Ratios

Let’s figure out just what analogy and metaphor meant for Marshall McLuhan. To begin, here’s an early summary of his conception spelled out for Modernist poet Ezra Pound. As Pound’s technique drew a great deal on his study of Mandarin, McLuhan frames his argument in terms familiar to his correspondent: that of the Chinese ideogram.

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.

I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.—Marshall McLuhan to Ezra Pound, Dec 21, 1948

The nature of four-part relations is key to McLuhan’s entire life-long project. Everywhere he saw people constructing logical, conceptual models which they’d try to fit onto the chaos of our complex world. “A is B!” “No, A is not B!” is the form which most arguments make. It is dialectical. McLuhan had no respect for dialectics which did not take place in full awareness of the role of analogy in perception.

All McLuhan wanted to do was ground these dialectical assertion within a conscious, explicit acknowledgement of where A and B came from. C and D, he knew, had to be spelled out in any critical analysis. That’s what interpretation is: to read into a text. This is how McLuhan learned literary criticism and how he taught it. If the “ground” of the two terms were left implicit—metaphors became dead and clichéd, robbed of life, or ensconced as a literal truth.

Instead of explaining more, let’s just see it in action. McLuhan demonstrated reasoning in four-part relations over and over and over and over. It’s his whole shtick.

If you wanted, for some reason, to become a McLuhan impersonator, the most critical ingredient would be mastery of expansion of all metaphors into four-parts, and then to begin doing it yourself as much as possible.

So here are some examples of explicit four-part relations drawn from his most famous book, Understanding Media. The book is full of them, every page has several—that’s what makes it so dense and difficult to read. I’ve picked these because they are neat and clear. Read them, and try to identify the four parts in each. I’ll help for the first one.

Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world.

Let A be a kept or maintained “emotional climate” and B be whole cultures. So C is market stability and D is “the commercial economies of the world.” The relation between AB and CD exhibits an implicit description of the principle of cybernetic control—we might add more terms, such as E being a comfortable room temperature and F being a modern home. Or G as a stable rocket trajectory and F as the clear skies over Cape Canaveral.

Okay, now it’s your turn to identify A, B, C, and D, and then try and interpret the metaphor which is revealed by their relation.

For example, what is known as “job enlargement” today in business and in management consists in allowing the employee more freedom to discover and define his function. Likewise, in reading a detective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much has been left out of the narrative.

To literary people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order.

Just as the barbarians got to the top of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were disposed to assume the dress and manners of the tribesmen out of the same frivolous and snobbish spirit that attached the French court of Louis XVI to the world of shepherds and shepherdesses.

One effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of the rich, but the effect of the speed-up of the photo had been to provide fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.

But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.

[The city-state as a form was not a response to peaceful commercial development, but a huddling for security amidst anarchy and dissolution.] Thus the Greek city-state was a tribal form of inclusive and integral community, quite unlike the specialist cities that grew up as extensions of Roman military expansion.

Thus the medieval world grew up without uniform roads or cities or bureaucracies, and it fought the wheel, as later city forms fought the railways; and as we, today, fight the automobile.

Oh look, McLuhan threw in an EF in that last one!

Did you notice what made the one about the Roman elites and the French aristocrats different from the others?

In that one, McLuhan actually spells out his interpretation of the resonance between the four parts. He might have just said “…out of the same spirit that…” and left us to infer just what it means when rich people act poor for fun, or as a fashion statement. The fact that he called such imposture “frivolous and snobbish” is somewhat out of character for him—it was a value judgement of the sort he usually wanted you, the reader, to make on your own.

If you had trouble easily picking out each of the parts of the metaphor, than you’ll have a hard time reading Marshall McLuhan. It’s worth practice though, because he’s actually making it easy for you by spelling things out so explicitly.

Let’s jump ahead to the formulation of the nature of metaphor which Marshall developed late in life with his son Eric McLuhan. It is the clearest description publicly available.

Structurally speaking, a metaphor is a technique of presenting or or observing one situation in terms of another situation. It is a technique of awareness, of perception (right hemisphere) not of concepts (left hemisphere). As two situations are involved, there are two figure/ground relations in apposition. Normally, only two of the four elements are made explicit; the others remain implicit.

All metaphors have four components in analogical ratio. “Cats are the crabgrass of life” presents “cats are to (my) life as crabgrass is to an otherwise beautiful lawn” Or, “she sailed into the room” presents “her motion entering the room” in terms of a ship’s swift (perhaps forceful or graceful) motion under sail. To say that metaphor has four terms that are discontinuous, yet in ratio to one another, is to say that the basic mode of metaphor is resonance and interval—the audile-tactile.—Laws of Media, page 120

Here you see why I said McLuhan, in Understanding Media, was making it easy! Most metaphors are not spoken in four explicit parts. The very act of interpreting a metaphor is the conscious inference of the two missing grounds of each of the two present figures.

“She sailed into the room.” She is to the room as a sail-boat is to the sea. As A is to B, C is to D. Here, Eric and Marshall suggest two readings of the metaphor: forceful or graceful. The phrase “she sailed into the room” could certainly mean either, or both. Maybe she’s wearing roller-blades, who knows?

We could rewrite all of the quotes from Understanding Media to fit this more usual form:

  • “The mood of the people is now a stable market.”
  • “The modern employee is co-author of his own job.”
  • “Practical jokes are no pun.”
  • “The pretension of the Roman elite was absolutely French.”
  • “The printing press was as transformational as the phonetic alphabet.”
  • “The Roman cities were as open and diverse as Greek city-states were closed and integrated.”
  • “As the medieval world, so was later cities, and so are we.”

Now this is what regular, run-of-the-mill prose sounds like! Why couldn’t McLuhan just write normally? Like this?

Before we answer that, let’s consider two roles which these metaphors might play in regular writing.

Each of these statements, taken alone, feels incomplete. To read them makes you ask “How?” or “Why?” Presumably each would be embedded within some larger context which gave you the puzzle pieces to fit together. We can easily imagine each of them beginning or ending a paragraph which delved into the missing B and D terms. Each metaphor would then serve equally well as teaser which elicited our curiosity, or as punctuating conclusion or flourish wrapping up a thought.

If each statement was given standalone, out of context, then they’d be thought provoking. It’d be up to the reader to answer the “How?” or the “Why?” Perhaps they would have some knowledge of markets or business practices, or a nasty prejudice against the French. In that case, they’d instantly infer a meaning with a sagacious nod or chuckle. Perhaps they are ambiguous. Or just bewildering.

It is this second scenario which illustrates the critical method which McLuhan taught in his English class for interpreting poetry. In reducing his four-part metaphors to two, we have worked backward the method he sought to teach his students to take in their reading.

Let’s get the straight dope from an unpublished essay (alternatively titled “Demons of Analogy” and “The Difficulties of Yvor Winters or Rymer Redivius” in various drafts) he wrote in the late 1940s

In one of the few instances in which he notices metaphor Mr. Winters considers some lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 104:

Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived
So your sweet hue, which me thinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.

Oh which he comments, “Here the subject is the change by which we perceive and measure time…” [Winters quote cut]

Now this is to say not only that the sonnet is about the change, etc., but that metaphor supports and reinforces the statements made about this subject. Metaphor is thus adventitious to poetry. And good metaphor is as little irrelevant as possible, as here.

Here we see the point of McLuhan writing as he did. Our “fixed,” two-part metaphors would serve well as a nice quip to open or seal off an argument. That is the usual nature of prose, and it is the context in which we are used to seeing metaphor. Metaphor is mere ornament in the normal view. It lends a hand to the real substance, the logical proposition.

However, in poetry, the metaphor is the point, instructs McLuhan here in his criticism of Yvor Winters. McLuhan continues

When we see why this is not the nature of metaphor either here or anywhere else, we shall also see why Mr. Winters cannot grasp Mr. Eliot’s idea of an “objective correlative.” For every valid metaphor is an objective correlative just as is any successful poem.

There are four terms in every metaphor, two of which bear a ratio to the other two. That is why the rhetoricians always discussed metaphor as a “figure of thought” until the dualistic philosophy [of Hume, Kant, Hegel etc.] made the conception of analogy meaningless. That is, when Being was held to be unknowable our knowledge became self contained; and truth was no longer conformity of the mind with Being but mere internal consistency of our own manufactured concepts.

Even simple metaphor presents, then, the ratio of BA:DC. As B is to A so is D to C. In the first line this appears as, “Just as your beauty is to your face so is the hand of the dial to the face of the dial.” But in line two, with “steal” we are led on to “As the hand of the dial is to the thieving of Time, so is your beauty to your face.” Here Shakespeare produces a considerable intellectual surprise and abandons all criteria of “relevance” such as championed by Mr. Winters. “Figure” becomes loaded with ambivalence about the declining wealth (time) of day; its lengthening shadows and changing hue. “Steal from his figure” involves not only the face (French) “figure” which is losing shape but the physical figure which is getting pursy. It is not then beauty which is being stolen but beauty is also the cause of the theft. There is still beauty in the face but “no pace perceived.” Since “peace” was pronounced “pace” the rationale of the beauty as thief becomes more apparent: “There is still beauty but no peace in your face.” The ratio is this: “As the dial hand steals from the dial so your beauty has robbed you of your peace which once appeared on your face.”

Instead of becoming less complex, the next two lines achieve deeper irony by their metaphors in which the previous ones are further involved in “mine eye” which not only dotes with self-pitying irony on the “huge” and the “figure” but holds precariously (by reflection) the wealth which both time and beauty conspire to rifle…

Mr. Winters, like a great many others, is prevented from reading lines such as these by his preconceptions which forbid him to regard the metaphoric ratio as a proportion between particular knowledge and Being. (It is in this proportion, of course, and not in the particulars of the terms that the poet as “catalyst” can be, has to be, impersonal, just as it is in such proportion that poetry is dramatic, that is, doing rather than saying something about something). For him the poet must rather look to the clarity of his statements and their logical consistency with themselves. He cannot know Being. The critic must likewise judge according to external criteria which are consistent with one another. The critic must have a system by which he orders and evalues poems.

First, it ought to be mentioned that both the notion of the objective correlative and the idea of the poet as a catalyst derived from T.S. Eliot (from his essays Hamlet and His Problems and Tradition and the Individual Talent, respectively).

Now it ought to be clear why Eric and Marshall, in Laws of Media, equated metaphor with such lofty subjects as perception, and with the activity of the right-hemisphere of the brain. Metaphor is as important as logic for rationality! Thinking without grounding is thinking divorced from capital-B Being itself! And what metaphor provides is proportion. Not mathematical fractions, but of relative human relation to the world and each other as embodied beings. Without that proportion, we may as well be brains in jars—with no emotional sense of the slightness or monstrousness of deeds and actions.

Metaphor, when encountered and savoured in poetry, shapes the listeners perception of the world by establishing a direct relation to the world. It is not ornamental flourish, or a bit of sugar to help the conceptual method get across. The struggle of comprehending McLuhan’s orotund writing is a mental work-out in thinking consciously in analogy. Of lifting the “18th century” American mind out of its propositional logic and conceptual schema, and recognizing the unexploited depth of meaning in language. The very nature of what we call “culture wars” are of dialectics of different conceptual schema or “ideologies”—each internally consistent, but thus incapable of appreciating a more total picture. Dialectic without perception is blind.

Metaphor, as a basic mode of sense-making, has to do with a lot more than just words, then. It is in words where metaphor is most obvious, because words are our richest medium for capturing all of our senses. It is with the concept of the Tetrad, explored more in Laws of Media, where Marshall and Eric McLuhan attempt to bring metaphor systematically into perception of our physical world.

We would do well to attending to our faculty for interpretation much better than we have been doing, if we are to understand the power of language and of the human mind. The exercise of expanding metaphors explicitly into their four parts, or condensing McLuhan’s long analogical statements down to two, suggests itself as an excellent beginner exercise. This sort of work is something I’ve had a great deal of fun doing with students in my private tutoring these past five years.

If your curious to read more about McLuhan’s thoughts on metaphor, Cameron McEwen at McLuhan’s New Sciences has written an excellent accompaniment (in two parts!) to McLuhan’s essay Poetic vs. Rhetorical Exegesis, the Case for Leavis Against Richards and Empson.