Most of the apparent “revolutions” in computing over the past decades have been a matter of surface representation, or appearance. That is to say, the underlying nature of the machines, or hardware, have improved incrementally in a rather boring, linear way. This stable, predictable ground, however, has long been out of cultural reach.
The top-level, apparent layer of representation—and the applications these human computer interfaces afford—are most responsible for whipping up the maelstrom of runaway technological progress. It could be said that Apple Computers’ entire business model is based on selling the newest skins for their old cider!
In McLuhan’s use of the term, “software” means not just 1s and 0s specifically, but all formal aesthetics or content.
Every new conquest of speed moves toward the minimizing of “hardware” and the maximizing of “software” or structural design.
As the West approached this awareness in the nineteenth century, biologists began to ask, “Why is there so much unused beauty in Nature?” The answer came later, from the mathematicians in the world of “software.” “If an equation is symmetrically beautiful, it is almost certain to be true.” What the artist has always known, namely, that the greatest effects result from the utmost economy of means, has now become a truism of the material sciences.
the unexpected effect of “hardware” speed-up has been to restore the world as a work of art or object of contemplation.
As a work of art, the world impels the viewer to Make it New, to cite the Chinese injunction to the artist concerning his role. Man becomes both explorer and maker of beauty as “hardware” and “software” merge. The “hardware-software” complementarity is a new version of the old form-and-content relation. The old hang-up about “form” and “content” had arisen under the regime of merely visual culture, where “content” had to be contained in something. With the figure-ground relation of Gestalt psychology, the “content” was continuously created in the gap between figure and ground. The new physics carried this relation even further, citing resonance as the very stuff of “hardware.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1970), pg.95
Even hardware forms, like computers themselves, are software when designed on a computer. This is why Friedrich Kittler said in his essay There is No Software that the last historical act of human writing was in 1971 with the planning diagram for Intel’s 4004 microprocessor—the first single-chip CPU.
And so understanding the plastic history of computer I/O (input-output) interfaces is essential to appreciating the breadth of effects computer content has had. The contemporary cultural image of “hackers” pounding away on keyboards in dark black boxes of monospaced text make a lot more sense when the typographical origins of computer interfaces are understood. No computer history lesson is complete without the story of the telegraph, and its intimate relation with contemporary computing at every level, low and high. This excellent article from How To Geek covers, at least, the high ground:
The 1995 interactive CD-ROM title Understanding McLuhan is a gold-mine of material which has not yet been made accessible on the internet. Among them is this interview of Eric McLuhan on the subjects of the 1990’s McLuhan resurgence, his father’s legacy, and the Laws of Media.
Q: What is your perspective on the resurgence of interest in your father’s work in the 1990s?
A: I think there are three main reasons. One: there’s a whole new crowd of people out there who never encountered him first hand, and to them Marshall McLuhan is news. And so they are discovering his work for the first time and it hasn’t been diluted or interfered with by other people’s opinions. Nobody’s arguing about McLuhan anymore so when they come across it, it’s fresh and they can take it on its own terms. They’re not filtering it through, let’s say, the ideas of a tutorial, or a lecture, or a class, or a newspaper reviewer, or something like that. It’s all coming at them fresh. Well, so what? I mean, a whole lot of things are fresh. You can’t keep everything in the air all the time.
I think they’re finding in McLuhan a set of answers to questions that nobody else asks and nobody else answers. Questions about media, about how they influence the world. There’s one reason. That’s still somewhat remarkable to me. I find it amazing that nobody else has picked up McLuhan’s techniques or his approaches to studying the media and run with them.
Q: You don’t think that there are any contemporary masters of the area that he was talking about?
A: No, not a one. The lines of force, if you will, in the field were laid down many years ago and have stayed pretty much what they were. McLuhan is very definitely a renegade, a guy doing something that nobody else seems inclined to do. Or if they are inclined, and there are few who are inclined, like for example, Camille Paglia comes to mind right away. She says, “I’m his number one fan. I’m a big student of McLuhan’s,” and so on. And that may well be, and she has a lot of fun doing what she does, but what she does isn’t quite what McLuhan does. Not quite. She doesn’t have the training that he had and hasn’t had the years to practice it, and so on.
A second reason, I think that McLuhan is being rediscovered, all the now he died in 1980, the last day of 1980, New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 1980. So, since then the world has changed. All the media that he talked about, television and film and radio and satellites, they’re all there. But the world has changed and they’re still there. So they’re still causing trouble and raising questions in this world, and he showed 20 or 30 years ago how to study these forms, and so they’re still there to practise on. And when you apply his techniques to these things you get contemporary answers.
There’s a third factor, and that is since 1980 you wouldn’t believe the number of new media that have appeared. Beginning with the PC, the desktop computer which we all take for granted, and isn’t it as old as the telephone, hasn’t it been around about as long? And the answer is no, it hasn’t. It’s only been around about half a generation. Which seems incredible because we’re so accustomed to these things. But here we are surrounded by a whole pile of new media: PCs, and faxes, and video conferencing, virtual reality, CDs, and CD-ROMs. The LP record is gone, it was in its heyday fifteen years ago and it was indestructible. Nothing was going to happen to it.
All kinds of things have happened in the meantime, and nobody else is studying them. There isn’t a single person that I know of, and I’m reasonably well up on what’s going on, who’s studying the media themselves. Not one. Well, that leaves the field kind of free for old McLuhan to jump in and start to say, “Well look here, here’s how you do it. Here’s where you look. Here’s the kind of thing that you’ve got to keep your eye on, and here are the distractions. Here are the things to ignore. Now go for it.” He’s the only one.
Q: It seems as though McLuhan’s ideas and his writings fell out of favor for a decade or more. Do you have any insights into why that happened?
A: Oh, it was out of favor at the time. Why was it out of favor? Because it’s difficult. It isn’t easy stuff. It’s not armchair analysis. You can’t just pick up the paper and begin to pontificate. It doesn’t work.
His techniques rely on a solid training and discipline in strategies of analysis of prose, ways of reading things written and reading the writing itself. That is, looking at the form of the writing and making certain deductions about the user, and then bringing those over to the area of popular culture and beginning to use them there. Not just on things like newspaper and advertisements but also on the forms themselves: on radio itself, on TV itself.
It takes a lot of work, a lot of discipline, and to do it well, I suppose, makes it look easy. Like somebody coming out of a piano recital and saying, “Oh, that looks so easy. I could do that.” But you get home and you find it’s not so easy. His material has always been out of favor because it ran counter to the prevailing winds of direction of study. He tackled head-on the people who go after content and said, “This is absurd. You’re just wasting your time. You’re making noise and so on. Having a good time but your effectiveness is zero.”
We can take as an example, the thing that blew up in the last couple of days: Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. By Jane, here’s a TV show guaranteed to rot the minds of anybody who watches, unless you’re adult of course, then you’re safe. It’s funny the assumptions that adults make that they’re immune to these things. That the kids are going to be devastated by these, they’ll be committing violence on the streets, and rape and pillage. But of course I’m an adult, it won’t apply to me. I know better. Which is hogwash. Adults are just as susceptible, if not more so, because they have the illusion that they are insulated. They’re not. Kids don’t have any such illusion at all so I think they’re in a much safer position.
But they’ve suddenly decided to take this show off the air, which is the most popular show on the air, because they say it’s got too much violence in it. Well, anybody who’s been around for awhile recognizes this mating call of, “There’s too much violence in so and so. Let’s get it off the air and out of the hair of the kids so it won’t be destroying our families, and so on.” You hear this all the time. I forget the name of the guy, but there was a chap back in the ’40s who was brought to testify in front of congress a couple of times over the evils and the abject dangers posed to our families and our societies of all the violence going on in comic books. And that was just midstream. In the 19th century there were people railing about violence in the dime novels and cheap fiction and pulp romances, and so on. This is going to rot the minds of our kids.
Then it was radio of course. Violence on the radio shows, you don’t hear a lot about that now. I wonder why nobody’s tackled violence in the newspapers, those slide into every home. But violence in radio shows like Terry and the Pirates, like Gangbusters Suspense Theatre, the horrors that they subject the kids to. Why my little Johnny can’t go to sleep, hasn’t been able to sleep since July because of your terrible radio show. And so on. Well, after a while it gets kind of funny. And it would be funny if these people were harmless, but they’re not. They’re in a position to do some harm and cause a lot of inconvenience.
The real danger posed by these people is that they give you to understand that when they’re done they have done the analysis of the media and they haven’t looked at it yet. They’re just fiddling around with the content which has been neutralized by being made content. It’s lost all its power by the time it’s content. However, they have they think a handle on this little power move called censorship, and that must be very comforting for them given they don’t have a handle on the medium. They must have something.
Violence in the media, or sex in the media or anything is a complete red herring. It doesn’t give the nature of the medium itself or its effects. In fact, the content of any medium is always an older medium, as my father showed over and over again. And by the time you put something inside another situation you change its properties. By the time you put, let’s say, a novel or an opera on film, as film it doesn’t have the effect of an opera which is performed on a stage with a live audience and so on. Or as film, the novel doesn’t have the effect of the book, it has now the effect of film. And it changes people and uses them according to the dictates of the film medium, not according to the way the book behaves. By the time you put the film on TV now it has the effect of television. It doesn’t have the effect of film anymore, and so on and so on. So to begin with they’re missing the point. They’ve lost all touch with the way these forms work on people.
The next cry that you hear along with violence and the content and so on is, “Well, radio is neither good nor bad in itself. It’s how you use it that determines whether it’s good or bad.” And that’s another mating cry of media morons. It has nothing to do whatever with use. In fact, the user is the content and to say that a medium is neither good nor bad in itself really is a way of saying, “I can’t deal with this. I’m not going to look at it. Let’s just make moral judgment on it and get on to other things that are less demanding.”
In fact, if you tried that on—well, let’s try it on a few media and see if it stands up. Radio’s neither good nor bad in itself, or film or videotape is neither good nor bad in itself. It depends on how you use it. If you use it for good reasons then it’s a good thing, and for bad reasons then it’s a bad thing. Well, let’s try that. On the light bulb as a medium. Light bulbs are neither good nor bad in themselves, right, it depends on how you use them. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? You’re not getting very far.
Let’s try another one, cholera. Cholera is neither good nor bad in itself, or AIDS is neither good nor bad in itself, it’s how you use it that determines whether it’s good or bad. So I suppose if bad people get it then it’s a good thing and if good people get it, it’s a—but it’s absurd, it’s stupid to even think in those terms.
Let’s try another, clothing is neither good nor bad in itself. It’s how you use it. Brassieres are neither good nor bad in themselves, it’s the way they’re used that determines—you see it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, you’re trying to extend this and use it as a principle of study and it just makes you really absurd.
Q: Why do think there is such a resistance to the notion that the medium is the message?
A: Well, for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s a paradox, a delightful paradox. And it calls for a lot of playfulness on people’s part just to handle a paradox like that. The medium is the message. What do you mean? That’s a contradiction, but paradoxes are. Rosalie Coly pointed out in her study of paradox that if you can explain a paradox then it isn’t a paradox. Paradoxes are self-explanatory and they’re difficult but you either grasp it instantly or it’s not there. To say the medium is the message is to collapse about a half hour of study into about five or six words. It’s very difficult, it’s a sort of gnomic utterance and people aren’t accustomed to it. They don’t like those.
That is they like to play around with it, the global village for example is another. “Well, this global village that you’re predicting is going to happen.” I finally heard last week: “The global village that McLuhan was predicting is finally coming to pass.” And I thought, boy are you behind the times. The global village was a way of describing the effect that radio had in the ’20s. Let me see, this is the ’90s, that makes you about 70 years behind reality.
Q: Some critics have leveled the charge that the sharpness of his aphorisms allowed him to escape any kind of critical scrutiny.
A: Well, there is a type of mind that is not capable of dealing with wit, with aphoristic style. But my father decided early on that he would try as much as he could to write and present his things, his ideas, in aphoristic style. Because aphorisms, as Bacon said, are incomplete. It’s not the spelled-out essay, this is something highly compressed. It’s a poetic form. And it calls for a lot of participation on the part of the person regarding it or thinking about it. You have to chew it over and mull it over and work with it for a while before you understand it fully. A good aphorism should keep you busy for about a week. Sort of on the back burner kicking it around and playing with it and exploring it, taking it apart to see what you can get out of it and so on. And applying it here and there and everywhere. It’s a very compressed, a very condensed form of statement and he deliberately chose that because he wanted to teach.
He said, “For instruction you use incomplete knowledge so the people can fill things in, they can round it out and fill it in with their own experience.” If what you want is simply to tell people something, then by all means spell it out in the essay form, but if you want to teach don’t do that. There’s no participation in telling. It’s simply consuming, you sit there and you swallow it. But with the aphoristic style, you have the opportunity to get a dialogue going, to engage people.
When you say, “The medium is the message,” you’re uttering what is patently a contradiction, because we reserve the term “message” for the content and “medium” for the container, as it were. And what it should do is send us looking at the terms: what do we mean by medium? What do we mean by message? That’s the proper response. Let’s examine this thing. Suppose it were a poem, a haiku, “The Medium is the Message.” Anything cast that way would make you immediately rush to the dictionary to see if what the speaker or the writer means is what you think. So, the proper response to, “the medium is the message” would be right away rush off and find out what medium means. It doesn’t mean what you think, and right there’s a lot of the trouble. My father was usually quite exact when he made statements like that. He may have had tongue in cheek and a twinkle in his eye but he was being quite exact.
If you say, “the medium is the message” you’re talking about a medium meaning a milieu. Oh, wait a minute—right away it changes! Medium in the sense of growing medium. What do plants grow in? That’s a medium. It’s a particular mixture of dirt and vermiculite, and it’s a whole circumstance that’s fruitful and makes something else burgeon forth and appear. That’s a medium, and to say that that is the message of technology, well, now that brings out a completely different kind of thinking. That is to say that every new innovation, every new gadget like a pocket calculator or a coffee cup or a TV camera brings with it a whole set of assumptions, a whole environment or milieu of not just assumptions but ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of organizing your life, a whole range of services or disservices—without which it wouldn’t function. Like electricity, without which we couldn’t be having this interview. Because of the lights, the cameras, it’s needed to power up the equipment. That’s part of the medium. And that is the message that, say, the camera or the light bulb holds. It’s at least in part that.
Well, content study never takes you in that direction, ever. But if you begin to examine what the man actually said, think about it, ponder them, and some of these will begin to open out and be quite fruitful. So we have a die-hard bunch who refuse to, and a new crowd who don’t know what’s the wrong way to study these things. And I think they’re beginning to find a lot of interesting observations of what McLuhan had to offer and what he said.
Q: We’ve experienced an explosion of new media in the last ten years. What new media would have fascinated your father? What do you think he would be studying now?
A: Oh, heavens. All of them I imagine. VR, virtual reality. That would be interesting, but mildly so. It may have a very big impact in a few years so it’s worth looking at now while it’s still new. Things are visible when they’re new and when they’re very old. In the meantime when they’re everywhere, they’re invisible, and that’s what makes them very hard to study, the present.
So what media would he be interested in? Well, heavens—the personal computer has just about devastated North American business life. It’s utterly ruined the old pattern and instituted whole new patterns of its own; it’s changed an awful lot of people’s relation to work; it’s allowed cottage industry to develop. People work at home, I work at home, a lot of people work at home. So that is at war with the motorcar. It’s had a big effect on the car, a big effect, in changing our preferences for space. About 20 years ago people still liked the very large roomy boxes on wheels. That’s largely gone now because of the intimacy of these new media, they don’t like those big empty spaces.
They don’t like containers, they like wrap-arounds. So you don’t so much get in your car and drive away as you put it on, like a pair of trousers or something, and scoot off into traffic.
He’d be looking at all matter of new media, everything that’s happened. All the new developments in TV and computers and new kinds of games. The information highway as it’s called, the data networks. They’re fascinating, every bit of it. Everything that impinges on our daily life and changes the way we live and the way we think and the way we feel and interrelate. All of those things would have been of absolute interest.
Q: Do you think that in his work he predicted the things we’ve seen happen in the last few years?
A: Well, he never predicted the future, never ever tried to. And that was one of the things that irritated people. He said, “No, no, there a lot of groups of people busy predicting the future. I’ll leave them to it. That’s futurologists, and certain sociologists, and so on. That’s their job to look at the future. And historians take care of the past.” He said, “I’ll tackle the really tough one: the present. Let me see if I can predict the present.” Which is damn near impossible. So he spent his time trying to predict the present, not the future. He said, “The future’s anybody’s game, it’s easy. Easy stuff. But looking at the present and predicting that, that’s damn difficult. That’s what I want to do.” So everything he said wasn’t a prediction of what would happen but of what had just happened.
It’s interesting. You’ll find in artists, for example, people say, “Oh, Picasso was years ahead of his time.” He wasn’t, he was years ahead of his contemporaries. He was very much a man of the present. The same is true of any artist, and the same was true with my father. He was very much a man of the present. He tried awfully hard to look at what was going on around him, and just talk about that. The future, the past, those are fairly easy. So what would he be interested in? Everything, everything that’s going on.
Q: In looking back on some of his perceptions, do you find that any of his findings have become more clear over time, or that some have turned out to be wrong?
A: If any of them didn’t work? Well, he was just a guy looking at a house on fire and saying, “There’s a fire over there.” He’s been proven right. So he’s looking at the present and saying, “Look, this technology is doing this to you.” He’s been proven right. I don’t know of any cases where he’s been proven wrong. A lot of people have tried to test his work, and every test that I know of, that we’ve heard about, has borne out what he said. Mind you, of course, as things recede from the present into the past a few years, they become visible. The one thing that you cannot see is the thing that you’re enmeshed in. Like they say, the one thing a fish can’t tell you about is water. Tell you about anything else, other fish, or what they’re doing, or what’s on TV, sure. But water, no. Can’t tell you about water. That’s because it is so much a part of you, it’s environmental, it’s invisible. If you’re going to study the invisible then you have to have a definite set of techniques for making things visible. And he gathered all those techniques from the arts. This is where the hard work and homework comes in.
The artists, he found, are the only people dedicated to working in the present. They don’t care about the future and they don’t care about the past. They spend all their time and all their energy training their perceptions, their sensibilities and trying to be contemporary, nothing more. An artist who wants to be ahead of his or her time is just a romantic and isn’t doing the job. But they have techniques of looking at, of discerning what is the new sensibility, what’s going on in perception right now? How have things changed this week or this month? And all of their energies are bent in the direction of trying to capture the new sensibility and to see as far as they can with it. To test its limits and tell you what it’s good for and what it isn’t good for.
But if you take those same techniques and turn them on the world, and look at it, take the techniques and use them just as a means of seeing, of finding out what is around you, then you’ve got McLuhan’s whole technique. That’s what he did. So he didn’t really care about the future or the past, he just worked on the present. He just worked on the present, and he found that a full time occupation.
“The medium is the message” is pregnant with all kinds of meanings. He used the title of a book which came out in the late ’60s, ’68 or ’69, only he twisted it a little. He called it The Medium is the Massage. And that was to point out that there are four puns in that little aphorism. “The medium is the message,” the familiar phrase. But then split that into two words: mess; age. It messes up, every age. Every medium means a new mess. And “the medium is the massage” meaning the medium gives you a working over and gives you and your culture a complete massage. And also mass, age. Split that one up. So there are four levels of meaning in that pun. And he meant all four.
He was talking about the effects of electric media on North America, and western civilization. And it is definitely a mess and it is to create a mass as well. To destroy the public and put in its place a kind of audience called a mass audience. And I don’t know anybody who’s worried about all four of those before but they’re all there, all waiting for someone to tinker with.
Q: And you never heard anyone else bring that out?
A: No. No one’s ever brought that out before. But we talked about that a lot. When he was naming the book, I helped him write it, and we discussed it and had a lot of fun with that and he used all the puns in conferences and at talks for quite awhile. To say “the medium is the message” is to say that the milieu that the thing brings with it is the message. So let’s say in the case of the motorcar, the road is the message. If you look at the motorcar and you ask, “What is the medium of the car?” The minute you ask that you realize right away that it’s not cars. They’re something all right, they’re in there but they’re not the medium of the car. The medium of the car is the road, the oil companies, parking lots, traffic tickets. But along with the oil companies you can throw in Middle Eastern politics and all of that stuff. All of this comes courtesy of the car. Without it, no motorcar. Without the roads, without the highways, without the neighborhoods, without the suburbs, without the parking lots, without all of that, and air pollution, and politics, and oil supplies, no motorcar. That is the message of the car. That is what changes your society. It doesn’t matter what you use the car for.
So we come back to, “Well motorcars are neither good nor bad in themselves.” That horseradish. It doesn’t matter whether you carry bombs in the car, or bullets, or brassieres, or anything benign. If you’re going to have cars then you’ve got to have all this. And it’s all this that changes you. That trend forms your whole society. So if you want to understand what cars are all about, forget what people do in them and look at what the car itself does. That’s what’s hard to look at. What’s the medium then of the fax machine? What’s the medium of the personal computer? “Faxes are neither good nor bad.” Well, OK good-bye. That person is sound asleep. Hasn’t got a hope of ever getting close to what the medium is doing. And this is just the gross effects in the culture at large. It doesn’t even touch on the personal effects, the effects that these media have on changing your sensibilities, and the way you think or feel or see, or acknowledge situations, or the way you live in the world. Because every one of them extends, and perverts, distorts the senses of the user. The corollary to “the medium is the message” is, “the user is the content.” The user of any medium is the content. The user of the car is the content of the car. The user of clothing is the content of clothing. The user of the fax is the content. The user of ads…
So you want to talk about the content? But you see, it’s another question, and a very dicey area. Now you’re into real questions not the moral value of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and all that absurdity.
Q: How would he read the political changes in the world today? The simultaneous balkanization of the world…
A: I think he’d already started talking about them. The successionist movements are, all of them brought about by TV and computer screens. Because they raise up in the users, very deep tribal loyalties and tribal antipathies that have been below the surface, maybe for centuries. So you get the Irish suddenly being very confused about their identity and wanting to assert this and divest themselves of British identity and British trappings. And Quebec doing the same with Canada, and the Basque doing the same with the Spanish. And so on all through Europe. It’s very clear that the same forces were behind the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and of Soviet Russia which was based on hardware communism, and software is far more potent. It raises issues of identity. The USSR’s collapsed into a bunch of republics. And will collapse further. And Canada undoubtedly is going to go that way in fifty years or less. Break up into smaller nations and a federation perhaps of those.
Because the message of electricity on the one hand is very large mass audiences, on the other hand it has the paradoxical effect of breaking up the audience into very small groups. Very very tiny, very small groups. So one of the first things it does is smash to smithereens the group for print. The group of individuals that constituted the reading public cannot stand up to the impact, the power, of television and computer screens. All of which demand an enormous, a very deep kind of participation in the thing that’s studied. And it’s quite subliminal—but very profoundly deep and that sort of participation when you extend it to other people is tribal identity. It’s group identity. Feminism is entirely group identity and comes from the same mold.
Males are not very good at this, they’re sort of lost in that milieu. They don’t know how to relate that way. So there isn’t a masculinist movement and there won’t be. But there is a feminist, there is a French Canadian, there is a Basque, there is a separatist movement. The terrorists that have afflicted Europe for so long and fortunately haven’t made it over here yet, are people without an identity. Violence is always to establish or recapture an identity. There’s always a threatened identity under violence. There’s no other practical purpose for it. I don’t think so at this point.
Q: What about the globalizing effect of technology?
A: Absolutely. The break up of the hardware patterns of industrialism, industrial nations, and nationhood goes with this global village, or global theatre now with video conferencing, satellites, and satellite imagery. We’re not in a global village anymore, we’re miles beyond that. This is the theatre we’re in, and everybody’s on stage all the time. It’s a theatre without any plot so it’s quite absurd. And only the unexpected happens, there’s nothing expected. So the news becomes quite important as giving you in retrospect, today’s script, if you will. The purpose of news isn’t really to give people information, it’s to tell them how they are. It’s for identity. And for a little bit of globalization and feeling of participation in something large or something bigger.
Strangely enough, while the world becomes a small, little environment, a little area, because of electricity, it breaks up into even smaller groups, tribes. The U.N. is a hopelessly impossible kind of thing. It’s based on the hardware ideas of communist or communal approaches to things: the idea that we can sit around as reasonable people and behave as if we were civilized right in a period in which we’re dumping civilization and all of its trappings. So the U.N. has got a lot of nostalgia invested in it. It’s the way we should have been, the way we might have been a hundred years ago, and will work on those terms, but only on those terms. Not as anything practical or up to date. It cannot possibly work that way.
So wherever new media interfere in a culture there’s going to be violence. Wherever you let them loose it’s going to change things. This has been so well documented in anthropology it’s ridiculous. Ted [Edmund] Carpenter, fifty years ago, was reporting on experiments done with radio, with film, on primitives who had never encountered anything and their reaction was instantaneous and profound. If they took radio into a tribal area into New Guinea for example, within a matter of months of their bringing in radio, the amount of militia required to keep the peace in the area would outnumber the population. And they take in radio as follows: install, let’s say, a loud speaker on a pole in front of the chief’s hut or tent and every few days they’d have a program from the government—fairly innocuous stuff. Not violent, no violent content here, this would be the missionary hour. Messages on cleanliness, and clean up the village, and don’t let stagnant water lie around in a puddles, and good things like that. You know, health messages. And even so, regardless of the content, within a few months the natives would go on a rampage. Absolute terror. Start ripping each other’s throats out. Just because radio was there and having this effect on their psyches.
In other villages, I remember Ted [Carpenter] told me, he got some of this on film even. He took film in and went up river in canoes, to head hunter villages, and would stay there for awhile. And film the people, film their rituals. Then go back downstream to do the developing, come back and show them the movies. And literally within weeks, those villages that had been filmed were deserted. Culture that had stayed together for generation after generation, hundreds upon hundreds of years just blasted to smithereens by the power of film, which we find fairly innocuous. We have some armor to withstand the power of these things, but primitives who’ve never encountered it before have no means of defense at all. They can’t defend themselves. But they respond instantly and instantaneously and intuitively to these media. The message of film is detribalism.
The men had gotten in canoes and gone down river looking for jobs, looking for women and the villages were deserted. Now why? All that was on the film was them. They filmed their ritual, they filmed them going about their daily work: fishing, paddling up and down the river, in and out of the huts, and making fires. Innocent stuff. No propaganda here at all. And it just blasted the society apart. Well, these forms are that virulent, that potent, and they have that far-reaching an affect on us too. Only we have some insulation just from all the other forms that are around.
Print, principally, has insulated us from the effects of electricity. And I think print is our main line of defense. If we want to retain any kind of civilized character at all as a culture we need to keep print going. Because print is the one thing on which we base private, individual identity. And that’s what characterizes us from the rest of the world: private identity; individualism. And that comes out of print. Out of electricity you get other kinds of awareness. Every time you shift identity it means violence. Whether the society breaks up and hops in the canoes and goes down river, or they just begin tearing at each other’s throats, it’s the same. It’s violence. Violence in the kids means they’re looking for identity, and they’re getting conflicting answers to the question, “Who am I?” So they’ve got to settle it, and that’s why they get violent.
Q: Tell me a bit about the way you worked with your father on a day-to-day basis. What were those years like?
A: We worked together for about fifteen years off and on and I was sort of the Girl Friday. I helped out with various things, mostly since I had done a fair amount of homework on my own, we’d sit around the breakfast table, or the lunch table, or the dinner table, or whatever, and just discuss what was going on. My job was largely to make notes and to be a sounding board, but also to give him a good fight if I thought he was on the wrong track. And usually it turned out that I was on the wrong track, but in the meantime we found out a lot of things. I helped write things down. We just had a day-long dialogue and conversation, and I would help as much as I could.
Q: When did you become interested in the field of study that your father had pioneered?
A: Well, that didn’t come until much later. All the time I was growing up, of course, the one thing that I was not going to do was teach. Lord no. My mother was a teacher, my father was a teacher, I was damn sure that I wasn’t going to be a teacher. And English? Oh no. I was interested in engineering and mathematics and the sciences. I was a radio amateur. I flew airplanes. I designed and built airplanes. I worked in radio. I even studied concert piano. I played the piano in bars and made my living as a musician for awhile. I ran off and joined the air force for four years, and couldn’t stand that, it was stifling.
All the time I was growing up, and after I grew up, I came home and lo and behold I not only started teaching, I started studying English. And I wound up getting my degrees in communications and in English, and about then it turned out that I was useful. So we worked together until he died.
Q: Tell me a little about Laws of Media, that book and how that came about.
A: In the early ‘70s, perhaps the middle ‘70s, McGraw-Hill got in touch with my father. They had published Understanding Media, and they said, “Well, this here book is selling pretty well. Things have changed a bit in the last five, six, eight years. We’d like to sell a few more. What about if you revise the book, bring it up to date?” Well, in the years before then, let’s see, a few things had happened since 1964. The book ended with automation, meaning the computer, and that’s what computer meant in the early ‘60s.
In 1962 or ‘63, computers meant automating production. Well, since then computers had done a whole lot of things. They moved into the space effort, and the Rand Corporation had a lot to do with putting men in space, and men on the moon. So there was the whole new thing of computers. Satellites had taken off. 1957 was the first satellite, the first Russian Cosmos. And this was now seven, eight, ten years later. Good heavens.
Color TV had come in. And it’s hard to imagine a world without color TV but color TV had to be invented sometime. It came in during the late ‘60s. Sometime after Understanding Media, four or five years later. A whole lot of things had come in, pocket calculators were starting to appear, and desktop computers had just begun to make their appearance. So there were a whole lot of things—cable TV for example, community-antenna TV as it was called then, had come in. And videotape was starting although it was still at the stage of port-o-packs. Clumsy things about the size of a kid’s backpack today that weighed twenty, thirty pounds, that you carried on your back, that you could put a half hour of tape in, and edit with a razor blade. That was really exciting. But it was still half-inch tape, and quarter-inch tape decks were coming in.
So a lot of things were happening, and we thought OK, this is a good idea. So it became one of many projects that we had going at the time; we like to work on six or eight things at once because you work on one and you get ideas for another. It’s just the way things are—perverse. So we started in on a project called UMR, Understanding Media Revisions, and we kept at it for awhile, and part of what we were doing involved looking at all the critiques of the book. If you’re going to revise a book that’s made a bit of a splash and people have had things to say about it, before you do the revisions, you look at what they’d said.
And it seemed to us that there were two kinds of critique: the nitpicker, of whom fortunately there were quite a few, and they’re a little annoying at the time, but really, you have some of the top people in the world, some of the top reviewers working for you for free, debugging your book. Pointing out, “No no, it was 1856, not 1865, you got it backwards!” And you know, here’s hundreds of hours of top-flight brains picking through and culling all the errors out of your book.
Well, we’re very grateful, great. We took every one of those to heart. Made all the changes, and then we looked at what was left. And what was left, instead of being matters of fact, tended to group itself around a general theme. The general theme being a sort of scream of rage to the effect, “Well, it’s all very well for you to say that, but it ain’t scientific. Whatever it is, it’s not scientific, this is just one guy mouthing off and making a lot of noise about media. Let’s get scientific here, come on.” So we thought OK, let’s get scientific. It should be easy, I mean we know we誺e got the track on this. So how do we present it in a way that’s scientifically presentable? It just means translating from this language into some other language. So then began a process of asking the people who came around, “What is scientific about statements? How do you make a scientific statement?”
At the time, the Centre for Culture and Technology was running full blast. This was the institution my father ran at the University of Toronto. And all sorts of people came through the doors. We had everyone from the Beatles to two of the prime ministers to Nobel prize winners in the sciences, artists, all kinds of people came through. And we had typically a meeting every Monday night, which was wide open. The public could attend, and did. And we’d have a guest in, somebody who just happened to be in town that day, or that week. And of course it wasn’t just a meeting, a public meeting, it was part of a graduate course. It was one of the lectures, one of the lessons. It just happened that this lecture was open to the public and anybody could come in.
It was a great thing to do with grad students. They’re usually closeted in a classroom across campus, and they sit and take notes and go off and read and learn and here they’re encountering whatever went by. And we had as I say the top. So we started asking the top people in every field, especially the sciences, “How do you make scientific statements in your field? What do you have to do? See, we have this problem.” And we’d explain what our problem was, and they’d hum and ha and mutter and so on, and it was astounding. Two years and nobody could tell us how to make a statement in a scientific manner. All these people do it all the time. They make their living being scientists and they can’t tell you how to make a scientific statement. It grew to be quite a game. Eventually, my father found the answer to his question in a book by Karl Popper. One evening he was reading Karl’s book Objective Knowledge and in it Popper made the crucial statement. He said, “A scientific statement is worded in such a way that it can be disproven.” Well my gosh, it took two years to find that out. And nobody, we had the best brains in the university in our place—nobody came up with that one. “Well, that’s easy,” he said. “OK, we can state things in a way that people can test them.” And so, we began doing that.
Now remember the project we’re working on is that of revising Understanding Media. So we had two kinds of things in there: we had all the corrections and the fiddly stuff going on; we also started a whole bunch of new chapters on all the new technologies. And in these new chapters we started to present these statements and that made them a little different from the earlier chapters which were in essay form. The minute we’d asked the question about, “What general statements can you make about all media that anyone can test for themselves, or that anyone can go out and find the answers for themselves?” And doing that, asking that question, lead to our discovering over a period of several weeks a series of four general statements that people can make. The first three came in one day. Now we’re working on Understanding Media and the subtitle is The Extensions of Man. So one general statement is, “Every technology, every innovation, amplifies or enlarges or extends or enhances—blows up in some way—something that is already there.” You take something that’s already present and you enlarge it with this new technology or technique. So, motorcars, for example, let you go faster than horses do. Airplanes let you go considerably faster, and farther, and so on. Every new innovation extends or amplifies or does something with human experience, it opens it up in a new way. At the same time, law number two, every innovation, as it does that it takes the old situation, whatever it was, and sidelines it. So, the motorcar, let’s say, makes walking unnecessary. Before the car people used to walk ten miles a day, to and from work. In The Return of the Native, Hardy has someone walk fifteen miles to work in the morning and walk home fifteen miles at night. Well OK, that was 100 years ago, 150 years ago, but people did it, if they couldn’t afford horses. And a horse was a pretty considerable piece of technology. It lead to developing roads. You had to have stabling facilities, and blacksmiths, and a whole range of services there. The medium for the horse.
But when the car came along it pushed the horse out, and hostelries, and blacksmiths, and a whole lot of things went with it. When film came out it had a big effect on radio. Law number one or question number one was “What is amplified, what’s extended, what’s enlarged here?” Law number two: “What gets pushed out of the picture? What’s sidelined?” Architecture for example, housing and so on, makes clothing, the kind of clothing you wear to protect yourself from the elements, unnecessary. You now use the house or the cave. The moment it becomes unnecessary something happens to it. Now it’s available to come back as an art form. Every art form we have, it turns out, used to be a cliché. Horses are now an art form, they’re an aesthetic activity. They used to be just everyday. Film is now an aesthetic activity. It used to be something you’d send the kids off to as a babysitter on a Saturday afternoon. Film used to be deprecated and people took large moral exception to them. “Oh, the quality of films is really low. You just get trash. You get these James Cagney things and Victor Mature, war movies. Nothing but the lowest kitsch and garbage in films.” When TV came along suddenly films looked good and they turned into an art form.
Computers come along and now you have people in graduate school studying Howdy Doody, and the old Arthur Godfrey Hour and the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. So there seemed to several things going on. One is every innovation enlarges some area of experience. It pushes aside something else that was there. Keep in mind we’re still thinking in terms of Understanding Media as we’re doing this.
Well, there’s another chapter in the early part of Understanding Media, namely reversal of the overheated medium. We found out that if you push anything far enough, it will reverse its effects. Its characteristics will assume a sort of complimentary pattern. A couple of examples from the book that I remember, IBM used to have a saying in information theory, “Data overload equals pattern recognition.” When the data in a field become too many or too profuse to attend to any one, then you stand back and you look at the whole field at once. There’s a flip in other words from looking at individuals to looking at whole patterns. A reversal. A complimentary kind of thing happens.
Well, it turns out, every technology does this. If you push it far enough it reverses its properties and turns into a complimentary form. So those three, what is enhanced, what is obsolesced, what is the reversal, came to us in one day. And we knew there was more to it and we kept at the problem of, “Well, what general statements can you make about all media that anyone can test?” If you say every innovation enhances or enlarges something, anyone can test that. Let’s pick anything at all. Let’s pick pocket calculators. What does that enlarge or accelerate or enhance? That’s fairly easy for anybody at all to test. Anywhere, any time, any culture, any period, you can test that. So that seems to hold up. We haven’t found one example of a technology that doesn’t do that. So based on that I’d say it’s a general law.
Second, what is obsolesced? Third, what is the reversal potential? And three weeks later we found law number four. All the time, all the while, we were going through all the media we knew and answering those three questions saying, “What’s going on here? Does it hold up?” And testing them, rigorously. The fourth appeared after three weeks, and that is, “Every innovation brings back in a new form something quite ancient, something that had been pushed out a long time ago.”
Sticking with the car, what does it bring back? A guy in a car is a knight in shining armor. It’s the human being as tank, one-man tank. Get into your car and you’re wearing a metal suit. It’s a knight in armor. It may not feel very courtly in the middle of a traffic jam on the Don Valley, but that’s the effect. In effect, that’s what’s back. The horse is out, the road has been revived, and in a new form too. We have turnpikes and highways that we’d never seen before. And in fact, with the motorcar the road became America’s only indigenous form of architecture. It’s strange to relate but we’re the world’s greatest road builders. What’s brought back? So there’s a question. What is the aesthetic revival or retrieval? And these four turn out to be absolutely universal. Every innovation has its impact along these four lines, or these four axes. In all the years that we tested these, that was until my father’s death in 1980, last day of ‘80, we did not find one exception to those four. In the fourteen years since, I’ve kept testing them and I’ve got a lot of other people working, we have yet to find one exception to these four. So I feel pretty safe in saying these are universal laws of media, of innovation.
Now, we found out several other things about them, and I’ll get back in a moment to Understanding Media and that project. One was they only work with human innovations. If you ask what a spider web, or a beehive, or a beaver dam, or some animal thing enhances, you might get a bit of an answer. What does it set aside? Not much there. What does it retrieve? Nothing. What is the reversal? Nothing, it’s never pushed to an extreme. It doesn’t work on animal artifacts. Only human ones, which was quite a surprise.
So here we have a way of discerning the difference between humanity and the rest of creation. That should be of interest to metaphysicians and philosophers and nobody’s taken us up on it yet, but that just means there’s work to do. Second, it doesn’t work with natural phenomena. You can’t ask what is enhanced or retrieved or obsolesced, or what’s the reversal potential in, let’s say, a tree. Or a mountain, or an earthquake, or a thunderstorm, or a whirlpool, or a tornado—it doesn’t work. It’s only human phenomenon, human artifacts, that have these four dimensions. Exclusively human, every single case. We also found that there is a certain set of ratios among the four. This is really intriguing because it places this activity in relation to speech. That is, these four have the ratio among themselves that A is to B as C is to D. Enhancement is to reversal as retrieval is to obsolescence. I don’t know why, but it is. And it pans out, it works out. So this has an advantage if you found two and three of the four and you’re looking for the fourth, you know what kind of thing to look for. You know how to look, and you know how to recognize the answer when it comes. So you know how to recognize if things are a little bit off as well. It gives you a couple of cross checks. All of this was being done in the interest of bringing Understanding Media up to date, about 14 years after its publication. So we wrote it up and sent it to McGraw-Hill. We said, “Here’s the book. We’ve made a few corrections in accordance with those snippity reviewers, bless them all. And also we have added a few chapters and an approach that we think is very fruitful to flesh it out and bring the new innovations on-line.” They took one look at it, sent it back and said, “We don’t want this. We want more of the old stuff. Give us regular essay. This is all new stuff, we don’t want it.”
We kept working, and after awhile we had what we thought was enough. We had a contract with Doubleday for four books. A couple of those weren’t going so well because we’d been spending all our time on Understanding Media and these new laws. So we sent them the manuscript and they looked at it and said, “Well, OK, we’ll take it in place of X.” And it kicked around the Toronto publisher for awhile. Then my father fell ill, and we sent it down to the States and it kicked around there. The Toronto publisher had a look at it, Doubleday Canada, and made a few editorial suggestions. It went to the States and as far as I know it’s still in somebody’s desk drawer. They’ve never even acknowledged receipt of it.
After my father had been dead for four or five years I decided to take the manuscript and get it printed. I hauled it around to U of T Press which had done The Gutenberg Galaxy. And we did a little editorial running around and eventually a few years later the book came out. There are several other unpublished things by my father that I’m hoping to get out in the next few years.
There’s basically the story. It was the Laws of Media which was really a revolutionary book. It hasn’t had its measure taken yet. It started out as a project to revise and bring up to date Understanding Media and then turned into its own production entirely and it is quite different from Understanding Media. Although in the editing I was careful to keep the parallels. So in all the media examined in the Laws of Media you’ll find them in the original book as well. I only added a few, that had appeared since.
Q: How did you come up with the idea? Were they developed in open conversation and discussion with McLuhan and friends?
A: All the time. These conversations that my father and I had were wide open. Whoever was passing got roped in and they came in just like joining a conversation in a bar. You don’t stop and say, “Well, so and so’s joined. Let’s turn back to page three and take it from there.” No, you just dive in where you are. So whoever came around and joined the conversation wherever it was at the moment. Well, we’re working on this problem of what does print enhance. What do you think? If you hit people cold like that you often got good things.
Plus you would get somebody with a lot of expertise in one area, which means they’re pretty sharp usually. And you ask them not about their area but about something else. Say, “Let’s bring your smarts to bear on this problem. What do you see when you tackle this?” And often you got solid gold. As a technique of discovery just get people involved, get them talking.
The Tetrads are the four laws taken together. When you take the four laws simultaneously or the answers to them and put them together at once then you have a Tetrad: a four statement gestalt or complex. Which is not definitive so much as a starting point for investigating. Often we find when we’re asking the four questions that some of them allude us for awhile. We can only get one or two. Well that’s wonderful because it tells you that there’s more to know about this and you just keep picking away and picking away sometimes for weeks, months, and eventually it yields. It isn’t something you can do nine to five.
When Marshall McLuhan mentions Henri Bergson at all, it is in a dismissive tone. The reasons why are simple enough. McLuhan was a Thomist inspired by Jacques Maritain, a fellow convert to Catholicism and student of Bergson at The Sorbonne. Bergson’s philosophy of Creative Evolution(1907 in French)—of a rising spirit of change and time coursing through and animating material nature—had at first inspired Maritain out of the nihilism which the otherwise mechanical, scientistic and secular curriculum of the University of Paris had instilled in him. After graduation, however, Maritain fell deeply into the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and subsequently retrieved Thomism for the 20th century with a harsh critique of his beloved professor’s secular spiritualism in 1913.
Here we have it then; the most thorough-going, most intelligent anti-intellectualism,—Bergsonian anti-intellectualism,—compromises and destroys man’s freedom just as much as the intellectualism of Parmenides, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Hegel. Let us realize that intelligence alone can correct intelligence and that if we wish to cure the soul of the false intellectualism of Spinoza and Hegel, which measures being upon thought and to which the dogmatism of our pseudo-savants bears but a faint and crude resemblance, there is only one means, only one remedy: authentic intellectualism,—submission to the real,—which measures thought upon being.
Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955), pg 266
At issue was the way in which Bergson, after diagnosing the Western malaise as a reliance on logic, rational thinking, and the mechanization of solid objects in fixed Newtonian space, prescribes a surrender or immersion into the constant changing flow and spirit of time and flux. The result would inevitably be, according to Maritain, a failure of rightly-fitting being in the world, owing to a lack of the sufficiently matured or oriented intellectual capacity necessary to rightly embody one’s sense of things. The development of the mature human as described by Aquinas would be forestalled, perpetually contingent upon constant reaction to material conditions.
The Bergsonian theory, moreover, does not escape the drawbacks of dualism, for in it soul and body form an accidental whole, not an essential whole; in it man cannot be regarded as a being composed of a body and a spiritual soul, but only as a soul making use of a body in order to act, and it is the soul by itself alone which would constitute the first subject of action, the human person in the metaphysical sense of the word, if the person could subsist in it.
On the other hand, the Bergsonian theory has all the drawbacks of monism, for it admits between soul and body only a difference of degree or intensity, not a difference in nature; since, according to Bergson, we go by continuous transitions from spirit to matter, since matter is only “inverted psychic,” since the sole reality is becoming, pure change, concrete duration, now ascending, now descending, now concentrated, now diluted, since in short opposites are identical with one another and all is in everything.
Opposites are thus made identical: instead of showing how the soul and the body, while fundamentally distinct, constitute one single and same being, and how opposites harmonize, Bergsonian metaphysics, in fact, seek progressively to attenuate one of the opposites and then the other, to the point that, by scarcely perceptible transitions, one passes on to some notion which is not properly suited to either, but in which each of them disappears. There they are then, placed in continuity and in fact identified; they no longer appear to be anything but different degrees of the same thing (which is not thing, but rather action). This is the way that Bergson identifies body and soul in a certain extensivity, intermediate between the inextended and the extended, in a certain tension, intermediated between quality and quantity, in a certain spontaneity and a certain contingency between freedom and necessity.
Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955), pgs 237-238
This prediction anticipates N. Katherine Hayles’ retrospective description of the Post Human condition—as being strangely spliced into cybernetic feedback circuits—by over ¾ of a century. Regarding Bernard Wolfe’s 1952 novel Limbo (concerning war in a society of cyborgs) she writes:
Limbo edges uneasily toward [Donna Haraway’s cyborg-]subjectivity and then only with significant reservations. Instead of a circuit, it envisions polarities joined by a hyphen: human-machine, male-female, text-marginalia. The difference between hyphen and circuit lies in the tightness of the coupling (recall Wiener’s argument about the virtues of loose coupling) and in the degree to which the hyphenated subject is transfigured after becoming a cybernetic entity. Whereas the hyphen joins opposites in a metonymic tension that can be seen as maintaining the identity of each, the circuit implies a more reflexive and trans formative union. When the body is integrated into a cybernetic circuit, modification of the circuit will necessarily modify consciousness as well. Connected by multiple feedback loops to the objects it designs, the mind is also an object of design. In Limbo the ideology of the hyphen is threatened by the more radical implications of the cybernetic splice. Like Norbert Wiener, the patron saint of Limbo, Wolfe responds to this threat with anxiety.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human (1999), pg 114
In another post we will get into another critic of Bergson by whom McLuhan was greatly influenced: Percy Wyndham Lewis.
The 1955 re-issue of Maritain’s Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism contains an extensive introduction apologizing for the severe tone of a book written in brash, youthful rebellion against Bergson’s popular influence at the turn of the century. It also includes an added chapter addressing Bergson’s later book, Two Sources of Morality & Religion (1932). Of it, Maritain writes
One fine day, without any notices in the press, without informing any one, not even the author’s closest friends, after twenty-five years of anticipation, the work was published. A classic from the day it appeared, it smashed the narrow framework of the rationalist, idealist and sociologist ethics, or pseudo-ethics; it outlined an ethics which does not shut man in on himself, but reveals and respects in him (and in this the title of the book is remarkably appropriate) the well-springs of moral experience and of moral life. He affirmed in magnificent language, and with new emphasis, that humanity and life can be loved effectually only in Him who is the Principle of humanity and life; he recognized, if not the absolute truth of Christianity, on which he withheld judgement, at least the unique value and transcendence of the fact of Christianity. (pg 326)
In his chapter on dynamic religion, Bergson studies Greek mysticism, Oriental mysticism, the Prophets of Israel, Christian mysticism, and at the conclusion of this study he considers himself justified in saying that Christian mysticism alone has reached real achievement. (pg 328).
An ethics of the cosmic type cannot possibly dispense with a system of the world; the universe of freedom presupposes the universe of nature and fulfills a wish of the latter: I must know where I am and who I am, before knowing, and in order to know, what I should do. All that is fundamentally true; on all that Bergson and Saint Thomas are at one. But it is immediately obvious that the problem now shifts ground and relates to the validity of that metaphysics and system of the world proposed for our consideration. Is the world, as Bergson believes, a creative evolution? Or is it, as Saint Thomas believes, a hierarchy of growing perfections? Is man’s intellect capable of attaining being, and does it consequently possess a power of regulation over life and action so that, as Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it, reason is the proximate rule of human acts? Or indeed is that which keeps man in contact with reality, with the dynamic élan that constitutes the secret of the real, is that, as Bergsonism would have it, a sort of instinct, as it were a vital inspiration, which runs through us from the depths of our souls, an instinct which emotion, above all, is apt to stir into action, to awaken? In each case, clearly enough, the edifice of ethics will be differently constructed. We are grateful to Bergson for having founded his ethics in a metaphysics; but we must note that the metaphysics is the metaphysics of the élan vital, and that the metaphysics of the élan vital does not take into account many essential truths.
Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955)
In Two Sources, Bergson makes some observations regarding mechanism which undoubtedly anticipate Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of technology as extensions of being. Within the continuity of his own work, Bergson here makes clear what forces are fashioning the “accidental whole” which Maritain and Hayles describe above:
Nature, in endowing us with an essentially tool-making intelligence, prepared for us in this way a certain expansion. But machines which run on oil or coal or “white coal”, and which convert into motion a potential energy stored up for millions of years, have actually imparted to our organism an extension so vast, have endowed it with a power so mighty, so out of proportion to the size and strength of that organism, that surely none of all this was foreseen in this structural plan of our species: here was a unique stroke of luck, the greatest material success of man on the planet. A spiritual impulsion has been given, perhaps, at the beginning: the extension took place automatically, helped as it were by a chance blow of the pick-axe which struck against a miraculous treasure under-ground. Now, in this body, distended out of all proportion, the soul remains what it was, too small to fill it, too weak to guide it. Hence the gap between the two. Hence the tremendous social, political and international problems which are just so many definitions of this gap, and which provoke so many chaotic and ineffectual efforts to fill it. What we need are new reserves of potential energy—moral energy this time. So let us not merely say, as we did above, that the mystical summons up the mechanical. We must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenward.
Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality & Religion (1932), pg 267
In a May 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli, McLuhan points out the poetry in the placement of an experimental atomic reactor pile mentioned in a scientific report.
That it should be situated symbolically in a football stadium is too perfect. American sport, the artistic imitation of American business. Our great emotional educator and indicator.
You see, American business, excluded form the lib. arts curriculum conquered the college for all that. The dialectically organized curriculum omits all emotional education. That is entirely in the hands of the symbolic stadium. You see how perfectly this ties up with the “real life” of the outside world—the alumni. Lethal nostalgia and revenge on the pedagogues. From outside the school the business man conquers the curriculum. What need to fool with actual courses?
I have all this stuff on slides. Show the entire interaction of all levels of our wake-a-day and dream lives. The areas of consciousness, though, are now pin points. Just a mind here and there struggling against freeze-sleep. Sent it as a book to Reynall Hitchcock but haven’t heard from them. Embraces the entire business of Existenz by anticipation.
As I move through these correlations you can see why I crave the materials provided by [Cyril] Connolly and Existenz. I begin to see deeper into the consciousness of Poe and Faulkner. Their rage is relatively noble. Rooted in a community born in the decadence of the Greek revival they were peculiarly alive to the impact of technology. Invalid or Dying from their inception, they had the hyper-awareness of the sick-man for his enemies. Disgust with themselves was mounted on disgust with their external foes. Inner exhaustion was called on to fight an empty robot. A nightmare of nullity. And yet symbolically in such as [Allen] Tate and [Cleanth] Brooks, a note of modest confidence in renewal of the human condition. Not the abstract assertion of such a possibility as in [Lewis] Mumford the urbanite, but the quiet cultivation of a positive grammatica. Stirrings, however dim, of a genuine culture. Knowledge and supply of a real pabulum. That’s where, I too, take my stand. The view is horrible, but the garden is there too.
Now a word about your essays. The America papers were good but your analysis would have been better for a closer view of the typical items. In fact, you yourself would have been shocked had you taken even the very best items and considered them closely. I mean with regard not only to their structure and texture but with a view to their assumptions about audience. The whole function of thought and entertainment embedded in that mag. can be a parabola of the most profound contemplation. (Have you seen the last 2 issues of Partisan Review?) But I am being though with you were Walter only because its the only point at which I can be of help to you.
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 186
The McLuhan’s Milieu feature will take a deep dive into the archives of Partisan Review, which is available online for free thanks to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. To start that journey, let’s consider a possible origin or catalyst for McLuhan’s 1946 craving for material on Existenz. Looking at the two issues mentioned to Ong, we find that it could very well be creditable to an essay appearing in the first, written by one of the magazine’s many prolific contributors: What is Existenz Philosophy? by Hannah Arendt. (PDF)
As distinct from existentialism, a French literary movement of the last decade, Existenz philosophy has at least a century-old history. It began with Shelling in his late period and with Kierkegaard, developed in Nietzsche along a great number of as yet unexhausted possibilities, determined the essential part of Bergson’s thought and of the so-called life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), until finally in postwar Germany, with Scheler, Heidegger, and Jaspers, it reached a consciousness, as yet unsurpassed, of what really is at stake in modern philosophy.
Arendt provides a broad overview of philosophical history following the destruction of the unity of Being by Immanual Kant, “the true, if also clandestine, founder of the new philosophy: who has likewise remained till the present time its secret king.”
More depends than is commonly supposed in the history of secularization on Kant’s destruction of the ancient unity of thought and Being. Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of God destroyed that rational belief in God which rested on the notion that what I can rationally conceive must also be; a notion which is not only older than Christianity, but probably also much more strongly rooted in European man since the Renaissance. This so-called atheising of the world—the knoweldge, namely, that we cannot prove God through reason—touches the ancient philosophical concepts at least as much as the Christian religion. In this atheised world man can be interpreted in his “abandonment” or in his “individual autonomy.” For every modern philosopher—and not only for Nietzsche—this interpretation becomes a touchstone of philosophy.
Arendt dedicates a particularly long section of the essay to explaining the major points of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, such as Existenz/Dasein, and throwness/Geworfenheit. To this, she contrasts the work of Karl Jaspers:
From an historical point of view, it would have been more correct to have begun the discussion of contemporary Existenz philosophy with Jaspers. The Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, first printed in 1919, is undoubtedly the first book of the new “school.” On the other hand, there was not only the external circumstances that Jasper’s big Philosophie (in three volumes) appeared some five years after [Heidegger’s] Sein und Zeit, but also, more significantly, the fact that Jaspers’ philosophy is not really closed and is at the same time more modern. By modern we mean no more than that it immediately yields more clues for contemporary philosophical thinking. There are such clues, naturally, also in Heidegger, but they have the peculiarity that they can lead either only to clues for polemic or to the occasion of a radicalization of Heidegger’s project—as in contemporary French philosophy. In other words, either Heidegger has said his last word on the condition of contemporary philosophy or he will have to break with his own philosophy. While Jaspers belongs without any such break to contemporary philosophy, and will develop and decisively intervene in its discussion.
Arandt’s essay is worth reading in full, so I’ll close with a question which you might find the answer to while reading it.
In a 1978 letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star, McLuhan proffered his own definition of the philosophic tradition of Husserl and Heidegger—what Arendt is calling Existenz—in regards to classifying Roland Barthes:
As for Barthes, he is a “phenomenologist”—that is, one who tries to see the patterns in things while also playing along with the dominant theory of his world.
Personally, I prefer to study the pattern minus the theory.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pg. 549-540
How did McLuhan come to that definition? That is, what is he communicating by defining Phenomenology/Existenz in those terms?
In his unpublished work The New American Vortex, Marshall McLuhan included in the first book a piece entitled The Case of the Missing Anecdote. The first three pages of its ten-page typescript are crossed out in pencil, and scribbled across the top are instructions to “Skip to the top of page 4.”
It’s funny to think that, were Vortex ever published, the reader thus might not learn that this chapter began as a response to a very-famous column in the September 1948 issue of Commentary Magazine. It will be our first retrieval in this New Explorations Weblog feature series: McLuhan’s Milieu. This series will link to full, archived copies of literary articles cited by Marshall McLuhan in his published and unpublished work, as well as articles which illuminate art criticism and historical commentary of the modernist age.
New York art critic Harold Rosenberg will feature heavily in McLuhan’s Milieu. Our first look at his extensive career will be a piece whose title has become an oft-used cliché in discussion of mass media:
Read the original 1948 article on CommentaryMagazine.com
The “mass” experience and recording of an historical event necessarily differs from each individual’s own private experience and recollection. Rosenberg cites a contemporary who writes, “For most American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930’s was a crucial experience,” and responds:
Warshow is able to state flatly that this was “crucial” only because he is discussing “the” Communist experience as a mass event. Yet from this point of view, it seems that Marxism in the United States became a renunciation or negation of experience, a plunging of the individual into mass inertia, precisely because he yielded himself up to the general intellectual “climate.” There wasn’t any significant group experience of Communism in America except in the negative sense, and this is one of the main reasons why people ran away from it. Then why talk about it as “crucial”? Or, better still, why not talk about some other kind of experience? Because since it happened to an historical “us” it seems to Warshow most significant: “It is for us what the First World War and the experience of expatriation were for an earlier generation. If our intellectual life is stunted and full of frustration,1 this is in large part because we have refused to assimilate that experience . . . never trying to understand what it means as part of our lives.” ([Rosenberg’s] italics.)
Harold Rosenberg, The Herd of Independent Minds, Commentary Magazine Sept. 1948
In turn, McLuhan zeroes in upon Rosenberg’s identification of the “renunciation or negation of experience, a plunging of the individual into mass inertia” and elaborates:
Mr. Rosenberg made no guesses about the source of such mental compulsion. I would personally suggest that it rises from the Kantian and Hegelian notion of the world as Idea and of the ‘manifold of experience’ as a blind chaos which we know and order only by our concepts. If things are inaccessible to reason, if they are not themselves radiant with intelligible forms which nourish the mind (as they are for example in the hylomorphic philosophy) then intellectual abstractions manufactured by the mind itself are the only things we know and offer the sole basis for social and artistic communication.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
And in Rosenberg’s quite off-hand, passing reference to Finnegans Wake as a more relateable rendition of his own individual anachronistic and fragmented memories of the 1930s than recorded, popularized “mass” experiences, McLuhan finds the opportunity to explain the origins of Joyce’s technique in his kinship to the French Symbolist poets.
Certainly Joyce (also Flaubert and Baudelaire) never made any concessions to the debased existence which surrounded him. But never for a moment did he entertain the attitude of Mr. Warshow that debased or mass culture “was a standing threat to one’s personality, was in a sense a deep humiliation”. Such an attitude is only possible to the prisoners of the concept for whom a conflicting set of concepts is a threat to the integrity of their own.
Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Joyce were often nauseated by but never alienated from the mass culture of their time. And the patient contemplation which they directed towards its every form and facet was rooted in the awareness that it was deeply related both to themselves and the nature of the real. Ulysses was already a work in which the alienation of the “artist” showed the illusions which Stephen had to banish before he could be either a man or an artist. So far as that book goes Joyce exhibits the prisoners of the concept as prisoners only of illusion, since they are all alike, seen to be embedded in a reality which unites them in spite of themselves. And it is a reality of the manifold of ordinary experience which is available as nutriment for everybody in any time or place.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
McLuhan’s typescript goes on, in its unredacted portion, to explain how the recording of “ordinary experience”—that is, experience of what he eventually comes to term “the human scale”—had been overlooked by American writers in the 1920s and 30s. Private notes, observations, and anecdotes were not being meticulously kept and filed by artists whose responsibility it was to record their every fleeting perception of the mundane objective scene in analogical just-proportion to both themselves and the whole.
Baudelaire knew that the “significance of an experience”, and this is the whole of the matter, does not reside in the poet, the thing, or the larger reality but in the ratio between the three. And there I think we should find the solution to the Case of the Missing Anecdote.
Marshall McLuhan, The Case of the Missing Anecdote, The New American Vortex Book I
The result was a paucity of raw materials from which to construct believable private experiences of historical events in novels and histories of those eras, increasing mass-susceptibility to retro-active possession by a retconned memory of “shared” experience.
Today, do we not let raw recordings stand-in for our own private experiences and impressions in our lives which, should we take the time to record them freshly in words, might serve as necessary material for the human-scale anti-environment necessary to oppose personality-obliterating mass dreams and media-rewritten memories?
Hello World! My concerns, fellow netizens, are about how cyberspace has affected our sense of embodiment and existence in our physical world. I study and tutor on Marshall McLuhan, and develop my ideas in what I am calling a Full Stack Media Ecology.
My earnest questioning began in 2014. Answers finally manifested in 2017 with my video documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.
In March 2024 I released a book-length culmination of my work the past decade titled Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary detailing how the work of Jean Piaget was used to hijack early childhood development in kids like TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis.
Read more about the complementarity between media ecology and developmental psychology here in Who You Callin’ a Robot?
In June of 2019 I “Toppled the Pillars of Cyberspace” in Toronto at the 20th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. Watch or read my presentation and paper to get to know more about how this all started.
I’ve also presented twice at LibrePlanet for the Free Software Foundation. My 2023 talk on the Long History of Metrics Before and After Cybernetics presents a sprawling overview of how mechanical calculation and optimization took over our world, inspired by Marshall McLuhan.