..--- _....-....._.4-. MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND EDUCATWNAL THEORY: AN moumv mm THE Epssrmomem AND AESTH’EHC FOUNDATIONS 0F LEARNENG STYLE . ' Dissertation for the Degree of Ph. D; MlCHiGAN STATE UNWERSiTY GERARD C. PENTA 1974 "—'--‘— _ n _- we _' lllllllll llllllIlllhllllllllllll 3 1293 10558 030 uauanlfl Michigan Scam University This is to certify that the thesis entitled MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING STYLE presented by Gerard C. Penta has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Secondary Education and Curriculum Ph'D' degree in NA ,\ Hawk; v \QMajor professotj. A” Date February 8, 1974 0-7639 ABSTRACT MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING STYLE BY Gerard C. Penta This study explores the character and significance of the work of Marshall McLuhan, with a View to relating his ideas to the fields of educational theory and aesthetic philosophy. The importance of the inquiry lies mainly in the impetus toward a reexamination of the question of perception and learning style that has come from recent developments in philOSOphy and educational theory. McLuhan's ideas on media, communication, percep- tion and the formation of consciousness have been pre- sented in a series of works dating from the late 1950's. By 1964, when he published Understanding Media, the basic outlines and the substance of his conceptions had been developed and his work since that time has consisted mainly of elaboration and dissemination of those ideas. His central premise, presented and popularized in such Gerard C. Penta aphorisms as "the medium is the message (massage)," holds that the behavioral style of a culture is rooted in, and is a consequence of, the ratio between the various senses, as those senses function in perception, imposed by the material characteristics of the technologies present in the culture. Technologies, of whatever sort, "extend" and heighten some aspect of the human organism and, in so doing, move the extended facility into a prominent place in the structures that govern perception. Thus, typography extends vision and generates what McLuhan calls "visual" culture. Television extends all senses, especially the tactile, and generates a very different culture, the "audio-tactile." From this impact of technology on perception all else--religion, education, commerce, government, social structure--flows in an inevitable sequence. The form of technology becomes the engine of all other forms, quite independently of the content uses to which those technologies are put. While there are several ways in which to analyze McLuhan's notions--social, scientific, biological and so on—-the one eXplored here is that of submitting his main premises to inspection from the vantage point of conven- tional aesthetic philOSOphy. It is possible (and possibly profitable) to View McLuhan's work as the skeletal outline of an aesthetic theory and to compare his basic entities and procedures to some comparable Gerard C. Penta theory. If this is done it becomes apparent that McLuhan has a great deal in common with those aestheticians who have deve10ped and analyzed aesthetic experience as (1) an integrative experience whose integrative power lies in (2) the capacity of the objects to "carry" symbolic meaning in virtue of (3) their sensuous configura- tions, which, taken as a totality (gestalt), constitute (4) the "form" of the object. McLuhan's work, while not pursuing the problems of that position in that sort of rigorous detail provided by, for example, John Dewey, is flawed by the difficulties inherent in formalist and symbolist aesthetics, especially the difficulty of the ineffability and form and the validation of statements about it. For McLuhan, the comprehension of the nature and impact of technology lies in the domain of the aesthetic-- the privileged observers are artists and the direction by them of the applications of media technology becomes the primary instrument of cultural survival. This platform is the substance of, and provides a certain cast of urgency to, most of social and political prescriptions. While the interpretation and application of McLuhanesque insights to social policy must be tempered with a full recognition of the methodological and theoretical problems built into his thought, it is possible to use his work as the starting point for a critical examination of education. Gerard C. Penta He reminds us again that learning is a function of the total environment; that the form in which the learning transaction is cast is a significant determining variable in the learning process and that attention to the aesthetic in education is an important, perhaps crucial, imperative. MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING STYLE BY ‘5. Gerard C? Penta A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Secondary Education and Curriculum 1974 Copyright by GERARD C. PENTA 1974 AC KNOWLEDGME NT S I would like to acknowledge the assistance and patience of the members of my doctoral committee: Dr. Marvin Grandstaff, chairman, Dr. George Ferree, Dr. William Sweetland, all of the College of Education; and Dr. Lewis Zerby of the Department of PhilosoPhy. ii Chapter II. III. VI. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . An Introductory Note on McLuhan . . . Importance to Education . . . . . . McLuhan on Education: A Sampler . . . McLuhan in the Literature: Two Instances Focus of the Study . . . . Aesthetic Aspects of McLuhan' 5 Thought . OVERVIEW OF MCLUHAN'S THEORY . . . . The Medium is the Message . . . . . Media Hot and Cold . . . . . . . . Media as Extensions of Man . . . . . The Concept of Sensorium . . . . . The Theory of History Employed by McLuhan PERCEPTION AS A CULTURAL ARTIFACT: MCLUHAN'S AESTHETIC THEORY . . . . . Perception . . The Role of the Artist and the Function of Art . . . . . . . The Nature of the Art Object . . . Significance of McLuhan' s Aesthetic Theory Epistemological Significance . . . . Strategy for Survival . . . . . . . Art as Experience: Another Perspective . McLuhan and Dewey Compared . . . . Evaluation of McLuhan' s Aesthetic Theory METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN MCLUHAN'S WORK The Extra-Environmental Observer . . . One—Factor Explanation . . . . . . Teleology . . . . . . . . . . . CRITICISMS AND EVALUATIONS . . . . . Either/Or Dichotomy . . . . . . . Contradictions . . . . . . . . . iii Page H 17 18 25 29 34 37 43 44 46 47 48 50 53 54 59 65 71 72 77 80 82 82 85 Chapter Page Other Logical Problems . . . . . . . 89 Disregard for Content . . . . . . . 92 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The question of how people learn what they know has always been of central importance to educational theory. The question has been addressed in many ways, under an almost infinite variety of rubrics. Different periods in the history of educational thought can be characterized by the sorts of questions about learning that were current. In recent years we have witnessed the reemergence of one question about learning that, while it has been a central question at several historical junc- tures, pretty much disappeared during the ascendency of scientific behaviorism, beginning during the 1920's. That is the question that has become conventionalized under the concept of "learning style." A confluence of events, including the impact of the work of Jerome Bruner, the push for differentiated programs for the "culturally deprived," the identification of the "counter—culture" and a general dissatisfaction with conventional, behavioristic modes of teaching and measurement forced into the purview of educational theor- ists the old question of whether there are different ways in which people learn, and, if so, how can those different ways be analyzed and understood. The question has been studied in a number of ways by different scholars; most frequently from the perspective of either learning theory or anthropology. The question does, as well, raise serious philosophical issues that, at least in the opinion of modern positivism, were thought to have been solved. The philosophical issues are fundamentally epistemological ones: how can modes of learning be characterized and described and what kinds of events and circumstances, either internal or external to the learner, configure modes of learning. More specifically and funda- mentally, the issues arise at the conjunction point between epistemology and aesthetic philosophy, since they bearxnxnrperception as the irreducible genesis of cognition. The philosophical issues that arise from the recon- sideration of the question of learning style have been little examined, either by philosophers or by scholars developing the area of learning style in other disciplinary frameworks. Most of what we have had thus far is on the order of superficial and unsatisfactory rhetoric, of the sort advanced by Postman and Weingartnerl or metaphor, in the style of Theodore Roszak.2 While the reconstruction of epistemological questions is beginning to figure in the mainstream deliberations of academic philosophy, especially in the work of Noam Chomsky and resultant controversies, some of the most fruitful attempts at reconstruction have come from scholars of a more generalist persuasion-—in the work of Teilhard de Chardin, in Paul Goodman's Speaking and Language and--the subject of this inquiry--in the body of work produced by Marshall McLuhan. An Introductory Note on McLuhan "The most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov"; "one of the major intel- lectual influences of our time"; "the oracle of the Electric Age"; such are the laudations heaped on the shrine of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Equally hyperbolic epithets have been framed by his critics, of which some of the kindest are "fraud" and "charlatan." A cursory perusal of McLuhan commentators presents the impression that, for McLuhan's theories, reaction is either "hot" or "cold," few could be considered "lukewarm." At the eye of this storm is a tall, slender, Canadian professor of English literature. Born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911, to a Baptist mother and a Methodist father, he spiritually "shopped around" in his youth and eventually embraced Roman Catholicism at the age of twenty—six. While a graduate student, McLuhan married Carinne Lewis, a native Texan. The McLuhans have six children-—two sons and four daughters. The family resides in Toronto, where Professor McLuhan has been the Director of the University of Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology since 1964. Marshall McLuhan's undergraduate career began with the study of engineering. He later switched to English and earned a B.A. in 1933 and an M.A. in 1934 from the University of Manitoba. The next two years, 1934 to 1936, he spent as an undergraduate at the Trinity College of Cambridge University, England, where he received his second B.A. in 1936. It was during those years at Cambridge under the influence of Wyndham Lewis, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, that McLuhan's commitment to literature began expanding to include the study of all media. In 1936, McLuhan arrived at the University of Wisconsin to teach freshman classes. His study of popular culture was at first a pedagogical maneuver to enhance his understanding of Wisconsin undergraduates. This early analysis of media would eventually result in the publica- tion of his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951); an exposition of the uses of subliminal sex in advertising. The same year in which McLuhan entered the Catholic Church, 1937, he began teaching at St. Louis University. He has taught at Catholic institutions ever since. Com- bining graduate work and a honeymoon with his bride, McLuhan returned to Cambridge in 1939. There he pursued his interest in the investigation of literary influences and received his Cambridge M.A. in 1940. Greatly impressed by the work of T. S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, and particularly, James Joyce, he traced the beginnings of Symbolist litera- ture back to the Elizabethian writer, Thomas Nashe. His doctoral dissertation, "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time," was presented at Cambridge in 1943. After leaving St. Louis University in 1944, McLuhan taught for two years at Assumption College (now Windsor University). He accepted his present teaching position at St. Michael's College, the Roman Catholic unit of the University of Toronto, in 1946. In Toronto, McLuhan's interest in the effects of media were stimulated by Harold Innes, an economic historian, who did a great deal of research on the impact of railroads on social and economic life. McLuhan's study of media has found expression in an ever—increasing number of publications and projects. He produced the magazine, Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications, with designer Harley Parker and anthro- pologist Edmund Carpenter. McLuhan edited eight issues of the journal, which lasted from 1953 to 1957. A collection of some of the contents of Explorations have been pub- lished by McLuhan and Carpenter in a 1960 volume entitled Explorations in Communications. DEW Line, Canada's Warning System, was a personal newsletter which McLuhan produced under a subsidy from the Canadian government. In 1959, McLuhan became Director of the Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of Education. From that effort came the report that formed the basis for Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). In 1964, McLuhan became Director of the University of Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology. On a sab- batical leave from Toronto in 1967, he accepted the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University as part of an effort by the State of New York to attract distinguished scholars to the state. (Connor Cruise O'Brien and Arthur Schleisinger were other participants.) Since his first published. esSay in 1934, McLuhan has produced hundreds of articles which have appeared in a variety of academic journals and popular magazines. He has ten books to his credit with at least three more in progress. It is not, however, difficult to isolate the most important and comprehensive parts of his work, even given its volume and his continued production. First of all, his mature work can be clearly marked with the produc- tion of The Mechanical Bride. It was followed in 1962 by the book that made his initial reputation in the academic world, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Galaxy earned several awards, and two years later was followed by Understanding Media. From that time, most of McLuhan's production has been fragmented, repetitious, often cryptic, and more accurately regarded as publicity for his ideas than as further development of his thought. He has produced a number of books (some of them in col— laboration with the designer Quentin Fiore) that attempt to exemplify his notion of "cool media," an intermittent journal, Counterblast, and numerous articles on his per- spective for popular magazines. The most systematic restatement of his position since Understanding Media is From Cliche to Archetype (1970). That book, along with Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy provide a fully adequate exposition of McLuhan's thought and they will serve as the foundation of this study. McLuhan has presented a general theory of encul- turation and acculturation. He has tried to say how patterns of perception are formed and shaped, how percep- tion fashions cognition, and how styles of cognition determine cultural character. In an emphatically material- istic vein, he chooses technology as deus ex machina and has generated a far-reaching and controversial thesis: technological media, regardless of content, are the central determinants of human perception and behavior, both corpo- rate and private. That thesis is most succintly, and perhaps most misleadingly, stated in the most frequently quoted McLuhanism, "the medium is the message." Importance to Education If McLuhan's theory is accepted on his terms, he would have said a great deal about the variables that bear on the "learning style" characteristic of different cultures, especially that of what he calls the "television genera- tion." In his not always humble opinion, he has done just that, insisting on a special relevance of his work for educational efforts that involve an interface between mediaistically different cultures. This is particularly true when a variable of media is literacy since McLuhan's analysis of culture often centers around the role of literacy in culture. Thus he homes in on a central and recurrent problem of schools--institutions based on literacy--and raises issues relevant to education in non- literate and what he terms "post-literate" cultures. McLuhan's importance to educational theory takes at least three forms. First, he raises important questions, demanding a reconstruction and reconsideration of central issues of learning style with concomitant ramifications for practical questions of pedagogy, curricular planning, and evaluation. The exploration of the questions he raises is the main burden of the present study. Second, McLuhan himself has produced a number of provocative and intrigu- ing statements on education. These will not be dealt with in detail in this study, but a sampling of McLuhan's educational thought is included in these introductory comments in order to establish a general feel for his approach to educational problems. Finally, his thought has attracted the attention of a number of writers on education, two of which will be briefly treated in this introduction. McLuhan on Education: A Sampler In the introduction to the second edition of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan indicates what he believes to be a fundamental conflict between the life of today's child and the nature of the school. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the "mythic" world of electronically processed data and experiences that he takes for granted.3 Later in the same volume, McLuhan diagnoses further the educational problem resulting from television's newly wrought alterations in the learning style of children. Since TV, children—-regardless of eye condi- tion--average about six and a half inches from the printed page. Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image. With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth. This is what they learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic—book medium. TV carried the process much further. Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement. Pointlessly they strive to read print in depth. They bring to print all their senses, and print rejects them. Print asks for the isolated and stripped-down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium. 10 These effects of television are what McLuhan believes result in "the fact that, in the visually organized educa- tional and social world, the TV child is an under- privileged cripple."5 McLuhan has not only diagnosed the educational problems of our day, but he has also made suggestions for, and predictions about, a future educational system.6 These he believes will avoid the current conflicts and take full advantage of technology. McLuhan in the Literature: Two Instances In citing the intellectual influences of their widely—read book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner give McLuhan a prominent place. In a chapter entitled "The Medium is the Message, Of Course," they conclude that McLuhan's theory "implies that the critical content of any learning experience is the method of process through which the learning occurs."7 This conclusion, which, as they correctly point out is encountered in the thought of many other educationists, including John Dewey, is a highly generalized interpreta- tion of McLuhan. While it is not mistaken, it does little to bring into the Postman and Weingartner work the distinc- tive and special constructions of McLuhan's perspective. Further on, McLuhan is cited as providing a basis for what they call the "inquiry method."8 Here the ll correctness of their reading of McLuhan is open to serious question since they seem to miss McLuhan's insistence on the point that a medium and its content are quite indepen- dent of each other in regard to their enculturative force. Rather, they take McLuhan to be arguing for a rather Deweyian unity of subject matter and method. The encul- turative impact of media, on that View, is in ratio to the saturation of the medium with content; the less the content, the more the message of the medium comes through. "McLuhan contends that, without the distraction of a story line, we get a very high degree of participation and involvement in the forms of communication, which is another way of saying the processes of learning."9 This is essentially contrary to McLuhan's contention that the content of the medium makes no difference in terms of enculturation. There are numerous other references to McLuhan, most of them by way of adopting McLuhanesque metaphors for incorporation into a highly eclectic, quasi—progressive and often convoluted prescription of what education should be. McLuhan, in this case, enters the realm of educational discourse second hand, primarily as the source of many of the aphorisms that, in the hands of Postman and Weingartner, attempt to pass for a theory of education. This is fairly important since the sort of use to which McLuhan's thought is put by Postman and Weingartner 12 is rather frequent and, quite probably, a major reason why McLuhan is not taken very seriously by a great many educational scholars. If we are to profit from the pur— suit of the very basic questions raised by McLuhan, we need to approach him in his office of philosopher rather than in his frequently taken role as glib aphorist. George Leonard is an eclectic, too, and also professes an influence from McLuhan.lo His posture, however, leads not to "inquiry learning" but to "con- trolled environments" and the development of "human potential." This seems to be a more consistent interpre- tation of McLuhan's conception of medium than that given by Postman and Weingartner, and Leonard is at pains to dissociate environment from content, to call our attention to the learning potential inherent in the "naked environ- ment."11 He does this by rooting his construction of the naked environment in perception: "A11 environment has the capacity to educate. We are rapidly becoming capable of controlling all environment we can perceive. It may some- day turn out that what we can be_will be limited only by what we can perceive."12 Thus, McLuhan enters the arena of educational thought through the work of at least two significant com- mentators on educational theory and practice. Though their interpretations of the significance of McLuhan differ rather markedly, there is little doubt that, at 13 least to some educators, McLuhanesque thought has become an important influence in the ongoing attempt to develop new conceptualizations of the educative process. Focus of the Study The general purpose of the study--to examine the epistemological and aesthetic issues raised by McLuhan's analysis of the genesis of learning style--has already been stated. What remains is to spell out in greater detail the specific focus of the study. The thrust of the study derives from the notion that McLuhan's perception- based theory of enculturation is fundamentally an aesthetic philosophy, employing, in McLuhan's distinctive guises, such conventional categories as form, significance, and meaning in order to advance answers to classical questions of epistemology. The main burden of the study will con— sist of a detailed examination of McLuhan's thought from the perspective of aesthetic philosophy and a critique of McLuhan's theory of enculturation qua aesthetic philosophy. The final part of the study will explore some of the sig- nificances of McLuhan's work for educational thought and practice. All that remains to be done by way of introduc- tion is to discuss briefly the aesthetic character of McLuhan's work. l4 Aesthetic Aspects of McLuhan's Thought A concern of paramount importance among philoso- phers of art has been the analysis of human perception and its relation to the aesthetic experience. The general theory of enculturation presented by McLuhan is essentially a theory of perception. It is the supporting structure for his speculations regarding the nature of art and the role of the artist. Therefore, we may legitimately view McLuhan's theory as fundamentally an aesthetic one. A few examples, taken from the many available in his work, may serve to illustrate McLuhan's primary con- cern, namely, the technological determination of our sensory modes of perception. In Understanding Media he writes, "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resis— tance."13 To interact with our technologies "is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the 'closure' or displacement of perception that follows automatically."l4 McLuhan con- ceives of technology in the broadest way possible; broad enough to include the spoken word. As a technological determinant, "each mother tongue teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of acting in the world, that is quite unique."15 15 A profound respect for James Joyce is evidenced throughout McLuhan's work. He refers to him early in War and Peace in the Global Village: Joyce was probably the only man ever to discover that all social changes are the effect of new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of our sensory lives. It is the shift in this order, altering the images that we make of ourselves and our world, that guarantees that every major technical innovation will so disturb our inner lives that wars necessarily result as misbegotten efforts to recover the old images.l6 Finally, speaking of our "technologically created" environments in Through the Vanishing Point, he again indicates that "new environments reset our sensory thresh- olds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expecta- tions."17 One final qualification is necessary, and that is to the effect that there will be no attempt in this study to test or even to discuss in detail the empirical "truth" of McLuhan's formulations. Rather, they will be treated as theoretical hypotheses and will be analyzed in that light. Put another way, McLuhan will be approached as a speculative philosopher rather than as a-social scientist. CHAPTER I : FOOTNOTES lNeil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968). ' 2Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (New York: Random House, 1968). 3Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: The New American Library, 1964), pp. viii, ix. 4Ibid., pp. 268-269. 5Ibid., p. 289. 6George Leonard, "The Future of Education, The Class of 1989," Look, February 21, 1967, pp. 23-25. 7Postman and Weingartner, op. cit., pp. 16—24. 81bid., p. 19. 9Ibid., p. 29. 0George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968). ll Ibid., p. 51. lZIbid. l3McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 915., p. 33. 14Ibid., p. 55. 15———— Ibid., p. 83. 6Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1968), p. 5. 17Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 253. l6 CHAPTER II OVERVIEW OF MCLUHAN'S THEORY McLuhan's writings, as most of his readers will testify, are often difficult and confusing. No doubt, part of the difficulty rests with the novelty of his analysis of media and the inherent complexity of some of the themes he takes under consideration. I am convinced a larger measure of the confusion is due to his style which is disconnected and repetitious. At times he is overly expansive on a point while on other occasions he can be frustratingly abrupt. His admirers euphemistically refer to the latter as being cryptic. McLuhan's style, semantics, and organization (or lack of it) have been widely criticized. McLuhan himself has either explicitly or implicitly admitted that his work is difficult, his ideas may be inconsistent, his method is repetitious, his facts sometimes wrong, his statements often exaggerated, and his arguments not necessarily logical. Maybe I am belaboring the point or perhaps I have not yet made it. The point is, as the literary critic George Elliot has said, "It is not possible to give a rational summary of McLuhan's ideas. His writing is deliberately antilogical: circular, repetitious, unqualified, gnomic, outrageous."l l7 18 If Mr. Elliot is right, then this chapter is an attempt to do the impossible. Acting out of the obvious academic necessity to pretend that Mr. Elliot was mistaken, let me begin by summarizing what I believe are the four basic ideas that comprise McLuhan's theory, stating what seems to me to be the theory of history he employs in his work. These five sections should serve as a fairly comprehensive overview. The first three: "The Medium is the Message," "Media, Hot and Cold," and "Media are Extensions of Man" are most directljrapproachable through his book Understand- ing Media: The Extensions of Man. This volume, although fairly rambling and somewhat obscure, remains his most concise and systematic presentation of his theory of enculturation. The fourth idea "The Concept of Sensorium" is a recurrent theme throughout his works. Finally, McLuhan's theory of history, while also abundantly avail- able among his works, is most clearly reflected in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, which is a kind of cultural history, and From Cliche to Archetype. The Medium is the Message Of that vast repertory of McLuhan aphorisms, "the medium is the message" is no doubt the most familiar. This is due, in part, to the strikingly contra—conventional ring of the statement. However, I believe it is the most l9 widely circulated McLuhanism because it is central to his general theory. It is, as well, the least understood of his postulates. To say that "the medium is the message" is, in McLuhan's words, . . . merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium-~that is, of any extension of ourselves-—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology.2 The medium then is any technological extension of our- selves such as speech, print, clothing, money, automobile, telegraph, radio, television, etc. Hence, "medium" as a term in McLuhan's theory, means any human invention from speech to automation. This needs to be clearly understood since McLuhan's frequent use of words such as "communication" and "informa- tion" seems to place his comments in a limited context-- that of "communications technology." But, for McLuhan, the limitations we place on "communications" in common language do not seem to apply since, for him, all tech- nology can be understood in terms of their incorporation, treatment, and manipulation of information. (This is only one of several cases in which McLuhan's special use of common words generates perplexity for the reader. Given his comprehensive use of "information," his often quoted aphorism, "the electric light is pure informa- tion"makes at least a modicum of sense. Given the more 20 restricted use of "information" in common parlance, the statement is more or less incomprehensible.) McLuhan then proceeds throughout his work to pursue his personal strategy of inquiry-~the exploration of the human conse- quences of technology in terms of the epistemological character of cultures. It is possible, given the analysis above, to place McLuhan's work in a context that is more familiar than the semi-occult one in which, as media savant, he is usually placed. Although he can be, and usually is, regarded as a major hagiographer of pop culture, he may also be understood as a scholar of culture-—an anthro- pologist or social philosopher--who studies the impact of technology on epistemology in much the same way that other scholars study the impact of technology on economic organization, on social life, or on styles of art. His program of investigation shapes his selection of objects of inquiry. His concern with the epistemological leads him, as it has philosophers since Plato, to a posture of assigning primacy to the Egrms of technology, as against the content of it, in much the same way that philosophers concerned with the epistemology of art are attracted to "form." Hence, "the medium is the message." We typically define as "consequences of media" those conscious or intended uses and effects of our technology. That is, we tend to believe that the content 21 of a book or a television program is the important or influential aspect of our experience with either of these media. According to McLuhan, this approach doesn't begin to reveal their important consequences. Speaking of our machine technology in general he says, "In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs."3 Our technology, as McLuhan points out, becomes a part of our environment and exercises a formative power over us. From their office as environment they legislate the "scale, pace, or pattern" of human association as well as our very awareness and mode of perception. We are as blind to these environmental influences on our human condition as "fish are to water." Now, this environ- mental conditioning of our perception and the ensuing personal and social consequences are the real meanings or "messages" of media. With respect to such consequences, the intended uses or "content" of media are quite incon- sequential. McLuhan has an interesting interpretation of "content." He holds that the content of any medium is always another medium. On this account the content of the telegraph is print, the content of print is writing, and the content of writing is speech. While we focus on 22 the "content" or uses of a medium, the true nature of the medium escapes us. This is what McLuhan means when he asserts that "the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium."4 The "character of the medium" is its formative power, and, for McLuhan, "the formative power in the media are the media themselves."5 As we have seen, the formative power of a medium is its real "message"; therefore, "the medium is the message," a fact, says McLuhan, of which most men have been ignorant. McLuhan's work is replete with examples. The following one deals with some of the effects of the rail- road and airplane. It illustrates that the "message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."6 In his chapter entitled "The Medium is the Message" he writes: The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite- independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for.7 23 Since the dawn of man, there have only been a few technologies that have had such a profound and per- vasive message as to configure major portions of human history. The invention of the Gutenberg press heralded the birth of one of these technologies-—the technology of mechanization. For centuries following the Gutenberg press, the human psyche and social organism were the blind servants of mechanization. It determined our con- ceptions of time and space, our politics and economics, and our religion and philosophy. Even our concept of rationality did not elude its radical influence. The analysis of the Gutenberg technology--its message—-is the nucleus of McLuhan's famous book The Gutenberg Galaxy. The linear, repeatable medium of typography with its attendant homogeneity eventually created in us the illusion of continuous space as container, the illusion of lOgic as rationality, the illusion of time as endurance, and the illusion of the universe as a Newtonian mechanism. It also created the "public," a collectivity of individ- uals who were separate, homogeneous and possessed of a "point of View."8 It fragmented and multiplied human functions in the manner of an explosion. The language of "illusion" is, of course, McLuhan's, but here, too, the language is perhaps mis— leading since he does not seem to mean that we possess 24 an "illusion" that is contrary to "reality." Rather, a given culture is imbued by characteristic, technology- based illusions that differ from those of other cultures with other technologies. Although this point is not always clear in McLuhan's writing-—he sometimes gives the impression of wishing to be regarded as being uniquely and quite specially in touch with a "reality" accessible only to himself and a few other privileged initiates-- its acceptance can clarify some McLuhanesque perplexities. Our illusions in regard to space, time, rationality, mechanism and so on are the foundations of our epistemology and they are "illusions" only to the extent to which we fail to recognize their bases in technology and the fact that they are artifacts of a given technological world and not immutable generalizations from some "real" world of eternal verities. It is only recently that electric technology has begun to reverse this fragmenting, explosive process. With the imploding effects of electric circuitry, we are being "retribalized." The "public" has given way to the "mass"; mechanical lineality has succumbed to electric all-at-onceness. Our world has become a "global village." Now, for the first time, we have a vantage point no other men have ever had. Our vantage point is the result of the present interfacing of two great technologi- cal ages, and it is enhanced by the speed of electrically 25 * induced change. It is this shift from mechanization to electric technology and the rapid succession of media and their effects that has sharpened our perception. With new insight we announce "the medium is the message." Media Hot and Cold To fully appreciate McLuhan's media analysis, we must understand his reference to media as either "hot" or "cool." By characterizing media in this fashion, McLuhan is distinguishing between what he sees as two fundamental types of media. He employs three criteria in making the distinction between "hot" media and "cool" media. First, he considers the sense or senses that are engaged by the medium; second, the amount of participation that is evoked by the medium; and third, the kinds of effects (message) engendered by the medium. These three aspects of a medium are closely, if not inextricably, interrelated in such a way as to color the nature of the medium, making the "hot" and "cool" distinction possible. In the following passage McLuhan defines "hot" and "cool" media and indicates how the three above mentioned criteria are interrelated. There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High defini- tion is the state of being well filled with data. A photographs is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very 26 little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.9 The effects of a "hot" medium are directly related to the medium's extension of a single sense in "high definition" and its incapacity to evoke participa- tion. "Hot" media lead to specialization and fragmenta- tion in our lives just as they are a specialization and thereby a fragmentation of our senses.' The fragmentation effect of hot media has resulted in the rise of individual- ity and the individual "point of View." McLuhan refers to this rise of individuality and fragmentation as "detribalization." Since hot media do not permit partici- pation or involvement, they encourage and produce detach- ment. They enable the individual to break away from the organic wholeness of the group and develop an independent "point of View." The posture of viewing society and the world in an involved, objective, independent manner has become a respectable model for civilized men as they have been conditioned by the bombardment of hot media. The great esteem given the stereotyped profile of the pure scientist in our society indicates the value we place on such a posture. 27 Primitive or "tribal" man, on the other hand, is not as fragmented as civilized man. Here, the individual is an organic and integral part of that whole which is the group. He is totally involved in the group life. There are no "private points of View." Specialization of the senses in perception has not occurred to the degree it has for societies shaped by mechanical technologies. Consequently, in the tribe we do not find the fragmenta- tion and specialization of life that manifests itself in what we call "jobs." Rather, in tribal cultures we find "roles" which are more inclusive and integrated approaches to life. Just as primitive man is in contrast to civilized man in these respects, so "cool" media are in contrast to "hot" media in terms of their effects. "Cool" media interrelate our senses and provide a balanced perception. They create involvement in depth as they seduce our par- ticipation. The effects of cool media are antithetical to separateness, fragmentation, and individuality. They have the inclusive character of an icon. They are mythical and lead to corporateness. "In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, 10 As hot backward countries are cool, and we are hot." media "detribalize," cool media have the power to "retribalize." 28 Enormous disruptions in society occur when a medium of a different "temperature" is introduced into a culture. That is, a hot mechanical medium results in social turmoil when introduced into a "cool" tribal culture. Likewise, television, a cool medium, has been causing a tremendous upheaval since its introduction in our hot society. The "generation gap" is actually the difference between a new generation raised with the influence of television and electric technology and the older generation whose perceptions, goals, beliefs and attitudes have been created by the effects of print and mechanical technology. The electric media cultivate involvement, a concern for the present, a "nowness." They bestow a mythical dimension on experience and cause a need for integration. McLuhan thinks it only natural that children raised with the dominant influence of electric media should eschew "jobs" and distant goals which belong to the past mechanical age of fragmentation and lineality. The new "now" generation are in search of roles and are concerned with the immediate. At this point, McLuhan's theory of history, which will be discussed in detail further on, begins to emerge. History, at least the history of the West, can be under- stood as a series of transformations of culture that flow from changes in the epistemological forms that inhere in technology. These changes, in turn, are manifested in 29 political, social, and economic transformations, often ones of great magnitude. It was the application of this theory, in Galaxy, to the Reformation epoch that established McLuhan as a major thinker, and he has maintained it through his later work even when he has turned from history to "futurism." It is especially interesting, in light of the position taken here, that McLuhan's main concerns are aesthetic, to note that historiography, on his view, becomes an emphatically aesthetic enterprise; i.e., the identification of the epistemological forms of technological transformations, at least at those points when the "temperature" of media is radically altered. Indeed, McLuhan is insistent that at such times it is uniquely the "extra-environmental artist"--especially the "avant garde," such as Joyce, Picasso and Eisenstein——who is best equipped to understand and interpret the foundations of social, political and economic changes. Media as Extensions of Man The concepts of medium as message and hot and cool media subsume McLuhan's treatment of one term of the transaction between medium and person. It is here that McLuhan attempts a turn calculated to counter the unre— stricted relativism and nascent mysticism of his concept of medium by introducing a biologically based construction 30 of the person. Technology, it turns out, does not flow from an infinitely variable world of unrestrained imagination. Rather, it is shaped by and grounded in the biological character of man. Media are extensions of man. Too, our response to media--our bundle of "illusions"——constitutes a sort of quasi-biological entity-~the "sensorium”—-which mediates our "takings" from the total possible world of perception. All media are extensions of man. That is, any medium extends one or more of our human organs or functions in some material other than ourselves. Two of the clearest examples McLuhan offers in support of this assertion are clothing and the wheel. Clothing is an extension of skin which functions to conserve body heat and energy. The wheel extends the function of transporta— tion, which is a function of the foot. If this were all McLuhan wished to convey regard- ing media as extensions of man, my task would be easily concluded. However, he attempts to explain the causative principle behind all extensions of ourselves and their effects upon our sensory lives as well as the reason we are "somnambulists" when it comes to our perception of the nature of media. Addressing himself to these matters he writes: 31 In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or "amputation" of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numb- ness or blocking of perception. . . . Self- amputation forbids self—recognition.ll In other words, all media are extensions of those parts of ourselves which have been overstimulated to the point of threatening the coordination function of our central nervous system. The strategy of placing the organ outside ourselves is a quest for equilibrium. The "amputation" relieves the strain on the central nervous system by causing a numbness with respect to the threaten— ing organ (sense or function) that is extended. However, the extended organ is thereby accelerated and intensified, becoming a specialist irritation. The central nervous system responds with a generalized numbness. This numbness blocks recognition of the effects of the accelerated function of the extended organ. When the acceleration places a burden upon, or overstimulates, another organ, sense or function, a new "autoamputation" or extension is necessary. 32 Throughout this process there is a shifting of sense ratios. The equilibrium that is sought by the process of extension is an equilibrium among the senses, for the central nervous system is the coordinator of the senses. As extension amputates an overstimulated organ, a new sense ratio or "closure" is established. The extended and thereby accelerated organ has its own sensory bias which has been intensified by the extension. As a new component of our technological environment, it takes part in the latest transfiguration of our sensory lives. Thus, it is the interaction of our senses with our technologies and the new scale, pace, or pattern they introduce into our lives that give birth to new techno- logical extensions of ourselves. This interaction and its result prompted McLuhan to say that Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world . 12 The significant reversal from the rapid multipli— cation of mechanically accelerated and extended human organs to the present implosion came with electric technology. In one of the very few passages in which his attitude toward this phenomenon seems to be appre— hensive rather than enthusiastic, McLuhan considers the 33 new technology in terms of his musings about technologi- cal origins in general. He writes: With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desparate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of out— rageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.13 McLuhan believes there is only one extension of man to come, and that seems to be somewhat destined to occur. As he put it in his introduction to Understanding Essie= After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—ethe technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collec— tively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extendedl4 our senses and Our nerves by the various media. This final extension of ourselves will be accom- plished, according to McLuhan, via the computer. The interplay between man and his technology, broken in all previous stages by the intervention of the human nervous system as a mediating agent, becomes, with electronic 34 technology, a closed system-—a "feedback loop" in computer parlance. The Concept of Sensorium McLuhan's concept of sensorium, its variegations and determinative power over perception, is the founda- tion of his system. This foundational concept is what authenticates McLuhan's theory as an aesthetic theory, and therefore, it will be addressed again in Chapter III. However, given its import for the total system, it could not be excluded from consideration in any sufficient over- view of McLuhan's theory. The sensorium is composed of the five senses. The ratio between the senses varies in this composition when— ever a particular sense IS intensified. Synesthesia, the interplay or mutual involvement of all the senses, is achieved when there is a balanced ratio among the senses. In this respect, the sense of touch has a special place in the human sensorium. McLuhan asserts that "tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object."15 Tactility then is itself synesthetic. This, in part, accounts for the fact that tactility is the first casualty among our sensory modes of perception when the visual sense is extended. As we saw earlier, the extension of any sense demands a new closure or ratio among the senses. Furthermore, the 35 specialized intensification of a single sense disrupts the sensorium, and by fragmentation, thwarts synesthesia. The technologiéally extended sense is removed from the humansensoriumaumiinteraction.with the other senses is thereby prevented. In his "Prologue" to The gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan discussed this point. ..Ale principle of exchange and translation, or metaphor, is in our rational power to translate all of our senses into one another. This we do every instant of our lives. But the pritmzxwe pay for sgnxéhal technoltxthmal tools, whether the wheel or the alphabet or radio, is that these massive extensions of sense consti- tute closed systems. Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness.l6 Although an extended sense is objectified and thus abstracted from the sensorium, it nonetheless effects the sensorium. The new closed system requires sensory closure. Simply stadrxfl, the inttwnzification Cd:éi scnse~nmn1ifest in any media demands a new ratio among the senses. The reproportionment of the sensorium is thus effected. In the earliru_