The Symbolic Stadium

One of the reasons that McLuhan’s proposed first base of operation is understanding rather than action is that he appears to have been decidedly ambivalent about the operations of the “symbolic stadium.” His ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in his later observations on William Shakespeare:

If Shakespeare were alive he would be in an ad agency drawing down huge salaries and all you cannot name … they pay damn well and they are great patrons of the arts. They are the only folk art we have. [1]

On one hand, he saw the North American post-war reconstruction and the redirection of the war-time propaganda machine and entire Hollywood apparatus toward ostensibly economic ends as a new, world information war. It differed from earlier hardware wars only insofar as the casualties of the latter are imperceptible in terms of symptomatic physical carnage.[2] The “carnage” of information war is largely invisible: “…it aims not only at providing mental dim out by means of a huge crescendo of sensation but the reduction of all constituents of consciousness to a single wave line.”[3] As McLuhan notes in the “Typhon in America,” the great mistake, of course, is to suppose that what went on physically in Birkenau does not go on psychologically in America and England. “Intellectually, spiritually and emotionally this is precisely what we have been doing for some decades.” [4]

There is no difference in result between our entertainment industry and Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion at these is irrational as we have developed more complex and subtle ways of achieving the same end. [5]

Far from being a conscious conspiracy, this is a nightmare dream from which we would do well to awaken at once. Return again, Finnegan … At the moment the sleeper stirs and writhes. It is nice to be enfolded in the comfort of the collective dream as long as it is greater than the pain. We have nearly passed that point whereby consciousness will come as a relief. [6]

On the other hand, however, McLuhan appears to have seen some services in the wake of the second great betrayal. Advertising was providing an educational program and common language for a country that might otherwise dissolve in anarchy. [7] Further, the operations of the “symbolic stadium” had restored “language,” if not to intellectual respectability, then at least to a position where ancient theories of the “Logos type” were recognized in some quarters as having practical application. Writing to Harold Innis in 1951 McLuhan notes:

Many of the ancient language theories of the Logos type which you cite in Empire and Communications for their bearings on government and society, have recurred and amalgamated themselves today under the auspices of anthropology and social psychology. Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have, in turn, given salience and practical effectiveness to these magical notions of language. But it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language, such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. [8]

1. McLuhan, “It Will Probably End the Motor Car,” Cinema Canada 30 (August 1976), 37. Kirwin Cox, the interviewer, responds, “but ads are designed to manipulate?” To which McLuhan replies, “of course, but so is any drama. Shakespeare dramas are all highly manipulative.”
2. After all, the economics of advertising had by that time taken on the scale of a military operation. McLuhan, “The Age of Advertising,” Commonweal 58, no. 23 (1953): 556. Undoubtedly McLuhan’s observations are informed by his never having been directly involved in armed combat. McLuhan remained a civilian throughout the Second World War, and his direct experience of “war,” as it is conventionally understood, was restricted to life at Cambridge, England (c. 1939–40).
3. McLuhan, “Typhon in America, typescript (I),” MS., 14.
4. Ibid., 24. Please note, there is a break in the pagination in typescript I of “Typhon in America.” The page cited is from the second part of the script.
5. McLuhan, “The Subliminal Projection Project,” MS., n.pag.
6. The Mechanical Bride, 128.
7. McLuhan, “American Advertising,” MS., 2 in “The New American Vortex.” It is possible that McLuhan also agreed with Otis Pease who regarded advertising as one of the only force that was at work against Puritanism. See McLuhan, review of The Responsibilities of American Advertising: Private Control and Public Influence, 1920–1940, by Otis Pease, MS., 3.
8. McLuhan to Harold A. Innis, 14 March 1951.