An Essay by Bob on McLuhan
PHASE 1
"... much of III.3 (Book Three, Chapter Three-ed.) is telephone conversation.... As III.3 opens with a person named Yawn and III.4 displays the ingress of daylight upon the night of Finnegans Wake, the note on VI.B.5.29 is interesting:
Yawn telegraph telephone Dawn wireless thought transference."
Roland McHugh,
The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, p.19, 1976.
"... Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, your brutest layaman with the princest champion in our archdeaconry, or so yclept from Clio's clippings, which the chroncher of chivalries is sulpicious save he scan, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends,..."
James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake, p.254, 1939.
(In McLuhan's private library in one of his copies of Finnegans Wake he has pencilled in the words "me" and "moon child" next to Joyce's "Meereschal MacMuhun".-ed.)
"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today."
(the first sentence in the first article
McLuhan wrote for Explorations-ed.)
H. M. McLuhan, Culture without Literacy,
Explorations Magazine, Volume1, p.117, December, 1953.
"Entertainment in the future may have quite different patterns and functions. You'll become a yogi, you'll do your self-entertainment in yoga style."
Marshall McLuhan,
Like Yoga, Not Like the Movies,
Forbes Magazine, p.40, March 15, 1967.
"T. S. Eliot's famous account of 'the auditory imagination' has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world."
Marshall McLuhan,
Letter to Playboy Magazine, p.18, March, 1970.
"At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation."
Marshall McLuhan, Libraries: Past, Present, Future
(address at Geneseo, New York-ed.), p.1, July 3, 1970.
"The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.227, 1972.
"And do you know," he (Eric McLuhan-ed.) enthuses, "there are actually (four-ed.) laws governing media communications? At last we can prove to people that we aren't just theorists. This is a real science.... We know there is one more law," says Eric. "And we'll find it. Sooner or later."
Olivia Ward,
Now! Son of Guru!,
Toronto Star, p.D1, March 30, 1980.
Marshall McLuhan made two decisions in 1937: one was the spiritual strategy of becoming a Roman Catholic, and the other was the secular strategy, after intensive study at Cambridge, of translating James Joyce's Work-in-Progress (later given the title of Finnegans Wake in 1939) into an aesthetic anti-environment useful for countering and probing the cultural assumptions of a practicing Catholic. For the next twenty years he refined his understanding of, first, the Thomist concept of analogical proportionality as the expression of the tactile interval, and second, its usefulness in perceiving the cultural effects of the new electric technologies, through an ongoing dialogue, analysis, and sensory meditation on the nature of metaphor and consciousness (including extrasensory perception) as an artifact. Since McLuhan defined "metaphor"(1) as the act of looking at one situation through another, each situation constitutive of figure-ground interplay (a concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology), then a metaphor was an instance of mixed media, or two figure-grounds. And so was consciousness - because of its essential subjective experience as doubleness, which is doubled again as the objective effect of its autonomous interplay with other consciousnesses. Metaphor, for McLuhan, was hylomorphic(2). In retrospect, the equation McLuhan was playing with could be flattened out as:
each and all (except for "metaphor") squared. However, after he made personal contact with Wyndham Lewis in 1943, their dialogue enhanced his appreciation of adopting Wyndham Lewis' social probing style as a political anti-environment to McLuhan's own commitment to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Hence, his own studies simulated the doubleness he was observing technically. For the rest of his career McLuhan juggled the artistic approaches of these five artists in miming the tactile qualities of the analogical drama of proper proportions - the drama of being and perception. For him, language was the drama of cognition and recognition, or consciousness.
"The measure of our (Catholics-ed.) unawareness and irrelevance can be taken from the fact that no Thomist has so far seen fit to expound St. Thomas's theory of communication by way of providing modern insight into our problems."
H. M. McLuhan,
The Heart of Darkness
(unpublished review of Melville's Quarrel with God by Lawrence Thompson, 1952-ed.), p.8, 1952.
"The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)... It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for 'simple explanations' is the yearning for univocity."(p.36-7)
Marshall McLuhan,
James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969.
"For the Catholic the revealed word of God is not the Gutenberg Bible nor the King James' version. But the Protestant cannot but take a different view of the passing of the pre-eminence of the printed book; because Protestantism was born with printing and seems to be passing with it. There again the Catholic alone has nothing to fear from the rapidity of the changes in the media of communication. But national cultures have much to fear."
Marshall McLuhan,
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,
Christian Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures,
Series 2, p.78, 1954.
"Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)(p.17)... With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante's Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It's this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell."(p.18)
Marshall McLuhan,
Third Program in the Human Age,
Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, p.17-8, October, 1957.
"Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man."
Marshall McLuhan,
Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966.
"The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can't destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that's probably what it needs."
Marshall McLuhan,
Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan,
U.S. Catholic Magazine, p.6, January, 1977.
McLuhan also meditated and formulated with the process-pattern that there had been three Copernican Revolutions in the collective consciousness: the first, via Copernicus, had thrown man as an image to the edges of the universe; the second, via Kant, threw man into an inner landscape; and the third, via the twentieth-century revolution of pattern-recognition, threw man inside the machine. His growing understanding of the third revolution in collective perception allowed him to see that the managers of contemporary society operated by means of the principle that the technological unconscious (the "archetypes of the social unconscious")(3) is a massage in all facets of modern life. For example, Keynesian economics was the recognition, in the 1930s, that money would now be a technically-managed medium, or a guaranteed environment. In all areas of decision-making, this principle meant the use of the technique of the suspended judgement in parallel with a multi-levelled application of the anthropological concept of "phatic communion"(4).
"It is on its technical and mechanical side that the front page is linked to the techniques of modern science and art. Discontinuity is in different ways a basic concept both of quantum and relativity physics. It is the way in which a Toynbee looks at civilizations, or a Margaret Mead at human cultures. Notoriously, it is the visual technique of a Picasso, the literary technique of James Joyce."
Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.3, 1951.
"By pretending that the new magic can be contained in the entertainment sphere we assume the old form-content split which is based on the doctrine that the form of communication is neutral. Even Hitler and Goebbels, fortunately, shared this illusion with the Western world. At present we appear to be living by an illusion but with magical media. Of course this may prove to be an enduring formula."
Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations Magazine, Volume 2, p.13, April, 1954.
"As gimmick, the machine is useful. As object, as companion, as environment-shaper, it is magical. Marx was right to that extent. He saw that the machine would necessarily transform human feeling and sensibility. It would change habits of association and work. It would re-structure one's idea of the world and of oneself. It was the revolution."
Marshall McLuhan,
Poetry and Society, Poetry Magazine, Volume 84, No.2, p.95, May, 1954.
"A few Europeans like LeCorbusier and Giedion have undertaken to verbalize our technology for us. A few of our artists such as Poe, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot have in reverse order undertaken to technologize the traditional verbal world of the European."
Marshall McLuhan,
Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine, Volume 4,
p.60, February, 1955.
"Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.... Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, 'The medium is the message', quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message."
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.28, 1964.
"The futurists, the cubists, the Vorticists, and others accepted the mechanical as an art form. Today, Pop art, derived from the old environment of advertising technology, appears as an art form."
Marshall McLuhan,
New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine, Volume 3, No.2, p.239, September, 1964.
"Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programing for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction."
Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.519, December 28, 1964.
"My own interest in symbolist techniques in poetry and painting, and my concern with the poetic processes and the training of perception and awareness, have long taught me to avoid fixed positions and value judgements where techne is concerned."
Marshall McLuhan,
Obiter Dicta, Letter to Atlantic Monthly Magazine,
p.39, October, 1971.
McLuhan, however, revealed an aspect of this principle that included the concept of a collective extrasensory perception as an hylomorphic ("organic")(2), dramatic quality and effect of any electric environment - an anticipation of the recent popular concept of the "meme". Privately, he would refer to one facet of the complex extrasensory characteristics of this third Copernican revolution as the "'Prince of this World',... a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media"(5). McLuhan was anticipating what I would term "tetrad management", the managerial "postures and impostures"(6) resulting from an environment of "participation mystique"(7) (effects merge with causes) and "anticipatory democracy"(8) (effects precede causes).
"Synesthesia, the new sin of the nineteenth century, roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore, people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present."
Marshall McLuhan,
Electronics as E.S.P., Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 3, October, 1957.
"Any artist in any field whatever knows that 'form' and 'content' are a bogus pair. But when such a notion is all we have with which to cope with modern entertainment (and education) we are helpless. When we hear that 'the medium is the message in the long run', we think it is jabberwocky or Finneganese. And so it is. That is, such a formula speaks not of one plane of fact at a time, but is multi-leveled."
H. Marshall McLuhan,
Around the World, Around the Clock
(review of The Image Industries by William Lynch, S.J.-ed.),
Renascence Magazine, Volume12, No.4, p.205, Summer, 1960.
"Wealth is already derived for the most part from the movement of information alone, and will increase in our time as the mere reflex of human chatter. That is why paid learning is long overdue."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion,
Mass Media in Canada, p.201, 1962.
By June, 1952, after television had become an environment in the United States, Harold Innis had died, and McLuhan had gotten tenure as a professor, he was ready to present his insights into the tentative maneuverings of tetrad-management in a multi-disciplinary format as an anti-environment to the new technical developments in society. Thus was born the Explorations experiment which ran its course until 1957.
"We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx."
Marshall McLuhan,
Media Log, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 4, p.55, February, 1955.
"Politics have become musical; music has become politics. Government has become entertainment, and vice versa. Commerce has become incantation and magical gesture. fScience and magic have married each other. Technology and the arts meet and mingle."
Marshall McLuhan,
Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 4, p.59, February, 1955.
"We have to know what we are doing in advance. We have to repeat what we were about to say."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Be-Spoke Tailor, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 4, October, 1957.
"A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space - a mirror. ALP is river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil."
Marshall McLuhan,
Television Murders Telephony, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 19, October, 1957.
"In his Company Manners Louis Kronenberger describes how 'one very real social phenomenon of our time is that "creative" people constitute America's newest nouveaux riches '. Spectorsky in his Exurbanites refers to them as the symbol-manipulators, meaning those who have mastered the grammar and rhetoric of the new media."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Old New Rich and the New New Rich,
Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, Section 23, October, 1957.
"The effect of TV, as the most recent and spectacular electric extension of our central nervous system, is hard to grasp for various reasons. Since it has affected the totality of our lives, personal and social and political, it would be quite unrealistic to attempt a 'systematic' or visual presentation of such influence. Instead, it is more feasible to 'present' TV as a complex gestalt of data gathered almost at random."
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.317, 1964.
"In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."
Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.518, December 28, 1964.
"In an interview with James R. Dickenson for the National Observer (May 30, 1966) he (McLuhan-ed.) spoke about the pride he takes in understanding media and quoted Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 'We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea'."
Raymond Rosenthal,
Current Biography, McLuhan: Pro&Con, p.22, 1968.
This project was obsolesced by Sputnik on October 4, 1957. During the following twenty years McLuhan studied the consequences of the post-tactile and post-television environments created by the new computer and satellite technologies (with an eye on the new laser inventions, also) which had cracked all the visual, acoustic, and tactile mirrors. The multi-media gestures that McLuhan made in this second twenty-year phase were based on a post-tetradic sensibility of menippean tactility, or menippean phatic communion, i.e., from the perspective of the "pentad-manager"(9) - one who understands that the Present can only be an art form.
"Jet travel and satellite broadcasting will foster the grasp of languages, ancient and modern, in a simultaneous cultural transparency."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Humanities in the Electronic Age, Humanities Association Bulletin (Canada), Volume 34, No.1, p.11, Fall, 1961.
"And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all."
Marshall McLuhan,
Prospect, Canadian Art Magazine,
Volume 19, p.365, September/October, 1962.
"Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.(p.19)... For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting."(p.222)
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
pp.19 and 222, 1964.
"TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon."
Marshall McLuhan,
New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine,
Volume 3, No.2, p.242, September, 1964.
"The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn't condition a mouse."
Marshall McLuhan,
Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966.
"The 70's will see: The end of SOLUTIONS. Pattern recognition via inspection of multiple problems will bring an end to the hidden environments."
Marshall McLuhan,
Profile of the 70'S, The McLuhan DEW-Line,
Volume 2, No.3, a poster, November, 1969.
"For the future of the future is the present."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.134, 1972.
"At instant speeds, everybody begins to live inside a 360-degree module in which every event echoes every other event back and forth at electric speeds, and all events bounce off each other creating patterns. There is one optimistic feature. The mind moves very much faster than light. Light travels to Mars in minutes. The mind can go and come back from Mars in an instant many times. The mind can actually recognize all these electric patterns as easily as it can alphabetic letters. It's very much faster than the computer."
Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Dissects the Executive,
Business Week Magazine, p.118, June 24, 1972.
Returning to the first phase (1937-57) we see, from McLuhan's perspective, he had enthusiastically performed as an agent and catalyst for a discriminating plenary awareness under electric conditions of the interplay between private and public awareness as an artifact. Miming the Logos (speech as an archetype)(10) this entailed retrieving the five parts of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) and the four Aristotelian causes (formal, material, efficient, and final) in parallel with the four traditional levels of exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral, and eschatological) and applying them as a grammarian, rhetorician, dialectician, musician, mathematician, geometer, astronomer, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, psychic, doctor, and politician either simultaneously or separately in their traditional specialized contexts, depending on the medium and audience addressed. This method was McLuhan's conscious strategy of mirroring and testing the conventional "schizophrenic"(11) lives of the ordinary citizen: McLuhan as cyborg and floating, winking tetrad (see the four-level interplay of the SI/SC/HD/LD charts in McLuhan's Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960-ed.). In this regard, he explored meditative attention a great deal further and deeper than the popular and influential Menippean religionist, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), or any of his imitators or successors. This phase of McLuhan's career inaugurated a new and enduring private and collective yoga inside an immanent "communication ecology"(12).
"This may be said, at least, by way of illustrating the mode in which any poet's prose criticism directs the keenest possible ray on his own poetic practice."
Marshall McLuhan,
Pound's Critical Prose (1950) in The Interior Landscape,
p.80, 1969.
"Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back. In the same way, the modern newspaper isn't seen by the reporter except from the point of view of its mushy sensual content, its pulsating, romantic glamour. The reporter doesn't even know there's a beautiful shell above him. He grows the shell, unwittingly, subhumanly, biologically. This is not even the voice, but only the feel, of the turtle."
Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.4, 1951.
"Today we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can't shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher."
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p.227 (June 22, 1951), 1987.
"Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. Un Coup de Dés illustrates the road he (Mallarmé-ed.) took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation."
Marshall McLuhan,
Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press (1953) in The Interior Landscape,p.11-2, 1969.
"As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself... the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice."
Marshall McLuhan,
James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.31-2, 1969.
"For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences."
Marshall McLuhan,
Coleridge as Artist (1957) in The Interior Landscape,
p.115, 1969.
"Senecan antithesis and 'amble' (as described in Senecan Amble by George Williamson) provided the authentic means of scientific observation and experience of mental process."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,
p.103, 1962.
"The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of by-passing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his 'content'. He programs the sensory order."
Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.517, December 28, 1964.
"You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly."
Marshall McLuhan,
Address at Vision '65, The American Scholar,
p.202, Spring, 1966.
"For all their obsolescence he (McLuhan-ed.) himself finds books 'a warm, visceral, tactile medium'...."
Jane Howard,
Oracle of the Electric Age, Life Magazine,
p.96, February 28, 1966.
PHASE 2
Reviewing the second phase (1957-77) we can observe, again from McLuhan's vantage-point, that he "acted" under and "mimed" the new and more challenging electronic (post-electric) conditions of the computer-and satellite-mandated programming of the whole planet. This meant that the technological environments, the "media", were retrieved as coordinated rhythmic modulations to replace the formerly-retrieved formulaic "Logos" in his advocacy for, and training of, perception as a counter-program of "awareness"(13) for now-fused whole populations in the global theatre. This approach was McLuhan's conscious strategy of probing and mirroring the "quadrophrenic" (post-tetrad) lives of the cyborgian citizens and their "pets": McLuhan as Pollstergeist and multi-clairvoyant pentad(9) probing the environment of electronic "autonomy" in the situation of the post-fusion of Nature and Technology via satellite
(see Up the Orphic Anti and
Silencing the Virtually Solar Theatre).
"Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village, and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional. With electronics any marginal area can become center, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights."
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan,
p.278 (December 23, 1960), 1987.
"The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,
p.74, 1962.
"Such a program involves the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous system of its own."
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.220, 1964.
"If University of Toronto professor Marshall McLuhan is right - and if he gets the money - he figures that within five years 'Madison Avenue could rule the world'. In turn, governments could manage the national economy 'as easily as adjusting the thermostat in the living-room.'"
Lee Belland,
He Sees Planners' Paradise, Toronto Daily Star,
p.11, May 7, 1964.
"The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. Social connubium?"
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,
Counterblast, p.64, 1969.
"One of the most successful genres of this age is the book title itself as a 'youdunit'. It involves the reader in such titles as: Time and Western Man;... The Revolt of the Masses;... The Organization Man;... Space, Time and Architecture;... The Hidden Persuaders;... The Death of God;.... Replacing the encyclopedias of earlier centuries, such books are all 'guides to understanding'."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.91, 1970.
"It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.11, 1972.
"The new art form of our time is the media themselves, not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms.... I write cartoons.... I have wanted to write a play, for a long time, on the media. And the media themselves are the avant-garde area of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it's in the media themselves. Not in the programs. Avante-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball or any of these entertainments. It's in the media themselves."
Marshall McLuhan,
Forces Magazine, Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973.
"Marshall McLuhan, the communications scholar, compared his own approach to that of the advertiser.... For centuries there had been no problem associated with what the product aimed to correct. So the manufacturer first invented the problem, through advertising, then made the cure available. 'That's the way advertising is done,' said Mr. McLuhan. 'They start off with the effects, then look for the cause. That's how I prophesy. I look around at the effects and say: well, the causes will soon be here.'"
John Slinger,
Advertising is: making someone ill, then selling the cure,
Globe and Mail, p.5, August 5, 1973.
"Again, the transmission of data at the speed of light creates non-persons."
Marshall McLuhan (1978),
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, p.143, 1989.
Granted, I have just uttered, and you have just eaten, a huge mouthful. But I am qualifying and supporting these themes, as you can see and taste, with selective quotations culled from my archives (see note at end of paper-ed.), which includes the largest private collection of McLuhan's creative output - outside of Langley, Virginia. This meal will include as many of the appropriate citings that the law and space will allow. Above all, these are offered in the spirit of modeling the mosaic of psychic surgery that McLuhan had at his fingertips.
"It is the difference between matching and making, between spectatorship and total dramatic participation. Through the drama of the mouth, we participate daily in the total re-creation of the world as a process."
Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p.347 (December 15, 1967), 1987.
"This principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order has always been present in the work of Sorel Etrog. In one of his poems he called it 'recollecting things to come', which might have been an alternative title for Finnegans Wake, itself a dramatic spiral of a single sentence."
Marshall McLuhan, Spiral: Man as the Medium (1976) in Sorel Etrog: Images from the Film SPIRAL, p.126, 1987.
I will now retrace what I have already said and define a few details and then elaborate on them. The first key to my understanding of McLuhan is grasping the emphasis he placed on the drama of cognition as an artifact, in contrast to Freud's study of the dream as an artifact. This drama is based on the doubleness of consciousness, the folding back on itself - the complementary process of "making" and "matching" that is necessary to create the resonance of coherent consciousness. An example of the "making" aspect of perception is the reversal of the rays of light that occurs in the retina as part of the process of creating the experience of sight. Another example is the fact that when food is ingested, what comes out at the other end is not the same as what went in. This sensory alteration, or closure, occurs with all sensory input. McLuhan used the transforming power of the movie camera and projector as a model of this drama of cognition. When the camera rolls up the external world on a spool by rapid still shots, it uncannily resembles the process of "making", or sensory closure. The movie projector unwinds this spool as a kind of magic carpet which conveys the enchanted spectator anywhere in the world in an instant - a resemblance of the human's attempt to externalize or utter the result of making sense in a natural effort to connect or "match" with the external environment. The external environment responds and the person is then forced to reply in kind and "make" again. This systole-diastole interplay is McLuhan's "drama of cognition" and it is parroted by the movie camera and projector. (Has it occurred to you yet of what the live pick-up in the television camera is a parrot?) This drama is the archetype for all creative activity produced by humanity, from ritual, myth, and legend to art, science, and technology. McLuhan understood that James Joyce was the first person to make explicit the fact that the cycle of Ritual, Art, Science, and Technology imitates, is an extension of, the stages of apprehension. And this is possible because the extensions have to approximate our faculties in order for us to pay attention to them.
"But, he (John Lindberg-ed.) argues, we now have the key to the creative process which brings all cultures into existence (namely the extension into social institutions of the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process)."
Marshall McLuhan,
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, Christian Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures, Series 2, p.86-7, 1954.
"And it was his mastery of the art process in terms of the stages of apprehension that enabled Joyce to install himself in the centre of the creative process. Whether it appears as mere individual sensation, as collective hope or phobia, as national myth-making or cultural norm-functioning, there is Joyce with cocked ear, eye and nose at the centre of the action."
Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 2, p.9, April, 1954.
"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools ape us.... We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."
Anonymous voice
heard on the album The Medium is the Massage, 1967.
"Miss Sontag writes:... To this one can add that consciousness, as well as dreams, has a structure that can be aesthetically enjoyed."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.199, 1970.
The second key to understanding McLuhan is guessing that he realized that the implicit discovery of the nineteenth century via Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hertz was the fact that the medium is the message: Life, Art, and Science imitate, are an extension of, the technologies they use. But the concomitant mystery and problem evoked by this second insight is the need to explain why human beings cannot recognize this cultural fact. McLuhan realized that the effects of television had been spelled out in Finnegans Wake, in that the structure of the television medium resulted in a vivid X-ray of whatever culture employed this medium. Thus, the traditional spell or numbness that hypnotized any culture, and created a subliminal bias in that culture, could be overcome through the comprehensive, plenary, perceptual bias of television. In addition, McLuhan, at first, pretended to believe that Joyce had come up with a plausible sensory and mental strategy to explain and counteract this natural "numbness", including the numbness induced by television (by virtue of the fact that Finnegans Wake, in the end, is a printed book), thanks to Joyce's training in the thought and perception of the "angelic doctor"(14), St. Thomas Aquinas. But later, adequate scientific experiment and study by Hans Selye proved and explained the physiological basis for the cultural numbing process. (Selye's results were published in the first issue of Explorations in December, 1953.) McLuhan then saw with Archimedean delight that Joyce had manifested the truism that the effects of an artist's work precede the causes.
"A common observation of European visitors to America is that life here is more collectivized and stereotyped than communists have ever aimed to achieve. It was always the central theme of Marx that direct political action was unnecessary. The machine was the revolutionary solvent of bourgeois society. Allow the dynamic logic of the machine full play in any kind of society and it will, said Marx, become communist automatically. Certainly America is far more advanced on the road to a collective, centralized, consumer's paradise than any other part of the world. May not some of the American panic about the communist threat be a dim recognition of this paradox?"
H. M. McLuhan,
Revolutionary Conservatism (unpublished-ed.), p.1, 1952.
"For Joyce has solved numerous problems which science has not yet formulated as problems."
Marshall McLuhan,
James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.41, 1969.
"So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain.(p.304)... Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society."(p.6)
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
pp.304 and 6, 1964.
How did McLuhan create a sensibility that could perceive the nature of his time with such acumen? By means of a thorough study not only of poetry as presented in the Western canon but also of the mystical, esoteric, and Manichean traditions in the alchemical concerns of the grammarian. Such were the preoccupations and background of his Ph.D. on Thomas Nashe. An essential program of these pagan doctrines has always been to use the senses as a laboratory. This sensory expertise, coupled with his Thomistic bias, was the knowledge that gave McLuhan the advantage over other students of Joyce, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats.
"If we grant that human existence is the state of damnation, two possibilities follow. Either we can learn to retrace the stages of our fall into matter, and so escape, or we can devise some means of extinction of personality. The pagan art and culture of the world, past and present, is divided in the pursuit of these alternatives. On one hand art is followed as a continuous labyrinth in which by blind, dogged persistence we may struggle upward by means of will power and ethical struggle. On the other hand there is the intellectual course presented by Mr. Eliot, in which we move from one intensity to another, towards a final flash of awareness and extinction. In the one art - that linked with Plato's cave man - Time, continuity, dialectic, are of the essence. In the other, time is lost in simultaneities and juxtapositions."
H. M. McLuhan,
Eliot and the Manichean Myth as Poetry (unpublished),
p.3, 1952.
"Aesthetically the newspaper creates an impact of immediacy and of super-realism. Metaphysically its mode is existential. Its impact is that of the very process of actualization. The entire world becomes, in this way, a laboratory in which everybody can watch the stages of an experiment."
H. M. McLuhan,
Technology and Political Change, International Journal,
Volume 7, p.191, Summer, 1952.
This advantage also enabled McLuhan to immediately exploit Harold Innis' studies, once he encountered them, to engage, as a post-man/machine merger, the 1950s in a prophetic challenge to the fused cluster of sex, death, and technology he saw all around him. He understood that the tactility ("the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process") of the television environment added the dimension of living thought, or the dancing drama of cognition, to that triad and loosened the grip of the mechanical Medusa. This was cause for a cautious and temporary celebration as any poet or scientist with a new vision will naturally express. However, the implied harmonies of this vision ended when Sputnik whirled around the planet.
"As the consequences of change accelerate, on the other hand, it is easier to discern causes. Another paradox of our time is the avid pursuit of a theory of change. Interest in formal causality seems to have declined after the sixteenth century, as did interest in analogy. But the artist picked up this interest where the philosophers left off and has always insisted on the formal (not just the efficient) causality of artefacts whether of individual or collective origin. (The Marxist claim to a theory of change may well be its major attraction in the West.)"
H. Marshall McLuhan,
Around the World, Around the Clock (review of The Image Industries by William Lynch, S.J.-ed.), Renascence Magazine,
Volume12, No.4, p.205, Summer, 1960.
"It is quite literally true that since printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie, radio and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development."
H. Marshall McLuhan,
Report on Project in Understanding New Media,
Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960.
McLuhan took seriously Joyce's ambivalence towards radio and television as communication technologies which did not have the traditional characteristics of former arts that had held up an energizing mirror to their respective cultures. The reason, for McLuhan: if you have ever looked at yourself in the television monitor while the television camera is focussed on yourself, you can observe that your electrified image is not reversed as it is in a flat mirror. In other words, there is no visual reflection in the television "mirror". The viewer falls into it. The viewer becomes the screen and is forced to start swimming. Now imagine a whole society dunked in such a manner. How does it get a perspective on itself? What serves as a mirror or anti-environment to the new mode of collective consciousness, if it can be considered a consciousness at all? Does the society really need a mirror anyway, when it is fused and splashing in the same pond?
"That is to say, nuclear structures, whether sub-atomic or in the form of mass-audiences for radio and TV, are, in their instantaneous speed modalities, not capable of comprehension in visual modes, except `a la Walt Disney science shorts."
Marshall McLuhan,
Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, Journal of Economic History,
Volume 20, p.571, December, 1960.
"The mirror, like the mind, by taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.163, 1970.
The needs of the West, as articulated by Joyce and McLuhan, would certainly scream loudly in the affirmative. And the West quickly gave us one - the satellite, with a little help from the computer. These two great technological cloaks enabled the establishment of an integrated fulcrum from which to orchestrate the sensory mixes induced by older media for the intended harmony of all. Or such a potential, at least, McLuhan foresaw. Would others? Not likely, and certainly not enough to implement McLuhan's vision. As a result, the satellite and computer environments were built with a fragmented perspective and with increasingly fragmented consequences. And thus, the 1960s ushered in a decade of social turbulence on a world-wide scale as every culture had a thrombosis and embarked on a violent identity quest. And this also was an effect that Joyce included in the possible scenarios suggested in Finnegans Wake.
"The oral man never asks for a blueprint. He never wants an over-all view. His but to feel he is a member of the team. The only possibility in an oral structure is a monarchical apex of control. Where the activities of many are to be orchestrated there can be only one conductor. But the more necessary the conductor the more expendable he becomes. The first job of a top executive today is to see to it that there are several who can succeed him instantly. They often do!"
Marshall McLuhan,
The Organization Man, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section15, October, 1957.
"The Bomb is electric software. It inspires nightmares of population explosions in the old nineteenth-century minds. There is no finish line."
Marshall McLuhan,
Culture is our Business,
p.334 (the last sentence of the book-ed.), 1970.
"It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time."
Marshall McLuhan,
An Interview: McLuhan on Russia, The McLuhan DEW-Line,
Volume 2, No.6, p.3, May/June, 1970.
"The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and 'owners'."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth, Explorations
(insert in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate-ed.),
Number 30, p.110, Spring, 1971.
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.92, 1972.
"When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.211, 1972.
"J. Pare: L. B. Johnson was a dropout in a sense, but it is difficult to conceive of John Kennedy as a dropout? M. McLuhan: He really dropped out. You know why: he was killed by the Establishment. He was executed. He was dangerous to them. J. Pare: Because he did not want to drop out, he wanted to change things like his brother? M. McLuhan: Yes. These men were executed by the Establishment. And they will be anytime they try anything like that."
Forces Magazine,
Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.67, 1973.
"As the world manifests its credentials and rewards in ever more theatrical terms, it becomes ever more difficult for some to resist the world, while for others it becomes easier and easier to reject its sinister and shallow pretensions. Like our money, which is a 'promise to pay', our advertising and P.R. only promise to pay promises."
Marshall McLuhan,
Forward to Abortion in Perspective:
The Rose Palace or the Fiery Dragon, p.iv, 1974.
"Everyone will be involved in role-playing, including those few elitists who interpret and/or manage large-scale data patterns and thus control the functions of a speed-of-light society."
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers,
Journal of Communication, Summer, 1981, p.199.
PHASE 3
Now, after having reviewed this background, I would like to examine the condition and nature of "quadrophrenia"(15). McLuhan's prolonged study of the qualities and functions of metaphor led him to see that the characteristics of the tetrad (enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal) were intuited by Joyce and demonstrated in Finnegans Wake as the constituent properties of metaphor (The four parts of the Wake admit of the tetradic structure from the widest possible perspective:
Book One handles enhancement, or the extensions;
Book Two the obsolesced;
Book Three the retrievals; and
Book Four the reversal).
Using the Wake as a guide, he turned his meditative double-focus on television and observed that the contents of television (the evolutionary species and by-products of the interplay between culture and technology) would manifest in regular epicycles of tetradic action as long as no new environments were created.
"Newton revolutionized the techniques of poetry and painting. Joyce encompasses Einstein but extends his pictographic formula to the entire world of language and consciousness. The tendency of the challengingly new to revoke and reinforce ancient disciplines never appeared more strikingly than in Joyce. Literature may have come to an end in 1870 but poetic, rhetoric and metaphysic have come increasingly alive since then."
Marshall McLuhan,
New Media as Political Forms, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 3, p.123-4, August, 1954.
"Examples of the operation of the four laws for various communication media follow: VERBUM (utterance): (A) Intensifies and crystallizes percept - as word (thing); (B) Obsolesces the merely sensory via perceptual interplay; (C) Retrieval: transference of power from things to word-as-vortex; (D) Reverses into the conceptual (replay of meaning-minus-the experience)."
Marshall McLuhan,
Laws of the Media, Et Cetera,
Volume 34, No.2, p.177, June, 1977.
But once they were, then the tetrad would be obsolete and Humpty Dumpty would fall off the wall and shatter again. However, this time it would be the after-image of a fall because humanity's technological evolution had ended with television as all "hardware" had flipped and fused into "software" and what remained was a complex collective ESP the patterns of which would be invoked by constant audience research, polling and surveillance. These new "weather" patterns, since they were multi-sensuous and abstract, McLuhan called "pollstergeists"(16). These are what plagued the human citadel of consciousness as it stared from its cave at the newly-retrieved quantum fluctuations of a still-born "astoneaged"(17) society. The content of this situation, the human users and "media" themselves, imploded into a rapid, Sisyphean, and tetradic oscillation through the states of metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony which registered emotionally as states of paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, and ecstasy. This is the condition I have designated as quadrophrenia in which the living metaphoric coherence of the collective consciousness appears to be usurped. Knowing it was unlikely "those few elitists" were going to take an active interest in his new discoveries, he retrieved Menippean satire as a hobby. Simulating the printed book's archetypal response to this dissolution of the tetrad-manager, McLuhan produced an after-image of the epyllion - the Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. And this is where the symptoms of quadrophrenia make their entrance. McLuhan knew that he had to mime discontinuously the splintering after-images of human/technological cognition to manifest an "impossible"(18) anti-environment to the seduction effected by the pollstergeists. This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan's books produced the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion - an early and persistent complaint by his critics, which proved the success of the technique ("You mean, my whole fallacy is wrong.")(19). One minute he seemed to be a utopian, the next a neo-Luddite, then a Gnostic, still later an agent of the Vatican, or a Zen Buddhist, then a technological determinist, pseudo-scientist, Manhattan Project romantic, and on and on and back and forth. But the classifiers couldn't see the method in the actor's performance - the miming of the fate that the Pollstergeist needed "a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments"(20) to disguise the fact it had long disappeared. His satiric retrieval of the mini-module of acoustic and tactile mirrors via the constituency of the homeopathic print mirror, in the genre of a "memory theatre", reflected the contemporary Medusan after-image of collective technological quadrophrenia, and its complementary human echo.
"...Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic (epyllion-ed.) as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is 'the tale of the tribe'. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the individual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man."
H. Marshall McLuhan,
Tennyson (1956) in From Cliché to Archetype, p.95, 1970.
"It is postulated that just as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio. Black is, therefore, the after-image of touch."
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker,
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting,
p.15, 1968.
"And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media."
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,
Counterblast, p.135, 1969.
"The familiar ad form of rippling repetition of profiles is an accessible example of the mini-module that is found in every electric structure, from space capsule to the modes of consciousness."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.155, 1970.
"The epyllion, by creating an interface or continuous parallel between two worlds, one past, one present,... More's (Utopia-ed.) Book I is the retrieval of the medieval archetype world, and his Book II is the cliché-probe of his own time, retrieving the past."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.165, 1970.
"Innovation is obsolete. So is obsolescence, as information speed-up transforms man and his world into art form."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.297, 1972.
"The theology of discarnate man, I should think, is going to be extremely transcendental and gnostic. It's not going to have much place for the human being as an incarnate spirit. Perhaps this may be behind the present swing toward abortion and the idea of euthanasia. (Why should we have people around when they're of no use?)."
Marshall McLuhan,
Interview with Marshall McLuhan, The Review of Books and Religion, Volume 3, No.9, pp.2 and 15, Mid-June, 1974.
But there remained two more surprises. First, the Pollstergeist would generate the means for its own metaphysical self-consciousness, its own doubleness, or folding back on itself - the instant replay. This technology would allow the Pollstergeist to wallow in and exploit its own "memory theatre", and, like an artist, create the effects beforehand, anticipating its first extension, of its own subsequent evolutionary leap - the hologram.
"Dante's Commedia was recognized as a 'memory theatre' in its time and later, as were the Summas of the philosophers. Vico was the first to spot language itself as a memory theatre. Finnegans Wake is such a memory theatre for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness."
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan,
p.339 (December 1, 1966), 1987.
"One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is 'Camp', and its motto is: 'Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards'. Despite the grotesque aspect of 'Camp' as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot's observation that 'we had the experience but missed the meaning'. The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight.(p.44)... Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change most obviously manifested in the TV service of the instant replay."(p.54)
Marshall McLuhan,
The Implications of Cultural Uniformity (1973) in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe,
pp.44 and 54, 1975.
"I think the instant replay is probably the most powerful experience that you will ever have in your lifetime."
Marshall McLuhan,
addressing students in his brother's class at Sheridan School of Art & Design, Mississauga, Ontario, in January,1975
(caught on video by Richard Kerr-ed.).
The stage for the second surprise was set by the implementation of the new digital chip as a technological environment in tandem with the established instant replay environment to usher in an unprecedented collective effect: the reincarnation of the Pollstergeist as the Android Meme. In short, the extensions of humanity had evolved to the point of actualizing their own drama of cognition. It thought like us, it intuited like us, and it anticipated like us. But we were "still"(21) suspicious. It seemed to have no staying-power. So humanity was left in the situation of having its ability to code and decode in "real time"(22) frustrated and paralyzed. It could only come up with a rear-view mirror term for the Android Meme's subtle collective actualization - "virtual reality".
"In fact, the next stage beyond subliminal projection has already occurred in the providing of TV for the blind by direct wire to the brain centers, by-passing external physical perception altogether. This latter step is slightly more contemporary than the crudities of subliminal projection, and for those who enjoy the thrills of moral alarm here is a field indeed in which to cavort. Since there is nothing to prevent all of us being provided with cranial wall-plugs which would permit instruction in all subjects to occur endlessly during a physical sleep which could be indefinitely prolonged."
Marshall McLuhan,
The Subliminal Projection Project,
The Canadian Forum Magazine, p.196, December, 1957.
"When the movies were new, they used literature as content. When TV was new, it used movies as content. The laser beam will use human dreams and the audience of the intellect right off the court decks. They will be scrubbed, but good!"
Marshall McLuhan,
Response to New Media, Explorations
(insert in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate-ed.),
Number 23, p.68, November, 1968.
As the Android Meme, in its own "anthropomorphic theatre", began to extend and hypnotize itself, it enjoyed miming and simulating the natural human modes of cognition - paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, ecstasy, individual sensation, collective hope or phobia, national myth-making and cultural norm-functioning. McLuhan did not live to see the Android Meme in action, but as an effective "empath"(23), he mimed the effects before the causes showed up. To accomplish this he intuited the "fifth element", what I call the "holeopathic cliché-probe"(24), by means of an understanding of the homeopathic effect (creating and maintaining memory in water), which is a process of "etherealization" (Toynbee) or "doing more with less" (Fuller) that is invisible and post-fusion, and projecting that effect as the consequences of the hologram when it becomes an environment that starts to evolve.
"For all the conscious intellectual activity of an industrial society is directed to non-human ends. Its human dimensions are systematically distorted by every conscious resource while the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers struggle dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means."
Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
Inside Blake and Hollywood, Sewanee Review,
Volume 55, pp.714-15, October, 1947.
"45 years ago things were like this, but less so."
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan,
p.227 (June 22, 1951), 1987.
"The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge's Primary and Secondary imagination. In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness, though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved."
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype, p.200, 1970.
"J. Pare: Nobody knows when it (TV-ed.) will be obsolete? M. McLuhan: Yes, with the hologram. J. Pare: That is 3D transmission? M. McLuhan: Yes, that makes the TV obsolete. And there are other developments, like the videophone, that might make it obsolete. The videophone is one of the things that terrifies people. I don't think anybody wants a videophone."
Forces Magazine,
Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973.
If you mate "hologram" and "homeopathy", you might create the term "holeopathic". I did. All evolution is the process of bashing and mating of clichés and archetypes. But when evolution can only be a non-linear process of resonance and modulation, there are no archetypes and we are left with only cliché-probes. And the human response is to stubbornly and cynically express quadrophrenia since we cannot avoid the four laws of the tetrad. But McLuhan playfully did this technically and artfully - the stance of the pentad-manager, who knows the Present could only be a fragile art form. Most everyone else, unless they retrace the stages of apprehension I have just outlined, is forced to painfully and reluctantly be a tetrad-manager - an unconscious response to the Internet and World Wide Web, the simulation of all electric and electronic technologies - from the telegraph to the satellite - for hoicking up an ersatz private identity. So, in conclusion, we see McLuhan made fun of those who live in the nineties, the mice who roar, by the traditional means of having perfect pitch when sung to by an inaudible environment of holeopathic quadrophrenia.
"BLESS the locomotives WHISTLING on the prairies proclaiming the SEPARATENESS Of Man."
H. M. McLuhan,
Counterblast, p.10, 1954.
"A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to."
Arthur Kroker,
Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh,
p.53, 1993.
Anyway, this is what always occurs to me whenever I'm in the presence of Marshall McLuhan and contemplating how the world ignored his scientific discoveries. But still, there is one question we are all curious about: what would McLuhan say of the 1990s if he were alive today? Well, I happened to ask him a couple of years ago. Through a trance medium, when I asked him this question, he confidently asserted that he certainly would create his own web page, but then he added: "...and I would let James Joyce write the instructions on how to get to it."
Yup, the medium is the message Ö under electric conditions.
FOOTNOTES