultimo instanti illius temporis, quod est primum instans . . .

Fifteen years before, in his 1955 Explorations 4 essay ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’ McLuhan cited Dante from Canto 1 of the Purgatorio:

We paced along the lonely plain, as one who returning to his lost road, and, till he reached it, seems to go in vain.

 

 

 

Menippean satire

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The importance of menippean satire in McLuhan’s work is overrated. While he did have a great (typically western Canadian) sense of humor and certainly did not disdain satire, including menippean, reading his work from this vantage brings with it a series of problems. Most importantly, menippean satire all too easily suggests that some passage is not understood because it is not intended to be understood. Instead, it is supposed, the passage is intended to ‘jar the reader’ (as the saying goes) with its absurdity or its opacity. So one understands all of McLuhan by understanding the understandable parts and not understanding the not understandable parts.  End of story. The history of the world can be grasped in short order following this recipe.

 

Centre and Margin 3

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McLuhan’s  January 4, 1961 letter to Claude Bissell (Letters, 279-280) is cited in Centre and Margin 2. This post will provide a running inline commentary on it. Italics appearing in McLuhan’s text here have been added.

. . . what our technology has done electrically, and will do with ever-increasing intensity, is to increase the flow of information in all directions and at all levels. 

As usual, McLuhan’s language functions here on two levels at once, the phenomenological and the ontological.  Phenomenologically he is describing, straight-forwardly, information flow in the electric age. It greatly increases “in all directions and at all levels” both in speed and amount. Ontologically, electric technology functions in this passage to describe the process of “preference” which becomes “all at once” as the velocity of “information flow” increases to “the speed of light”. The one-sided “preference” of print technology (a ≠ b or a ≠ b) gives way to the multiple “preference” state of the electric (a =≠ b).

What is needed therefore is an understanding of what happens to existing center-margin relationships as the interplay between center and margin is affected by ever-higher levels of information.

As the relationship R (characterized by “preference” and “stress”) in the a/b structure changes, so do ‘a’ and ‘b’ (here ‘center’ and ‘margin’). McLuhan puts it this way in Take Today:

BRIDGES ARE INTERVALS OF RESONANCE  AS MUCH AS MEANS OF CONNECTION. LIKE ANY RESONATING INTERVAL, THEY TRANSFORM BOTH AREAS THEY TOUCH. (9)

This is why the medium is the message/massage. Hence it is that:

Classroom and curriculum as centers for community margins can undergo some strange reversals of roles, as well as considerable subdivision of roles, when the same levels of information are equally available at margin and center. It is this in a word which has caused the restructuring of management.

The double “preference” of the electric is described as “the same levels of information (…) equally available at margin and center”. This sort of shift in “preference” and “stress” (= this sort of shift in R) is what McLuhan often calls “the restructuring of management”.

As McLuhan points to changes in the education environment (changes that Bissell knew all too well), he is like a proto-chemist who points to the gas produced when mercury oxide is heated and says: “Oxygen”. Phenomenologically, it seems clear what is indicated. But the ontological dimension is utterly obscure. When it is finally grasped that the two belong together and express each other, even the phenomenological dimension is transformed and a new world is born.

But there is nothing in any management structure, so far as the response to such information change is concerned, which differs from an educational structure, a biological structure or an art structure. Any field of perception is a structure of center-marginal interplay…

Here McLuhan directs Bissell’s attention (or attempts to do so) to the elementary or ontological level of the educational phenomena in which he is interested. He could not understand ‘Oxygen’ if he did not understand the ways in which it appears in air, water, mercury oxide, etc etc.  Just so, Bissell will not understand the educational changes in which he is interested until he sees the general structures and laws that are expressed in them (as in “any field of perception”).

and when the center usurps margin, the patient is in an hypnotic trance; or alternatively,  mad. 

The patient here is Bissell and the whole world of education he represents. In that world, only the one phenomenal side of events is acknowledged and not their equally present ontological side. This one-sided usurpation or marginalization leaves Bissell and his world “in an hypnotic trance” of unknowing. Or “alternatively”, if the “stress” of such one-sided “preference” is stepped up, this world becomes “mad”.  Hence:

The same problems are faced now by town planners, for whom changes in center-margin roles and interplay have become sheer nightmare.

To come to see the ontological level of events and its interplay with the phenomenological level, McLuhan suggests (what he had earlier suggested also to Innis) that Bissell take the same route McLuhan himself took and that is close at hand for Bissell from his own training in English. Namely, he should consider, or reconsider, what takes place in modern poetry and art:

We at least in education have available possible structures of moving transparencies, or montage patterns of multi-level kind, in which by means of dialogue centers and margins can change positions at high speed.

In order to understand the “multi-level” or “moving transparencies” or “montage patterns” of the phenomenological/ontological “dialogue” relationship at stake here, Bissell would have to adjust his own “management structure” which itself falls within the domain to be refocused. The new world into which McLuhan invites him already includes everything Bissell has ever done or ever will do and everything that has ever happened in universities or ever will happen. The phrase “we at least in education” has both objective and subjective reference and it is the subjective which is the more important of the two because the more difficult to acknowledge.

The movement at stake is catastrophic (a ‘turning of the furrow’ in Greek) in a way the birth of chemistry was not since this new shift is self-referential in a new way.  Although chemists were and are composed of chemicals, chemistry is not (so far as we yet know) a matter of the disposition of chemicals. At any rate, the disposition of chemicals in our brains was not something which had to be consciously re-arranged in order for chemistry to gain its start. But disposition is exactly what the domain of media interrogates.  This is, therefore, a domain which we cannot begin to understand until it is already understood: the required disposition falls within the field whose study is to be initiated. To take the required initiatory movement, the field into which movement is to be made must already be in focus (however necessarily ‘gapped’ this focus must be). Such a ‘knot in time’ (Eliot) is one of the implications of McLuhan’s ever-repeated insistence on “all at once”.

(…) The traditional role of city is that of center or consensus for rustic margin. Now that our technologies are no longer positional but interplanetary, an urban consensus will not serve. The university itself would seem to become the only possible model of such consensus, inviting the concept of a university of being and experience, rather than of subjects.

Electric ‘identity’ is inclusively dual (a =≠ b) or, as McLuhan phrases the point here, “interplanetary” (= both the ‘a’ and ‘b’ planets are “privileged”) . No attempt to preserve a one-sided (“positional”) “consensus” (= “preference”) can attain the “dialogue” between the phenomenal and ontological “levels” which is the prerequisite for the initiatory perception of this domain.  The “university” (= diverse unity) of both being and experience must be seen to underlie this possibility, not “subjects” taken either only objectively, as diverse university subjects of study, or only subjectively, as determinative action by individuals. (Both Lamberti and Chrystall urge the active participation by subjects in the learning process as if this could ever not be the case. Future posts will deal with the time problem here where Lamberti and Chrystall want to go forward into a new situation when the need is to go backward into an existing one.)

Such a concept of university could supersede the concept of urban center in an age of electronic information movement, and need not be locational, or geographic.

As always, McLuhan is making many points at once. At the ontological level, print1 is “positional or geographic” because it isolates a single pole in the a/b relation through “preference” and “stress”.  Subsequently, it operates at the phenomenological level (expressing the ontological model) to isolate a university, both geographically and as an ivory tower, away from the rest of society.  As a “university of being and experience”, however, it could function everywhere or “all at once” (just as chemistry functions everywhere and “all at once”). By re-presenting the belonging-together of unity and diversity, especially of phenomenology and ontology in the human domain, the university might retake its place in “dialogue” with society as both symbol and laboratory for the study and application of the new sciences of this domain.

  1.  As future posts will need to detail, there is nothing more important for an appropriate reading of McLuhan than the insight that one-sided (“hypnotic trance”) and even “mad” views have an ontological basis just as much as two-sided and entirely sane ones. How else could such errant views be? McLuhan’s realization that he had failed to give full weight to this insight came at the start of the 1950s with his turn to advertising and popular culture as the very keys to media analysis. If not also here, then nowhere. (Cf, Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 202: “There is nothing arbitrary in the ventures of a philosopher, even when he is mistaken.”) ↩

Centre and Margin 2

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At the turn of a year, McLuhan reviewed questions which were important to him and often attempted to think them through in correspondence. On January 4, 1961 McLuhan wrote such a letter to Claude Bissell (1916–2000), then the president of UT and formerly McLuhan’s English department colleague. Like McLuhan, Bissell had joined the department in 1946. Since their personal and professional relationship went back 15 years in this way, McLuhan’s closing to the letter, “regards as ever”, was not merely perfunctory.

McLuhan used the letter to rehearse the presentation Bissell had asked him to give to a university advisory committee on “patterns of educational change”:

. . . what our technology has done electrically, and will do with ever-increasing intensity, is to increase the flow of information in all directions and at all levels. What is needed therefore is an understanding of what happens to existing center-margin relationships as the interplay between center and margin is affected by ever-higher levels of information.  Classroom and curriculum as centers for community margins can undergo some strange reversals of roles, as well as considerable subdivision of roles, when the same levels of information are equally available at margin and center. It is this in a word which has caused the restructuring of management. But there is nothing in any management structure, so far as the response to such information change is concerned, which differs from an educational structure, a biological structure or an art structure. Any field of perception is a structure of center-marginal interplay, and when the center usurps margin, the patient is in an hypnotic trance; or alternatively,  mad. The same problems are faced now by town planners, for whom changes in center-margin roles and interplay have become sheer nightmare. We at least in education have available possible structures of moving transparencies, or montage patterns of multi-level kind, in which by means of dialogue centers and margins can change positions at high speed. (…) The traditional role of city is that of center or consensus for rustic margin. Now that our technologies are no longer positional but interplanetary, an urban consensus will not serve. The university itself would seem to become the only possible model of such consensus, inviting the concept of a university of being and experience, rather than of subjects. Such a concept of university could supersede the concept of urban center in an age of electronic information movement, and need not be locational, or geographic. (Letters, 279-280, italics added)

McLuhan closed the letter by mentioning that he had “had a most delightful afternoon and evening with Peter Drucker and his family recently”.  Drucker (1909-2005) was a renowned, if somewhat controversial, management consultant and theorist whom McLuhan doubtless first got to know through his best friend, Bernard Muller-Thym. Muller-Thym was a PhD graduate of UT and the Mediaeval Institute, McLuhan’s colleague at St Louis University from 1938 to 1943 (but in the Philosophy department, not English), the best man at McLuhan’s wedding in 1939, the godfather of McLuhan’s first child, Eric, and now a successful management consultant in New York.  Muller-Thym also taught management theory, at first at Columbia and then for many years at MIT. McLuhan stayed with Muller-Thym and his large family (eight children) whenever he visited New York.

As a favorite student of Etienne Gilson (after whom Muller-Thym named one of his sons), Muller-Thym became McLuhan’s conduit not only to business theorists like Drucker, but also to Gilson and Aquinas. (Note may be made of the strange parallels between McLuhan’s relationships with Muller-Thym and Tom Easterbrook, his best friend from an earlier era. Like Muller-Thym and Gilson, Easterbrook was a favorite student and colleague of Harold Innis, and became McLuhan’s conduit to Innis and to the history of economics and communications research pursued by him. Coincidentally, both Muller-Thym and Easterbrook obtained their PhDs from UT in the same year, 1938, and both had the unusual honor of having their dissertations immediately published, in 1939 and 1938 respectively, through the efforts of their thesis advisers and fatherly friends, Gilson and Innis.)

When McLuhan writes in his letter to Bissell of “the concept of a university of being” he is quoting from the title of Muller-Thym’s UT PhD thesis (for which Gilson wrote a complimentary preface in the published version): On the University of Being in Meister Eckhart of Hochheim.

Almost a year before his new year’s letter to Bissell, McLuhan had rehearsed some of the same thoughts in a letter to Muller-Thym:

the increasing volume of information flow substitutes for products in the sense of becoming the major product. In terms of the university as an area of subjects, the tendency of awareness of process is certainly to make one subject substitutable for another. And so by a commodious vicus of recirculation (note the chiasmic form here) we come back to Bernard, Eckhart, and the University of Being. (MM to Muller-Thym, May 5, 1960, Letters, 271-272)

As noted elsewhere (RVM or through the looking glass?) “management structure” is not (or is not only) a commercial term for McLuhan. It applies, as he specifically notes in his letter to Bissell, to “any field of perception”. So ‘McLuhan for Managers’ can be misleading in the same way as ‘chemistry for metallurgists’ might be. Of course chemistry has enormous application in metallurgy. But since chemistry is much broader than metallurgy, its application there depends upon first mastering the wider field. So with McLuhan and business management. His work was directed to the wider field of media research from which applications to organizational management, for instance, might be derived. But reading his work as business theory, even though he often cited people like Drucker and Muller-Thym, and even though he considered developments in business highly important, and even though he wondered if his thinking might better be communicated to business executives than to academics, is a category mistake.

The letter to Bissell has many important theoretical implications for McLuhan’s overall project. These will be analyzed in Centre and Margin 3…

 

 

 

 

Centre and Margin 1

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The economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between the centre and the margin of western civilization. (Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 1930)

As described by McLuhan in ‘Media and Cultural Change’, his 1964 introduction to Innis’ The Bias of Communication, the structural pair of centre and margin is subject to a range of expression:

Visual technology creates a centre-margin pattern of organization whether by literacy or by industry and a price system. But electric technology is instant and omnipresent and creates multiple centres-without-margins.  

What Innis calls “the discrepancy” between centre and margin names not only their relationship in a particular case (here, the fur trade in Canada) but also, as McLuhan explicitly points out (and as is clearly implied by Innis), it may be taken to name a range of relationships which characterizes ‘events’ as different as “literacy”, “a price system” and “electric technology”. A “discrepancy” can hardly be unique.

It is not the case that these different happenings come first and then the relationships they exhibit between centre and margin are abstracted from them.  Instead, from the vantage of media analysis, the range of relationships is prior and the events with their different modalities of centre and margin are subsequent.  

Innis’ “discrepancy” names the relationship or medium between the two poles of centre and margin which governs or ‘dominates’ (as Innis says) their expression and which thereby determines the meanings of those poles. This structural determination may be seen in McLuhan’s manipulation of the pair. In the “visual (…) centre-margin pattern of organization” McLuhan puts forward an (a≠b) relation where the ‘centre’ pole is preferred to the ‘margin’ one (so either a≠b or a≠b). But when McLuhan comes to write of “multiple centres-without-margins” he is not indicating some centre-only state which might be mapped as a (alone) or b (alone). Instead, as the reference to plural “multiple centres” makes plain, the form of “electric technology” is still complex and certainly does not abrogate the elemental a/b structure. So McLuhan does not use the phrase “multiple centres” to indicate something about the single ‘centre’ pole of a centre/margin structure, but, instead, he uses it to describe an inclusive or “multiple” preference-state of that structure: (a=≠b). This is an a/b structure “without-margins” only in the sense that there is no pole of it which is without “preference” and which would therefore be ‘marginal’. In fundamental contrast to a case with one-sided “preference” and with corresponding marginality of the other pole, here both poles are, in this new sense, “centres”. Absent the literate habit of privileging ‘centre’ over ‘margin’ (aka ‘imperialism’, ‘orientalizing’, etc) this could also be expressed as centre =≠ margin.

In fact, margins are still necessarily present in “multiple centres-without-margins” since (eg) there could be no plurality of “multiple centres” if there were no margin or border or gap separating or differentiating individual “centres” from each other. In this latter sense, ‘margin’ takes on the meaning of R in the aRb relation and is therefore not only not absent but, as the medium, is just the elementary message: “the gap is where the action is”, “the medium is the message”, “the medium is the massage” . . .  

 

 

 

Chrystall on time 1

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Andrew Chrystall opens his essay ‘A Little Epic: McLuhan’s Use of Epyllion’ with the statement: “Commentary on Marshall McLuhan’s oeuvre has shifted from debating whether he was right or wrong to a deeper consideration of his rhetorical praxis.” Different takes are implicated here. On the one hand, Chrystall is noting (and is surely correct in noting, along with Lamberti) that any discussion of “right or wrong” in McLuhan must be based on an accurate reading of what he had to say. And the understanding of what he had to say entails understanding how he said it: “the medium is the message”. Thus far one must agree that a consideration of McLuhan’s “rhetorical praxis” is indeed a necessary and “deeper consideration”.  But, on the other hand, Chrystall’s statement seems also to have been intended as a restatement in regard to McLuhan of Nietzsche’s title, On the Genealogy of Morals: in this case, “right or wrong” is to be treated as a surface manifestation of “deeper” psychological and/or sociological — at any rate historical — factors. “Rhetorical praxis” would name this supposedly deeper, and singularly efficacious, historical level.

Chrystall’s essay embraces both of these readings. The focus of this post will be on the second and it will be argued that this misses an essential dimension of McLuhan’s thought — the fundamental plurality of time. In a word, there is no single ‘historical’ level to his work. Aside from his constant critique of “lineality” and his insistent recourse to figure and ground in his later work, note should be made that rhetoric in his earlier work is only one of the disciplines of the trivium whose “ancient quarrel” is always also contemporary. As McLuhan makes explicit in the title of his 1946 essay ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America‘, it appears today as much as it did in Greece or Rome.  The surface reality may be utterly different between these widely separated civilizations, but beneath them, at a “deeper” level, there beats the same heart with the same three ventricles with their same complex interactions.

The beating heart of the trivium acts like continental drift beneath the surface of historical events. (There are important parallels between McLuhan’s work in communications and the contemporary work of John Tuzo Wilson, also at UT, on plate techtonics. These will be treated in later posts.) Like continental drift, the surface effects of the dynamic life of the trivium vary between slight tremors that are hardly noticeable to magaquakes that are catastrophic. The key point here is that the trivium is dynamic and has its own fundamental time (“time not our time” in Eliot). Further, the relation of its time to our historical time has yet another chronology. Time, too, has a triple beat. Not only past-present-future, but layers of times like an onion.

McLuhan is often explicit concerning this complex plurality of time as times:

time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground. (GV 10)

Later posts will detail this fundamental theme in McLuhan’s works. Suffice it to note here with McLuhan that this other “simultaneous” time is “ground” to the “figure” of our historical time (the “lineal”) in the same way as techtonic plates underlie (and so can overwhelm) our surface geography. This is exactly why the “ancient quarrel” of the trivium, like continental drift in geophysics, can have global effect.

That Chrystall yet sometimes holds McLuhan to the standard of a single linear history is apparent at the very outset of his essay and at its very end. At the outset, after noting that “commentary on Marshall McLuhan’s oeuvre has shifted from debating whether he was right or wrong to a deeper consideration of his rhetorical praxis”, he immediately cites Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond as if in clarification:

And if McLuhan wasn’t right? Well frankly, who cares? For the fact is, no North American intellectual of his era held the world’s ear quite as intensely and obsessively as this (…) professor of English literature from Toronto, and none mainlined the peculiar zeitgeist of the era with such (…) precision. (Mondo Canuck, 132-133)

Here McLuhan’s virtue is to be measured by that of an ad. The person who did more than anyone to direct our attention to the ways in which we allow ourselves to be manipulated by ads is here treated as being a successful ad himself — an ad so tuned to “the peculiar zeitgeist of the era” that it is able to grab our attention “intensely and obsessively”. This assimilation of McLuhan to advertising is possible only because the very question of whether McLuhan was “right” is rejected as uninteresting: “who cares?”  What alone is interesting is “the world’s ear”, “the peculiar zeitgeist of the era”, history at its most effervescent, history as nothing but such effervescence.

While Chrystall’s essay quickly veers away from this dedicated superficiality to treat (as Lamberti has it) “the structural (how he said what he said)”, and does so with admirable insight (as future posts will elaborate), at the end of his essay, in its concluding note, he inexplicably returns to it. Reflecting on the structural analysis he has just set out with some perspicuity, he comments:

Admittedly this is a somewhat idealized reading, probably only possible within a decade of the initial publication of these works. Today, the weight of McLuhan’s observations are out of date and this militates against the possibility of reading McLuhan in this way.

Here again, single-layered linear history returns as a, or the, standard “ruler”. It rules even what is “possible” via what is, or is not, “out of date”.

Strangely, this same return of the “linear” also occurs with Lamberti. Future posts will need to consider why this is so. At a guess, the reason may have to do with the fact that the relation of the “linear” to the “simultaneous” cannot be one of either/or exclusivity.  It must be one of both/and inclusivity. But how to think such a relation of times while “holding to both” (as Plato has it in the Sophist) is something the present age has lost and now can grope toward only blindly.

 

 

 

McLuhan’s language 2 (Lamberti)

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In her recent book, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic (UTP 2012), Elena Lamberti correctly warns that “those who cannot see through the form of a medium inevitably misread and make a mess of its mediation” (56, italics added). Lamberti’s book itself, however, illustrates the problems which result when this advice is ignored.

In the following passage, she recommends taking “an imagist approach” to McLuhan’s language, one which would “read in depth and grasp the complex implications”.  But she fails to take such “an imagist approach” in making her own case:

,..McLuhan did not use words to represent the world in a mimetic way, but worked upon language in order to render the ongoing cultural and societal processes through it. He adopted an imagist approach to language, not a referential one. Terms such as civilization and book must therefore be read through, as semantic boxes containing a broader set of concepts.  (…) In McLuhan’s thought — as translated in his writings — book and literacy/literate are therefore images that immediately render the environment he was probing — an environment which the new electric media started to remodel from the middle of the nineteenth century, slowly inducing a sort of cultural schizophrenia, which McLuhan rendered through the expression ‘from the eye to the ear’.  This image immediately translates the passage from the mechanic to the electric cultural mode, that is, from linear (implying an atomistic visual approach to space) to acoustic (implying an oral space-time-oriented approach to duration).  ‘From eye to ear’ is a one-liner which invites us to read in depth and grasp the complex implications of the passage from an old to a new space-time sensibility projecting us into an acoustic space we have to experience through our five senses. (Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 59-60)

Here Lamberti herself takes an “atomistic visual approach” at the very moment when she would urge its rejection in favor of an “imagist”, “complex” and “electric” one. Thus she inexplicably writes that McLuhan’s words as images “immediately (!) render the (!) environment he was probing” and that his work “immediately (!) translates the (!) passage from the (!) mechanic to the (!) electric cultural mode”.  But can anything be “immediate” when the “medium is the message” and when, therefore, everything needs to be “read through” as “containing a broader set of concepts”? Can there be such a thing as “the environment” in this case? Especially can there be “the mechanic” or “the electric” one? And what about “the passage” that she describes as leading between the two? Where did all these “atomistic” singularities come from in a “depth” situation with its “complex implications” of figure and ground?

One sign of the crisis that makes its appearance here is Lamberti’s reference to “a sort of cultural schizophrenia”. The implication of this phrase is that the “one-liner” she cites — “from the eye to the ear” — along with its inverse — from the ear to the eye — does not name two isolated historical “environments” which replace each other in sequence (supposedly depending on the rise of different communications technologies). Instead, in order for “a sort of cultural schizophrenia” to be possible at all, it must be the case that both ear and eye can be active at the same time. Indeed, when everything is “simultaneous”, when everything is subject to “the speed of light” and is “all at once”, when Lamberti’s “complex implications” are always the case, then not only can both ear and eye be present at the same time, they both must be present at all times. As McLuhan specifies:

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)

Simply put, for McLuhan there is no such thing as that diachronic sequence of discrete ear and eye perceptual modes so loved by McLuhan scholarship:

Everybody who exists within any man-made service environment experiences all the effects that he would undergo in any environment as such. (TT 90)

Compare: any chemical question of course involves all of chemistry. So with media analysis.

Another sign of the same cross-road crisis which Lamberti might encounter here (but seems not to notice) is her repeated recourse to linear narrative:

an [eye] environment which the new electric media started to remodel from the middle of the nineteenth century, slowly inducing (…) the passage from the mechanic to the electric cultural mode, that is, from linear (…) to acoustic (…) the passage from an old to a new space-time sensibility.

This “passage” or “remodel” from “from linear (…) to acoustic“, from “old to (…) new (…) sensibility“, is strangely one which Lamberti’s own text has failed to implicate. For it itself remains decidedly and insistently “linear”. The “passage” she names is simply one of chronological time: “from the middle of the nineteenth century, slowly inducing”.

Now it is not the case that Lamberti has not gone ‘far enough’. For that, too, is linear. Instead, a kind of backwards somersault is required here which would go “through the looking glass” and “through the vanishing point” via “dropout”. Lamberti would have to ask: if “sensibility” has become questionable (because known to be both plural and “all at once”), what should my “sensibility” be in making my “approach” to these matters of “sensibility” and “approach”?

Here, as McLuhan never tires of insisting, only limitation and ignorance provide the needed signposts. For if we cannot let go of previous standpoints and certainties, if we cannot acknowledge their limitation, if we cannot see through our wisdom to its ignorance, we remain bound to the RVM. And this encloses us within a bubble with no possible perception of reality. Hence it is that:

All solutions are in the very words by which people confuse and hide their problems. (TT 103)

Only by interrogating what we do not know, first requiring perception of it, can we find our way.

As will have to be repeatedly unpacked in further posts, we need to find a way to retreat in preliminary fashion to that which is preliminary:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the change of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (TT 22, italics added)

 

Plenary judgment

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Root post: Media as atomic structures

“Plenary judgment” or “overall view” does not imply the possibility or desirability of some mystical state where all things would be intuited in their fullness.  Such a cloud of unknowing is what McLuhan repeatedly critiques as “merger”. Instead, much as in the physical sciences (although here even more significantly, since it is now itself subject to investigation), it is exactly limitation which enables “plenary judgment” and this in several senses.

First, if human beings could not know their current view of things as partial or biased (“finn-again”), therefore as “evitable” (TT 6) in some ways, they would not be able to start again with a “re-cognition” in which an “overall view” of “the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties” (TT 14) can emerge. Such a “reversal” away from “concept”, such a “replay” of what and how was previously experienced, is exactly what McLuhan terms “percept”.

Put another way, if all human experience were not some “role” or “mask” in a “global theatre”, some “in-vestment” which is always a “put-on” or vestiture (that, exactly therefore, can always be taken-off and changed), it would not be possible for humans to learn anything. Humans learn language (where before they heard only noise) and generally learn to socialize in some particular way, and then later learn new skills and, in some cases, learn the essentials of some whole new area, only because re-investment (“recognition and replay”) is fundamental to them. They are that nature which is essentially biased and therefore fundamentally capable of change (including a change of outlook in which the elements of a domain emerge into focus).

Second, when an “overall view” emerges (as it did, say, with Mendeleev’s table in 1869), what characterizes that view as opposed to previous views is exactly its particularly. In particular ways capable of general reproduction, it posits relationships and makes predictions which anybody can test.  More, its particularity in the sense of not being the whole truth is exactly what drives further research — forever.

It was just such fundamentality of particularity which struck McLuhan in Popper’s falsification thesis. As Eric McLuhan describes in Laws of Media,:

Sir Karl Popper’s (right-brain) statement that a scientific law is one so stated as to be capable of falsification made it both possible and necessary to formulate the laws of the media. (LM 93).

This thesis is “right-brain” because it is “inclusive”, and it is “inclusive” (presupposing plurality and complexity) because it rests on a foundation of fin-itude.  Finitude always implicates a gap — or gaps — “where the action is”. Insight turns on such a gap of finitude (away from a previous view) and turns to such a gap of finitude (in a revisioned particular object) and exists in such a gap of finitude (between the multiple planes through which the revisioned particular object is now known):

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)

Mendeleev’s table put forward the testable correlation (“intersection”, “interplay”) between the “plane” of physical materials and the further “plane” of the schematic organization of the table.  Such “intersection” is “endless” and “constant”, not because it suddenly answers all possible chemical questions for all time, but rather the reverse: because it opens a new field for “endless” and “constant” investigation.  There are gaps to its coverage which will endlessly engender new insights: they are “where the action is”.

 

 

The ‘Values Discussion Group’ of 1949

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Root post: The bias of communication

As set out in William Buxton’s fine report, ‘The “Values” Discussion Group at the University of Toronto, February – May 1949‘, McLuhan participated in an informal seminar with Innis in early 1949 where bias was one of the central topics:

the members of the group examined how the prevailing social, economic, and political conditions affected the writings of economists and philosophers. In particular, they gave consideration to “what extent do certain conditions of change cause these scholars to deal with more or less highly abstract propositions than at other times they would?” This led to a discussion of the way in which various scholarly fields, including history, economics, and philosophy, dealt with questions of standpoint, premises, and bias. (Fourth Meeting, March 1, 1949)

The presentation by Innis (Eighth Meeting on April 5, 1949) was a trial run for his ‘Bias of Communication’ lecture two weeks later in Ann Arbor.

The ‘Values Discussion Group’ was chaired by William Thomas (Tom) Easterbrook (1907-1985), McLuhan’s old Winnipeg friend and University of Manitoba classmate, who had traveled in England with McLuhan in 1932. After graduating with McLuhan from Manitoba in the same class of ’33, Easterbrook became a student and later colleague of Harold Innis in the Department of Political Economy at UT. The two were close enough that Innis arranged for the publication of Easterbrook’s PhD thesis, Farm Credit in Canada (UTP, 1938), and personally contributed a foreword to it. Then, in a final sign of their personal and professional association, it was Easterbrook who took over Innis’ communications course when Innis became seriously ill with cancer in 1951 before dying of the disease in 1952.

After McLuhan arrived in Toronto in 1946, he was joined there in 1947 by Easterbrook. Since receiving his doctorate from UT in 1938, Easterbrook had been teaching at Brandon College in Manitoba (1938-1941), doing post-grad work with a 1941 Guggenheim award and then working for the Manitoba Post-War Reconstruction Committee.  Coincidentally, Innis also worked in Manitoba in the immediate post-war years as a member of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education. (The section of the report of the commission authored by Innis is reprinted as an appendix to The Bias of Communication.) Once the two of them were together again in Toronto, McLuhan must have been motivated by his decades old friendship with Easterbrook to learn about his friend’s work and, perhaps particularly, given McLuhan’s long-standing interest in communication, about Easterbrook’s close knowledge of Innis’ new research interests in that area. For Easterbrook was familiar with ground-breaking research Innis had been doing since around 1940 on the history of communications.

In his 1964 ‘Introduction’ to Innis’ Bias of Communication, McLuhan reports that the first thing he read by Innis was his 1947 presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada, ‘Minerva’s Owl‘, which UTP issued in print in 1948. The coincidence of these dates with Easterbrook’s return to UT is significant. Then, once McLuhan had grasped the potential importance of Innis for his own developing work, he was able to establish personal contact with him through Easterbrook as seen in this ‘Values Discussion Group’ of 1949.

McLuhan’s language

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McLuhan speaks to us from across a fundamental divide. He speaks to us from an inclusive position where everything in the human domain is always both phenomenal and ontological at once. (See ‘RVM or through the looking glass?‘)

This same phenomenal/ontological inclusivity holds in the physical realm where every material is both something that can be handled as it is found or made and something that can be represented, precisely, by a chemical formula.  

This phenomenal/ontological inclusivity in the physical realm resulted from the isolation of the structure of the chemical element in the nineteenth century.  The chemical formulas which became possible in this way map the ontological status of materials which always also have a corresponding phenomenal reality:  they are known to appear in just this or just that way.  Or, conversely, any and every material is known without exception to have an exact chemical formula.

Any misfit between the two phenomenal/ontological sides of this fundamental relation is indicative of a need for research which may reveal new information about either or both. Any misfit is, therefore, revelatory.

The relation is held constant, while its sides are investigated on the basis that it always holds.

Now McLuhan would have us approach any and all artifacts in the human domain in the same way and on a parallel basis.

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship. (TT3)

 

 

The bias of communication

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Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures. (‘Media and Cultural Change’ McLuhan’s introduction to The Bias of Communication by Harold Innis, 1964)

When Marshall McLuhan arrived at the University of Toronto after the second world war at the age of 35, fundamental pieces of his mature position were already in place. These included:

1. the importance of “inter-communication” or “essential community” in all areas of modern life — personal, familial, commercial, religious, social, national and international. McLuhan had imbued this notion 15 years earlier at the University of Manitoba through one of his professors there, Henry Wilkes Wright (1878-1959), and particularly through Wright’s 1925 book The Moral Standards of Democracy.  McLuhan studied this book intensively in the early 1930s. Andrew McLuhan confirms that McLuhan’s copy of this book, which the McLuhan family has donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at UT, is heavily annotated. McLuhan’s interest in communication was then furthered at Cambridge through the work of I A Richards and, particularly, F R Leavis. The title of a collection of Leavis essays from Scrutiny published in 1933, For Continuity, expresses an idea, communication through time, that was important enough to McLuhan that it played a major role in his conversion to Catholicism a couple years later in 1937. Communication as continuity, but not as identity, particularly through time, was central to McLuhan’s very different attractions to the two great scholars he would befriend at the University of Toronto after his arrival there in 1946, Etienne Gilson and Harold Innis.

2. the notion that there are three “approaches” to experience whose definition is at once an “ancient quarrel” in human history and an outstanding topic of research in the domain of the human sciences and humanities. Here again, both Wright and his University of Manitoba colleague, Rupert Clendon Lodge (1886–1961) were important in supplying McLuhan not so much with an idea as with a tradition for life-long rumination. Both Wright and Lodge had backgrounds in neo-Hegelianism; importantly (beyond McLuhan, for Canadian intellectual history at large), both had contributed to the memorial volume for John Watson‘s 50th anniversary at Queen’s, Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. Another contributor (of 13) to that volume was Henry Carr (1880-1963), then the superior of St. Michael’s College, later the founding president of the Institute of Medieval Studies at St Mike’s (in 1929) and the person most responsible for bringing Etienne Gilson to Canada. Gilson and McLuhan would be colleagues at St Mike’s for decades following McLuhan’s appointment there in 1946, but before then Gilson had already decisively influenced the direction of McLuhan’s research. For it was Gilson (not without decided influence from Hegel on his own thought) who supplied a link between the triple “ancient quarrel” of neo-Hegelianism, which McLuhan had from Wright and Lodge, and McLuhan’s Catholicism.  This link was, of course, the history of the trivium which formed the cornerstone of McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis.

3. the conviction that human life is intelligible even while being (or exactly on account of being) definitively finite.  McLuhan had this conviction from Aquinas and Chesterton, and again from Gilson, but also in a different way from Leavis. It was this conviction he would later express 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)

What McLuhan did not yet see when he arrived in Toronto in 1946 was how to bring these insights together into a unified program. It was just here where his new colleague at the University of Toronto, Harold Adam Innis (1894-1952), was able to supply the decisive clue in the very title of his April 1949 lecture — ‘The Bias of Communication’.

It would take McLuhan decades to understand the implications of this insight: they would emerge fully only in Take Today, his 1972 book with Barrington Nevitt.  The basic idea can be formulated as follows:

(1) All human action and experience presupposes a certain style or structure of communication.

(2) Communication is inherently biased and therefore inherently plural, since bias is inherently plural (bias would not be ‘bias’ if it were singular).

(3) The full range of communication, hence the full range of human action and experience, can be mapped on the range of bias.

(4) Bias ranges over 3 settings or “preferences”: (a) exclusive preference for one side of a communicative pair; (b) exclusive preference for the other side of that communicative pair; (c) dual or inclusive preference for both sides of that communicative pair (an inclusive preference which is possible precisely because exclusive preferences for both sides are just as possible).

(5) That humans are capable of mapping the range of bias is fundamentally related to the plurality of bias.  Bias could not be plural (and bias would not be ‘bias’ if it were singular) if humans were not capable, somehow, of navigating between biases: “the executive as dropout”. From the navigational position between biases (“the gap is where the action is”), humans can achieve understanding not only for both sides of any one communicative pair ( thereby exercising dual or inclusive “preference” in regard to it) , but in fact for all possible preference states or biases for that pair (where “stress” or “emphasis” differences introduce further variations even within a single “preference”). The same holds for all such pairs. 

In this way McLuhan was able to bring together his existing ideas of the centrality of communication in all human action and experience with the triplicity of “approaches” found in the “comparative philosophy” of Rupert Lodge, in the disciplines of the trivium and in Hegel’s “absolute” forms.  At the same time, the intelligibility of this domain could be revisioned as consisting in an ongoing set of sciences based on the structures of bias identified in this way.

Texts in Take Today setting out the importance of bias (limitation) are given here.

Also see media as atomic structures.

 

 

 

‘Limitation’ in Take Today

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Root posts: The bias of communication; Plenary judgment

When McLuhan writes of “Finn-again” at the beginning (22) and end (297) of Take Today, he is not referring only to Finnegans Wake and to the Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill (aka Finn MacCool). He is also specifying the essential (‘again’ and ‘again’) role of ‘fin’ as end, limit and border. Indeed, throughout Take Today, McLuhan emphasizes this essential role of limitation:

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

man is enriched (…) by the recognition of his own limitations. (242)

As we return to role playing under the impulse of electric circuitry, we also confront once more the mysteries of both malignancy and magnanimity in the human heart. (276)

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

In an information environment the most valuable resource is the recognition of specialists’ ignorance. (287)

For the comprehensivist it is the “noise” of the total environment that he must now convert into the program of his global theater. (293)

In fact, we have now to replace nature itself, remaking it as an art form perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations. Such an enterprise requires nothing less than inclusive awareness of human resources and limitations. (294-295)

 

 

Media as atomic structures

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Root posts: On the new opening of a domain; The bias of communication

Marshall McLuhan aimed to initiate the scientific investigation and mapping of the domain of human sciences and humanities through the identification of the structure of its atomic elements — “media”.

Atoms in the physical sciences are not ‘a-tomic’ (Greek: ‘un-cuttable’) in the sense that they have no smaller components. Particle physics is the study of just how complex (and therefore ‘cuttable’) these atomic structures are.  The chemical atoms are  ‘uncuttable’ only in the sense — only in the fundamental sense — that important definition and investigation must focus on them. Exactly so with McLuhan’s media.

The basic ‘particles’ of media are “eye and ear”:

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)… (TT 22)

All material elements are expressions of the formula (PE)n. Their atoms are composed of some matching number (n) of protons and electrons (PE), plus some roughly matching number of neutrons (Nx), where x approximates n, but can also be zero. The “two basic extreme forms” of the chemical element are therefore the proton and the electron. All of the chemical elements — and all the “innumerable” things compounded of those elements — are “variants” of their combination.

In a comparable way, all elementary media are a relation R of the “basic extreme forms” of eYe and eAr — eYe R eAr — but here the relation R does not consist of some quantifiable matching number, but of some variable quality of “preference” and “stress”. (The designations eYe and eAr are intended only to indicate that these are formal structures and not senses as found objects. The same holds for toUch which McLuhan generally treats as R. This sort of refocus from found object to formal structure explains how it is that McLuhan can speak of using the eye as an ear or can think of TV as a medium of touch, not of vision.  An analogous turn from found object to structure occurs with chemistry or, indeed, with any scientific law like Galileo’s law of falling bodies.)

“Preference” is the valorization or marking or identification with either the eYe or eAr side of R — or with both sides at once (“all at once”). “Preference” is therefore an expression of R:

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship. (TT 3)

A Mendeleev’s table of elemental media would set out the complete range of R.  As early as 1944, the 33-year-old McLuhan concluded an essay on his Cambridge teachers, Richards, Empson and Leavis, with reference to:

the journey which remains to be accomplished before winning an overall view, which is plenary critical judgment. (‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’, Sewanee Review, 52(2), 1944, 276)

Such judgement would be “overall” and “plenary” in two senses.  First, it would envision the complete range of the ways in which humans ‘make sense’ and would judge in light of this range.  To compare: chemistry is a map of the range of the ways in which physical materials exist; chemical analysis situates substances and reactions in light of this range. Second, since such judgement would itself fall within this range, it would itself be “overall” and “plenary” in the sense that it would be that way of ‘making sense’ best able, or perhaps uniquely able, to initiate and accomplish such judgement.

“Stress” is the color of “preference”.  The valorization of eYe, for example, can be made in a violently one-sided way against eAr or it can be made in a way which also acknowledges the virtues of eAr. The same is true for eAr preference. Every “preference” state is further marked by some such “stress”.

Following on “preference”, therefore, “stress” is a further specification of R:

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship. (TT 3)

The difference between the domain of the physical sciences and the domain of the human sciences is that R is fundamentally invariable in the former and fundamentally variable in the latter. In this sense, among many others, the medium (R) is the message.

Further, just as the solution to all problems in physical nature lie within chemistry, so in the human sciences “all solutions are in the very words by which people confuse and hide their problems” (TT 103). Here again, in a different sense,  the medium (the revisioned domain of human sciences and humanities) is the message.

Further still, just as the identification of the chemical element was the key to the revisioned domain of physical sciences that has developed in the last two centuries, so the medium as the elementary structure in the domain of the human sciences is the key to a parallel development in it:  the medium (as the elementary structure) is the message

“Preference” and “stress” as markers of R are markers of bias. And it is exactly the bias of communication that enables rigorous investigation of the human domain.

Subsequent post: Plenary judgment

RVM or through the looking glass?

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Reading McLuhan, everything depends on whether his texts are seen in the RVM or “through the looking glass”.

On the one (RVM) hand: “whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend (…) the use of the present as a nostalgic mirror of the past” (‘The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest’, 1967, 176).

On the other (through the looking glass) hand: “Once science went through the vanishing point into acoustic or resonant space, both scientists and economists were left on the wrong side of the looking glass, because they were mostly unable to make what Bertrand Russell cited (on the first page of his ABC of Relativity) as the indispensable preliminary act needed for grasping Einstein: “What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world…” (TT 69).

This change is “the indispensable preliminary act”: it must come before starting to read McLuhan. But what kind of action comes before the beginning? What kind of boundary line or limit [Latin, limes, limitis] must be crossed before [pre] the starting line? And what kind of time is implicated where the essential action is “preliminary” in this way?

The result of this “indispensable preliminary act” is the initiation of perception or “insight”:

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)

“Intersection of planes” or “interplay” or “in-sight” is a matter of seeing through. In the same place McLuhan calls it “overlay in depth” — not limitation to a single plane, like Narcissus, but penetration into multiple planes, like Alice.

When McLuhan is read via such in-sight, ‘media’ are not, or are not only, print, radio, television, etc, they are also the elementary structures of the now fundamentally revisioned domain of human sciences.  

And the ‘senses’ are not, or are not only, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, they are also the structural components of the atomic elements of this domain — media. 

And ‘managers’ are not, or are not only, business functionaries, they are also the shadowy “executive” through whom — as whom — humans, all humans, have the strange power to “flip” identities and worlds:

As all monopolies of knowledge break down in our world of information speed-up, the role of executive opens up to Everyman. There are managers galore for the global theater. (TT 295)

It’s Reigning Executives Everywhere Today (TT 281)

every manager creates a service environment or ground that is an extension of himself. He puts on his organization like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The managing process is both a creation and an extension of man. As such, it is a medium that processes its users, who are its content. (TT 13)

The next job is to process all branches of executive function in such a way that a man can be sent to any part of the organization anywhere, anytime, and feel quite at home. (TT 283)

“The organization” is the world or, indeed, the universe. The human need is to “feel quite at home” in it, “anywhere, anytime”.  McLuhan proposes investigation of the “managing process” as the way in which this might eventuate.

Humans somehow participate in a “managing process” in which they themselves “are its content”, in which they themselves are a result. A result of a strange “preliminary” action…

But when does this happen? And who does this? And how? Who is this “nobody” who goes “through the vanishing point” and “through the looking glass”,  the “executive as dropout”?  Who is this “emperor” who somehow “puts on” “new clothes” as both their “user” and their “content”?

the ultimate question: who am I? (The Global Village,147)