Putting Us On?

Perhaps one of the best ways to begin an exploration of McLuhan’s praxis is through the lens of the “put-on.” While touring the South Pacific in the late-1970s McLuhan was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission program, Monday Conference. The weight of the interview is taken up with McLuhan discussing dialogue as an alternative to violence, and his charge that the task at hand is to understand media because: “If you understand the nature of these forms you can neutralize some of the adverse effects and foster some beneficial effects.” [1] During the interview, however, McLuhan is asked: “If the world had not discovered your great thinking and writing how would you go about creating a demand for it?” McLuhan replies: “I’d put people on … putting people on means teasing them, challenging them, upsetting them, befuddling them; any comic puts on his audience by hurting them.” McLuhan continues, no longer talking about the “put-on” as a hypothetical possibility, but rather as a description of his praxis:

The technique of putting people on in my case consists simply in pointing to things that they [the audience] have ignored, the things that concern them very nearly but have been pushed aside as insignificant … A put-on is a situation that I study a great deal.[2]

It is probable, if speculative, that McLuhan’s appropriation and transformation of the phrase “put-on” was, to some degree, informed by Jacob Brackman’s use in “The Put-On,” in The New Yorker (24 June 1967).[3] Regardless of the source, McLuhan appears to have deemed the phrase adequate. One of the first recorded usages of the phrase by McLuhan is in “Pound: The Playboy of the Westend World” (1968). There, McLuhan takes up what is essentially a slang phrase, apparently in the common stock in North-Eastern America during the late 1960s, and applies it in his discussion of Ezra Pound’s sense of decorum, authorial praxis, and relationship to his audience. He also uses the phrase in the article to describe how the new tribal politics that came with the radio brought Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt — “tribal chieftains,” who put-on their people as their mask and transformed politics into a masquerade of images.[4]

The term “put-on” appears to have provided McLuhan with a way of talking with a general audience about the latest thinking about form and gesture. For example, in “Roles, Masks, and Performances” McLuhan uses the phrase to discuss the magazine as performance:

While puzzling over my role as commentator on this issue of New Literary History, I have tried to see the magazine itself as performance .… There is a sense in which a magazine is a vortex of energy, a mask which the reader puts on in order to perceive a field of action that would otherwise be outside his ken …. If a reader must put on a magazine as a mask or a pattern of energy in order to organize his perceptions, the contributors must also put on the public created by the magazine, creating a reciprocal and complementary action. It is especially difficult for me as an outside commentator to focus both aspects of this process simultaneously. Perhaps I will be permitted the role of “the stranger” used by Plato to promote the ends of dialogue and avoid the specialist exchanges of an “in-group.”[5]

Nearly a decade after his initial use we find McLuhan still employing the phrase, this time to point to what he considers to be the failure of Jacques Maritain: “At no point does Maritain understand formal causality in art or philosophy. That is to say, he is totally unaware that formal causality consists in ‘putting on’ the public proper to the activity involved.” [6]

+ + +

[1] McLuhan, “Television is Cool and Radio is Hot,” television, Monday Conference, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 27 June 1977.

[2] McLuhan, “Television is Cool and Radio is Hot.”

[3] Jacob Brackman, “The Put-On,” The New Yorker, 24 June 1967. McLuhan’s literary agent, Matie Molinaro, appears to have kept a close eye on the press clippings. In the article Brackman makes two references to McLuhan.

[4] McLuhan, “Pound: Playboy of the Westend World,” MS., 3. Emphasis mine.

[5] McLuhan, “Roles, Masks and Performances,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 12, 3–4. Originally published in 1971. McLuhan concludes, stating: “I see that assuming the role of a "stranger" provoking a dialogue has been an incitement to global thinking. Although I began with one role, I have played many parts in this "Commen­tary." The "stranger" has become the guide; the passenger, the driver. Since this multi-role-playing is inevitable in an electronic world, one hopes that the put-on has also been a turn-on,” (Ibid., 26). Here, McLuhan appears to be invoking the image of Plato’s “Athenian stranger” (often said to resemble Socrates) who appears in Plato’s Laws.

[6] McLuhan to Fredrick Wilhelmsen, 17 June 1975.

McLuhan on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One of the few Churchmen that McLuhan credits with having any awareness of media effects was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whom he credits with having “correctly defined the major change of our age”:[1]

It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the airplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still, thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.[2]

That said, however, if McLuhan expressed some kind of enthusiasm towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work during the mid-1950s, it had evaporated by the 1970s. Writing to his close friends, Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook, McLuhan flatly states: “I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies.”[3] Similarly, McLuhan notes to Wilhelmsen: “The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction … is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word ‘evolution’ …. That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community.”[4] In short, while seeing that he diagnosed one aspect of the new electric situation correctly, McLuhan appears to have regarded Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, at best, as an exemplar of highly literate man (or “print orientated bastard”), and, at worst, a Manichean.[5]

[1] McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 7, 12; McLuhan, “The Electric Age – The Age of Implosion,” MS., 3.

[2] Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, cited in McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 7, 12. Emphasis mine.

[3] McLuhan to Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook, 3 March 1972.

[4] McLuhan to Fredrick Wilhemsen, 28 January 1972. Publicly, however, McLuhan artful avoided making any claims, pro or con. For example, see McLuhan, “Electric Consciousness and the Church,” in The Medium and the Light, 87–88.

[5] “[I] would be grateful if you would suggest to me a bit of reading that might point up the ‘Manichean deviation’ as it manifests itself today. Is it to be found in Teilhard de Chardin with his ‘trust man and trust the world?” (McLuhan to Donald Pikell, 25 October 1971).

McLuhan & Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The relationship between McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin features extensively in criticism and commentary of McLuhan’s oeuvre. The first studies into the relationship were conducted by Daniel Leary,[1] and Richard McCafferty.[2] Both concluded that McLuhan was not directly influenced by de Chardin. Despite their findings, however, Miller has sought to “bracket” McLuhan with his “co-religious” de Chardin, while also noting that a comparison between the two is “unjust.”[3]

During the mid-1990s the question of the relationship between the pair resurfaced. In this context Hickey asserts that McLuhan “flirted” with the ideas of de Chardin.[4] Tom Wolfe has sought to stress the influence of de Chardin on McLuhan.[5] And finally, Uwe Jochum finds McLuhan’s work to be to be a form “political media Gnosticism,” heavily influence by de Chardin.[6]

[1] Daniel J. Leary, “Voices of Convergence: Teilhard, McLuhan, and Brown,” in The Continuous Flame: Teilhard in the Great Traditions, ed. Harry J. Cargas (Jefferson, St. Louis: B. Herder, 1969).

[2] Richard B. McCafferty “The Influence of Teilhard De Chardin on Marshall McLuhan,” (Northwestern University, Ph.D. diss., 1969).

[3] Miller, 20–21.

[4] Neil Hickey, “McLuhan in the Digital Age: Where Are You Now That We Need You?” in The Legacy of McLuhan, 64.

[5] Tom Wolfe, foreword to Understanding Me, xiii–xviii.

[6] Uwe Jochum, “The Gnosis of Media,” Library Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2004): 31–32.

Wyndham Lewis & H. M. McLuhan

Except of an email from Donald F. Theall to the author, 11 February 2008:

“There are two comments offhand I’d make at the moment regarding your work. First is your appropriate recognition of Eric’s helpfulness and of his deep submersion in his father’s work; the other involves your perceptive treatment of Wyndham Lewis’ influence on McLuhan. Lewis appealed to McLuhan more than the others because he provided a much closer affinity to McLuhan’s own complex dilemmas and retained a very Anglo-Catholic oriented direction toward what society should be achieving (much closer than any other to McLuhan’s post-Protestant attachment to Catholicism). Both of them also could critique the limitations of the narrowly focused theological view of the officials of the Church. Like Lewis McLuhan could neither come to a dedicated acceptance of modernism or of the old morality. One could go much more deeply into this discussion, but not in the space of a letter.”

A Question of Rights

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves. This question would be like asking people what sort of sights and sounds they would prefer around them in an urban metropolis! Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. Understanding Media, 68.

Barbrook's "Imaginary Futures."

Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007.

[* * * * / 5]

Farewell to the Don

Friday, May 16, 2008, Peterborough//The Trent University community is saddened to learn of the passing of former Trent University president and vice-chancellor Dr. Donald Theall.

Following a brief illness Dr. Theall died at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre on Thursday, May 15, 2008.

“I wish to express my heartfelt sympathies to the family of Dr. Theall,” said Bonnie Patterson, president and vice-chancellor of Trent University. “The loss of a former university president is a profound one, especially for an institution as young as Trent University, where so many fondly remember Donald Theall’s years here. Certainly, all of us benefit from his legacy as a leader and as an academic. He will be missed here at Trent and at the many institutions that he has influenced through his admirable administrative and academic work.”

"Dr. Theall's own passions and pursuits were so much a reflection of the institution he led for seven years," added Reid Morden, chair of Trent University's Board of Governors. "As a leader whose academic credentials were well-known in humanities circles internationally, he epitomized the benefits of a well-rounded liberal arts education. An effective and respected leader for Trent, he will be missed by many."

Dr. Theall was born in Mount Vernon, New York. He earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1950, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1951 and 1954. It was at the University of Toronto where he began his long and distinguished career in the university sector, rising through the ranks from lecturer to professor from 1953 to 1965.

During his final year at U of T, Dr. Theall was also chair of the combined Departments of English. In 1962, he edited and annotated selected poems of Pope for the last print edition of Representative Poetry.

After becoming chairman and Molson professor with the Department of English at McGill University from 1966 to 1973, and then founding director and Molson professor with the graduate program in communications, from 1974 to 1980, Dr. Theall joined Trent University as president and vice-chancellor from 1980 to 1987. He stayed on at Trent as a professor until his retirement in 1994, when he was granted the title of professor emeritus.

During his academic career, Dr. Theall also served on the Board of Directors with the International Communication Association (1979-81), was founding president of the Canadian Communication Association (1978-80), acted as first cultural exchange professor for Canada to the People's Republic of China (1974), and served as co-director of the National Film Board of Canada/McGill University Summer School on Media (1967-71).

Dr. Theall was also well-known for his published works, which focused on a wide variety of topics, including: communication theory; Marshall McLuhan; poetic theory; science fiction; film theory; virtual reality; cyberspace; and the works of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Alexander Pope, and Harold Innis. He was also the author of several books, including: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce's Techno-Poetics, and Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. In 1975, he guest-edited a special McLuhan issue of the Canadian Journal of Communications with G. J. Robinson and published The Medium is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan in 1971.

Dr. Theall was also often described as a “pioneer in computing in the humanities”, and made an extraordinary contribution to literature on-line with his web version of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. As a tribute to his contributions to education over the years, Dr. Theall was presented with a Doctor of Sacred Letters, honoris causa from the University of St. Michael’s College in 2006.

Dr. Theall is survived by his wife Joan Ada Benedict and their six children: Thomas, Margaret Rose, John, Harold, Lawrence, and Michael.

In honour of Dr. Theall’s service and leadership to Trent University, the flag atop the Bata Library has been lowered to the half-staff position.

Squids and Skulls

Á propos our earlier note, “Point of Method,” it is with interest that we monitor the current fixation on the "translucent skull." Today, the image of the "chemical" brain, albeit in a variety of guises, appears to be getting a lot of attention. Dispassionate survey and appraisal of the situation would seem to be warranted, even if it is a little to hard to find (particularly after decades of perpetual motion and emotion).

“The U.S., the only great country in the world based on a written Constitution, has no way of coping legally or politically with the new oral and acoustic situa­tions created by the electronic bugging and the general X-ray procedures in the entire private sector. Man-hunting has become the biggest business on the planet in the electronic age, and is a return to the Paleolithic conditions of the hunter.” McLuhan, To Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 26 March 1974. Emphasis mine.

“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 in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate, November, 1968.

And then...(these letters are from the late 1960s and early 1970s).

Helping You Find Where Other People Aren't

The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians

THE HIEROGLYPHS OF ENGINED EGYPSIANS: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake, By Donald Theall

Full text available at:

http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/paper_theall_egypt.html

[Excerpt]

Adopting a position consistent with (yet critical of) Vico's theory of historical evolution, Joyce is acutely sensitive to the problems of speech, script and print and their inseparable involvement with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression. He roots all communication in gesture for "In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says, . . . (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture) is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). The grounding of communication in gesture is underlined by the obvious play of the quote which Joyce lifts from Jousse on the opening of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word . . ." Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon, beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud." (Note again the playing on John 1:14 " The Word was made flesh" [267.16- 17]). Since gesture and ultimately communication are generated from the body " . . . for the end is with woman, flesh-without-word" (468.5- 6), an integrated process of communication arises which embraces all signs. The "gest" as "flesh without word" is "a flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the original sinse" (original sin + originary sense + the temporal, "since" [239.1]). The reference in "communicake" to the mechanism of eating as paralleling the mechanism of speaking and of commun-ion as participation in and consumption of the Word, attributable to Jousse's title, La Manducation de la Parole ("The Mastication of the Word"), treats the gest as a bit (a bite). Orality and the word as projections of gesture arise from the body as a communicating-machine.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 (uncensored)

“At this moment, for example, we are quite in the dark about the political implications of Telstar. By outering these satellites as extensions of our nervous system, there is an automatic response in all the organs of the body politic of mankind. Such new intensity of proximity imposed by Telstar calls for radical rearrangement of all organs in order to maintain staying power and equilibrium. The teaching and learning process for every child will be affected sooner rather than later. The time factor in every decision of business and finance will acquire new patterns. Among the peoples of the world strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly…” (Understanding Media, 99)

“In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and lotteries on the first American telegraph, Soren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun. 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. To put one's nerves outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain, is to initiate a situation-if not a concept-of dread.
Having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters. Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire.” (Ibid, 252)

NAVSTAR: In Rememberance

30 years ago today saw the launch of NAVSTAR 2 (following closely on the heels of NAVSTAR 1, launched 22 February 1978). Both NAVSTAR 1 and 2 have since been incorporated into the vast constellation of satellites that give us GPS.

. . .

“With satellite broadcasting a few months off, we move, scientist and humanist alike, into the world of instant and inexpensive access to anything and anybody on the globe. The divorce in our world is not now, nor will it be, between the scientist and the humanist but between the mechanist and the electrician. Our scientists as much as our humanists are caught in the old forms of the depart­ing mechanical culture which all have contributed to for centu­ries. We now live electrically, but we continue to think in the older modes of mechanism. Even the wheel itself, which we abstracted from animal form, is being reabsorbed into the organic in the jet age. In the Polaris missile the fuel and the engine are one. Both cease to exist at the same moment. Yet the mark of obsolescence is now, as always, hypertrophy.” McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” Humanities Association Bulletin 34, 1 (Fall 1961).

McLuhan on the 1980s

The 1980s, McLuhan predicted, will see a host of new figures (keeping in mind that he died in 1980): [1]

• A society of contented non-achievers
• The end of Chinese culture [2]
• The end of identity
• The emergence of a new multi-sub-cultural mosaic
• Literacy for an elite only
• Education in an age of amnesia
• Cubism in sports [3]
• The imminent arrival of the computer for home shopping and voting
  
• The collapse of representative government [4]

[1]It is appropriate to start with “figures” insofar as McLuhan and Powers indicate that: “When the ground moves too fast, a condition endemic to the electronic society, only figure is left,” (The Global Village, 99).

[2] In the article McLuhan meditates on the effects of the Chinese bid to apply the phonetic alphabet to their culture. He concludes that it dooms them to an ever greater explosion, via industrial aggression and enterprise, than anything the Western world has ever experienced. What has taken centuries in the West, McLuhan notes, under electric conditions, could happen in China in a generation. McLuhan, “Living at the Speed of Light – the 80’s, version V,” MS., 3.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] With the disappearance of private identity, representative government (previously based on majority rule and nose counting) will yield to the figures McLuhan referred to as the “polstergeist,” the cultural mind readers. Ibid., 10.

It is relevant to note here that during the late 1960s McLuhan used the same procedure to “predict” the situation of the 1970s. His vision included: (a) a rampage of lawsuits for disservice environments created by old services, (b) the biggest depression ever, (c) with the birth of the computer, the end of childhood and sex as a special interest, (d) role-playing instead of work, (e) the end of the megalopolis on account of the disservices it creates, (f) the end of the east/west dichotomy, (g) the full emergence of the global theatre, and (h) the end of the bureaucratic structure of the Roman Church as “Electric technology ensures universal liturgical lay participation and dissipation of centralist clerical bureaucracy,” (McLuhan, “The End of Jobs, The Return of Roles,” Administrative Management 13, no. 1 (1970): 40).

"...To Be (Perfectly) Honest..."

What does that mean? What cult do these people using the phrase belong to? What conditioning programme have they been exposed to? Is it, perhaps, an indication that the ancient doctrine of decorum has been retrieved and is alive and operative under late-electric conditions?
More exploration needed.

Point of Method

“The figure is what appears and the ground is always subliminal. Changes occur in the ground before they occur in the figure. We can project both figure and ground as images of the future using the ground as subplot of subliminal patterns and pressures and effects which actually come before the more or less final figures to which we normally direct our interest.” H. Marshall McLuhan to Tom Stepp, 26 March 1973.

Disemvoweled // TXT

mntime we shl xprs r drkr prpos.
gve me th’ map thr. knw we hve dvd’d
in 3 r kingdm; & 'ts r fst ntnt
2 shake all crs & bsnss frm r age,
confrng thm on yngr strngths whl we
unbrthn'd crwl twrd death.

TXT is faster and, in NZL, cheaper than voice.
As the vowel withdraws “English” moves back along the code axis and assumes a character not unlike a Semitic language (Hebrew?). “Reading” requires "Rabbinic" authority (does chps = CHIPS or CHOPS?) and/or participation in an osmic-tactile (and acoustic?) tribal collective (e.g. Street or postcode gang). Paradoxically, in some circumstances, TXT is perceived to be less "intimate" than a voice conversation and is used to preserve some sense of separation and/or detachment.

Spell-check, predictive text, and other computer-aided composition tools attempt to reverse the situation — reconfiguring TXT as dictionary-pure "English." A syntactically correct email or word processed .doc, however, is not considered "romantic" and "genuine" invitations are still hand-written.

The Rise of "AntiSocial Media"

It was only a matter of time before the reversal phase of “Social media” became a prominent feature of the online landscape.
See: Hatebook, enemybook, snubster.com, isolatr.com, and bugroff.

You can't sign up to bugroff because you're not invited -- "Invite no one, Nothing to update, Avoid friends, Get some peace ."

Discovery (perspective and objectives?) Vs. The Suspended Judgement (cubism?)

It has been said by A. N. Whitehead that the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. That technique consists in the retracing of any process of generation or cognition. Bertrand Russell noted as complementarity that the greatest discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of “the suspended judgement” — not single but multiple models of experimental exploration. The need to suspend points of view and private value judgments is indispensable to the programming of total environments.

T. S. Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” gave classic statement to the theme of strategy of “the suspended judgement.” Citing the role of platinum as catalyst in effecting new chemical combination, Eliot observed:

“The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”

Take Today, 97.

Clear Thinking on Creativity (the Cliche of the 20th Century)

1. The artist in any age is the first and final clue to cognitive processes.
2. The artist is engaged in perpetual discovery and criticism of his [sic] own process of cognition.
3. He [the artist] retraces these processes in order to disassociate them from all alien admixture.
4. By isolating and projecting, externally in objects, his own processes of awareness he achieves style.
5. The cognitive process raised to critical self awareness is the creative process in any field.
6. It is for this reason that all modern discovery naturally appears as a branch of aesthetics.
7. Creation in the arts and science is the process of retracing the stages of apprehension which have resulted in insight.
8. The artist of any age provides first and final clues to the process of reconstruction since he is typically engaged at the centre of the network of his milieu.
9. By isolating and externalizing his inner drama in carefully ordered objects and situations he offers the arrested means of contemplation to his time, an indispensable way of clarifying ordinary imprecision and confusion of the endless crowd messages circulating in the social network.
10. By current extensions of self awareness of the techniques of apprehension and communication make practical a “reamalgamergence” of the domains of time and space, knowledge and power.