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Page 2 of 4 McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia:
The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome
PHASE 1 | PHASE 2 | PHASE 3 | FOOTNOTES
An Essay by Bob on McLuhan
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.
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