P92.5 .M3 C479 2008 SMC

[It's finally there]
"The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan"
Mr. Chrystall’s study revisits the work of H. Marshall McLuhan by re-reading McLuhan’s oeuvre on his own terms and in light of newly unearthed primary source material. Through the lens of his career-spanning concern with communication, McLuhan is seen as transforming the great tradition of Ciceronian humanism and the Ciceronian ideal (the figure in whom eloquence and wisdom coalesce), and the programme of the Anglo-American Modernists: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and P. Wyndham Lewis. In the final analysis, McLuhan is re-envisioned as a singularity - a paramodern (neither modernist nor post-modernist) doctus orator.

1970-1980 (part V)

6. A New Religious Age
When the ground for existence is a disembodied and discarnate experience, McLuhan also saw that we had entered a great new religious age[1] — one that had in fact been in the offing for some time, since man began living “not by bread alone but by slogans also,”[2] since television,[3] and since the abolition of nature with Sputnik. As McLuhan notes in “The Future of Morality: The Inner Versus the Outer Quest”:

Mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti … This statement has always seemed to indicate that both the Incarnation and the Mass are a profound and total remaking of man and the world. Now in the electronic age, when so much of our world is man made, it becomes easier to understand some of the wonders of this doctrine.[4]

While McLuhan can be seen here developing on the observations of both Joyce and Alexander Pope,[5] as with the weight of McLuhan’s claims, they are not as far-fetched as it might sound to some. He was merely acting as the “antenna of his race,” the “serious” artist,”[6] observing and reporting, in both an empirical and artistic manner, the experiences of his age. In many respects he had to look no further than the horoscopes in the newspaper or the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke (the “second best” science fiction writer of his day who “predicted” the satellite), and Stanley Kubrick (a pioneer of American cinema).[7] Just prior to the launch of Intelsat 1, the first commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, Clarke and Kubrick began work on 2001: A Space Odyssey.[8] Reflecting back on the film that is now famous for its development of the themes of metamorphosis, from pre-historic Ape-man to übermensch,[9] and technologies coming “alive” and spinning out of human control, Clarke noted that he and Kubrick had set out with the deliberate intention of creating a myth with an Odyssean parallel:

Quite early in the game I went around saying, not very loudly, “M-G-M [Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer] doesn't know this yet, but they're paying for the first $10,000,000 religious movie.” Nevertheless, it is still quite a surprise to see how many people realized this, and it has been amusing to see how many faiths have tried to stake claims in the finished work.[10]

Having been invited to an advanced, private screening of 2001 by Kubrick,[11] it is little surprise then that we find that McLuhan states in one of his interviews of the period: “[Electric man] … is a very religious man in that he lives in a physical universe that is now spiritual.”[12] Further rationale for his claim is visible in light of his conversations with Pierre Babin. Here McLuhan concludes that while having “no relation to private identity and no relation to natural law,” discarnate man “retains and perhaps intensifies his relation to ‘supernatural law.’”[13] Ergo, discarnate man is not only inclined towards “totalitarian regimes and to acceptance of the state as God,”[14] but in desperate need of religion to hold himself in community:

Since the basis for natural law is unavailable to the TV generation, their only recourse is to supernatural law as a means of cohesion, coherence and meaning. For these reasons we seem to be on the threshold of a great new religious age.[15]

As something of a further side-effect, McLuhan saw that a new state of “civil war,” between the Catholic Church and the forces of the electric media, was in prospect (if it did not exist already) given that he saw no grounds for the coexistence of these two tribal forces:[16]

Discarnate man is not compatible with an incarnate Church … I cannot see that the physical existence of man is compatible with the speed of light. There is no lack of evidence of both physical and metaphysical violence as a response to this situation…[17]

1970-1980 (part IV)

5. Organs Without Bodies
McLuhan’s charge that we are confronted once again with the mystery of the human heart takes on new significance when we consider what stands as his most striking image of the condition of man in the new decade. From the 1970s McLuhan turns to stress that technologically speaking, we now seem to have gone beyond T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men.”[1] When man has extended his central nervous system, McLuhan appears to have seen that he becomes a collection of organs without a body — endowed with super-angelic qualities. Not even the angels of Aquinas had this power to be everywhere at once:[2]

On the telephone, or on the air, man is in every sense discarnate, existing as an abstract image, a figure without a body. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state. When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in diverse ways. Violence is the quest for identity.[3]

Under late-electric conditions, as McLuhan notes in a letter to Father Shook, we entered the age of discarnate man:

My concern is with the fact that the psychic and social structure of the Western world has been profoundly shaped by its technologies of communication. It is the view of Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato, and of others, that the individual private psyche, the human “self” is itself an artefact. This private, separate self is as little known to the Hebrew as to the Hindu of yesterday, or the hippie of today. Electric man is discarnate man, sharing a consciousness or at least a sciousness, as fully as any native tribe. Information moved at electric speeds also sends the sender instantly. Not just the broadcaster but his public go to Peking and return, and everybody becomes totally involved in everybody.[4]

For McLuhan, the condition of discarnate man, where the ground for existence is disembodied and discarnate experience,[5] was one if not the “major sickness” of this last decade of his life, and he attributed it to the action of the “media” themselves.[6] In “Violence of the Media” McLuhan argues that it is the media themselves that inflict (rather than depict) violence by way of an instant invasion and deprivation of their users physical bodies as they are merged into a network of extensions of their nervous system. The elimination of the physical body of the user, he notes, deprives them (the user) of the means of relating the program experience to their private individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity:[7]

What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut but can move much faster. He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. Caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “reality” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place (usually in real time); fantasy has no such commitment.[8]

1970-1980 (part III)

4. The End of Invisible Environments
One of the most striking differences between McLuhan’s diagnosis of the 1970s and his earlier reports is that he registers the end of hidden environments. Having reached something of a threshold, McLuhan apprehended that something of a “flip” or reversal had occurred, pushing all former hidden environments into full visibility:[1]

The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural.[2]

Arguably, one of the contributing factors appears to have been that the rapidly maturing computer-satellite matrix served to consolidate the retrieval of “human scale” that had emerged with the Bomb:

From the moment of Hiroshima and The Bomb we had positive proof that information as such had become the new sinews of war. By complementarity, the same pervasive use of information had created an environment of learning for war, business, and education alike. Paradoxically, the overkill via sheer knowledge returned men to sudden recognition of the precious significance of the human scale. The classic wisdom of nothing in excess was resurrected by this instant of hideous strength when everything was in excess. The human scale that had been submerged during a century of industrial gigantism was instantly and unforgettably retrieved.[3]

As a consequence of formerly hidden environments becoming visible, McLuhan was moved to suggest that Lewis Mumford might “be quite correct in seeing the wedding of the old mechanical hardware and the new electric software as creating a megamachine of the Aztec or Pyramid type.”[4] The complex North American megamachines, e.g. the US$ 53 billion per year advertising industry for the manipulation of the public psyche or the equally vast security systems,[5] McLuhan shows, begin to stand out, stark, and everywhere visible.[6] So too does the mystery of the human heart:

After centuries of confronting the hidden and twisted motives of social men, it came as a mighty deliverance through mechanization to slough off humanity altogether. The alibi for their gesture was absolute equality, albeit in nonentity. As we return to role playing under the impulse of electric circuitry, we also confront once more the mysteries of both malignancy and magnanimity in the human heart.[7]

1970-1980 (part II)

3. Shrinking, Blurring, and Pulsing
In addition to presenting an image of the planet “shrinking,” becoming a “single household” (a condition of “no boundaries and no monopolies of knowledge”),[1] McLuhan tries to show how change itself has become the main staple and “…change alone has any semblance of reality.”[2] One of the best images McLuhan offers as a means of apprehending the character of the new situation can be seen in “A Media Approach to Inflation”:

Perhaps there is no better way of indicating the discontinuous simultaneous pattern of the new situation in economics and society than to point to the nature of the TV image, which is structured by innumerable pulsations which move toward the viewer through the monitor. The TV image is literally constituted by a mesh or mosaic of live intervals which provide an overwhelming inducement to involvement on the part of the TV audience. The entire world of electric information now presents pulsating intervals for the intervention and involvement of the world population.[3]

Naturally, under these conditions, old categories and figures tend to blur and disappear. New figures spring up only to submerge again in a blur, and formerly identifiable categories, e.g. artist, frontiersman, and enemy, push towards invisibility:[4]

Today the end of steel is no mere metaphor, since the ‘hardware’ now disappears inside the computer by design; but the new frontier is as invisible as a radio wave. There are no tracks to identify or locate the new frontiersman, even nostalgically. He has neither retrospect nor prospect in his instant space-time field. It is all pasts and all futures in an eternal present.[5]

Older media “forms” too, that were formerly invisible environments, become visible as figures and are caught up in this shrinking, blurring, and pulsing action. Under the proscenium arch of the satellite, older forms are shown as enacting something of a drama of pseudo-Ovidian metamorphosis.[6] Again, it is a theme mentioned, albeit briefly, in Understanding Media.[7] It is, however, most visible in his proposed musical-cum-neo-beast epic, “Every Man in His Media or Medium,” where a multiplicity of old forms take the place of the obsolesced East-West dichotomy.
This shrinking, blurring, and pulsing action, McLuhan shows, also serves to inform the very “tone” of the decade. From the 1970s he documents how the age of boredom, which had earlier supplanted the age of anxiety, was in turn giving way to an age of rapid oscillation or phase shifting (pulsating intervals) between ecstasy (and the thrills of widespread festive celebration),[8] and paranoia (or a state of “…panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence”).[9] McLuhan saw that paranoia was evoked when: (a) there is a pervasive feeling that every kind of change affects everything else,[10] (b) there is a general awareness that the technological game is out of control,[11] and (c) “war” becomes the “environment” of our time.[12]

1970-1980 (part I)

...I will now offer six of McLuhan’s more striking images of the 1970s (which I have not attempted to put in any “pattern” — logical or analogical — on the grounds that, while tempting, this kind of speculative enterprise would involve us in countless misunderstandings). To some readers McLuhan’s diagnosis in the following may appear to be science fiction.[1] It is not irrelevant that McLuhan had claimed that “we live science fiction” in both his review of The Naked Lunch and Nova Express,[2] and also in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

People of literary and critical bias find the shrill vehemence of de Chardin as disconcerting as his uncritical enthusiasm for the cosmic membrane that has been snapped around the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses. This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the “noosphere” or technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.[3]

1. Emergence of New Figures
We can get a sense for how McLuhan saw what was to be the last decade of his life by examining his predictions for the 1980s. They emerge from his observation of patterns already present in his day, extrapolated via figure-ground analysis:

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.[4]

The 1980s, McLuhan predicted, will see a host of new figures:[5] (1) a society of contented non-achievers, (2) the end of Chinese culture,[6] (3) the end of identity, (4) the emergence of a new multi-sub-cultural mosaic, (4) literacy for an elite only, (5) education in an age of amnesia, (6) cubism in sports,[7] (7) the imminent arrival of the computer for home shopping and voting, and (8) the collapse of representative government.[8]

2. “Media” as Unmoved Mover
In “Living at the Speed of Light,” in which McLuhan predicted the figures of the 1980s we have just mentioned, McLuhan also predicts the invention of “anti-gravity” as a possible new energy source. Arguably, his ability to make such a claim is that he saw that, during the software age, the “principles” of anti-gravity were already operative. As the only “machine” that consumes and produces the same “material” (information), computers were creating more information than they were being “fed.” In short, the computer-satellite matrix, the ‘software” environment, was exhibiting characteristics that are analogous to the proposed “hardware” “free-energy” generators. In view of these and other similar observations, McLuhan begins to stress that the “media” themselves are becoming autonomous.[9] Perhaps the crux of the matter is expressed in a letter to Jim Davey where McLuhan suggests that the “media” were assuming a character analogous to deity:

I have only just discovered that St. Thomas Aquinas’ idea of instrumentality is that of the “unmoved mover.” All media change us and their surround without in any way being changed themselves. In other words, Aquinas also said “the medium is the message,” just as he said the user or the cognitive agent is the content…[10]

Gems on the New/Old McLuhan-L

The New/Old McLuhan-L is up and running at: http://groups.google.co.nz/group/McLuhan-L.

Theall on McLuhan and Carpenter

From:Donald Theall, Thu, 31 Jan 2002.
Peter is quite right when he stresses the importance of Carpenter's role as the person who initially interested McLuhan in many of his borrowings from anthropology. If you look at McLuhan's work prior to 1950 or thereabouts and compare it with his work by 1953 or thereabouts, you will notice his growing interest in anthropological questions. It is worth noting that he first met Carpenter at a meeting with Innis in 1948, but he actually became deeply involved with Carpenter in 1951. I can personally attest to this, since I was taking an anthropology course with Carpenter in 1950-1 and taking a course with McLuhan and working under him on my Master's thesis in the same period. I believe the first personal social encounter they had was when we invited both of them and their wives for an evening to our apartment. Marshall and Ted really clicked and they became colleagues and friends who talked frequently. In the winter of 1952-3. I acted as a secretary to their discussions of the application to the Ford Foundation and assisted in doing preliminary drafts for them. The other contributor at this time was Marshall's lifelong friend, the political economist, Tom Easterbrook. who had a lot to do with McLuhan's initially becoming interested in Innis. But Carpenter was the prime influence opening up Marshall's interest in the newer interest in anthropology Sapir, Boas, the culture and personality school, Whorf, the Smiths, Hall, etc., supplementing the knowledge of anthropology that Marshall had developed from his literary studies and Joyce Levi Bruhl, Malinowski, Marcel Jousse and other such figures. Carpenter also encouraged Mcluhan's reading into major figures in the history of anthropology such as Edward Tylor.

Another vital area was Carpenter's own field work, especially in the North, which plays an important role in early investigation of modes of space and time, questions of language and communication and the like. And when Explorations started in 1953 (Carpenter's idea actually), Carpenter brought in the anthropological and social scientific side like Dorothy Lee.

Essentially it was a cross-fertilization, since they sparked off one anther's interests so it was possible to see Carpenter coming to speak of _Ulysses_ as a mode of anthropology. Since they became such close friends, the relationship is complex and fully discuss it would take a lot more space. For those interested I think that Bob Dobb's suggestion of Carpenter's appendix in _The Virtual Marshall McLuhan_ is helpful in this respect. And perhaps some of the discussion in passing of Carpenter and McLuhan complement it, although unfortunately I did not go as deeply into the anthropology connection as I would have liked. It is, as Peter suggested, most important.

Donald Theall

[McLuhan-L] http://groups.google.co.nz/group/McLuhan-L

McLuhan to Robert Fulton, July 12, 1978

"I had no idea that you wanted the media coverage of death. I had instead sent you some basic analysis of the American relation to death. The TV coverage of death is necessarily frothy fantasy like the news itself. Movies are a completely different proposition. The movies take a death more deeply than TV. For example, the world of Kojak is a cartoon world straight out of the comic books. The current Star Wars type of violence is not only fantasy but nostalgia for comic books. It would be meaningless to refer to death as such in relation to in relation to any current entertainment since all of it is in the order of kids’ games of cops and robbers. This, by the way, is a world of nostalgia and appeals to those who have lost their identity. When you come to the Kennedy funeral you enter at once a ritualistic world of mock death. This is less true of Martin Luther King funeral because of the deep emotions felt by the blacks. These emotions rubbed off on some of us."

Further Notes on Figure, Ground & Causality

In later life, McLuhan would talk about his use of figure and ground by presenting his work as being primarily concerned with causality, or more specifically, what McLuhan refers to as “formal causality”:

My own approach to the media has been entirely from formal cause. Since formal causes are hidden and environmental, they exert their structural pressure by interval and interface with whatever is in their environmental territory. Formal cause is always hidden, whereas the things upon which they act are visible …. This matter of formal causality and the environments created by the media is so big that I hope your new academic set-up will be able to take hold of some of it.[1]

The study of formal causality, at least as McLuhan conceived it, is the study of ground. As Eric McLuhan casts the matter, “formal cause” is the configuration of the ground and reciprocally it is the shape of the figure. Therefore a figure might have one efficient cause but has many and diverse effects (formal) that preceded it. Formal cause is found in the prior restructuring of the ground and its continuing dynamic relation to its ground.[2] “Efficient causality” on the other hand, which McLuhan saw as the sole concern of the leading lights of “communication,” is largely preoccupied with figures. As Eric McLuhan notes, efficient causality “has nothing to do with effects.” Neither does material or final. “Only efficient cause is diachronic, all others are synchronic and simultaneous. Formal cause is the only one concerned with effects and is synchronic — hence the paradox that effects come before causes.”[3]
Writing to Barbara Ward McLuhan implies that his “method” of starting with the ground is derivative of the work of Q. D. Leavis:

When Q. D. Leavis did a study of Fiction and the Reading Public, there was an uproar because she had ventured to suggest that highly literate people could lead moronic lives through most of their waking hours. It is the only study ever made, in English, of a reading public. That is, the study of ground for the figure of the novel. The ordinary study concentrates on figure minus ground, i.e. the content of the novel is studied and the kinds of readers and their relation to the novel are ignored. Visual man likes to assume a merely neutral transportation process as between the figure and the ground, ignoring the complex changes that take place in both figure and ground during all communication [handwritten addition: except for H. A. Innis's Empire and Communications.][4]

The extent that McLuhan’s thinking developed along these lines is evident in his early review of Fredrick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Here McLuhan takes issue with Wertham’s deliberate isolation of the crime comic from the entire culture in which it operates.[5] That said, however, merely starting from ground is not the whole of the matter. McLuhan also presents his concerns as ultimately being with the interplay between figure and ground. Writing to Jacqueline Tyrwitt, McLuhan notes:

It is this figure-ground relationship that constitutes the dynamic of any culture, and it is totally lacking in the Ekistics magazine. Ekistics is run on general systems approach … The general systems people are completely unable to relate figure and ground so they merge them by translating the cultural ground (or the ground of any situation they consider to be worth studying) into another figure by a statistical approach of fragmentation. Statistics can never provide a gestalt or a, figure-ground interface.[6]

In “The Future of New Media,” McLuhan states: “the meaning of a new medium is not merely its definition but what it actually does as a figure in its changing context or ground.”[7] An example of McLuhan’s figure and ground analysis directed at observing the “interplay” between figure and ground can be seen in “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” where McLuhan considers “writing” initially as figure, then as ground, and finally as a figure again against a new ground:[8]

In the first place, then, pre-literate societies based on a monopoly of the spoken word, are static, repetitive, unchanging. They are, as it is said, “time-bound.” Such societies find it difficult to explore space or to extend their communications horizontally. Writing is a tremendous revolution in such a world. For writing is the translation of the vocal or audible into spatial form. Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. And when messages can be transported, then comes the road, and armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes. But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial network. It is obvious that writing cannot have the same meaning or function for us that it had for earlier culture.[9]

[1] McLuhan to John Culkin, 19 June 1975. It appears that while McLuhan borrowed Aristotle’s terms, he was ambivalent about Aristotle’s formulation of how the causes actually worked. As Patterson has noted, although both McLuhan and Innis were interested in “formal causality,” what McLuhan meant by formal causality was something quite different from Aristotle or Taylor, formal cause is used not in the sense of classification of forms but in their operation. Graeme H. Patterson, History and Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, the Interpretation of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 135.
[2] Eric McLuhan, “The Logos and Formal Causality,” MS., 2.
[3] Ibid., 1–2.
[4] McLuhan to Barbara Ward, 9 February 1973. Emphasis mine.
[5] McLuhan, review of Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredrick Wertham, Shenandoah 6, no. 2 (Spring 1955): 53–57.
[6] McLuhan to Jacqueline Tyrwitt, 24 March 1972. Ekistics is a term coined by K. A. Doxiadis in 1942 to refer to the science of human settlement. The magazine of the same name, which became very influential in the second half of the 20th century, had its origins in a private mimeographed sheet available to only a few experts (much like McLuhan’s Network).
[7] McLuhan, “The Future of New Media,” MS., 1. Emphasis mine.
[8] In the language of drama this might be called “situational irony.” However, McLuhan is here reporting “situational irony” as an effect of speed-up in technological innovation. The effect this has on a reader might be said to be not unlike Empsons’ description of the value of double irony — that is, it combines breadth of sympathy with energy and judgement, permitting a balance among all materials being judged. William Empson. Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of Pastoral Form in Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 57.
[9] McLuhan, “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” 161–62. Emphasis mine.

Notes on Figure and Ground

Once new tracts of or an area of “ignorance” is determined, even faintly, McLuhan tends to shift modes and begins sharpening the “discovery” for use as a probe, to provoke, initiate or stimulate further dialogue.[1]To assist in both the task of discovering ignorance and sharpening ignorance into a probe, McLuhan appropriated another set of terms in use at the seminar that had been taken from Gestalt psychology — Figure and Ground. I will defer at this point to the McLuhans who offer a more than adequate account of the terms in the Laws of Media:

“Figure” and “ground” entered Gestalt psychology from the work of Edgar Rubin, who [in] about 1915 used those terms to discuss aspects of visual perception. They have here been broadened to embrace the whole structure of perception and of consciousness. All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground), two continually coerce and play with each other across a common line or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. Shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other. Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurational and comprises all other available figures at once .… Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the “way of seeing” Flaubert called it, or the “terms on which” a figure is perceived. The study of ground “on its own terms” is virtually impossible; by definition it is at any moment environmental and subliminal. The only possible strategy for such study entails constructing an anti-environment.[2]

Perhaps McLuhan’s own use of figure and ground is best seen in terms of his attempts to grapple with both the ordinary use of “medium,” and “unfortunate” use of the term “Mass media.” [3] In a later address to the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), for example, McLuhan uses the terms as general analytic principles: (a) to collapse the conventional understanding of the terms media and medium, and (b) to break the monopoly of discourse about media and medium stemming solely from concern with “efficient” cause. In this address, McLuhan notes how: “Communication is the act by which the descriptive parameters of the state of nature, including human nature at one point in space-time, are made known to another.”[4] McLuhan continues, arguing that the term communication is also used to include the means by which one set of parameters (the information) is transmitted: “The medium, in ordinary use, the term refers only to the figure, not the ground.” [5] By extension then, a point that the McLuhan’s make explicit in the Laws of Media, the respective approaches of Deutsch, Shannon and Weaver, and Weiner’s use of the terms “media” and “medium,” is problematic on two counts. Firstly, they are “frozen” and “dialectical … born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology.”[6] And secondly, their approach “neglects the vital environmental surround” (the ground) which extends beyond a mere geometric configuration (or more precisely, the graph of the communication net), thus failing to provide them with a real place of observation. As McLuhan notes to Edward T. Hall in 1975:

The Shannon-Weaver model of information theory (encoder, channel and de-coder) simply ignores the law of the situation, i.e. The Shannon-Weaver model is identical to the bias of Western man which excludes the possibility of environmental influence. In fact, the environment presupposed by the activity of communication is categorized as “noise” in the Shannon Weaver paradigm. Visual space is the only kind of space that is figure minus ground.[7]

McLuhan apprehended that Deutsch, Shannon and Weaver, and Weiner, as with Maritain,[8] Julian Jaynes, Levi-Strauss, and Noam Chomsky, were working: “figure minus ground in the Cartesian tradition.”[9] By contrast, McLuhan presents his own enterprise, and approach to “media,” as starting with ground:

My writings baffle most people simply because I begin with ground and they begin with figure. It begins with effects and works to causes. Once it is understood that the hidden ground of our time is information moved at the speed of light … then it becomes easy to see.[10]

Radio, then, according to McLuhan, is “merely a name for all of the electric and simultaneous services which create the instantaneous surround of information, that is itself acoustic in form and structure.” [11] Similarly, as McLuhan argues in the “The Poet and the Press,” the principles of “cinema” were discovered before the moving picture camera was perfected.”[12] The matter is stated plainly in a letter to Melvin Kranzberg: “Structurally, in figure/ground terms, the ground proceeds and includes the figure before the figure, as such, emerges to perception.” Hence, McLuhan adds, one can predict how causes will shortly follow the achievement of effects.[13] The example McLuhan uses is the relation of the bicycle to the car: “The bicycle literally paved the way for the motor car. That is the effects of the car came first, namely paved highways.”[14]

[1] See McLuhan to Fredrick D. Wilhelmsen, 18 January 1971; and McLuhan to W. K. Wimsatt, 6 March 1974.
[2] Laws of Media, 5. In “The Later Innis,” McLuhan mentions how Gestalt comes close “to our own tradition of…un-theoretical positivism,” (McLuhan, “The Later Innis,” MS., 10–11).
[3] See McLuhan, “Notes on the Media as Artforms,” 5.
[4] McLuhan also takes care to note that all communication is partial.
[5] McLuhan, “Technology and Media,” (Paper presented at the Sixth ICOHTEC Symposium, 18 August 1977), MS., 3.
[6] As the McLuhans note in Laws of Media: “Dialectics – logic and philosophy – represent in the trivium the extreme of left hemisphere operation as it uses no ground but alphabetic writing itself,” (Laws of Media, 233).
[7] McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, 26 August 26 1975.
[8] McLuhan to Anne Muggeridge, 14 February 1978.
[9] McLuhan to Edmund Carpenter, 23 March 1973.
[10] McLuhan to Franklin R. Gannon, 12 June 1973.
[11] McLuhan, “Untitled Article On The Vietnam War,” MS., 3
[12] McLuhan, “The Poet and The Press” MS., 3.
[13] McLuhan to Melvin Kranzberg, 10 July 1976
[14] Ibid.