Here’s the second video in my Media Ecology in the OCaC series! What follows is the shooting script and slides, and so can be read instead of watched if you are in a hurry.

Hello, and welcome back to Media Ecology for the Online Community as Classroom. This episode is called Words Words Words. So eventually want to talk about computers and the internet in light of media ecology. And to do that, we to build on the O.G. of Media Ecology, the self-described intellectual thug Marshall McLuhan. However, McLuhan famously, definitively, intrinsically, had no concepts. To ascribe “concepts” to him would be to undermine him completely. In lieu of concepts, he offered “percepts”, his way of sensing the modern electric environment. So, in order to explain McLuhan I need to retrace his life story and his learning so as to a the sense of his perception of the world.

This will take a bit of time, but that investment should pay of with great benefits. For instance, his most well known book, Understand Media, chapters of which are assigned reading in all Media courses in the world, are very difficult to understand *until* you get a sense of where he’s coming from, and why he writes as he does. The next few videos will establish precisely that.

Now. I don’t have an arts degree, or a history degree, so I’m looking forward to learning more perspective on lots of stuff that I’ll be mentioning here. What I’m striving to relate, with the utmost fidelity, is McLuhan’s well-studied, yet likely idiosyncratic perspective on them. Anything I get totally wrong should be presumed to be out of my own fault or ignorance, so, let me know!

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1911. His mother, Elsie McLuhan was a professional elocutionist and toured the country performing one-woman stage shows of popular plays where she played all the parts. At home she would recite epic poetry from memory while doing housework. Elsie trained Marshall and his siblings on the art of releasing the full meaning of words in carefully considered dramatic oratory. Conversations at home were lively and there heated debates at the dinner table on many subjects. From this clamor of this boisterous household Marshall often escaped into reading. Lots of reading. He also developed a long-standing habit learning and using 3 new words every day.

At the University of Manitoba, after a year of engineering, he switched majors to English. He studied the poetry of Victorian and romantic poets of the belles letteres. The degree focused on the great men of these period, their biographies and works, and the beauty and meaning of the visions in their art.

After a few years of that, Marshall then skipped across the pond to continue his studies at Cambridge, where he learned that the style of literary criticism he had just spent three years studying was dead. The 19th century approach to poetry taught in Winnipeg had been replaced in a growing number of schools by the New Criticism of I.A. Richards, who taught at Cambridge. Thus, Starting his English degree all over again, he learned from Richards how to analyze the techniques of poetry: how a poet used tools like rhythm, ambiguity, metaphor and juxtaposition of words and forms to achieve maximally effective communication.

What developed from this double-education in literary criticism was an acute sensitivity for how the content of poetry, all the sensuous richness of human perception and thought, was captured and delivered in mere words alone. Well, mere on the page, but brought to life by a proper reading, as he learned from his mama!


McLuhan published many literary criticisms in the 1940s and 50s. In them, he elaborated a broad historical analysis of developments in poetic technique from the Romantics of the early 1800s, through to the modern poetry of the 20th century.

He described how the first Romantic poets, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, sought to fixate readers upon the harmonies and balance of nature hoping to restore in turn much-needed harmony and balance to their souls. All of society was becoming mechanized by both the technology of the industrial age and the cultural effects of applied Newtonian physics and Cartesian modelling of physical space; more and more of the world was being considered in dehumanizing, machine-like terms. The romantics carefully honed their senses to become in tune with beautiful natural landscapes and the meaning within them. But, McLuhan noted, these English weren’t able to go beyond nature to focus on the honing of the senses in-and-of-themselves. That would be done by the French.

In the essay “Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry,” 1951, McLuhan explains:

 …if one asks what it was of landscape art that the Romantics and the Victorians did not achieve, it must be replied, le paysage interieur, which had to wait for Baudelaire, La-Forge, and Rimbaud. It was this discovery that gave the later poets and painters alike, the power to be much more subjective and also more objective than the Romantics. For all their skill in discovering and manipulating external-nature situations by which to render states of mind, the Romantics remained tied to the object when they wished only to present it as a point from which to leap to another kind of vision. So they repeatedly bog down in reflection just at the moment when they are ready to soar. They could not discover the technique of flight…. By means of the interior landscape, however, Baudelaire could not only range across the entire spectrum of the inner life, he could transform the sordidness and evil of an industrial metropolis into a flower. With this technique he was able to accept the city as his central ‘myth’, and see it as the enlarged shape of a man, just a Flaubert did in *The Sentimental Education*, [James] Joyce in *Ulysses*, and [T.S.] Elliot in *The Waste Land*…

The dirty, crowded, inhuman, industrial cities of the early 1800s drove the sensitive romantics to pine for nature as a restorative. To bring nature, and its healing properties to their readers, a poet like Wordsworth would, while meandering about the lush forests a few miles from Tintern Abbey, develop language to capture his own senses taking in the scene, retracing the very act of perception. Later, the French Symbolist poets would Reverse-engineer these methods of encoding raw, human sense perception and abstract them away from the nature scenes. They could then create poems which manipulated people’s “inner landscapes” any way they wanted. They could, for instance, enchant the reader’s perception of industrial cities to see in them the beauty of nature. Or they could manipulate the readers senses in entirely abstract, discontinuous ways which had no ideas or logic, but were full of aesthetic emotions and sensations.

These techniques would be brought back into English by the late 19th and 20th century Modernist poets like T.S. Elliot, and Ezra Pound. for McLuhan it was James Joyce who perfected the modernist approach in encapsulating raw sense perception in a world of everchanging technology. His book Finnigan’s Wake would feature very prominently in McLuhan’s later works.

McLuhan’s original plan for his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge, was to apply his developed sense for poetic meaning to 16th century English prose. But it get’s pretty crazy after that — I’m indebted to McLuhan scholar, editor, and biographer W. Terrence Gordon for making any sense of this part.

As his began surveying more and more works, the weight of his findings sharpened his focus onto Victorian journalist Thomas Nashe. Unable to pin down the origins of Nashe’s writing style, he extended the scope of his reading earlier and earlier and into medieval writings. Upon determining Nashe wrote in the style of classic rhetroic, McLuhan began an immense survey of rhetorical works stretching back to the Roman empire. Thereafter he realized he had to also study the other two divisions of the liberal arts of ancient and medieval education, Grammer and Dialectic. Into these three divisions, known as the trivium, McLuhan began to sort all the styles of works he had been surveying, noticing historical patterns over the centuries interveening from Cicero in 1st century BC all the way through to the Reformation of the 1600s. He diagnosed the cause of many (1)*quarrals between contemporary thinkers*, and (2)*undue dismissals of ancient and medieval works by retrospective commentators* as the result of a lack of sympathy between adherents of grammar, rhetoric, or dialectic unbalanced by the other two.

For instance, those prone to dialectic, or logic, would dismiss grammatical and rhetorical writers as primitive or sophist. Dialecticians, in turn, were accused of compartmentalizing knowledge and blinding themselves to truths expressed analogically, or metaphorically, not only by spoken and written words, but by nature and existence itself. By tracing this “ancient quarrel”, as he called it, over 16 centuries, McLuhan arrives at the conclusion that the Renaissance was not a retrieval of ancient wisdom from antiquity, but just one more blow in a war between the elements of the trivium which had been raging uninterrupted throughout all of the middle ages going back as far as Ancient Greece. And, if so, then all European literature since the 1500s ought to be re-evaluated in light of the rich medieval intellectual traditions from which they emerged, rather than being treated as though developed after some clean break from the past attributable to the re-emergence of classical Latin texts or the Protastant reformation. He closed the thesis suggesting that his scholarly re-interpretation of Elizabethan and, thus, much of Western litearature was only made possible by the advent of poets like James Joyce.


As I said in the introduction to this series, McLuhan would eventually base his entire theory of media and technology off of his study of words. I think you can see why. He grew up married to his dictionary, and was taught how to use words exceptionally well. His redoubled studies of English showed him how the poet’s ability to capture, express, and shape human sensory perception was developed like technology in an arms race.

And his study of Classic Trivium showed him how, for most of Western History, reality itself was had been made of words; the Logos comprising words for Rhetoric, for Grammar, and for Dialectic, all in proper balance.

Around this time McLuhan converted to Catholicism, understandably.

You know how they say that 90% of communication is non-verbal? A fair corollary, would be that 90% of the what is written in a book depends on who is reading it. In the next episode, we’ll focus on some books by two people, Siegfried Giedion and Wyndham Lewis, who were read early by McLuhan and this will help us see how his later career was shaped by what he got out of them.