McLuhan's Techno-Sensorium City: Coming to Our Senses in a Programmed Environment 9781793605245, 9781793605252, 1793605246

Citation preview

McLuhan’s Techno-Sensorium City

McLuhan’s Techno-Sensorium City Coming to Our Senses in a Programmed Environment

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-0524-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-0525-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction: Unsettling Cities: Erudite Activism/Ongoing Influence

1

1 Techno-City: From City to Village to Programmed Environment

25

2 Sensorium City: Coming to Our Senses

51

3 Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning: Collaborating with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Mixing with Ekistics

75

4 McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers: Gyorgy Kepes and Jane Jacobs

97

5 McLuhan Now: In New Materialist, Media Ecology, and Visual Theory

125

6 McLuhan Now: City Theory, Architecture, and Art

141

References169 Index177 About the Author

183

v

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge support from my institution, The University of Winnipeg. Within my department, I am rewarded by the friendship and invested scholarship of Dr. Matthew Flisfeder, Dr. Jason Hannan, and Dr. Andrew McGillivray. I am lucky to have such colleagues. Dr. Jino Distasio in the Research Office at University of Winnipeg has been helpful in finding funding, and Dr. Ken McCluskey in the Faculty of Education also provided support for this publication. In our Library, copyright librarian Brianne Selman and area librarian Ian Fraser have been helpful. Student research assistants have provided excellent and careful proofreading support: Sophie Ashton, Valerie Chelangat and Cassidy Rempel. I also want to mention other generous and collaborative colleagues: Dr. Adina Balint, Dr. Helen Lepp Friesen, Dr. Fiona Green, and my dear and gifted friend Dr. Judith Harris. I must also thank colleagues in the Media Ecology Association, a professional organization that has provided a home for my research, with particular thanks to Carolin Aronis, Lance Strate, and Paolo Granata. The Canadian Communications Association annual conference has also offered valuable space for exploring ideas. In the Toronto area, at different stages of writing this book, I have appreciated the support and collegiality of these scholars: Adam Lauder, Sarah Sharma, John Shoesmith, and, recently, Pascale Chapdelaine, with whom I am moving into exploring new McLuhan territory. At home, I owe thanks to my family for understanding that this project has needed buckets of time: my husband Warren Rogers (for editing help); my daughter Morgan (for listening); and my daughter Hartley (for encouraging).

vii

viii

Acknowledgments

At Lexington, Nicolette Amstutz has shepherded this project from inception to production, and Jessica Tepper has also provided valuable editing support. Project manager Arun Rajakumar provided patient and timely assistance,especially with the tricky task of indexing. None of us knew at the time of the contract was issued that we’d have to produce the book in the time of a pandemic.

Introduction Unsettling Cities: Erudite Activism/Ongoing Influence

Marshall McLuhan is known primarily as a theorist of media and communications, a field where his reputation and influence have enjoyed a resurgence over the last decades (Lauder and McLeod Rogers 5), in part because his probes and speculations have proven prescient on many fronts: our reliance on burgeoning media and technology; our related sense of emptiness and alienation; our sense of global connectedness, promoting time-space compression; our immersion in participatory “social” media and tech-based elements of maker culture. Redirecting the focus, the argument of this book is that above all else his was a program to train human perception, and to support this he was conversant in design and urban theory, making substantial explorations of these fields as well as contributions with resonant explanatory power. Our understanding of McLuhan is enriched, and applications of his legacy of thought and theory are freshly motivated if he is reconsidered as both an activist and a speculative urbanist, one who drew from crossdisciplinary and ahistoric sources to explore constitutive exchanges between humanity and technologies and to imagine a sustainable future based on collective sharing and shaping of resources. Apart from my examination of McLuhan’s urbanism in the article, “McLuhan and the City,” the scope of McLuhan’s interest in and interventions into the shape and future of cities—into matters of architecture, infrastructure, housing, and planning—remains largely unexamined. This book compiles his direct references to these concerns, as well as related passages in which McLuhan explored the changing demands of individual and collective citizenship in a technologized environment with global reach and spread. The compendium of McLuhan’s observations about city life and development has stand-alone significance, yet his insights are rendered more powerful and profound when understood as influencing and interacting with interdisciplinary 1

2

Introduction

design-oriented theory and conversations. Beyond possessing a historically informed view of perceptual knowing, sensory awareness, and design-making, he was actively engaged in the vibrant art and urban design culture of his day—aware of emerging theory and practices and in turn influencing how his contemporaries imagined and often produced environmental installations and spaces. Moreover, the links he drew among media/technology and space, building, art, and cities continue to provide fodder for current urban and art criticism and practices, although his informing presence is often unrecognized. My study proposes to remedy this oversight. Examining McLuhan’s statements about the city and his extensive interaction and collaboration with urban planners and designers provides both context and focal point for reconsidering the highly implicated relationship between humans and technology at the heart of his vision. His definition of media is expansive, including all human-made systems and tools. He explored how technologies we make for survival and pleasure—from the wheel to the alphabet, to the telegraph, to the computer—provoke transformative change. As designers and users of these tools, we are transformed by relentless immersion into the technological surround and on a trajectory of becoming ever more extended and integrated into the world of things. Often caught up in interplay without “interval”—without gap time to think about how to identify connections or distinctions—we not only tether the organic to the inorganic/machinic/electric/digital but do so without recognition of what we are losing and without means to intervene in the process (McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs” 3). He made an urgent appeal for us to recognize and resist the encroachments of technology on the human body and environment; with the unlimited growth of technology, there is perhaps more urgency now in such a call. He believed that awareness could spark resistance and encourage collective participation in reshaping the urban environment as a technosensorium—an environment in which technology is designed to be favorable to life and capable of engaging multiple human senses. McLuhan’s prediction of dissolving cities captures the essence of our current “dematerialized” state—our bodies increasingly trained to stay prone as technologies act on our behalf—shopping, protesting, cleaning, for example— and our minds dependent on computer assistance that leads to a widespread sense of living foremost as cyber-citizens. We still remain in place and amid streets and buildings and meet real-time/real-place demands, and in recent times, there has been a resurgent interest in the energizing force of local place and increasing awareness of our dependence on and debt to earth elements and climate. Yet such commitment to environmental culture and ecology is not enough to restore or rebalance lives reliant on a range of technological devices and time spent online; we share a collective sense of living virtual/ethereal and multidimensional lives—“living in a field of relations where before there had been only a segment or a fragment or a single point of view” (“Inside”

Unsettling Cities

3

52). As we move further away from embodied engagement in the visual and tangible spectacle of city life, we begin to imagine space as “environments” and “atmospheres”—supported in this by art and design performances, installations, and texts that render atmospheres visible and virtual space tangible. More recently (as I write this), the global viral pandemic has expedited the effects of city dissolution. Isolated and quarantined, we have emptied our cities by government mandate and self-regulation, depending on virtual connections for sociability and commerce. Many have praised our readiness for online migration and the widespread availability of digital portals, yet there have also been murmurs against such wholesale restructuring of sociability and public order and hopes for a return to human occupation of physical places. Conspiracy theories aside (linking viral spread to platform capitalism, suspected as beneficiary), there are concerns that technology propels calamity: we had an online world waiting and migrated on cue. We can read in McLuhan prediction of such a full-scale plunge from place to placelessness as has been provoked by COVID-19 when he warned, for example, that the message of electric circuitry is “Total Change”: “Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ You can’t go home again” (Italics mine, Media 16). The immanence of this change and the danger of disorder provoked the urgency of his call for public awakening and involvement. Before others did and with an ecological sweep that continues resonant, McLuhan recognized that electronic and digital technologies were changing our lives on many levels in ways that could have good or tragic outcomes: affecting the external, visible, material environment, as well as the lessvisible infrastructure and systems implicated in its design and sustenance; influencing collective civics such as sociability and governance; and, perhaps most important in his view, changing our interior lives, individual identity, and a sense of purpose. Beyond forecasting that our cities would become one connected “global village” and our lives become more communitarian, he offered more radical speculations about the central role of technology in this village, benign only if designed to foster interactive and sensory responses. While he warned of a dystopian future of out-of-control technologies and human enslavement, he also expressed hope that we might begin crafting, collectively, a techno-sensorium city, using computers to respond to human needs and desires and to help us liberate synesthetic capabilities and knowing. Speculating about a future state of “cosmic harmony that transcends time and space,” McLuhan anticipated the possibility of us building a responsive and interactive human-made environment—one assistant to transformed and collective human needs and interests and one pulsed with the intent “to sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art” (Playboy 23). McLuhan did not believe in or advocate for a model of human progress but looked for what can best be described as patterned change. His “laws of

4

Introduction

media” argued that nothing is ever entirely new but should be understood instead as retrieving and reformulating an element of the past. Yet if he allowed for a form of recurrence, he coupled this with speed-up, characterizing ours as a time of accelerated speed and spread of change. McLuhan believed that by actually witnessing the power of technology to alter human activity, minds, and bodies, as well as the environments for living, many of us might recognize the danger of passively adopting every new technology on offer—especially those designed to take over human activity and agency and render us more helpless and dependent. He believed we were irretrievably immersed in a world of artifice of our own making—producing not only a plethora of human-made objects but a fully human-made environment— goaded by the vastness and speed of electric technologies. His frequent reference to satellite technology altering our relation to the earth conveys his sense not only of a sea change in communications—of increased connectivity and surveillance—but more broadly and in terms that animate today’s climate change debate, of creating an artificial environment: what we had imagined as “nature” and “natural” is now touched and affected by deliberate technological interventions and less predictable seepages which, he argued, make survival dependent on planned engineering. Committed to urging citizen involvement and imagining conditions needed for the formation of “a liberating and exhilarating” urban future for the world (Playboy 22), McLuhan can be understood more fully if reconsidered as both radical activist and speculative urbanist. This book argues that by acknowledging the educative aim and activist edge of McLuhan’s project, we grasp not only the depth of his vision but also its currency. He imagined a designed world—an engineered environment—built to promote sensory engagement and improve the human condition: a world city I am describing as a “technosensorium.” He imagined the delivery of this manufactured environment not as sealed and inflexible but as responsive to adjustments by interactive citizen users. Designed to maximize the comfort and pleasure of all citizens, such a city, formed following a transformative process involving the dissolution of boundaries delineating races and nations, would be principled by shared consciousness. CITIES/CITIZENS/TECHNOLOGIES: MAKING CHANGE This book examines how McLuhan read the logic of the modernist city, giving way on all fronts. The modernist city still dominated in McLuhan’s day (although he detected its demise); in it, we have relied on, reverenced, and anticipated more media and technology. His speculative predictions about the city of the future allowed for both dystopian and utopian outcomes. In

Unsettling Cities

5

the worst scenario, we could fall further into servitude and storm, unable to withstand rhizomatic ecological pressures; in a better city future, we could participate in engineering the programmed environment. His utopian vision predicts harmony among interlayered ecologies (along with the demise of pillars that organize life as we now know it, such as politics, language, and privacy). He uses mystical terms to convey the heretofore unknown power and beauty of living without privacy, edges, or separations of any sort, suggesting such a transformation will enable us “to plumb the depths of [our]own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe” (Playboy 23). For McLuhan, the modernist city (still present in his day, although he espied its decline and demise) was for him a showcase or showroom of media and technology. He exhorted us as citizens to grapple with understanding how this powerful media assemblage was built not simply to promote human survival and comfort but, of darker consequence, to regulate human practices and values. The Western modernist state does not encourage free thought and action but passivity and blind consumerism, distributing many forms of regimental propaganda. His frequently stated and movable aphorism, “the medium is the message,” encourages us to recognize that every new technology comes at a cost—so that we may buy innovations hoping for ease and prestige but in so doing lose a measure of independence and ingenuity. Rather than being distracted by the bevy of new products and the machine world of urban consumption and circulation—and the messages of reassurance surrounding each—we need to step back and evaluate the city as a composite medium that shapes—really, contorts—our values, actions, and dreams. His awareness of undertaking a pioneering advocacy role in encouraging citizens to be reflective and critical of the urban world of whirling technologies is conveyed in his observation that “the wild broncos of technological culture have yet to find their buster or masters. They have found only their P.T. Barnums” (Counterblast 14). The built urban environment is media saturated, with structures and infrastructures updated over time, always in pursuit of increasing our ease, distractions, and amusements. Each human invention delights by relieving us of a physical burden and by restoring psychic “equilibrium” by supplying a “counter-irritant” to environmental pressures (Understanding 65), yet ultimately these same innovations rob us of connection and our ability to do for ourselves. Technological innovations, housed and always evolving in our cities, serve as physical extensions of our bodies, and they are no sooner introduced than taken for granted in an ongoing process that results in amputating abilities and truncating agency. As a result, media and technology change not only material place but also how we act within it: social and civic practices, aesthetic values, and personal attitudes and expectations.

6

Introduction

McLuhan believed in the inevitability of forces of change and recurrence—and in the possibility of understanding incoming patterns if one were prepared to study the environmental surround. Our dependence on all technologies—from wheel to alphabet, to home computer and smartphone—is fated for obsolescence, in a world “where nothing is stable but change itself” (McLuhan and Nevitt 1). Current technologies differ from older technologies, mainly because the speed of innovation allows most of us to witness their impact first hand. To use a real-world example, many of us can remember the process by which cell phones became smartphones and became our constant companions. Design theorists Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley observe that along with physical changes to the device itself, there have been accompanying changes to how we relate to others and our surroundings: “Its huge role in relieving boredom and avoiding communication with people in the vicinity cannot be underestimated. . . . It is typically placed between the human and its surroundings, tuning the surroundings out or engaging differently with them” (242–43). They note that, for many of us, the cell phone is an extension of body and mind: “The person is unthinkable without the phone. . . . The brain no longer saves the kind of information that the phone is expected to store and provide. . . . The ability to ask questions of the phone gives the sense that the Internet is part of one’s cognitive toolset” (243). McLuhan pioneered the point that changing technological devices and systems change culture, interiority, and even the body itself. The speed of change from wall- to cell- to smartphone and the corollary influences on human identity and conduct would have been something he easily (if unhappily) grasped, for another of his central claims was that in the electric/digital age, the speed of innovation had quickened to become observable. Whereas, in the past, media changes were gradual enough to be absorbed without noticeable impact, he noted speed-up and circulation characterizing the flow of media and communications in his day and providing “a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us—and thus win back control of our destinies” (Playboy 5). He hoped that by actually witnessing the power of technology to alter humanity and the environment, many of us might oppose adopting new technologies and adapting to the pressures they impose. He believed that witnessing such evidently linked changes in our tools, practices and abilities might motivate interventions—such as our refusing to be so easily mastered by technological aggression and instead seeking control of our own usage patterns and even to imagine and make technological options. If we engage and intervene, to direct mediatic development, we are bound to seek and favor technologies that affirm life—that make us feel more balanced and involved in our lives and that in turn treat others and the environment in more equitable and sustainable ways. His was a humanist conception—we build the technologies, we are in turn changed by these instruments of human

Unsettling Cities

7

devising, and yet it is possible by the exertion of conscious effort to reinsert ourselves in design evolution and even to regain control. His method of seeking environmental change was dialectical. He was part of—a leader of—countercultural movement, aware of projecting his voice alongside the voices of artists he viewed as tasked with seeing through veils and various contrivances of repressive corporate and political regimes. Aiming for more than dissonance and critique and for more, too, than amassing oppositional factionalism, he hoped in the short term for the awakening of individuals, leading en masse to collective liberation; in the longer term, he expected instantiation of his counter-environment as a dominant environment (although this environment would in turn be destabilized and revised). He used the term “counter-environment” rather than “counterculture” to indicate that he imagined an ecological network of change, not merely revised social practices. Musician and theorist Ted Giaio recently recommended turning to Gregory Bateson not out of nostalgia but for a model of 1960s counterculture capable of informing political action now. McLuhan’s example has a similar heft. In particular, we might review his provocations encouraging individuals to wake up: just as Joyce wasalert to the many shades of meaning attaching to wakefulness, and the powerful need to wake to the world, McLuhan imagined an awakened state as one more critical and open, making one more aware of powerful and previously dormant sensory capabilities and more adept at wielding them. He wanted fully sentient people to participate in and contribute to world making, not “woke” citizen groups directing their energy to revising broken systems and too often working from narrow scripts, taking aim at narrow targets. In McLuhan’s view, it was a waste of time to critique the established culture—for it was already fading if not gone. The important action was individually to understand change and incoming forces and collectively to participate in crafting better and more responsive technologies to build a sustainable and rewarding environment— not suitable for an elite few, nor for an empowered faction, but involving everyone and responsive to global needs. FROM METROPOLIS AS SECOND BODY TO MOVING CITIES, WITHOUT WALLS McLuhan conceived of the city of his day as a human-built tool on a macrocosmic scale, a complex of interactive structural and infrastructural technologies. Scholars continue to ponder the utter elasticity of his view of what constitutes media and technology: not only everything built but also the organic world, “the planet itself,” post-satellite image capture (Understanding Media), and, ever-increasingly, the mediated human body. As he tells readers in City as

8

Introduction

Classroom, there is no better place than the city to gain an understanding of media and technology and human and mediatic interactivity. Let me sketch a few more details of McLuhan’s view of the modernist city of his day and the changes happening within it as a counter-environment replaces the environment in a transforming world. He referred to the modernist city that was still visible and functioning in his day as in the process of “fading” (Understanding 454), its heavy and imposing structures and infrastructure inevitably subject to decay and potential disorder—built up to impress but outmoded by the forces of inevitable change. At its peak, responding to industrialism and growing urban crowds, the great city had functioned as a hub and focal point to bring people, goods, and governance to a centralized location; to move citizens efficiently through the maze of innercity streets; and to furnish protective housing to act like “the castle of our skins” (Understanding 454). All roads and tracks led to the city, and, within the city, roads, wires, and pipes moved people and things around invisible networks of manageable scale. In McLuhan’s day, there was the visible waning of the processes of city settlement and centralization in the North American cities he observed. Housing was decentralizing, and road expansion projects too were connecting hubs to suburbs as well as increasingly establishing multiple small centers. Air transportation was in turn loosening dependence on road and rails. These new and rapid transportation/mobility changes were both hastened and supported by technological developments, and they affected not only the shape and structure of city spaces but also economic, social, civic, and personal patterns. There was for McLuhan urban estrangement in the process of decentralization that removed neighborhoods and homes from the heart of the city, which was in turn populated by “mobile strangers” (Understanding 300). In their substance and structure, modern cities had been built to be heavy and unresponsive to change, and the planning and renewal projects that McLuhan observed were continuing to rely on what he considered to be recalcitrant materials and outmoded concepts of permanence, creating a heavy footprint: tall towers of concrete and glass were replacing more modest brick walkups, and freeway expansions—“an old hardware American dream of now dead cities and blighted communities”—were still gouging through neighborhoods to widen the original grid pattern (Letters 269). To McLuhan, the city of his day was replete with technologized extensions, each built to replace some form of human ability or activity. As he said in a letter to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “We have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven out of us” (278). We have developed technologies to do work formerly assigned to human limbs and nerves—so that we are increasingly inactive, unreceptive, and thoughtless—and more reliant on devices that replace human effort. We consult information in print

Unsettling Cities

9

(and now of course online) in place of relying on memory, use thermostats to control room temperature and climate in place of body sensation, and rely on cars and planes to move us quickly across distances. These are gains that allow us to do more, but each introduces artificial substitutions and reduces human involvement. Similar to Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” that has us tethering ourselves to deeply internalized daily practices and sense of place—to “social structures . . . deeply ingrained within us all” (Houston 156)—McLuhan also considers us as compliant in constructing the pattern of our habits. We are not simply sleepwalking but “motivated somnambulists,” dazed by technologies and conformist pressure and eager to take the path of least resistance. Since the growth rate of technology is exponential, our sense of being swallowed by it only stands to grow stronger. He recommended that rather than simply remaining silent, doing less, and feeling more lost—adopting what he called a “stop the world I want to get off” stance (City as Classroom 16)—humans should instead use the city as a lab, to reactivate senses by deliberating on how media operates and intervenes in our sensory life at every turn, on multiple levels. Much of this training involved learning to rely less on sight and to activate other senses. He argued that print literacy as our key mode of organization and communication has made us increasingly occularcentric—prone to take in everything through the eye and to disregard other forms of sensory information (McLeod Rogers, “Self and City” 191). Moreover, he contended that our gaze is drawn to the obvious and prominent, conditioned by both the push of personal habit and the pull of outside regulatory apparatus. By overlooking secondary details and the contextualizing surroundings, we see too little and entirely miss how things are connected: habit-bound and seeing surfaces that mark our way, we are propelled to follow open roads and crowds; we fail to seek meaningful patterns or engage in the process of discovery and understanding that he refers to as “pattern recognition” (Classroom 165). To invoke another pair of terms he favors, we take in “figure,” but not “ground,” and as a result move through our lives with limited information about the environment or our connection to it. INCOMING: TECHNO-SENSORIUM WORLD CITY The future world city McLuhan imagined favorably would be light, flexible, and mobile by design, responsive to conditions of increased human mobility and product and information flow. Relatedly, he imagined housing structures and patterns of settlement, which “shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community” (Understanding 173), by evolving the characteristics of lightness, transparency, and mobility, to suit global and

10

Introduction

even cosmic sharing. Understanding Media provides many examples of how McLuhan imagined impending changes. In place of fixed walls and heavy furnishings, he pointed to the growing implementation of modular pieces that allow for responsive spatial reconfigurations (Understanding 174). He further speculated about the possible (perhaps even desirable) development of technology-based engineered solutions like transparent walls made of climate-controlled air currents (Understanding 174). He often pronounced an end to linearity as an organizing principle: forms such as lines and formations with borders such as buildings, cities, and even nations were facing obsolescence with the worldwide integration of the human population, redefining community as made up of global rather than proximate neighbors (Medium 16; Understanding 176). Accompanying greater global mobility and portability for the apparatus of culture, McLuhan also imagined new forms of politics and sociability. He imagined a formation calling for less governance and conformity and for more individual investment in community, environment, and the technological affordances woven through these. If the modernist city and the machine age had demanded systematization and conformity, the incoming electronic/digital age allowed for expressions of preference and difference and the constellation of small groups on the basis of like-mindedness. It is in view of this that McLuhan uses the term “tribalism.” In the future techno-sensorium city, there is greater permeability and transfer between outer and inner lives in McLuhan’s view. Houses, buildings, and cities always represent cities of the interior, “manifesting all forms of human personality” (Understanding 153). Houses as they now represent our expectation of individuality and privacy and our sense that there is a barrier between us and others; houses in the future—lighter, more portable, and even more transparent—both influence and represent our developing sense of there being no barrier between inner or outer lives, where values are more communal and everything is shared, so that we may even transfer thought without the tool of language but instead by a form of ESP. Working with an interactive and ecological matrix, changes to our physical world go beyond simply changing social practices and need to be understood as both caused by and influential of our psyche or inner lives. In a letter to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, McLuhan suggested that the challenge of city planning is to respond to a new era of radical openness and movement: he targeted decentralization and the speeded-up flow of information as provocative of cancelling boundaries and traditional or familiar organizational patterns: “We can no longer exist in Euclidean space under electronic conditions, and this means that the divisions between inner and outer, private and communal . . . are simply not there for an electric one” (Letters 278). In this same letter, he links the loss of centralized city planning and design to a raft

Unsettling Cities

11

of conditions that accrued from moving from literate to electric culture—for example, there is his claim that we no longer take time to think in words nor depend on the assumption that words have shared meanings but instead experience a barrage of nonlinguistic sensations and movements that defy definitional coding and any permanent form of collection or collation. He claimed that the management of urban space required abandoning flexible and responsive structures permanently to promote our sense of being connected to—and even influential over—the outer world: “The problem of urban planning today . . . [ is] that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal point of consciousness” (278). With impending conditions of permeability and exposure, McLuhan exhorted engineers and designers to connect their mapping and building efforts to the broad reconceptualization challenge facing leaders in other sectors—politicians, corporate and finance managers, educators, scientists, and artists. He phrased the question in these terms: “How to breathe new life into lineal forms of the past five centuries while admitting the relevance of the new organic forms of spatial organization . . .—is not this the task of the architect at present? . . . Is it not time that we begin to think seriously about a consensus for our media, as we already try to think of some social relevance for structure and design in our buildings?” (“Inside” 54). Whatever is planned and built both represents and becomes us, for outer and inner worlds elide, each resembling the other. He urged designers to control the role of technology in planning and building so that rather than being reduced to living in a world of meager efficiencies—and being reduced individually to meager and regulated existence—we seek an environment promoting comfort and beauty and options for sociability, sharing, and choice. If our earth photographed as globe and belted by communication infrastructure is now an art form, it is within our reach, he claimed, to make of it an installation project that supports life and helps us find patterns and make meaning. The future world city McLuhan imagined—a planetary “techno-sensorium”—was a programmed environment, with humans in a position to control and adjust the algorithms. He often used space and flight imagery to convey the need to harness unseen energies into invisible patterns and networks to promote order, comfort, and pleasure; while he envisioned computer monitoring as a programmed environment responsive to human sensory needs, the role of humans in designing the program and monitoring its use is implicit: “Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights”(Understanding 278). He speculated further on the possibility of entire regions wired to receive rationed forms of media whose delivery was dependent on the sensory needs

12

Introduction

of the population (as calculated by sensors installed in the environment); he was explaining what we now think of as the way algorithms—“artificial neural networks and deep learning systems”—control environments and offer choices, given that “the algorithm shows us what it thinks we really want to see, as if in a strange kind of mirror” (Colomina and Wigley 253). McLuhan imagines this interactive program working individually and collectively to support wellness and wholeness so that “whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable” (Understanding 45). He believed that once we identify optimum sensory thresholds, the computer can then establish these: The computer will be in a position to carry out orchestrated programming for the sensory life of entire populations. It can be programmed in terms of their total needs, not just in terms of messages they should be hearing, but in terms of the total experience as picked up and patterned by all the senses at once. (“Invisible Environment” 166)

In another speculative turn, he imagined sensors responding to physical cues from the human bios, with self-adjusting walls of air built to suit the human body temperature; he also imagines the reverse, with the human body adjusting to atmospheric conditions. For him, we are in the process of reintroducing principles of interactivity and connectivity, and part of this is accepting houses as “extensions of skin and body” (Understanding 177) and cities as like “a second body” (Understanding 175). Computers and technology can play a support role in establishing “a new equilibrium among all the senses and faculties” to help “shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community” (Understanding 171, 173). DISSOLVING CITIES AND BOUNDARIES McLuhan’s well-known prediction that our rural/urban world was transforming into a linked “global village” has often been slenderized to a cliché conveying that we live in a world of increasingly instantaneous sharing and communication, with networked connectivity blending time and space together. Yet beyond the linked affordances of computer technology, he envisioned the multiple and radical changes that would affect place, people, and practices in this village as technosphere, discriminating between the conditions leading to a dreadful future and those needed to build one more hopeful and liberating. He warned of being mobbed by others and barraged by data and surveillance, if out-of-control technologies continue in the lead, leaving us helpless in the face of ever new “gadgetry” (“Notes on Burroughs”

Unsettling Cities

13

3) and wandering through a “junk yard of environmental change” (Playboy 22). He hoped we might avoid such a slavish future by cultivating a critical understanding of our resources and relationships and controlling our mediated experience, ensuring human survival and improving “our comfort and happiness” (Playboy 5). He argued such change was already underway in his day: unsettling everything from homes and roads to jobs and human relations. He contended there would be increasing dissolution of national boundaries and the politics associated with national and regional identity—and that such political and proprietorial change would be contentious and dangerous—especially in an age with nuclear options at hand. He also frequently sketched his premonition that we would lose our dependence on phonetic language and that in place of speaking and writing we would rely on the computer to supply a communicative code and in concert with this develop our capacity for ESP (“Invisible” 167). He ruthlessly discredited conservative attempts at preservation or recovery, chiding the impulse to cling to the safety of what we know as a form of “rear-view mirror” thinking, where we assume that the options and values that were available in our youth continue to represent norms and possibilities, disparaging the common folly of engaging “in the ancient routine of regarding the patterns of the previous environment with nostalgic reverence” (“Emperor’s Old Clothes” in Kepes 94). Yet his was not simply a plan with forge-forward impetus, because for McLuhan past elements always resurface—if altered in shape and not immediately evident. Thus he advocated the imperative of cultivating individual acuity and understanding so that we might discern links to inform change-making. Apart from speculating about successful linkages across geographies in a “new tribalism” of sharing, he speculated more darkly about a period of resistance and divisive factionalism, especially virulent during the process of “convulsive” world change (Playboy 18). Apart from warring groups, there was the threat of human enslavement to corporate masters and out-of-control technologies. Yet against these odds, he also expressed hope that we might craft, collectively, a techno-sensorium attuned to human needs and desires, one capable of engaging multiple senses. He imagined it was possible—with the assistance of computers and the direction of human intelligence—for a human-engineered technology to fashion an environment capable of promoting human comfort, pleasure, and democratic communication. He imagined we might move beyond languages to a form of synesthetic ESP, supported by a computer marshaled by human programmers. Without civic boundaries to delineate city limits and without national borders to separate nations and races, he imagined a new form of communication, unity, and harmony— nonlinguistic, coded, and sensorial communication in a mobile and responsive world city. We made our cities to accommodate our desire for safety,

14

Introduction

community, and commodity production and exchange. In turn, our cities continue influencing or remaking us, deactivating our primary role as workers tied to commodity production and consumption and sheltering our retreat from such physicality and encounter as we invest more fully in virtual lives and work as prosumers of information and re-creators of patterns. McLuhan observed that if the city is changing its form, its adjustments help us to find and fit our new role and purpose: “The work of the city is the remaking or translating of [the human] . . . into a more suitable form” (Understanding 90). McLuhan can be understood as pursuing a radically imagined activist project for he was intent on stimulating human receptivity, sensitivity, critical awareness, and imagination, calling for intervention in the process of unsettlement and participation in evolving a techno-sensorium surround supportive of life and opposed to more stuff and “junk.” We might characterize his thinking about the elevated and visible speed of change in our digital age as a hopeful form of accelerationism. Rather than adopting the grimly deterministic view of speed-up that sees the world inevitably careening out of human control and into the grasp of systematized power and dominating AI (dystopic versions of accelerationism that have formed many popular narratives), McLuhan retained hope that the very speed of change might reveal the process and move us to a collective awakening, freed from the enchantments of ever-incoming technology and tools. He imagined humans in control, insofar as we would adopt only those forms of media adjustable to improving human responsivity and quality of life. He imagined humans merged/merging with media yet controlling the conditions of this merger in the best of coming city worlds. His was a humanist conception: we are the primary actors within it, even though the human world is related to—colors and takes its color from— myriad human and nonhuman ecologies. We built the technologies and have in turn been changed by this artificial progeny. He privileged human above other planetary actors and interests because he takes an environmental and ecological view: we are responsible for the ruin or balance of technological systems in planetary ecologies. Embedded in an ecology of assemblages, we must proceed with the understanding that change in any one area results not only in visible outcomes but also in unseen, innumerable, and uncontrollable ripple effects. McLuhan’s vision of the relatedness of all things has many points in common with currently prominent materialist philosophies—although his faith in human intervention for the planetary save is not widely shared. His was an early voice in the scholarly chorus now urging us to recognize we share the planet with everything else nonhuman, living, as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue, in cities of networked complexity understood as a “rhizomatic ontology” (Seeing 165). Advancing a theory of general ecology, Erich Horl also moves through the territory already mapped by McLuhan; Horl’s planet as “technosphere,”

Unsettling Cities

15

replete with intricately interconnected systems, resembles McLuhan’s postsatellite world , where everything is mediated or technologized image, with nature no longer differentiated as a separate zone. In Horl’s “technosphere,” technology’s function is to connect everything: “an entire formation and a global cooperation of natural and non-natural, human and non-human actors and forces—from all kinds of flows of energy and communication, via processes of production, to bureaucracies, states and human beings—in which technology becomes an autonomous entity and matrix” (10–11). For McLuhan, there is outstanding hope that humanity may be able to join forces to create together, collectively, a balanced techno-sensorium that supports all (interconnected) life forms by controlling environmental conditions. Left to unfold without human direction or plan, our technologies can rage, change, and ruin everything; controlled by a cadre of scientists and humanists empowered to build an interactive commons to serve collective needs and values, technology can be used to engineer a responsive and flexible environment. As this book goes on to explore, McLuhan saw signs around him and a future ahead where everything is changed. He adopted a form of science fiction inquiry—calling today’s science fiction the science of tomorrow that “presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies” (Medium 124). In imagining new city forms, he wove in elements of the old (reworked in new ways) but overall avoided basing his model of urban futurism on structures we now know. CONVULSIVE CHANGE, CITY ECOLOGY, AND FUTURISM McLuhan is sometimes discredited for having a vision clouded by the limitations of his time and age. In his defense, it can be said that while he spoke regretfully of the demise of Western ways and values, he also placed responsibility for the end of the world as we know it on Western technology and vision. It’s true that to depict his own as an age when Eastern and Western values were merging, he relied on anthropological accounts that are now recognized as tainted by colonialism and misapprehension. Yet his larger point was a foreseeable commons: if we were to survive the tensions arising from redefining society and identity—and the changes provoked by the pressures of technology that devalue both how we live and the earth itself—neither Eastern nor Western life ways would ultimately preside. If we pull through the calamities unleashed by our total dependence on machinic devices and artificially engineered surroundings, we will do so by creating conditions that favor equality—that do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or wealth, since these categories of identity will lose their meaning. He does

16

Introduction

not describe human activities in detail—leaving unclear, as much speculative prediction does, exactly what we will all do day-to-day. Yet he sketches a world in which we will be equally served by and serving planet earth, perceived and designed as an ecological environment. Perhaps mitigating the appeal of McLuhan’s speculative world city of sharing is that he imaged it as a technocracy, with some delegated to be in charge, and the rest of us left to live by the decisions of a cadre of intellectuals, positioned at the helm or in “the control tower” (Counterblast 143). Here, it helps to remember that he developed this vision in the midst of a post–World War II climate, acutely being aware that most of his colleagues, fired by historic memory of malignant Nazism, would be set to resist leadership by elites as well as to leadership favoring experimental engineering as a way to shape society. It is of note that McLuhan’s speculative utopia met these concerns head-on, establishing conditions against a “power over” regime and meant to produce planetary good. Moreover, he turned to the idea of such a cadre as the best way to replace what he noted—and what has become increasingly evident—as rule by gadget and algorithm—a form of regulatory control serving corporate interests and poised to explode in maverick machine-willed directions. To form a utopia, he imagined benign and de-corporatized human leadership with the earth as a shared commons; he imagined innovative and creative people—scientists linked with artists—in leadership roles, designing environmental features to expand human sensory life and capacity and thus exerting benevolent control over technology. In line with many current urban design projects meant to engage users in the cooperative making, his environment engineered as techno-sensorium would come to us as neither static nor finished but as something responsive to human use and renovating energy: a forum for the daily exercise of human sensory life. For him, the strongest lure of this new world was that it was poised to excite and liberate senses long dormant in the Western and technologized way of life. McLuhan did not imagine this utopian outcome, if achieved, as being near at hand. He imagined it as coming into place after years of fomenting and division, coming at the cost of familiar benchmarks: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—all will disappear like the dinosaur. The automobile too will soon be as obsolete as the cities it is strangling, replaced by new antigravitational technology. The marketing systems and the stock market as we know them today will soon be dead as the dodo, and automation will end the traditional concept of the job, replacing it with a role, and giving [us] the breath of leisure. (Playboy 18)

Global tribalism linking citizens across geographies, for example, would cause fresh divisions, and more broadly the process of giving up our

Unsettling Cities

17

established political order and borders would unleash furious energy. His point was that if the world and humanity were able to stagger through this reformation—through “cataclysmic environmental changes” (Playboy 22)— we would have the opportunity to organize something unknown to us now. On a personal note, he admitted feeling only “distaste for the process of change” (Playboy 21) and the prospect of global deterritorialization and loss of agency—devaluing property and privacy—but recognized that total environmental and psychic change was preferable to obliteration. He argued that the only and best option for survival was for gifted and good humans to step forward to control the powerful forces of all things made. We already depend on artists to cut through the haze of growing technologies and “a whole series of new environments” to “provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself” (Understanding 14); we need to continue relying on them not merely to create fanciful counter-environments that help not only to see the world as it is but, pushing further, to fashion the actual environment itself as a space for living. McLuhan’s notion of the city transformed to an adjustable techno-sensorium surround built to engage us individually and collectively, speculative in his time, can now be understood as operational in many contemporary examples. Some are positive, some less so. The spread of data-driven corporate urbanism powering “smart cities” represents reprehensible and destructive futurisms McLuhan urged us to avoid when he called for a humanistic commons and public engagement. Closer to his vision of sustainable and rewarding design directions are models and projects aimed at producing a “sentient city,” one responsive to the needs and input of publics. Nor is his hope of life-sustaining and productive human and technological interaction, with human leadership at the helm, lost in current architectural and design projects that experiment with data-driven and algorithmic design and construction. Buildings that are the result of computerized programs are still said to be only as good as the architects controlling the input and decisions. Wired magazine, for example, ran an image of a wholly computer-designed building accompanied by the architect’s commentary saying that human intervention and ingenuity takes a lead role in operating CAD programs: “It’s easy to assume that a computer-generated building leaves little input for the actual designer, but the fact is, even algorithms need to be designed. Moreover, when humans are defining the constraints that guide a building . . . those in turn become an avenue for creative expression. The hope . . . is that this process can bring out the best in both humans and computers” (cited in Stinson). Engineered building materials and even engineered earth elements and surfaces also contribute to building environments. Many of McLuhan’s projections about city change and development, in play today, were speculative extrapolations in his. Yet, according to

18

Introduction

speculative theory, even those design ideas that remain in the realm of the imaginary can have an immeasurable impact, for they become part of the overall assemblage and, once summoned, affect everything. One might think in this regard of the ongoing impact of Ron Herron’s Walking City (1964) and of other works by his Archigram affiliates; their maps and sketches presenting urban structures that de-naturalized the world and untethered expectations continue to circulate despite never having assumed a material form. Certainly, McLuhan—like the artists he envisioned exposing patterns by offering counter worlds—was driven to break old habits, intent not only to see and sense more but to do this in the discernment of predictive patterns. Practicing what MIT affiliates Ratti and Claudel refer to as “futurecrafting,” he offered an open call to his audience to question everything and become full participants in the project of the urban invention. NOT AN INFLUENCE STUDY: MCLUHAN’S MOSAIC METHOD AND CITY THEORY For McLuhan, meaning and ideas are not generated by a singular genius inspired by a specific zeitgeist but emerge through a web of ahistoric patterns. He believed in eternal patterns as the building blocks composing the world and human life, albeit patterns that undergo change and transformation. He advocated for the value of training senses, body and mind to enable “pattern recognition” (Classroom 165). Pattern recognition, he argued, awakens one to life, instilling a sense of individual purpose and enabling us more broadly to claim our place within the wider company and to contribute to world making. In his view and practice, artists and theorists pick up age-old themes—elemental and important—and, as he did, repurpose them in relation to current needs and pressures. His method puts a relational principle into conscious action: he sought out expertise, often espousing with some adjustment ideas grown from those of others. His four laws of media underlie his concept of how ideas circulate, for he was always retrieving from other sources, noting the obsolescence of outworn approaches, enhancing what he borrowed, and being aware it could be changed or reversed over time and with further application (Laws of Media). McLuhan has often been taken to task—unfairly, I am arguing—for the relational character of his work, particularly for what some have criticized as derivative borrowing from others and inconsistent attributions. An article by Donald and Joan Theall, for example, criticizes McLuhan for leaving his debt to Joyce unacknowledged and unexplored; they contend that “Joyce is more central to McLuhan’s work than Innis or Mumford” (58) to make the case that if McLuhan had worked more directly with Joyce as

Unsettling Cities

19

a source, then “McLuhanism might have contributed [more] to communication studies” (51). Several recent reassessments are more sympathetic to McLuhan’s collaborative approach. Eleni Lamberti calls his approach a “mosaic method”—by which she means he was less interested in complete statements conveying discrete and finite thoughts than in offering ideas (“probes”) related to other ideas, to the environment itself, and to the perceiving mind of the reader or viewer. This combinatory and aggregate approach mitigates against a fixed perspective and requires a more sweeping environmental scan. Lamberti defines this approach as helping to cultivate “a new frame of mind conducive to a different approach to knowledge, wherein knowledge can be conceived of as a continuum to be investigated in all its complexity” (Lamberti, Mosaic 7). More recently, Richard Cavell plumbs the presentation of McLuhan’s own ideas, arguing that they can be understood as continual reworkings and remediations, rather than marked by linear progress and newness. While it improves our reading of McLuhan to know that he placed his probes in different forms of media, intending by such travel that they should gain nuance and resonance, the reading strategy I am using here places his probes alongside arguments by design contemporaries whose texts provide depth and extension, not on the basis that McLuhan did not know the roots and wings but that he preferred offering signposts to mobilize reader engagement. Aligning him with likeminded contemporaries in the field of design provides a way to illuminate and extend his sometimes-gnomic pronouncements about cities or art. Often he extracts elements of arguments more fully formulated by others, and his claims become clearer when read against those that are similar but more detailed. In his own day, McLuhan’s shared approach to scholarship and idea circulation was recognized and accepted by some of his contemporaries. It is reported that design engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller “told his friends that McLuhan never had original ideas, nor claimed to. He simply remixed available material in an original way” (Wigley 86). The Explorations group, established at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, was convened expressly to share interdisciplinary ideas and methodologies (Darroch, “Bridging” 155). From this group, McLuhan drew extensively on the work of urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. We have learned from Tyrwhitt’s biographer, Ellen Shoshkes, that Tyrwhitt modeled a communal approach to knowledge generation and circulation; she was “adept at mobilizing ‘the collective brain’” and “unconcerned with the ‘ownership’ of ideas” (186). Their intellectual bond and exchange connected more than their two minds, however, for each came with a network of traditions and active contemporary influences. The willingness to borrow, share, extend, and explore idea kernels evident in the McLuhan/Tyrwhitt connection presents a model of knowledge

20

Introduction

as pattern-based and shared and of knowledge production and circulation as collaborative and reiterative. McLuhan himself was ambivalent about authorship claims, sometimes recognizing his role as a recipient of idea legacies as well as the generative edge of collaborative studies but other times asserting claims of originality and individualism. Art historian Alexander Nagel captures something of this rupture when he tells us McLuhan had “a fairly elaborate but never quite articulated understanding of the conditions of mosaic production” and provides this gloss: “In mosaics the artist uses chunks of readymade material and patches them into a composition that is understood as an application of a program—a program typically not of the artist’s invention. Once it is in place the mosaic has a very long life, not only because its materials—glass and stone—are more durable than pigment on canvas or panel, but because it is by nature structurally amenable to ongoing restoration. . . . Many ‘ancient’ or ‘medieval’ mosaics are in fact the ongoing work of succeeding generations” (159). Perhaps McLuhan resisted giving a full recitation of the differences between medieval guild crafting and modernist creativity because he himself never totally committed to one model over the other—and may even have seen them as interconnected. He is on record for being reluctant to abandon values of individualism, privacy, and personal authority associated with the modernist approach as a person “molded within the literate Western tradition” (Playboy 21). Despite his personal preference for modernist attitudes to creativity, he purposefully experimented with the medieval approach to knowledge-making and reception—wherein insights and ideas are ambient, circulatory, and open to revision, neither devised by a single mind nor owned by an author with copyright stranglehold, experimenting with bridging and fitting old and new together. Some of McLuhan’s ambivalence, coupled with his determination to explore the return of collective conditions, is captured in a letter to Tyrwhitt sent in 1960, wherein he notes somewhat ruefully that electric interface has ushered in sharing and done away with “divisions between inner and outer, private and communal” (Letters 278). From our perspective as readers, aligning him with like-minded contemporaries in the field of design provides a way to illuminate and extend his sometimes-gnomic pronouncements about cities or art. Often he extracts elements of arguments that are more fully formulated by others elsewhere, and reading his claims against those that are similar but more detailed enables fuller understanding. This is what motivates the extended comparisons in chapters 3 and 4, where McLuhan’s position on spatial and urban matters is described in relation to those of his contemporaries whose work informed the field of city design, Tyrwhitt, Kepes, and Doxiades. The collaborative and ahistoric character of McLuhan’s methodology is a second, if supportive, arc of this book, underpinning my extended

Unsettling Cities

21

examinations of his contacts and colleagues. A collaborative and interactive approach was particularly strategic to enable him to conduct city studies, for although he was thoroughly conversant in art, planning, and design theory, his formal training was literary and rhetorical; he often drew his models and examples from language and text-based sources and transcribed them to offer explanations of spatial and visual situations, doing so in consultation with urbanists and designers to build, guild-like, a knowledge mosaic. It can be argued that he self-consciously sought out experts in aesthetics-related fields to test and expand his understanding of spatial forms and materialities. Examining how influential people and models from art and design communities—committed to improving seeing, making, and living practices—are threaded throughout McLuhan’s work substantiates my claim that his was an activist stance. Placing him in radical and avant-garde contexts and company underscores his investment in making and leading world change. Moreover, arguing favorably for McLuhan’s collaborative sharing and remix contemporizes his project and approach, connecting him to present-day design theorists who work with pastiche, medley, and connectivity. McLuhan was fluent in and contributed to a rich dialogue about art and urban design in his day, many strands of which continue to animate. BOOK PLAN: CITY THEORY, INFLUENCES, AND CURRENCY Chapters 1 and 2 are paired in the sense that each foregrounds McLuhan’s pronouncements about cities and city life. Chapter 1 focuses on the built city as a showcase of technologies. Chapter 2 examines subjectivity and culture, considering his admonition that human and planetary survival depends on reactivating and reengaging sensory capabilities. Chapters 3 and 4 form another sort of pair, examining McLuhan in the context of contemporary thinkers and practitioners with whom he shared interests and ideas about urban life. In a final pairing, chapters 5 and 6 consider McLuhan’s place in current theory, targeting different locations. Chapter 5 considers McLuhan’s often unrecognized presence in new materialist philosophy—influential over the past few decades in interdisciplinary applications—as well as his prediction of our inevitable gravitation toward information and data visualization. Chapter 6 examines resonances in the areas of art, architecture, and urban planning—opening a rich field ripe for further investigation. Chapter 1 places emphasis on expounding the “techno” aspect of McLuhan’s techno-sensorium vision. It examines his views of the city as built environment, the material place of structure and infrastructure built to be solid although subject to laws of change. While some have misunderstood

22

Introduction

him as a technological determinist, the force of inevitability driving his theory was primarily one involving cycles of change and return. This chapter examines what McLuhan conceptualized as unsettlement patterns, melting even residual boundaries currently marking off major and large single cities to map instead a loosely woven “world city”—one undoing not only city boundaries but also nationalist borders and statist territorialism, one characterized by connectivity. This chapter also examines more fully McLuhan’s optimism and pessimism about the force of growing technological pressures and impending shifts. Planned and understood, the new forms of housing and the expanded world city could be designed to open doors of perception and promote human ease and pleasure. On the other hand, simply allowed to happen unmanaged (or unfolding under the direction of a manipulative consortium), the new city would only lead us further into chaotic disaster and dissension. McLuhan imagined both utopian and dystopian possibilities. Toward the end of his Playboy interview, he stated plainly his hope for proper city management— for artist-led and populist participant-driven directions, but he also voiced his fear of chaos and trauma in a tech-driven world. Key to positive change was the involvement of citizens in their environment—first recognizing how technology “works us over” and then sanctioning technologies that encourage vitality and responsivity. This chapter also takes up how his attitude—particularly his framing of hope—continues resonant in current reflections on human life and technological futures. Chapter 2 moves to the “sensorium” element, taking up how material changes in our built environment affect perceptual practices and consciousness, of both individuals and the collective. McLuhan was fascinated by perception and knowing and by changes to the human sensorium affecting this process. This chapter considers how the modernist city encouraged visual literacy to the determent of other senses, drawing us outside ourselves, observers of shared spectacle. With the pending move to a decentralized world city, there is, he claimed, already less monumental splendor—fewer human-made markers to draw our collective gaze and wonder. Instead, wonders are unseen—the myriad networks that connect us, for now globally, but in time, universally, cosmically. McLuhan imagines that in these conditions, we may use technology to reactivate our senses, finding new ways to restimulate inner life, rather than continuing to pull our attention outside our bodies. He imagines a reconfigured balance of inner and outer worlds: rooms without walls, mobile houses of shell-like composition, cities without boundaries, and bodies that communicate without words—everything linked in space. This chapter also explores McLuhan’s hope for the development of an artist-led techno-sentient environment. For him, media in the Western world—constructed technological apparatus, built over time to assist human

Unsettling Cities

23

activity and acts of perception—have in the electric and digital age replaced the work of previously embodied nerves and senses. Describing how we have fallen victim to our ingenuity for making, he wrote to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “We have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven out of us” (Letters 278). His hope lay in redesigned artifacts and environment, relying on technological affordances to make adjustments to reactivate and balance a fully sentient human experience. He called for artists to take the lead in this world making project, to stave off the threat of self-serving impositions of scientisms and government and corporate interests. He hoped for planetary redesign to create a responsive environment—one capable of stimulating multiple senses and alive to human interaction and intervention so that artists and the public would ultimately work in codesign roles. Following these chapters about changes to cities and settlement, chapters 3 and 4 shift to examining McLuhan’s interactions with a selection of designers and urban scholars of his day. I chose to focus on his engagement with figures who influenced him on key questions related to city development and futures: with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, an urban planner who modeled collaborative thinking and learning and who connected McLuhan to the Ekistics movement, and to radical figures in the world of design, including Buckminster Fuller and the Archigram and Metabolist groups; with Gyorgy Kepes, who shared McLuhan’s interest in the overlap of aesthetics with technology; and with Jane Jacobs in a brief collaboration significant for revealing McLuhan’s commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. While McLuhan consulted with many others in the design field, he read, corresponded, and worked with these figures to test ideas about how housing, cities, and settlements were implicated in human-techno interaction and in the extension of human bodies through space. It was common for McLuhan to follow questions and probes about perception, life, and culture with those about housing, architecture, and civics, ever attentive to patterns and connections. While chapter 3 focuses on his collaborative interactions with the Ekistics group and the urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, chapter 4 examines intriguing areas of overlap between McLuhan’s thinking about human/machinic connection and that of MIT visual designer and theorist Gyorgy Kepes, known for exploring unexpected forms of overlap and pattern repetition. The chapter ends by considering McLuhan’s brief, yet revealing collaboration with Jane Jacobs. Taken together, all of these connections reveal his awareness of issues in planning and design theory. Ekistics immersed him in theorizing and mapping efforts expended to create one-world city, and his lifelong relationship with Tyrwhitt kept him apprised of sustainable efforts to technologize “natural” flora and fauna. Like Kepes, he explored questions about images and language in communication and the role of citizens in immersive

24

Introduction

installations. With Jacobs, he undertook activist work to prevent freeway construction and revealed his opposition to pollutant overdevelopment. Chapter 5 takes up the question of McLuhan’s legacy in contemporary thought. It looks at how many of his ideas about materiality, space, and technologies have been integrated into materialist and post-modern theory as well as at linkages to theories of visual communication. This chapter also considers how McLuhan’s faith influenced his conceptual framework, particularly his insistent humanism. It examines the challenge of post-literacy and technology to meaningful communication. Chapter 6 looks at legacy in relation to art, architecture, and design studies and practices, with the proviso that those on the vanguard of art theory and practice might make further connections in this complex and unfolding area. This chapter considers several schools of urban theory concurrent with McLuhan’s approach and contrasts the grasp and regulation of corporate smart cities to developments supporting more sentient and responsive cities. McLuhan’s ideas about the inner-outer transfer and about the city as a training ground for human perception appear in the work of architect and scholar Juhanni Pallasmaa, whose Eyes of the Skin reads as an extension of McLuhan’s sensorium probes and insistence on citizen engagement and participation. McLuhan’s interest in perception and multiple, often-unseen environments is also resonant in current discussions that use the terms “ambience” and “atmosphere.” Finally, McLuhan’s position forms the basis of critical infrastructure studies that oppose the takeover of science and technology in design. Some caution against algorithmic architecture, while others, like Keller Easterling, warn against the imposition of fully wired smart cities, replicant rather than original, and surveillance laden. Rather than depicting McLuhan as a historic figure conducting a requiem for the lost values of literacy and literature, I emphasize his radical edge in these final chapters by exposing live links to current projects that use sensory and visualization technology, projects that can be understood as reenergizing his mission to create venues for perceptual excitement and stimulation. Many of his perspectives undergird the current theory that imagines the city as a complex zone of combinatorial connectivities and foregrounds principles of movement and change. He was not speaking only of globalisms—of material or visible flows so carefully investigated in the 1990s and early 2000s. His vision, linked to Deluezian connectivity, is resonant in the studies of the city that argue for its rhizomatic complexity and responsivity and in environmental and atmospheric studies. Yet for McLuhan, mere assemblage is drive without form, and the challenge is to discern and create life-sustaining patterns.

Chapter 1

Techno-City From City to Village to Programmed Environment

DISSOLVING CITY In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in a chapter on weaponry and war, McLuhan made direct reference to city obsolescence: “With instant technology, the globe itself can never again be more than a village, and the very nature of the city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like a fading shot in a movie” (454). Intensifying his prediction of city dissolution in Counterblast, he pronounced in bold graphics that the city has already died and suggested not only that computer technology is responsible but also that it has shamelessly recorded its destructive deed: “The city no longer exists. . . . The city is obsolete. . . . [A]sk the computer” (McLuhan and Parker 12). Studying his metaphors (which he used for fun and for the serious work of translating perception into language) adds to our understanding of how he storied the city. If it is now “like a fading shot in a movie,” the city in its vibrancy had been for him a full-scale media production, setting the stage and scene for the human performance of urban activity and sociability and helping to organize and regulate expectations and activity. McLuhan liked some aspects of modern cities and movies—not so much their contents as their capacity to engage a sense of affiliation and shared values. He was also an astute critic of cities and movies, exposing the limitations and systemic shallows for both curating and encouraging “canned dreams” (Understanding 391) and lethargy. We might begin by considering in literal terms how the city was for him like a fading movie set. He observed external city change, noting, for example, how the center was no longer heart. He observed hubs no longer serving as central locations of business and entertainment, drained of vitality as dwellers moved to the 25

26

Chapter 1

suburbs and outskirts. Roads and tracks were also no longer all-powerful forces dictating city design and arrangement, with at least equal consideration being given to accommodating cables and networks and overhead air routes, forging electric and global connections. In short, if the modernist city resembled a movie set in being produced to orient and control our vision, action, and values—to enable central action and train the viewer’s eye and mind to attend only to major elements and actions—we are moving away from relying on such visual spectacle and governing central framework. We forge media-reliant global connections from our homes, finding tribes on the basis of shared interests, rather than on the basis of sharing locality and material place. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan critiqued movies of his day and earlier for featuring tiny plots and tiny talents—for showing small things being worked out in repetitive patterns. He was equally critical of modern audiences who turned to movies to shape aspirations and manage real-life expectations. Whereas Greek tragedies tell us that crime and punishment are beyond human ken, modern movies often tell us simpler tales about the dangerous incompatibilities of civic order and crime: “The Greeks were prepared to admit that even a good family man who paid his bills and income tax might be offensive to the gods. Our entertainment shows few signs of any eagerness on our parts for that degree of catharsis” (147). Apart from reinforcing status quo values, mid-century movies often depicted an isolated hero; the gods do not enter this human drama, but more commonly a small figure is “linked impersonally to all the elaborate mechanisms of a great industrial city” (147). McLuhan cited Bogart’s gangster as a type who, pitted against figures and systems representing corporate corruption, is fated in the end to “suffer and die rather than . . . act and succeed”; individual resistance is extinguished, systems roll on, thus furnishing viewers with a “stock mechanism of emotional evasion” (147). Movies not only represent us as caught in powerful and complicated systems that resist circumvention or reform but, particular themes aside and demonstrating again the medium as the message, convince viewers that the images on the screen—common fare seen and shared by many—are more important than the individualized lives we lead. Citing the widespread worship of Betty Grable as a pinup figure for soldiers at war, McLuhan described how a pulp magazine reported one such soldier dying with a picture of Grable clutched to his chest, grazed by the death bullet; his analysis of the misdirection of feeling drips sarcasm: What could be more moving than to think that this soldier fought and died for the fantasies he had woven around the image of Betty Grable? It would be hard to know where to begin to peel back the layers of insentience and calculated oblivion implied in such an ad. And what would be found as one stripped away

Techno-City

27

these layers, each marked with the pattern of sex, technology and death? Exactly nothing. One is left staring into a vacuum. (13)

McLuhan was neither prudish nor conservative when inveighing against the cultural rush to worship photo and filmic images of crude sexual stereotypes but recognized this as another example of our steady willingness to avoid personal physical and emotional encounters for the easier road of following the crowd and doing as we are told and shown. If the movies provided narratives of narrow compliance, the city as filmic backdrop provided an environment geared to regulating human action and intercourse. McLuhan’s perspective on the city in a film as a training ground for shared dreams and values might be understood as foundational to the thesis James Donald expounds in Imagining the Modern City, yet while Donald explores our collective tendency to see the great cities through a filmic haze—so that we see what the camera has shown us—McLuhan emphasizes that beyond shaping our apprehension of physical surroundings, films also regulate and depress our feelings, dreams, and values. The modern city in a film projected a commons but at a cost. McLuhan wanted more complex city and media development: not simply one standardized format designed above all else to catch the eye. Against being “hypnotized” (War and Peace) or “narcoticized” (Understanding 65), he encouraged us to understand that city as media provided more than mere backdrop—more than a setting or ground for the play of human life. He hoped instead for us to activate multilayered sensory awareness and begin to practice reading figure and ground together. Figure and ground roles are reversible, mutually interactive and constitutive, so that if the city fades and dies, part of human life suffers a similar fate: the fate of the city is our fate, putting in jeopardy all the values, style, and culture it fostered. Working from an insight now frequently claimed by German media materialists following Friedrich Kitler, McLuhan depicted media as animate, even sentient, forming an archive of lively knowledge. He told us—sounding rather like the white rabbit directing Alice—that if we want to learn more about what has happened to the older brick-and-mortar structures and even visible clunky forms of media, we should “ask” the computer, the newer medium in town. In War and Peace in the Global Village, he expanded on the interchange between human and nonhuman realms, referring to all of the material and spatial environment as “a man-made environment . . . ending nature” (36); he referred to data and communication systems as organic rather than machinic or artificial, an influential interface in our relational world: “The important thing is to realize that electronic information systems are live environments in the full organic sense. They alert our feelings and sensibilities” (36).

28

Chapter 1

FUSION AND INTERPLAY The apparently incommensurate yet co-requisite materials of life are, according to Clifford Geertz, “rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other” (10). In city theory, understanding urbanicity using this two-part material/ethereal structure—so that we consider both physical and psychosocial dimensions— is often attributed to Henri Lefebvre’s city theory, as Rob Shields explains when he describes Lefebvre’s concept of actual material city as “the tangible thing” in contrast to the “intangible qualities” associated with the urban, whose effects “are social, economic, and psychological” (41). McLuhan recognized that for the rough purposes of making oneself understood, the city can be characterized as having a sort of “mind/body” duality: there is the material place (structure and infrastructure, tools and technology), and then there is the human dimension, supporting our sense of identity and social and cultural practices. Yet key to McLuhan’s version—and crucial to differentiating him from those propounding dualistic conceptions—is that for him the two dimensions are not discrete but subject to overlay and interplay: each dimension is deeply implicated in the other and even co-constitutive. The material and technological elements of the city—structure and infrastructure—are not simply created by human minds and hands but in turn change our minds, practices, and bodies, in a fusion of organic and inorganic form and energy. We craft myriad technologies, yes, build our cities; but perhaps more important to McLuhan—his signature insight, applied to city life—was his assumption that new technologies change people psychically and profoundly—that “psychic change [results] from man-made or technological environments” (Letters 458). We build new things, and, being connected to what we make, what we make affects our biology and practices. He was fascinated by changing technology and humanity and the interplay between them, fascinated by “the complex changes that take place in figure and ground during all communication” (Letters 467). CO-CREATING—NOT JUST NAMING—THE WORLD There is more at stake here. In War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan told us that stuff and matter have vibrancy, at least when touched and modeled by the human hand. We do more than simply name our world— more than develop ever deeper, rationalized conceptions of our world and our place in it. He believed that we have been gifted with creative and making capacity, and even that since the Incarnation which brought sacred energy to the earth, matter has been transformed to have vibrancy and sacred vitality. The Incarnation, not simply about sending the son of God as commonly given

Techno-City

29

in the Biblical narrative, was about renewing the earth matter with sacred energy: Whereas the first Adam was an aesthete, viewing and naming and enjoying creatures, a resident in a world he never made, the second Adam remade His first establishment and conferred on man totally new powers of creativity such as the first Adam had not known. To the Christian the Incarnation means that all matter was reconstituted at a historical moment and that matter is now capable of quite superhuman manipulation. (War and Peace 58)

Notably, this observation is not one he repeated with frequency, and in fact it appeared parenthetically in War and Peace in the Global Village, introduced with the qualifying phrase “Any Christian might add” in a way that neutralizes and deemphasizes it. Perhaps because it offered a faith-based interpretation of life and meaning, McLuhan was hesitant to propound or foreground it and usually opted for considering our engagement in creativity and making in modern contexts (rather than housed in ancient or Christian orthodoxies). Yet once one grasps his belief that we are makers and creators—more than simply tasked with conceptualizing and organizing what we have—we better sense the urgency of his position on the need for the exercise of human design and control. Wanting nothing as solid as an engineer’s report or city planning maps, he often hailed the capacity of the human-guided computer to shape and build cities aimed at balancing the human sense ratio to promote creativity and community. He indicated that by design, cities might be programmed to control physical, climactic elements, like temperature and lighting for optimal physical comfort and stimulation. He indicated that we might use the computer to ration media, responsive to regional and community needs, helping groups of citizens to avoid over-inundation or stimulating some senses at the expense of others—or to promote synesthesia, for multisensory activity. There was not to be one generic program but designs aimed at regions and groups, each of whom had different cultural strengths and needs. And there was not to be an imposition of a preset environment, for he called for improvisation, responsivity, and interactivity, fostering our ability to individually alter or engage with the world rather than simply be forced to fit in. His aphorism, “the medium is the message,” conveyed his vision of the complete transfer or exchange between the human and nonhuman realms. He was not saying, of course, that the particular content has no value or import but that the medium in relative terms had a far greater impact for it was capturing our attention and leading our sensory responses, stimulating some senses and shutting down others (Florian Cramer). The phonetic language was his prime example of a transformative medium, one that had been

30

Chapter 1

responsible for changing our sensory lives and, from that, every aspect of interaction as well as accompanying infrastructure required to support literate culture. With language, we no longer needed memory or others as we had in preliterate times, and he often rehearsed the various levels at which the print word enabled social regulation and political control. Literacy and the city are intertwined concepts for literacy drove the interplay of human culture and technology: For the West, literacy has long been pipes and taps and streets and assembly lines and inventories. Perhaps most potent of all as an expression of literacy is our system of uniform pricing that penetrates distant markets and speeds turnover of commodities. Even our ideas of cause and effect in the literate West have long been in the form of things in sequence and succession. (Understanding 123)

His key point here was that the introduction of any new form of media brings changes to human senses, affecting our individual psyche as well as our collective practices; a huge shift in media such as our entry into an “electric” world marked sweeping sensory changes. We change along with our tools and surroundings. The ways new media has worked and is working imperceptible changes to the human sense ratios will be examined in chapter 2, which explores McLuhan’s hope that we might each embark on a program to regrow and exercise our perceptual abilities and deliberately embark on expanded consciousness. In chapter 1, the focus is more squarely on the technical developments altering place, social life and habits, and psyche. Drawing from the past, McLuhan provided examples to illustrate how apparently minor technological developments can have devastating impacts on life, values, and practices. As he argued in War and Peace in the Global Village, the stirrup was an innovation that ushered in myriad and deep-level social changes; it enabled new forms of combat and introduced new standards of conduct affecting manners and art, while requiring new labor and economies to support the production and purchase of armors (26–30). He quoted the narrative of historian Lynn White on the effects of the stirrup, with this resounding pronouncement about how these pieces of molded metal changed not only the hopes and expectations of knights and warriors but also the fate of kings and power affiliations: “The exigencies of mounted shock combat, as invented by the Franks of the eighth century, had formed both [the European knights’] personality and his world” (30). While McLuhan agreed with White’s assessment, he went beyond the stirrup in providing his own narrative of tools-with-impact, noting how the stirrup was blown away by gun powder, which in turn packed a slight systemic wallop in comparison to the thoroughgoing “massage” of modern automations: “The invention of gun powder simply blew this armour off the backs

Techno-City

31

of the knights and made the entire feudal system redundant. (This revolution, however, is puny compared to the effects of automation today.)” (34). The computer, McLuhan argued, was a ramping up of pressure; it is “the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised . . . since it is the extension of our central nervous system” (35): Various people have pointed out that the computer revolution is greater than that of the wheel in its power to reshape human outlook and human organization. Whereas the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer gives us a world where the hand of man never set foot. . . . As much as the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer is an extension of our nervous system, which exists by virtue of feedback or circuitry. (War and Peace 53)

If older technologies extended the body, newer technologies continue the transformative process by extending our nerves, so we face a world where everything happens outside the human body, which has become a discarnate shell. Cities in the past were built as service environments meant to ease human burdens and provide human comfort—to promote ease of communication and supply protection. Electric/digital technology is a game changer because of the relentless and powerful pressure it exerts on us. We are always connected to media all hours of the day, and it connects us to the world. Technological change happens so fast that we are able to see it unfold in a matter of months and years. For example, many of us have witnessed our paper-based reading culture shift to screens: heads bent and smart phones perpetually in hand is now a more or less ubiquitous human pose. Seldom cut off from our “devices,” we operate less as private minds than as a conglomerate, connected consciousness. As Malcolm McCullough notes, we have come to expect a wired, computer-responsive environment, an architecture with ubiquitous or global connectivity: “Also known as ambient, physical, embedded environmental or pervasive computing, ubiquity has succeeded cyberspace as Silicon Valley’s party line on the technological future” (Digital Ground 5). McLuhan described the North American city as media saturated, and its dwellers as increasingly cut off from direct contact with others and the environment, dependent on mediated arrangements. Technologies have evolved from industrial/mechanical to electric/digital, and we have become increasingly dependent on screens—from television to computer environments—for information, entertainment, and communication; as this transfer in attention has been occurring, we have simultaneously learned to rely less on material or actual work, service, and entertainment environments. McLuhan was interested in the adjustments that such a radical change required—changes to place, practices, relations, and psyches. In the human-city relationship,

32

Chapter 1

both partners undergo continual readjustment and change. As humans we are merging ever more completely with our machines—each new development acting to further the prosthetic extension of our bodies and, with electricity and its contents, increasingly our nerves. What he called for in terms of the city of the future was one designed or deliberately programmed to engage and balance the senses. To be viable and supportive, his impending digital city would not offer inadvertent stimulation but be more of a learning lab designed to stimulate our individual and collective senses, thus providing a hub of common experience. He conveyed this in a letter to urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, where he stated the city must be planned “as a teaching machine” to program the total sensorium: “The planner’s job is to program the entire environment by an artistic modulation of sensory usage. Art is a CARE package dispensed to undernourished areas of the human sensorium” (Letters 299). CITY CHANGE AND LAW[S OF MEDIA] McLuhan did not believe in a model of human progress. He believed change was inexorable, in some ways patterned and recursive, yet always the product of human decisions. We would never retrieve or relive past conditions for there are laws of change at work so that whatever recovered is, in some respects, altered. Given McLuhan’s understanding of the ebb-and-flow rhythms of all media, the death of the city, as mass media depot, was inevitable. According to McLuhan, the common fate of all media is to change—to enter a phase of obsolescence and flip or reverse into a version of a prior form. According to his laws of media, any new medium can be understood as replacing another to provide enhancement that makes the prior medium obsolescent, reversing the old form, yet retrieving elements from an even older medium. Without a set pattern and certainly without a concept of forward progress, what these laws make certain is change and recurrence, always understood as embracing these four terms: “enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal” (see Laws of Media 7). When McLuhan called the city “obsolete,” he was invoking one of the four laws of change, which also means that the others are at hand. City obsolescence, then, was tied to his broader vision of cycles of change and transformation—cycles he observed to be speeding up in contemporary electric life, making change visible to all. “We live,” he said, “in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society as a whole” (Playboy 4). He made statements about recurrence in many places. For example, in the 1973 article “The Argument:

Techno-City

33

Causality in the Electric World,” co-written with Barrington Nevitt, he stated that we live in a world “where nothing is stable but change itself” (1) for if “innovation scraps its immediate predecessor,” it “retrieves still older figures” (2). If the city as we know it dies, it will eventually return in a revised form, likely one that bears a resemblance to a previously outmoded form; an example of historical throwback can be glimpsed in his depiction of our lives becoming more nomadic than settled: the village replacing the city will be its reversal, yet this new village will retrieve some of the old village forms. Apart from techno-material changes that occurred with the dawning of the global village, the inescapable related change was to urbanity—affecting our psyche and sense of identity and community—the personal and social city. We are, McLuhan says in Understanding Media, “poised between two ages— one of detribalization and one of retribalization” (Understanding 456). With the return of the village, we are no longer individuals who define ourselves by spatial proximity to others and by sharing bounded territory: membership in cities or nations is no longer key to identity. In place of gathering together in centralized hubs, we are spread out, and loss of physical proximity provokes an accompanying change to our sense of allegiance and affiliation. As residents in a global village, we find others who share our interests and bond with them rather than understand ourselves as emplaced within a fixed group. McLuhan postulates that the attraction of the nation as an identity concept was tied to the propensity of print to circulate as a form of propaganda “an intense and beguiling image of group destiny and status” (Playboy 9). With retribalization, the route to maturation and identity development takes a different form so that we choose our associates or find an affiliate group based on likeness or sharing. The structure of the group with which one bonds is looser in one sense—not defined by physical proximity—yet being tied by shared interests introduces another level of intimacy. Along similar lines, Axel Bruns describes the hive-like community of internet groups, where members come together voluntarily, and contribute on the basis of their ability, in a group-regulating and rewarding system. Retribalizing not only means we choose from a wider range of affiliates around the globe but also that our sense of identity and belonging is attached less to a city or a nation than to our immediate and surrounding community. We might think here of how the urban landscape now abounds with districts and villages, each promising a measure of diversity but also offering “unique” characteristics. McLuhan told us that the positive aspect of the village is that it supports diversity and even eccentricity, whereas the city demands uniformity and homogeneity. Of course, pushed too far, he warned, the virtues of diversity become division and disagreement, leading to foment within the village, as well as the rivalry of tribe against tribe (Playboy 15).

34

Chapter 1

In defining a progressive sense of place, Doreen Massey refers to some of the same characteristics McLuhan had in mind as those informing local communities. In her reading, globalism and mobility are productive factors in lives and communities, which can balance the principles of diversity and change with maintaining a unique core or character so that community is responsive to change yet able to maintain indigenous qualities. To attract residents or tourists, many of our contemporary North American cities have picked up/play up McLuhan’s village imagery—using the term to designate distinctive “Village” areas within the city—areas which are nonetheless amalgamated under the banner of one city. This cultivation of micro-identity, based on tastes, amenities, and often remembered or reconjured ethnicity, conveys some of what McLuhan sensed about our shift from affiliation with big entities—the city and the nations—to our affiliation with a like-minded cohort. The village, thus marketed, often romanticizes settlement heritage yet does so while welcoming influx, to define a “progressive sense of place.” Doreen Massey describes her sense of belonging to the specific area of Kilbourn, a region of London. While feeling allegiance to a neighborhood does not mean disavowing a broader sense of citizenship, it points to the redistribution from the center to margins that McLuhan had in mind when he predicted cities giving way to villages. Of course, the changes are not all outer, taking place on the city stage and synthetic surfaces but are also inner, affecting the human body and consciousness. The human-made world of machines and things offers enhancements and ease, serving to extend our organs or senses and thus making the body obsolete. By using the technology of the wheel, I replace my former reliance on and exercise of hands and feet. Or, by installing glass windows in my house, I control light affects, changing not simply the appearance of the dwelling but also the admittance of heat and the variety of activities that can be performed inside. With the window, “[the] world was put in a frame” and thus glass windows were not simply a luxury improvement but a device structured to control thought, habits, and vision by encouraging a linear and objective gaze; light control by glass was “a means of controlling the regularity of domestic routine, and [promoting] steady application to crafts and trade without regard for cold or rain” (Understanding 174). A window in my house influences how I look at the outside world, as well as how I think and act. We might also consider here the well-known aphorism about the constitutive interface and exchange between design and designer, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” While there is a dispute over whether McLuhan actually said or wrote these exact words, they continue to be attributed to him (see Coupland 103), likely because they convey succinctly an idea he explored in a variety of contexts. In this, McLuhan’s theory is a harbinger of the recent interdisciplinary wave of new materialisms: many emphasizing the

Techno-City

35

bioenergy of nonhuman resources. In our post-human turn, there is currently a variety of theories that decenter human actors and consider instead the life force of animal, plant, machine, and object lives. Much of this theory accepts and celebrates the rise of uber-otherness, arguing that it is time for other-thanhumans to come to the fore to assert their needs and intelligences. To use terms familiar to McLuhan, there is a recognition of ground so long ignored (the nonhuman realm) and with this shift a simultaneous decentering of the human figure. Despite confluences, McLuhan would have opposed in new materialist thinking the decentering of human for nonhuman interests. While it is valuable for the unseen to come into focus, the advantages of gaining a fresh angle are lost if former points of view are vanquished. Current attention to the inhuman realm might be understood as a corrective phase, a reversal. The human figure does not disappear but remains present amid the other figures. Indeed, as we noted in invoking McLuhan’s religious perspective, the human actor has been charged with continuing the job of divine making and creating, with responsibility for the stewardship of nonhuman life. The “laws of media” indicate that McLuhan’s theory of history is not about progress or regression but about transformation and reformulation. The present contains the past and future, shifting temporalities being part of a total or fully grounded ecological perspective. Applying the language of McLuhan’s media laws, the city is in the phase of becoming obsolete—or we are in the process of recognizing its changing form and recovering a transformed way of village life. His Janus-faced laws of media look backward and ahead, linking McLuhan’s view to contemporary media archaeology practices that unearth past media forms to reckon how these begat other media and changed the earth in ways that affect not only how we live now but future options and decisions. His was not a dystopian or anti-urban vision, despite being characterized as such by British urban theorists Ash Amin and Stephen Graham, who number McLuhan among those who anticipated “a progressive dissolution or erosion of cities, as advanced transport and telecommunications infrastructures released economic, social, and cultural activities from the need for spatial propinquity and metropolitan cooperation” (419). McLuhan did recognize these change features and their impact on the city structure and patterns of living, but he was not working from a linear or even a cyclic outlook. Instead he viewed a shifting mosaic that offered a “change” vision rather than an “end” vision. We hear some of this in his exhortation to architects to devise new forms (more relational and interconnected, responsive to feelings and synesthetic experience—hospitable to our changing needs and interests), but to do so without shattering the legacy of the past (principled by lineality, rationality, and the dominance of the visual) that provides stability and reassurance:

36

Chapter 1

Surely this is why architectural design is entrusted now with a major task of sustaining traditional values achieved by print culture. How to breathe new life into the lineal forms of the past five centuries while admitting the relevance of the new organic forms of spatial organization (what I have explained as auditory space above)—is not this the task of the architect in the present? (“Inside” 54)

FROM VISIBLE ROUTES TO INVISIBLE SIGNALS: AIRBORNE AND MOBILE NETWORKS In Understanding Media, McLuhan provided a history of the development of North American cities, from frontier and horse, to train, to car, to plane, to computer cities. The transformative power of transportation as a form of communication and the key role of the automobile in this scheme was a pillar of McLuhan’s thinking about urbanicity and for this reason provides another point of entry for thinking about how McLuhan understood the city. McLuhan provided his take on the common argument that cities were formed by and around transportation technologies in Understanding Media, where he described the life and death of the “train city.” The young cities of North America grew up as train stops and were themselves designed around tracks and depots that allowed for the movement of people and commodities, staples prioritized over industrially produced goods (Gutenberg 269). After railway tracks, with the advent of cars in the early twentieth century, roads defined the shape of cities. In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, he inveighed against the role of the automobile in shaping culture and landscape; the fetishized car became a marker of status, freedom, and identity, an object of desire, a version of our “mechanical bride.” In Culture Is Our Business, having exchanged critique for observation as his mode of inquiry/ delivery, he nominated the road as “our major architectural form” (132). The automobile and roads changed urban to rural boundaries and connections, exemplifying the power of material communication/transportation technology to change our views of space and place (transforming the sense and meaning of distance, personal mobility, rootedness, home, and wilderness), as well as our tolerance for hordes of strangers. Inner cities, as hubs of government, business, and retail activity, were car-clogged and full of crowds, which dispersed at night to go home to ever-spreading suburbs. The following passage from “The Motor Car: The Mechanical Bride,” a chapter in Understanding Media, captures the impact of the car on our physical environment—creating “a new landscape”—as well as some of its power to influence our psychic and social lives: “The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape. . . . [It] destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became

Techno-City

37

too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next door neighbors became strangers” (300). Notably, he ends this recital by pronouncing that the motorcar has lost its power to shape and influence cities and lives and its dominance, a story that “has not much longer to run” (300). The urban dilemma provoked by cars and roads that troubled planners in McLuhan’s time has continued into ours: we continue to puzzle how to deliver and update efficient and safe public transport, to promote alternate walking and cycling routes, and to repopulate centers and discourage sprawl and spread. And so we need to clear up exactly which story about cars McLuhan saw as coming to an end. He was, of course, not predicting the end of all vehicular traffic but a cooling off of public interest in the machine itself and its promise of moving us to physical destinations: into the city as a site of action or, opposite, into the countryside as a site of pastoral calm. McLuhan argued that television quieted our urge for actual travel and encounter, schooling us to sit sedated and take our entertainment at home (an emplacement, we might note, exacerbated along accelerationist lines McLuhan predicted by our current dependence on digital forms of entertainment). Reduced interest in cars and travel would thus end a period of urban development marked by proliferating parkades and freeways. McLuhan also noted that roads were adapting their form and function. No longer built as emanating from a central hub to provide a series of connective routes to destinations, they were themselves becoming increasingly urbanized—alight with signs, shops, and pitstops. He observed that many roads offered along-the-way service options—a stretched village, in the sense of offering decentered and smaller service centers: “The road ceases to be a link between different social spaces, town and country, city and suburb” (“Inside” 50); instead roads “became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines” (Understanding 132). City planning mapped to respond to a gridwork of roads and highways was imbued with linear thinking—with the lineality that had represented the mindset of “typographic man” in a “Gutenberg galaxy.” McLuhan was generally dismissive of linearity in culture, arguing it had been a dominant conceptual model—organizing both thought and spatial order—which was no longer in tune with a networked electric environment that thrives on nonhierarchic, changeable, invisible, and multiple connections. Systematized and regulatory, linearity operated to suppress human curiosity and invention, and McLuhan noted that this conceptual mode and practices resulting from it were becoming increasingly passe: “We have all noticed how lineality has faded from the current scene. The chorus line, the stag line, the assembly line, all have gone the way of the clothes line” (“Inside” 43). In The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, he described

38

Chapter 1

the link between alphabet literacy and linearity, affecting how we both think and live, our work, and our culture: “The alphabet created a lineal and visual environment of services and experiences (everything from architecture and highways to representational art) which contributed to the ascendency or dominance of the left . . . or lineal hemisphere” (McLuhan and Powers 58). Losing interest in cars and roads—machines and their maneuverability—was all part of our transformation from place-based citizens to signal-dependent global beings. Imagining us becoming less dependent on cars and roads was also linked to airborne travel. He was interested in planes and jets assisting our transition to planetary citizenship, noting that “the further speed up of vehicle traffic occurs not on the road but in the air, and the logic of the jet plane would seem to render even the wheel obsolete” (“Inside” 50). Of course, related to this was his recurrent reference to us becoming discarnate as our voices and ideas were transmitted through the air via signals and transferred via cables and networks. On this, it should be noted that McLuhan merely observed what others have by now plumbed. The theme of mobility, invisible flows, and flight and flight paths been the forefront of urban and other theorizing from his day to ours, heating up during the 1990s and the early years of 2000s, a period when urbanism wound into globalism. Geographic and social mobility—migrant lives and selves—were characteristics definitive of our age, according to Tim Cresswell in On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, for example—a book that has served as a textbook for many geography students. McLuhan aptly mapped the direction of city change, according to the like-minded observations of contemporary design theorists Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. They describe how the smartphone provides the shelter and intimacy we used to expect from our homes. There are echoes of McLuhan’s extension theory in their claim that the cell phone permanently attached to the human body has taken over the role of architecture in providing us with a sense of being secure and grounded. They trace how it has usurped much of what “used to be defined as the responsibility of shelter in terms of sense of security, space, orientation, and representation. Cell phone as shelter, then. . . . It houses more overlapping social formations, turning traditional architectural space itself into a kind of displaced or vestigial technology” (Are We Human 244). This observation links to McLuhan’s concept of our moving to “housing-without-walls” (Understanding 176) in a process of city unsettlement and human mobility (that he believed was occurring rapidity and visibly). Less committed to material place and things, we would inhabit houses without walls, he imagined, in the sense of increasingly privileging mobility over living securely housed in place, interactivity over privacy, and collectivity over

Techno-City

39

individuality (and eventually shared consciousness based on sensations rather than language). Moreover, the re-forming city—already taking shape in McLuhan’s time but also his imagined and projected city of the future—would be built to accommodate movement and impermanence, in a (counter-)environment of unsettlement, replacing/displacing the monuments of modernist settlement. Wigley notes that McLuhan exchanged an “idea of settlements held together by transportation networks for the idea of inhabitable information networks” (“Network” 97), in which human inhabitants were linked together in an evolving “planetary consciousness” built of sensory images rather than based on language. McLuhan wrote: “Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. . . . The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness” (Understanding 114). Without the need for shelter or language, we would, McLuhan said, incrementally abandon reliance on the heavy material structures and infrastructure of the modernist city, with our bodies, practices, and psychic composure transformed by and migrated to technologies. Themes of mobility, portability, and virtual presence that McLuhan outlined continue in the discussions of the city aimed like McLuhan’s at providing new angles from which to view urban life and features. Stephen Graham’s Vertical advocates for our being more conscious of vertical layering, noting movement as well as structure and infrastructure above and below planetary surfaces: ‘“In an urbanized, hyper-mobile, and hyper-mediated world where ‘there is no ground,’” Graham tells us, a “stable, linear perspective is of decreasing importance, in parallel with the reduced importance of the horizontal horizon” (10). Even though Graham claims to issue novel warnings of the stranglehold—from both above and below—of overweening technologies, his is not breaking news; instead, like McLuhan he worries we live as if we were flat figures on a flat surface, unaware of rabbit holes and cyclonic forces in the unseen surround—traps and crises that are growing as technologies multiply and collide without human governance. THE ELECTRIC VILLAGE: HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH TECHNO? McLuhan explored changing urban development and city settlement in Understanding Media, noting the dissolution of the urban center—“a radiational or centre-margin pattern” (Understanding 251) that had served as the model for years of industrial expansion and population explosion. The digital/ electric age “creates decentralism in the midst of older centralism.” The city

40

Chapter 1

no longer explodes outward from a hub—it no longer attempts to balance proximity and physical growth but is part of a network of global transmission, with the implosive energy of “contraction and simultaneity” (Understanding 251). As opposed to thinking about growth by foregrounding physical modeling to depict creeping urban sprawl and surface spread, he was more concerned with the effects of time-space compression—whose effects enable “everything-all-at-onceness,” on a planet where “in one spot one could touch every part of the world” (251). The city we see today, he said, was the product of yesterday’s plans, materials, and values—a product of modernism, devised to accommodate visible transportation grids and infrastructure, and these to connect structures built for permanence. He referred disparagingly to contemporaries who continued to want cities to be such lasting places as “earnest men, rather nineteenth-century types, still preoccupied with bricks and mortar” (Letters 453). Instead of cities taking shape around transportation and communication networks that are visible and material, and instead of dwellers gravitating to “the huddle of the city” (Understanding 454), the future form that McLuhan pictured was more randomly spread out, unsettled, and responsive to invisible interconnectivity, such as flight paths, digital networks, and even fully engineered environments (such as those developing apace in our smart cities, if in ways over-reliant on technological affordance at the expense of human needs and interests). This world city of invisible electronic linkages connecting people across and around the globe is one that removes for many the need to travel while providing transportation options should the need for mobility or migration arise. Although he did not sketch or model possible forms of buildings and housing, he referred to impermanence as responsive to increasing human mobility. He predicted that great cities would lose prominence and, more generally, that city centers and urban borders would become more fluid; he imagined buildings and material structures as softening—even melting—to allow for adaptivity and disassembly. He made frequent reference to and was familiar with Buckminster Fuller’s glass Dymaxion structures, yet he was likely suspicious of their visual protuberance, since they were both visible and visually commanding for being out of step with other structures and were thus as such artifacts of modernity rather than futurity. McLuhan warned of new technologies spawning new and superficial environments rather than developing counter-environments productive of insight and change, suggesting as an example that our concern with the property was outmoded in a world where the incoming hot commodity was “electric information” (Letters 343). Demonstrating this, he asked if Canadians worrying about U.S. ownership of land resources were concerned with “a red herring,” at a time when the real struggle was over electric information (an exaggeration, perhaps, given that resource ownership remains a cross-border issue—and that

Techno-City

41

borders themselves remain firmly intact—yet accurate in anticipating how platform capitalism and digital information have become key sites of struggle in the new century). He opposed generating surplus technologies—minor or adjusted media developments—and preferred challenging and alternative forms and structures for “new technologies create new environments which mirror everything but the present because they are the present” (Letters 343). McLuhan wanted cities and city structures of the future to be evolving and responsive “engineered environments” produced by the interactive design efforts of scientists, artists, and users. He believed that media should be rationed and available to support group needs so that for example populations who have never been exposed to a particular type of media are not suddenly inundated by it. He referred to the possibilities of buildings without walls— buildings whose “walls” themselves were “self-adjusting air currents” (Understanding 174), responding to the human bios and the atmosphere. McLuhan envisioned interiors becoming increasingly flexible with movable floors and walls within them, enabling access and portability (Understanding 174), designed to be responsive. For McLuhan, the engineered environment required a blending of scientific and humanistic principles and know-how. He participated in design forums and planning sessions and was buoyed by some of the concepts and models circulated by cybernetics designers modeling ways to improve the planet and human lives. Yet he opposed plans modeled solely by the input of experts. For example, he was anti-modernist in his urban/architectural aesthetic, finding the built environment lifeless/static, overly visual and geometric, and prefabricated. McLuhan would have run from Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, whose fait accompli design elements and details are summarized by Stephen Graham this way: Housing was thus to be much more than shelter: rather than merely the inhabitation of private space, it was to emerge as the fully modern, collective and mechanized social and technical experience of an entire “environmental matrix” organized and designed around the figure of the standardized (able-bodied male) human body. Thus freeways, parks, schools, leisure facilities, elevated walkways raised megastructures, and all other accoutrements of modernist living needed to be planned for as well. (181)

McLuhan was aware that one feature of the environment impacted many/ all others, yet he resisted such wholesale urban visions with changeless multilevel plans and all the parts readymade, as opposed to being open and vulnerable to ongoing making: “Truth is not matching. . . . It is something we make in the encounter with the world that is making us” (McLuhan and Powers 1989 xi). He wanted design and technology to be both interactive and

42

Chapter 1

improvisational, not a “machine for living” devised by a specialized expert (driven by modernist occularcentric-heavy values in the case of Le Corbusier) but a techno-sensorium, leveraging technological innovation and supports but always open to being improved by human users. OLD AND NEW/INNER AND OUTER ENVIRONMENTS: TRANSFER AND TRANSFORMATIONS McLuhan’s views of desirable directions in architecture and planning can sound contradictory. For example, his call for the generation of counter-environments sounds like he is interested in extreme reversals, in abandoning old for new. In The Medium Is the Massage, he appears to advocate for letting go of the past, joking about how even as we drive fast cars we retain horse and buggy images and values; our eyes lock on the horse and buggy in our rear-view mirror: “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past” (74). Even though he goads us for laggard perceptual acuity and love of habit, he does not mean that we must abandon the past and remake everything as new. For example, rather than calling for an entirely anti-lineal design, in “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium,” McLuhan charges architects and designers with making adaptations: “How to breathe new life into the lineal forms of the past five centuries while admitting the relevance of the new organic forms of spatial organization . . . is not this the task of the architect at present?” (51). This call for blending old and new can be understood alongside his comments implying suspicion of an overly designed world: one that imposes the standardized vision of a particular planner or planning group. In a letter to Tyrwhitt, for example, he is dismissive of Kevin Lynch’s planning efforts that eventuated in his influential book about planning based on usage, The Image of the City, saying simply, “Kevin Lynch doesn’t understand this matter at all” (Letters 299). McLuhan would have disparaged Lynch’s approach of canvassing city dwellers to learn about their habits and patterns of use as more rear-view mirror thinking, sticking too close to what is, without recognizing important environmental shifts. He eventually adopted a similar critique of world-city architect Doxiadis and his Ekistics planning group (see chapter 3), telling Kepes that “we are already living in a new kind of world city that is far outside the ken of Doxiadis” (Letters 453). He tired of the materiality and imaginative limitations of Doxiadis’s world-city project that was committed to erecting permanent settlements and mapping surfaces. He felt Doxiadis missed the call and opportunities to build for change: that too much of what he did was an homage to past practices, too traditional and “piecemeal” in offering reforms to dwelling (453).

Techno-City

43

For similar reasons, the design-controlled environments of smart cities and “cities in a box” like Songdo, Korea, fail to represent McLuhan’s techno-sensorium ideal. According to Orit Halpern, Songdo claims to have been developed to provide better sustainability and connectivity, as well as to increase human pleasure—and thus at first blush we might imagine it to instantiate McLuhan’s dream city (17). Yet these prefabricated environments are design heavy, exploitative, and surveillance ridden, crippling human responsivity and imposing an option-evacuated maze. Smart cities, as we are learning, manipulate dwellers rather than stimulate involvement and human responsivity. What is lacking in smart-city narratives if we are looking for McLuhanfocused goals is primary reference to engaging the sensory life and ensuring the collective interactive participation of citizens—of helping citizens to live more expansively so that with minds stimulated and consciousness expanded they are better able to connect and communicate with others. In providing her analysis, Halpern, herself, warns that theorists would argue that Songdo, heralded as the “experimental prototype of the city of tomorrow,” is not beckoning with promise but threatening the next step into layered machinic-run culture. What developers have boastfully called “the city in a box” comes to life as a technological nightmare (Easterling 5). Keller Easterling has further rued that such cities are regulated by the logic of operating systems set to surveil and regulate all aspects of civic life and to uphold digital capitalism. Buildings and structures are networked “spatial products” (12), in zones that obey algorithms that defy both human intervention and comprehension. Easterling notes that McLuhan’s principle “the medium is the message” operates in these zones—powerful technologies control every aspect of civic life. Yet whereas in McLuhan’s model it is possible to understand the effects of various media, in Easterling’s chilling variant the effects of the medium— sneaky and contagious in smart cities—are deliberately disguised to exceed our ken: “The activity of the medium or infrastructural matrix—what it is doing rather than what it is saying—is sometime difficult to detect” (13). In a recent book Are We Human—evaluating the relationship between humans and things we design and the design process itself—Mark Wigley and Beatriz Columina suggest that the urge to design, coupled with an appreciation for the world as artifact, may be what makes us definitively human. Although we have only emerged as a species dominating the planet “some 200,000 years ago” (19), we no longer simply perch on the earth’s surface, they argue, but we “encircle the planet with layer upon layer of techno-cultural nets,” a species, “[e]nveloped in all the nets of its own making” (12, 15). Like McLuhan’s observing that we tamed the planet when we captured its image, they tease out how making has been an act of ownership, but like other new materialists who acknowledge the nonhuman realm (bringing to the fore previously ignored ground, posing a generative

44

Chapter 1

counter-environment to our prior obsessive interest in the human figure and values) they raise questions about whether our designs, making, and artifacts may at this point have become more human than our fleshly, organic bodies. They ponder whether humans are in control or whether we have created animate and life-filled webs of code and cloud to be more powerful than a mere human body. Concurring with McLuhan that a new city form is immanent, Deyan Sudjic says we may be seeing it in the corporate and regional structures of Silicon Valley, which extend new shapes, scales, and cultures. They turn their back on traditional city forms but nonetheless “try to inject the essence of city life into their controlled environments” (203). Sudjic notes that these corporate enclaves, while unlike cities as we have understood them in relatively recent times, bring a community together to share a particular purpose in much the same way as medieval, tribal, or feudal communities formed. He studies, for example, “the ring” formation of Apple headquarters—the physical compound built to symbolize the expectation of living in a physical world of circuit and feedback. Apple’s plan is to draw bright minds together to a specified place, where they live and work in a shared and looped environment. Ideally, there is no division between inner and outer, self and other, but a shared sense of purpose and interests. There are unmistakable echoes here of McLuhan’s city of the future—the village one inhabits with like-minded others, the abandonment of physical and psychic walls and boundaries, so that even one’s inner life is shared and transparent. But life in Apple’s ring city, according to Sudjic, is static and threatens oversharing, rather than powered by the interactive and creative dynamic that was at the heart of McLuhan’s model. RETURN OF THE CITY AS SHOWCASE OR WORLD’S FAIR Globalisms, ubiquitous in 1990s scholarship, seemed to underscore McLuhan’s prediction of widespread shift from place-based to global citizenship. Yet more recent scholarship reasserts the vitality of city studies. Deyan Sudjic, for example, presents the city as growing, not stagnant, and praises it as “human kind’s most complex and extraordinary creation” (219). Far from depicting dissolution, statistics tell of urban population escalation. Amin and Thrift, for example, begin Seeing Like a City by rehearsing city growth expectations: “By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s expected nine billion people will be living in urban areas, a relentless rise from today’s 50 per cent. Today there are more than 450 cities with more than one million inhabitants, and they include twenty-one cities between ten and 35 million people. The pace of growth is particularly marked in the developing world” (12). In their analysis cities are

Techno-City

45

not ubiquitous or interchangeable, but each a unique assemblage—a “combinatorial ecology,” “rather than conforming to some fiction of universal standard or objective method” (9, 30–31). Their reading indeed ascribes a particular character and vitality to each city place. Urban commentaries like these seem to run counter to McLuhan’s claim that the city was fading and obsolescent. Yet the reemergence of the city as material place and as a major political and social form is actually predicable according to McLuhan’s principles. First, we might take into account his belief in dialectical energy, causing counter-environments to replace environments. We might also invoke the figure-ground principle governing perception, which allows that things recede but are never lost: foreground can shift to the background, becoming part of the invisible environment: “All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground). The two continually coerce and play with each other across a common outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. . . . The study of ground on its own terms is virtually impossible; by definition it is at any minute environmental and subliminal” (Laws of Media 5). These principles of recurrence and perception argue the resilient character of the city. Yet cities have changed in many of the ways McLuhan predicted. Key elements of the modernist city are gone or changing, reliance on the center as controlling hub, for example. Even where center renewal has taken place, the business and attractions of city centers have been reconfigured: they are now less likely to offer housing, governance, and business—to seat essential services—and to provide instead entertainment and education—cultural and perhaps less essential activities. McLuhan commented in several places that city centers would no longer serve as hubs of government, business, or residential activity. Instead, they might commemorate the past, functioning as museums or memorials, or showcase new technological and design developments to welcome the future. In “The Invisible Environment,” for example, he observed, “The future of city may be very much like a world’s fair—a place to show off new technologies—rather than a place of residence or business” (67). In The Medium Is the Massage, we get something similar: “What remains of the configuration of former ‘cities’ will be very much like World’s Fairs—places to sow off new technology not places of work and residence” (72). While at a glance it may sound like he is depreciating the value and vitality of the city, the reverse is true if we remember the public attention and popularity of the two world fairs in the 1960s when he was making the connection: the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and Expo 1967 in Montreal, Canada—each drew over 50 million visitors. Rather than minimalizing the role of the city, he was repositioning, even repurposing it.

46

Chapter 1

Evidence argues that the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with its futuristic expose of technology affecting the earth, space, culture, and commodities, influenced McLuhan’s conceptions of world and city futures. While he never cited its influence—perhaps shying away from admitting to being struck by a populist, even “low brow” event—there is little doubt he absorbed many of the images. Several factor into the images and even the rhetoric he uses. We might note first that the overall theme of the fair, “peace through understanding,” captures the wording and represents the theme and direction of Understanding Media—a book that explores how we have neither personal nor global peace if we are driven by media rather than by more orderly sentience: with a human understanding key to brokering a safer future. The event symbol, a statuesque metal globe of the “Unisphere,” provides a striking visual representation to support the conceptualization of the global city. In this monument, the earth is entirely visible. McLuhan often observed that satellite images rendered the earth itself an art object. Unisphere reverses or at least shifts this theme, by literally turning the earth into art as a model. It is not only bios itself we are changing and forming but of course human perception and understanding as we are able to see in this sculpture the earth as an ornament (for photos and description of the Fair, see Alan Taylor’s online article from The Atlantic, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ph​​oto​/2​​014​/0​​6​ /196​​4​-the​​-new-​​york-​​wo​rld​​s​-fai​​r​/100​​749/)​. Ironically (given McLuhan’s antipathy to cars and car culture), it was images displayed in the General Motors Futurama pavilion that seem to have seeped most deeply into his psychic storehouse, impinging on his descriptions of how cities might aspire to look. In particular, he was interested in rounded and free-floating forms: buildings and structures that were circular and cylindrical rather than linear that were impermanent. Perhaps most important is that the images reveal a city that blends old and new. There is sediment as well as innovation so that new and old architecture functions together to mix, for example, innovative curves with older linear forms. McLuhan admonished architects of his day to blend old and new: “Architectural design is entrusted now with a major task of sustaining traditional values achieved by print culture. How to breathe new life into the lineal forms of the past five centuries while admitting the relevance of the new organic forms of spatial organization . . . is not this the task of the architect at present?” (“Inside” 54). McLuhan made a direct comparison between the New York Fair (1964) and Montreal Expo (1967)—suggesting the former was old-style show-andtell, as opposed to Expo’s open format he found preferable for drawing people in. The Montreal fair played with elements of mosaic structure, with various points of entry, avoiding established narrative and content in the stationary display: “Thus the New York World’s Fair defeated itself by imposing a visual order and story line that offered little opportunity for participation by

Techno-City

47

the viewer. In contrast, Expo Canada presented not a story line but a mosaic of many cultures and environments. Mosaic form is almost like an x-ray compared to pictoral form with its connections” (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 240). Yet his dismissive comments about narrative and coherence aside— comments that, incidentally, indicate he was familiar with both fair sites—the story and images about futures and technology purveyed at the New York Fair were those that colored his thinking and touched his imagination. NOT TOO LATE: [RE-]MAKING SPACES ONLINE AND IN PLACE It’s possible to understand and apply laws—to see and manage change—but not necessarily to applaud the direction and outcome. Certainly, reticence colors how McLuhan viewed the inevitable changes he forecast in the urban technological environment. In his interview in Playboy, in what seems forthright self-representation, he called himself innately conservative and expressed the wish he’d lived in other easier times when technology was developing more incrementally. He found it hard to witness ever-increasing mediation, coupled with generic apathy in its face. Beyond exercising resistance as an individual, he expressed commitment to provoking collective resistance. “The world we are living in is not one I would have created on my own,” he conceded before going on to argue the obligations of avoiding “the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the ivory tower” and the need to teach young people how to understand reality and change by getting “down to the junk yard of environmental change” (Playboy 22). Yet he was at the same time hopeful. He advocated for human control or mastery and widespread involvement. He claimed to be excited by the advantages that such changes might offer to those committed to learning from and growing with the times: “The whole globe has been compressed to the dimensions of a village. This global extension of the human brain is as involuntary as seeing when one’s eyes are open. It represents a new kind of continuous learning and an enormous upgrading of [humans]” (quoted in Wigley115; emphasis added). He wished he could witness the future: “Personally I have great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of [humans] and I tend to look at our tomorrows with a surge of faith and hope” (22). Moreover, a further source of optimism might have come from his seldom-invoked Catholic faith. While he preferred avoiding denominational views as a strategy for reaching a broader audience, a passage in War and Peace in the Global Village indicates that a tenet of his faith may have buoyed his optimism. There, slipped into a running passage without particular fanfare, he offered his belief that the Incarnation changed everything, elevating or rarifying with sacred energy

48

Chapter 1

human and nonhuman matter alike: “To the Christian the incarnation means that all matter was reconstituted at a historical moment and that matter is now capable of superhuman manipulation” (58). This lens of Christianity, seldom directly brought into focus by McLuhan, suggests that humans have an active role or agency in shaping and making the world that goes beyond the Blakean notion that moments of earthly revelation allow us the visionary capability to “see into the life of things.” For McLuhan, the vibrant matter lies all about, and humans are responsible for world making and shaping. Who was to do this important design work? All signs point to McLuhan’s suspicion of planners and architects as those too rooted in tradition and perhaps too superficial in being focused on material products and outcomes (as he said in criticizing Doxiadis and his group, despite their progressive interests and adoption of technological imaging and mapping tools). His suspicion of architects taking the helm of city design connects to his resistance to any specialists standing forward without being informed by experts in multiple fields and without commitment to public engagement. One might object that his program was itself avant-garde elitist, built as it was on privileging the insight of artists. Yet we must remember that for him the category of “artist” was fluid, admitting creative people from an array of fields. And it had a populist drive with the goal of widespread engagement, artists enabling human involvement and control. He imagined a state unifying self and others, resembling a Foucaultian heterotopia as defined by communications theorist Ganaele Langlois: “Beyond utopia and dystopia, heteroptopia is a principle of otherness, of othering what we perceive to be the normal order of things, and therefore of highlighting limitations and opening the door to the formulation of creative alternatives” (173). In McLuhan’s city of the future, individuals are joined to others, sharing consciousness and even concepts without the need for language, with computer code and computations brokering this link. Yet his optimism was measured. He feared that humans have abdicated control—and often described the process as a progressive loss and numbing—“narcissus narcosis”—already rendered helpless, like Eliot’s prone wasteland patients “etherized on a table.” Many developments in our day support McLuhan’s claim that we were moving into an engineered urban environment. Our virtual lives on social media, for example, represent some of what McLuhan had in mind when he spoke of our gravitation to an engineered environment and likely reliance on code to transmit ideas. This environment, however, is restrictive, offering us preset algorithmic programs, without liberating our sensual or sensory capacities, tending to enable mass or mob interventions in place of thoughtful engagements. Yet the world of social media could be made more meaningful if, as Langlois points out, we were to improve the software to allow for more thoughtful engagement and purposeful involvement. There can be programs

Techno-City

49

that enrich and engage our sense of justice and our desire to show care and cultivate relationship; there can be programs that liberate us from being enslaved by machinic parameters or managed by corporate and government interests so that we escape circuits and feedback. There can be responsive/ reactive programs that change as we need them to. A similar argument circulates about improving the material city and citizen futures through critical architecture and design practices so that material forms and cities are made more responsible and responsive, with design “at the interface between people, technologies and the city . . . to empower citizens” (Ratti 49). We can allow technology to enable bigger and more intricate buildings and monumental forms, or we can take McLuhan’s advice and begin to program environments to be more integrated and responsive to humans, the character of one reflecting and enhancing that of the other in a turn proposed by smart-city designers Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel: Active and networked architecture is starkly opposed to recent form-focused attempts at dynamism and may illuminate a path forward. . . . Rather than using digital tools to mathematically calculate complexity for the visual sense, interactive spaces can use digital tools to generate a new form of complexity: experiential complexity. . . . Grounded in communication and learning systems, sensor networks can transform buildings into intelligent agents with the capacity to learn from and coexist with their occupants. (Ratti and Claudel 80–81)

The material city spaces we inhabit and the virtual spaces we occupy are both still forming and thus open to the balanced and inviting techno-sensorium structures of McLuhan’s dreams and advocacy. There is still the chance to direct technology to provide opportunities for sensory fulfillment and transformation in a way that affects individuals and connections to everything other.

Chapter 2

Sensorium City Coming to Our Senses

For McLuhan, we live in a techno-sensorium environment, one increasingly technologized and mediated in ways that restrict and regulate human activities and feelings. He was fond of observing that Sputnik and satellite imaging turned the planet into an art form”: “When we put satellites around the planet, Darwinian Nature ended. The earth became an art form subject to the same programing as media networks and their environments. The entire evolutionary process shifted at the moment of Sputnik, from biology to technology” (Counterblast 141). He referred to the city, too, as an art form, working much as a movie set does to enable certain performances, practices, and sensibilities and discourage others, and like a movie set subject to being discarded after use: “The city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like a fading shot in a movie” (Understanding 135). Media are for him the technological apparatus—the constructed gadgetry—built to assist human activity and acts of perception but now accelerated and overgrown to replace the work of previously embodied nerves and senses. Describing how we have fallen victim to our ingenuity for making, he wrote to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “We have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven out of us” (Letters 278). His hope lay in a redesigned, consciously rebalanced techno-sensorium—a city deliberately harnessing science and technology to build and service a human-imagined and human-generated environment, responsive to human needs and senses. He imagined a city produced by human ingenuity and creativity and designed to energize and engage human users and respondents. McLuhan frequently referred to changes to the human sensorium so that rather than actively sensing the world and relying on balanced sensory intake, we have learned with our dependency on print literacy to be overly dependent on the eye; there is a “peculiar monopoly and separation of visual 51

52

Chapter 2

experience, at the expense of the other senses, which is imposed by print and its industrial, organizational extensions” (“Inside” 51). Moreover, such images as we take in are not part of a well-integrated stream of perception or imagination for we simply take in cliché images—those that we are accustomed to seeing and those that others deem important—and understand these by applying available cultural narratives to explain what we have been able to see. We have learned to favor a particular way of looking—to favor organized perspectival viewing and linear vision and to direct our gaze from a stationary position. We have trained our eyes to scan from left to right, as in the act of reading print. From a broad cultural perspective, we have also grown to consider some objects and arrangements as more important than others, and it is these culturally predetermined figures that we tacitly agree to notice, while everything else recedes into the background, becoming what McLuhan called “The Invisible Environment.” If we consider his phrase “the medium is the message” in relation to how we take in the world, we would note that Gutenberg’s invention did much more than furnish a democratic flow of textual information, more widely shaping our desire and purpose, training us to read, write, reason, and watch the world from the perspective of isolated individualism. Yet in the Gutenberg milieu, we shared our urban and industrial environment in common, shaping it to suit our needs and desires: a common view of values. With the arrival of the electric and digital age, changes occurred. In an increasingly technologically structured environment—we control light, heat, and sounds—our senses have undergone almost total extension so that “all of our senses are externalized now, all times” (Letters 277). Prior to the electric age that gave us 24-hour access to our environment, the city followed rhythms oriented to human patterns, with day light and dark night, inside separated from outside, private from public, city from country; with electricity, these boundaries have collapsed and we are able to see and be everywhere, aware of proximate and global neighbors and aware too that they have access to us. Despite this share, spread, and flow—increased interconnectivity—we now lack common values or focus for the surrounding city is a technological jungle or tangle, and we feel we have no say or control in its mega-development. McLuhan suggests in a letter to Tyrwhitt that the city itself had used to function as something we knew in common; it provided a shared understanding of and orientation to place; he worries we now feel no grounding to place nor relationship to real others: Now that by electricity we have externalized all of our senses, we are in the desperate position of not having any sensus communis. Prior to electricity the city was the sensus communis for such specialized and externalized senses as technology had developed. . . . Today with electronics, we have discovered that

Sensorium City

53

we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city as centre for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional. With electronics any marginal area can become center and marginal experiences can be had at any centre. Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights. (Letters 277)

While this passage is laced with visionary abstraction, it’s clear that McLuhan is concerned not simply because we experience more input and sensation than in the past but because what we are experiencing is technologically assisted or technologically dominated. Many of our perceptual channels are blocked so that we are operating without a balanced human perspective. This is the world of Yeat’s “widening gyre” where the center has not held; it is the atonce real and dissolving world of Joyce’s Bloom, who experiences sensations no longer fitted to words—words that melt and morph, with meaning no longer stable and shared. Unless we make a conscious effort to reorient ourselves and reactivate sensory life, McLuhan argues, this shift will render us vulnerable to becoming even more helplessly dependent on media, overwhelmed by new and faster devices and the practices they foster and require. He expressed hope that “we might be able to translate, or program, the environment before it translates us” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 92). His efforts to promote embodied sensory experience and provoke wider civic engagement in shaping media and culture can be understood as an educational project aimed at coaching us to resist and control powerful and mounting forces of media that regulate our sensory lives. His program for sensory involvement addresses two groups. First, he directs a call of action to individual citizens, asking each of us to awaken to our senses—to see more and to turn on other senses to complement vision, informing our minds with myriad unseen information, in an act potentially revealing patterns in the world. McLuhan explains this program in City as Classroom. The second group he hails are artists, who are a step ahead of the general public for being those who by vocation exercise and value the senses. As he noted in War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan’s artist figure welcomes and works with innovation, and “the pain that the ordinary person feels in perceiving the confusion [of innovation] is charged with thrills for the artist in the discovery of new boundaries and territories for the human spirit” (12). Avant-garde in approach, this figure works with an understanding of the present environment often by its refraction through the creation of a counter-environment that throws the present into relief. He defines the environment as “a special organization of available energies,” which “as such, are often imperceptible,” except as depicted in the art, which provides an “indispensable means of perception” (“Emperor’s” 90). As McLuhan argues, “the role of art is to create

54

Chapter 2

the means to perception by creating counterenvironments that open the door of perception to people otherwise numbed in a nonperceivable situation” (McLuhan and Parker 241). Kenneth Allen says it is the power of the counterenvironment to provoke a call to action and even change: “Like institutional critique, the counterenvironment is both aesthetic and social in its revelatory qualities” (125). Apart from helping others to see their physical and social surroundings more fully and clearly, McLuhan’s artist figure is also portrayed as leading the art/science (human/techno) project of shaping or programming the environment for the artist sees and senses what remains invisible to most of us and understands how to balance sensory ratios. This chapter explores McLuhan’s call for all to reclaim some of our sensory dexterity and interactivity, honing our capacity for synesthetic responsivity. It also explores his call to artists and designers to adapt technology to human needs and scale. The future is upon us, he was fond of observing, and to cope with change requires adjusting to media and artifice that are on our planet and even, through protracted exposure and dependency, within us. He believed it possible for designers to control technology to support both human and planetary life. What McLuhan wanted was for a more conscientious and complementary relationship between humans and technology attained through the acts of design and sustained by populous involvement in ongoing acts of making. What he also imagined had mystical and spiritual dimensions—a spiritual reawakening with religious dimensions, likely linked to, if not modeled after, Teilhard de Chardin’s Christian visions of the coming of a sacred mind and union with Christ on earth. The sense of advance and return he forecasts is resonant with Christian evolution and can be understood as a version of it, although McLuhan preferred to frame his vision and discussion in the register of art and science in order to appeal to (and potentially “save”) the widest audience who might be moved toward collective enlightenment. SENSE AND THE CITY: HUMAN ENGAGEMENT City as Classroom—a text McLuhan coauthored with Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon in 1977—aims at educating readers to identify “patterns and structures [that] ‘make sense’ of things” (165). Unlike many McLuhan texts that catch attention by lobbing provocative probes, this text is offered as a primer or propaedeutic for younger readers—offering exercises to guide highschool and undergraduate university students in matters of perceptual knowing and sensory acuity. This book encourages readers to respond to taken-for-granted stimuli using a variety of senses, activating those often bypassed. There are strategies for balancing multiple sensory inputs, as well as for becoming more aware of the process of using words and forming

Sensorium City

55

thoughts. McLuhan provides a process meant to return humans to using the senses to capture rich perceptual information, engaging them in a process aimed at reshaping both how we know the environment and what we know of it. The exercise of embodied cognition is requisite to full consciousness and attunement to the world of things and others—to “the total field of awareness that exists in many moments of consciousness” (Understanding 121). He encourages the conscious exercise of the process of understanding the changing environment and one’s relation to it. The terms “figure” and “ground”—from gestalt theory—were those McLuhan favored when talking about perception and material realities. For him “ground” was the full unseen world, composed of networks, both organic and built, rich with energetic and emergent character and constitution. Ground, then, is not simply comprised of discrete, formerly hidden things but is a net of interactive connectivities, with all things and beings influencing other things and beings. The drive to make assemblages and networks visible and understand their generative power is also connected to McLuhan’s conception of the role of “formal cause”—a term referring to the atemporal environmental field of things, events, and others whether linked by connectivities or separated by gaps. While “formal cause” is a complex term with roots in Aristotelian philosophy, McLuhan often used it to convey how things and events unfold in response to total environments or ecologies, rather than by simple patterns of causality. Eric McLuhan helps us to consider that it is equivalent to the gestalt concept of “ground,” when he suggests we understand cultural and environmental changes by asking “what is the ground (i.e., formal cause)” (qtd. in Zhang, 2016, np). The world understood using formal cause logic is interactive and mutually constitutive, not taking up the traditional subject–object dichotomy, and, as Thomas Rickert notes in assessing ambience, provides insight into “the deep patterns of relationality from which a world, as a composite of meaning and matter, comes to be what it is” (221). Apart from using terms like “figure and ground” and “formal cause” to explain our connectivity to the world and the dynamism of things, McLuhan used these terms to convey his sense of our need to expand sensory understanding and balance the senses. In his article “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium,” he declares the need for an aesthetic program to reeducate the “North American sense life,” making “synesthesia and wholeness” accessible to all who are sentient. Tactility, “less a separate sense than it is the interplay amongst senses” (46), can bridge the senses. McLuhan is critical both of our over-reliance on sight and the limited way we exercise the power of vision. Seeing is a learned practice, and what we take in visually is governed by cultural practices and personal preferences. Despite these visual restrictions, we nonetheless rely on sight to the exclusion of other senses. McLuhan advocates for better exercise and balancing

56

Chapter 2

of the five senses to attain a fuller reach of our perceptual abilities. We have learned from years of reading print and gazing at flat paintings and frozen photographs to use the eye “as a geometrical rather than a tactile organ,” short-circuiting sensory interplay that would afford more organic rather than lineal and exclusionary spatial organization. As he explains, with “a segmental and sectional sense of space,” we not only rely overmuch on vision but have also developed a gaze that isolates objects from their surroundings in denial of their relational position (“Inside” 50). Although many elements of our current digital culture encourage participatory communication compared to the individualism and even isolationism thought of as requisite to print culture, our disincarnate selves and virtual relationships do not admit the sort of total engagement McLuhan had in mind. Instead our lives online continue our sense of being outside ourselves, extended outwards in prosthetic style, dependent on media and artifice rather than on embodied responses. Responding online requires a form of participation, yet our involvement and interventions are notably regulated by interfaces and apps—by the computational affordances that direct and limit digital performance possibilities. As digital cultural critic Roberto Simonowski recently noted, we believe we are choosing our news and offering opinions by creating content, yet are trapped in a filter bubble, “a framework of technical and social conditions that largely determine the communication that occurs in its area of influence” (3). He also warns that rather than a balanced form of programming, we have accepted Zuckerberg’s Facebook model of communication that refuses complexity and soul searching, and rewards fast glib answers to garner “likes.” The example he cites of our programmed environment in relation to digital media is likewise discouraging. He reports, for example, on the development and operation of “the death app,” which allows an algorithm to decide who lives and dies when there are mishaps with selfdriving cars, reducing “moral philosophy[to] a central factor of automotive production” (xii). McLuhan often depicts sensory loss and imbalance beginning—or beginning to introduce problems—alongside the rise of literacy and print culture. Before words, we were, he imagined, immersed in unsorted sensation and emotions, “boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror” (Message 48). In his view, “the dark of the mind” had its attractions, such as placing humans in an environment infused with life and magic, all outside comprehension, let alone control. With language, we began to separate, discriminate, and impose order. Speech enabled shared ideas and plans and increased sociability. Then writing and print opened the way for creating and enforcing more systematic plans: writing “abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of

Sensorium City

57

civilization began the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built the city” (Message 48). The move from dark to light signaled accomplishment and gain, yet McLuhan wants us to understand it also came with costs; taking control of environmental resources and building cities and cultures caused us to see and attend to some elements, to decide on hierarchies, yet in the process to disregard many things and connections between things. CHANGES TO THE HUMAN SENSORIUM McLuhan often gravitates to pre-renaissance medievalism as a highpoint in human development—a time when human making, the senses, and tools and technologies were knit together, interdependent, and interactive. In his call for the activation and integration of the five senses, he refers to the pre-print medieval sensorium as a model of balance. Art theorist Alexander Nagel explains that for McLuhan the medieval mosaic was “a mode of apprehension” that involved integrated sensory response, unlike the modernist modes of perception favoring the eye and sequential vision: Mosaics engaged an integrated medieval “sensory ratio” where the visual was not disconnected from the other senses and if anything was subordinated to the “audile” and “tactile” forms. . . . [In] The Gutenberg Galaxy, [McLuhan wrote that the mosaic is] “a multidimensional world of inter structural resonance”—in contradiction to modern perspective, which was “an abstract illusion built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses.” (2012, 160)

As Nagel explains, McLuhan found “the mosaic mode of being relevant in the new age of electronic media, which were exploding the bounds of a mechanically understood world, putting things once again into multiple relation across space and time” (160). A looming and growing difference between the medieval mosaic sensorium and our digital techno-sensorium is that we no longer live in nature but in an artificial and fully mediated environment. We can activate senses but what we respond to now is mediated information and stimuli. The medieval mosaic offers an image of collectivity and integrative balance and reminds us that media in concert with humans can be useful to support connectivity as well as to slow and filter flow—to establish limits where there are no boundaries. McLuhan feared that by now being caught up in the rush and whirl of a fully mediated life and world, we are threatened with being fully submerged and overwhelmed in undifferentiated pattern-less points of contact. He warned against allowing ourselves to inhabit “that Africa within” (“Inside”

58

Chapter 2

54)—similar to the abyss we sometimes connect with Conrad’s Kurtzian figure who was released into freedoms. McLuhan imagines we should organize our new relational consciousness so that we maximize personal comfort and happiness and at the same time share with others. He suggests computers and machines may be harnessed to produce patterns that engage and interest us, as individuals and as a human community, and with this stimulation also provide us with a sense of safety, purpose, and organization. City Technologies: Confronting Ourselves and Extensions of Our Own Senses City as Classroom proposes ways for students—but really for all readers or citizens—to make the environment more evident and expressive and to expand and improve human perception and understanding. It recommends students move out of actual classroom confines and encounter urban elements directly through the senses, challenging them to be ready to identify emergent patterns. Students are asked to engage in thinking, feeling, and sensing—to blend concept and percept—and to engage in the process of recasting figure amid ambient grounds. The book asks students to consider how the classic optical illusion drawing of the “old lady/young woman” (see Classroom 11, figure 2.3) illustrates several points about blinkered vision. The drawing illustrates figure/ground relations: how looking at a particular figure leads to ignoring other patterns, let alone potentially rich contexts. Most of us, McLuhan notes, need to work at holding both images in mind at once. The text posits that concentration and willed perception may enable seeing both images together in “configuration,” which “allows the viewer to perceive figure and ground together; in fact, the viewer perceives the whole situation as ground before figures emerge or become detached” (10). The exercise provokes thinking about sight as a learned practice, one that can be developed; seeing is not a simple or even natural act, but more of a discretionary exercise. Performing self-conscious looking can begin to unsettle common presumptions about vision as “natural” and shared. Apart from retraining visual capacity so that we look against the grain and see more—leading to a more expansive sense of outside reality—the exercise of looking at the illusion also contributes to fostering self-reflection and insight. Thinking about vision as formed by habit and recognizing that our educational regime produces certain ways of looking can compel further curiosity and inquiry. Recognizing that looking involves privileging one image over another indicates that each of us is capable of moving beyond habit and the regulation of systemic registers to see for ourselves. It prompts the recognition that—as Edmund Carpenter puts it—“The so-called real-world turns out to be not nearly so independent of human consciousness as we once

Sensorium City

59

thought” (19). According to biographer Douglas Coupland’s unattributed quotation, McLuhan expressed a similar idea in the succinct aphorism, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it” (78). The exercise also exposes how perception is altered by our tendency to filter everything through our consciousness, making ourselves the figure and all else ground—a modern perceptual habit John Berger disparaged for putting “the single eye at the centre of the world” (16). McLuhan asks us to put the world first, allowing for the possibility of a direct encounter with the world of things. This openness may carry with it the possibility of prelinguistic e­ ncounter— similar to what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he spoke of the relative purity of image perception from his Berlin childhood. For Benjamin, youthful feelings triggered by “sacred” objects remain powerful and accessible, although only as pale shadows or in trace form. For Benjamin, there is a sharp “originary” world we lose as we fall through time and the mediations of language and experience. Moreover, recovering sensory memories can provide “traces of what’s to come” (2006, 79). “Ground” in this case is personal and temporal for Benjamin is invoking objects from his personal past, whose aura reaches through time in trace form. Likewise, for McLuhan, there is also a falling off that occurs as we age out of our youthful sensory activity: “A child is a genius till he is five because his senses are in active interrelation. Then his senses specialize” (“Unseen” 166). Yet rather than linking loss with aging—with an inevitable waning of our capacity to intuit immanent meaning as Benjamin does—McLuhan never denies the possibility of recovering perceptual acuity and by so doing enabling the insights of pattern recognition— understanding that the pattern one recognizes is reconfigured rather identical, marked by forces of change in the environment. Seeing and sensing more of the environment brings unseen things to light, reconfiguring relations and values, as well as providing an opportunity to recognize harmonies and patterns. Training visual perception affects how we understand the city. The widespread habit of taking in surface features leaves much of the city invisible. We privilege certain figures and views and allow everything else to slide into the background: for example, we see a large building, but perhaps not the cracks beginning to show in its foundation nor the window details. To be more visual, curiosity is to be rewarded with an improved sense of surroundings. In a 1955 Explorations article “The City Unseen,” Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, McLuhan’s longtime friend and collaborator, published a study that demonstrated how little students at Ryerson Institute in Toronto knew of their campus environment. Tyrwhitt biographer Ellen Shoskes describes the project: “Students were asked in December 1954 to complete a questionnaire ‘to discover what particular aspects of the environment of the campus communicated to them—or in other words—registered in their minds’” (155). According to Tyrwhitt, the students demonstrated a willingness to see what

60

Chapter 2

they expected to see and an “almost deliberate refusal to see what lies about them” (95), revealing a lack of “critical appreciation of the environment” (96). She observed that they only noticed what was useful to them—“The subject can afterwards identify those sensory impressions that interest or serve him; otherwise he remains unaware that he has seen an object”—and concluded that by leaving their aesthetic sense underdeveloped, “beauty passes them unseen” (96). The study implies that when subjects do not see or read objects in the world, they also miss opportunities to recognize complexity or critique ideas. It is on record that McLuhan valued Tyrwhitt’s study and ranked it as “the Explorations Group’s ‘major effort’: a test of visual awareness carried out with 800 students at Ryerson Institute” (Shoskes 155). Elsewhere, he reported undertaking several of his own experimental studies testing public media use; for example, in “The Invisible Environment,” he reported a study to establish “the sensory thresholds of the entire population of Toronto”: a large-scale study proposed to measure “the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactile, visceral and other senses as a matter of daily use” (166). Immediately, such data could reveal the sensory changes stimulated by new forms of media; eventually, computers could use such recorded data to adjust sensory stimulus and that such adjustments might “improve and stabilize [the] emotional climate” (166). He believed such environmental programming was foreseeable and desirable, expecting computers to be positioned to “conduct carefully orchestrated programming of the sensory life of whole populations” (Playboy 19). Such a broad quantitative study of an entire city population was never published, but McLuhan continuously explored its root question: what happens to individuals and cultures as a swift series of changing technologies affect our sensibilities, expectations, and practices? As he warns in Understanding Media, accelerating technological change now affects all aspects of life— “educational, political, and legal”—making the exercise of human understanding and control difficult but no less essential: “Our establishments are scarcely contrived to cope with such change. . . . Yet in all these situations we confront only ourselves and extensions of our own senses” (Understanding 512, italics mine). Rather than polling subjects to capture data, City as Classroom presents as a teaching text, a guide showing readers how to understand and balance the senses by being conscious of perceptual activity and the brain’s power to sort and interpret visual information. Readers as participants are to question perceptual operations by asking such questions as “What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car, or the radio?” (166). City as Classroom foregrounds how McLuhan links “pattern recognition” to how we “‘make sense’ of things” (165). Pattern recognition, of course,

Sensorium City

61

depends on seeing things-in-relation, rather than things alone—in organic totalities or ecologies, rather than as discrete and isolated. Cultivating the ability to see more than one thing is important in McLuhan’s view for things are never singular but always touched and tempered by each other so that “every experience happens in a milieu, in a set of circumstances, and not by itself in isolation” (City 14). The implications of this in terms of how we think about city and culture are profound. We see some things, not others—those that delight or offend, for example, or those that are in the news and rhetorically crafted to seize our attention. Yet McLuhan’s message is not simply that we are blind or blinkered but that we have an agency to improve our gaze. CITY: CLASSROOM WITHOUT WALLS City as Classroom was designed to reveal our over-reliance on vision and to activate other senses in relation to urban stimuli. As an exercise to expand awareness, it proposes that readers target an urban location to inventory sensory events that might otherwise go undetected: Go down town on a weekday and stand on the corner which you consider the most beautiful in your city. Note all the things which you think make this corner so beautiful. Now close your eyes and listen for a few minutes. Is the corner still beautiful? Next look for a place to sit down? Is there one? Or must you “keep moving”? Does this affect your feeling about the corner? (25)

This activity reveals that there is more than that meets the eye: that much of the extra action is media generated (or artificial) and appeals to senses other than vision. The list-making activity—“Note all the things which you think make this corner beautiful”—that precedes empirical exposure introduces the further recognition that our vision is regulated by preconceptions. If we expect scenic beauty, we see those things that support this pre-supposition unless; by setting aside our expectations to confront the scene in itself, we can collect new impressions and correct and update environmental information. By turning on some of our “extra” (underused) senses, we notice that all around is a live world of ground that has receded from consciousness. Even when the ground has been ignored, it has been affecting and changing what we know as and about the figure. If we are absolutely/resolutely tone deaf to the ground, then we cannot fully understand the figure itself. This exercise enriches how we think about the concept of ambience and entanglement, concepts currently popularized in “new materialist thinking” that assumes that, as well as cash and class, there are material consequences wrought by the world of things. In Vibrant Matter, for example, Jane Bennett

62

Chapter 2

presents her case, linked to science, for understanding ourselves as part of an interactive assemblage, whose influence is consequential but indiscernible. “If I take away any one thing, the material environment or outcome is not the same. Drawing on the concept of entanglement from physics, [Karen] Berard has provided another model for observing the chaotic but necessary network connecting all things” (42). Her observation is paralleled in the concluding section of City as Classroom, which refers to quantum physics as providing a new model for thinking about connectivities: “[When] Max Planck presented quantum physics (1900) . . . [h]is theory replaced the concept of connected matter with the concept of matter as a cluster of ‘quanta’” (170). As sensory expert David Howse points out, activating a multisensory register contradicts “the privileging of the brain and cognition in the modern Western understanding of perception, which operates to the exclusion of all those ‘loops through the body and environment’” (160). McLuhan himself sought to move beyond traditional modernist and Western positions and revealed in a letter to Innis that the balancing “Easternisms” was central to his program: “Claiming to be willing to provide a simplified key to his approach, McLuhan said he had throughout his work attempted to blend left and right brain hemisphere, eastern and western thought, feeling and thinking” (“McLuhan and the Bicameral Mind”). City as Classroom encourages readers to cultivate multisensory and even synesthetic knowing and in the process reflect on how feeling and thinking are connected. Visiting a favorite place and setting aside preconceptions raise questions about how the place affects one’s body and feelings so that one’s opinions of place can be transformed by newly reckoning the effects of discordant noises, smells, and the presence of other bodies. McLuhan’s exercise lays the groundwork for a recent essay by Trevor Marchand, which describes how pilgrims expect sacred encounter when visiting a church in Old Jerusalem; when instead they experience “a disposition of anxiety” brought on by noise, crowding, and strangeness—by “a kaleidoscope of unfamiliar stimuli . . . creating a flurry of mental representations of things seen, heard, touched and smelled” (66), they deal with the contradiction by retrospective reframing, remembering only those details that support a positive sense of place (67). While Marchand goes beyond McLuhan in studying our determination for reality to match expectations or preconceptions, McLuhan would accede to his conclusion that we need to approach place as “a constantly transforming mental representation,” in which emotions play a key role (68). Yet if we invent as much as encounter place, McLuhan argues the imperative of slowing down and analyzing the steps in this process. Rather than simply default to preconceptions like Marchand’s pilgrims, McLuhan’s students are coached to unpack the sensory experience, to consider individual sensory input, sensory interaction, and ever-shifting figure and ground constellations.

Sensorium City

63

By using “figure and ground” to explain how we look at the world, we gain access to what McLuhan thought of as the constitutive power of “unseen” forces. Really everything is simultaneously in touch: small or large, present or invisible, in ourselves and outside. We are trapped neither by personal habits nor by cultural sway or systemic regulation. City as Classroom provides a guide, especially for helping young or uninitiated readers to take first steps to open perceptual doors: looking for the “patterns and structures [that] make sense of things” (Classroom 165). McLuhan of course knew the impossibility of a non-mediated confrontation with reality, for the effects of tools and technologies are unavoidable on a planet that has “cease[d] in a way to be the human environment” (“Invisible” 165). Yet, even if the nature of nature has changed, and our surroundings have become artificial, we are still able to see and understand the environment more fully, improving our own lot and positioning ourselves to make informed interventions and civic contributions. Meaningful action, however, depends on taking the first step of training perception. BUILDING A BETTER TECHNO-SENSORIUM: THE ARTIST AND PROGRAMMED ENVIRONMENTS McLuhan’s efforts to encourage and educate individual citizens to re-embody and reactivate the sensorium represent only one arc of his program: this arc has so far been the focus of the chapter—the value placed on individual awakening so that each of us reclaims some of our sensory dexterity and interactivity in order to exercise some control. He declares that populist or participatory response is part of the electric/digital moment and that in the past we were more dependent on the artist to expose unapparent living conditions: With the extension of the nervous system itself a new environment of electric information, a new degree of critical awareness has become possible. Such critical awareness in the Western world, critiques and discriminations of sensory life as expressed in our environments, has previously been the province of the artist only. . . . Art has been considered the primary mode of adjustment to the environment. (War and Peace 20)

Poised to become more active and aware than ever before, human subjects still rely on visionary and sensory-adept artists, not only to expose stillhidden environmental elements but also to advise engineers and scientists about making technologies and remaking environments. The second arc of his program was directed at the role of artists to make media more responsive to humanity, to create system-wide and collective change. While many now

64

Chapter 2

know that individuals cannot break free of a media-saturated environment by turning off the phone or quitting Instagram, McLuhan recognized this early on by calling for collective engagement and effort: The individual is helpless against the pervasiveness of environmental change: the new garbage—or mess-age induced by new technologies (Playboy 21). McLuhan imagined the role of the artist as essentially twofold: as both educative and interventionist. He wanted artists to promote public safety and engagement and to contribute to reshaping—even programming—the environment. With electric media, and especially with the computer, we have gained the capacity to “program the entire environment responsively as a work of art” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 93). Thus it falls to artists to work with real life as their medium, to leave “the Ivory Tower for the Control Tower and [abandon] the shaping of art objects in order to program the environment itself” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 94). To create optimal levels of interaction between media and the human senses—and even to orchestrate interaction among various forms of media themselves—he calls on artists whom he believes have a superior understanding of sensory matters and who may therefore be able to coax out underused senses and attempt to restore balance. McLuhan looked to artists as avant-garde visionaries to provide histories, maps, and directions to move us forward: “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present” (Understanding 96). Before electric and digital conditions, in the world of mechanized modernism where things took place in a physical, relatively permanent location, the city served as a hub and focal point of activity, bringing people together and built to support human sociability and exchange. All roads led to the city, and, within the city, the infrastructure of roads, wires, and pipes moved people and things around. For each citizen, the city was “the sensus communis,” translating “each sense into other senses, so that a unified integral image is offered at all times to the mind” (Letters 277). The city, externalized for all to see, furnished not only common images and content but also reassurance that we are exercising sentience by enabling “us to perceive that we perceive” (Letters 271). We looked to outer landscapes of the urban world to tell us about ourselves and provide externalized representations of inner lives and drives. We wanted to buy certain soaps and cars to make life better, to admire movie stars viewed as shared idols, and to be like television characters whose dramas drew us in. In our present and coming world, we have a different relation to the city, and in concert the city itself has changed. Electricity has technologized everything: media no longer extend only the body (as in a wheel for a foot) but extend or outer our nervous systems. We are not looking out at the

Sensorium City

65

world to tell us about life, but we are ourselves out and exposed, always reliant on some form of media that shapes what we do or think. As a result, a city—both as an actual place and as a place we imagine—is no longer an organized setting, with a place for everything, no longer guaranteed to be built around essential services that define terms of citizenship and community values—functioning as an “externalized sensus communis” (Letters 281). Instead, our new environment is almost entirely mediated and artificial, as much a glaring collage of lights and ads for often nonexistent virtual places as it is a street with addresses and actual destinations. Many remaining elements of actual city have passed from having prominent roles as figures to drift into the realm of things disregarded or unseen for the business of city hall and lawcourts is relatively puny compared to global transactions. Moreover, media direct our attention away from the city center as the heart. McLuhan called on artists and designers to use media to excite our senses in the way the modernist city had once done, with its visual appeal and dynamism and overall sense of promise. He was not advocating that we evacuate old for new nor that we attempt to retrieve the old forms but that we old and new can work together. As is, the “ground rules, the pervasive structure, the overall pattern elude perception” (“Emperor’s” in Vanishing 242) and we need them to come into relief to determine what to salvage and what make new. As biographer Terrence Gordon explains, McLuhan called on the artist to generate “a counter environment as a means of perceiving the dominant one” (167). Gordon also captures McLuhan’s expectation that contemporary art was not meaningful as artifact or product, but more as a means of encouraging perceptual activity in viewers. Art offers an opening for processual involvement, provoking multiple sensory responses to expand consciousness. In the speeded-up, electric world that has replaced the controlled expansion of industrial modernism, the city no longer functions as a center but is part of a global flow of programs that discourage separation, boundaries, or organizing forms: “We can no longer exist in Euclidean space under electronic conditions, and this means that the divisions between inner and outer, private and communal . . . are simply not there for an electric one” (Letters 278). In this same letter to Tyrwhitt he links the problem facing urban planners to the problem of moving from literate to electric culture—we no longer take in words in an individual process of thinking and assume that words we use have shared meanings but instead experience a barrage of nonlinguistic sensations and movements that defy coding, ranking, and sharing: “The problem of urban planning today . . . is [that] the global village is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times comprise all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the

66

Chapter 2

management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal point of consciousness” (Letters 278). Recognizing the disordered and quickening flows of information and stimuli, McLuhan called on technology to assist in new management infrastructures. Many of us are just beginning to notice the pervasion of technological sensors in the environment—bioidentifiers and bioresponders that can modulate environment factors such as access, heat, and sound. Smart cities are all about algorithmic order and the supervised/measured and controlled movement of human and nonhuman energy. It was a form of algorithmic force that McLuhan proposed as the mode of shaping our global and coming world city: “Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flight” (Letters 278). Yet it must be emphasized that he opposed letting technologies and algorithms rule, but imagining them being harnessed for the purpose of human safety and comfort, managed by human hand and eye, and perhaps optimally responsive or reactant to the human sensorium. McLuhan often invoked “control tower” imagery, comparing artists to air traffic controllers who have a seeing and salvaging mission, needing in our time to identify paths within networks and clarify our implicated role and position within technology and media—so that the artist moves from aesthetic to applied outcomes—from “the ivory tower to the control tower of society” (Understanding 96). He wanted artists involved in building a responsive environment, one meeting human needs and interests—to coax back some inner responsivity, in environmental projects that encourage involvement; he also argues that these installations can make a multisensory appeal so that we are not simply looking and thinking, but responding both consciously and unconsciously, with “all the senses participated at once” (“Emperor’s” in Kepes 91). It is the mission of artists and architects to design environments that respond to human needs so that we are engaged by cities managed to scale and balanced for our ease and comfort, rather than being caught by fragmentary connections and swirling data. There is no return to a pre-media age, but there is a possibility of attempting to restore some of the balance between inner and outer worlds if we adjust the effects of media to provide comfort and reassuring scale. Artists (those tuned into their sense and, in exemplary cases, trained to understand some of the physical properties of media) are like traffic controllers for being able to see patterns and provide order to those of us caught in the fray on the ground. The hope he evinces—of human and tech interaction, with humans at the helm and serving human interest as their purpose—is not lost in current architectural and design projects that experiment with generative and computational design and algorithmic construction. Buildings that are the

Sensorium City

67

result of programs are still said to be only as good as the architects controlling the input and programs. Wired magazine, for example, ran an image of a computer-designed building and quoted project developers as saying that even with reliance on CAD programs, the architects continue to play a huge role: The question with computational design is where the actual human designer comes into play. It’s easy to assume that a computer-generated building leaves little input for the actual designer, but the fact is, even algorithms need to be designed. Moreover, when humans are defining the constraints that guide a building . . . those in turn become an avenue for creative expression. The hope . . . is that this process can bring out the best in both humans and computers. (Stinson np)

Like future crafters and speculative realists today who argue that we need to dream design into being, he offered several ideas about how technology might swerve to add new accommodations and engaging elements. Some of his plans affected the material environment, such as his proposition that we would have houses “without walls” as we know them—surrounded instead with walls of climate-controlled air or “with music as a structural part of our sensory environment” (“Emperor’s” 243). Coupled with this was his vision of our living without speech, communicating silently through telepathic waves using a shared or communal consciousness. Although he does not provide precise details of how thought transference might take place, he invited us to imagine moving to communicate without the metaphoric interference of language: “The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E. S. P.” (“Invisible” 167). His point was that the artist would join with the scientist to program the environment as technosensorium, merging forces of technology and humanism to build a technosensorium fully favorable to human users. The blend of humanistic and scientific models is one that can be seen in McLuhan’s own investigations. Rather than seeing these as discrete or discontinuous fields, he imaged interactive and informing knowledge ecologies and turned to cybernetics and physics to provide models. Yet rather than rest his hope in a world calibrated by computers and algorithms—albeit, initiated by the minds and hands of human programmers—he was imagining more human intervention and interface, a world where computers work for and with us, rather than one we pre-program and then walk away. The recent trend encouraging driverless cars is one likely to have terrified McLuhan: it is initiated by human efforts and programming to achieve conditions of ease and safety, yet the evacuated driver’s seat leaves the computer to make decisions and ushers in an array of fresh dangers.

68

Chapter 2

ATHLETICS AND PROSTHETICS: SKIN DIVING WITH JOYCE More than a scientist or philosopher, the revelatory figure for McLuhan is the artist who struggles to depict human experience. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, the work of art tended to be representative or mimetic, “to depict the outer world by putting the ordinary outside environment inside books and theatres,” and doing so “as a means to defining and controlling inner states” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 91 ) McLuhan notes that more recent creative projects have abandoned relying on the visual and rational and introduce abstract elements of the unconscious to begin mapping “the inner landscape.” (“Emperor’s” in Kepes 91). Whereas artists from Renaissance to modern times were concerned with “matching” inner to outer worlds, modern and contemporary artists are concerned with “making”: exploring new configurations; leaving gaps rather than proffering a seamless narrative or mimetic picture; leaving openings for audiences to join in the activity of finding patterns and resonances; “making a world in which all the senses participated at once” (“Emperor’s” in Kepes 91). Joyce, an artist McLuhan cites frequently, is pertinent to McLuhan’s study of the city, for McLuhan referred to Joyce’s Ulysses as “the greatest piece of city planning and building in this century” (qtd. in Wigley 113). Jaqueline Tyrwhitt filed this comment under humor in the Ekistics journal that published minutes for the 1972 Delos 10 (qtd. in Wigley 113). Yet on a serious level, his appointing Joyce as a master planner tells us of McLuhan’s limited interest in actual blueprint plans and material structures, and his investment instead in creative and imaginative projects aimed at exploring and expanding human consciousness. Joyce’s word-based place- and world-making appealed to McLuhan in several ways. First, the characters experience the simultaneity of insularity and interpenetration that composes the twentieth-century psychosocial urban experience; each character feels radically alone, despite being part of a web of connectivity and experiencing moments of convergence or camaraderie. Inhabitants of this city are not driven by reason, but by dreams, desires, and the irrational. Inner landscapes were Joyce’s preferred terrain, explored via stream of consciousness flow. In a letter to Tyrwhitt, McLuhan commented that figuring out the inner/outer connection was the chief mission of architects—that design should accommodate the human scale and register: “Is it not . . . the problem we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new-made ratios” (Letters 278). Oliver Sacks’ description of how imagination can connect inner to outer worlds helps convey what McLuhan appreciated in Joyce: Simple visual imagery may be invaluable but there is something passive and mechanical and impersonal about them, which makes them utterly different

Sensorium City

69

from the higher and more personal powers of the imagination, where there is a continual struggle for concepts and form and meaning. . . . It is by such imagination, such “vision,” that we create or construct our individual worlds. (“The prescience”—“the mind’s eye” 41)

In Ulysses, Joyce incorporates landmarks and features of the actual Dublin he knew—a physical, material city place, with streets and buildings—yet whatever occurs in the external drama and setting has less narrative weight than the complex inner lives that truly animate the characters and, bubbling into these, even deeper inner and unconscious drives. The city is a hub for both random and deliberate meetings. Yet only in the most limited and even superficial ways does it furnish a social space of shared norms and interests. More often it is the stage for unaccountable interactions—even near meetings, unnoticed but nonetheless changing the course of personal or social events, like quantum mechanics that argue that objects in space affect other objects exerting unseen influences on the environment. Joyce also conveys time connectivity. Every moment and event has unexpected and even untraceable origins and outcomes. Nothing is isolated. Terrance Gordon suggests that McLuhan, too, eschewed a chronological, cause-and-effect worldview, for a more “synchronic” view of language and culture, adopting an approach “in which any moment, or aspect of culture, can be made to reveal the whole to which it belongs, and in which all past cultures survive as resonance” (Gordon 329). In Joyce’s Dublin, meaning is not contained in moments of action or interaction but spreads out, colored by and in turn coloring memory and expectation. Fluidly and invisibly, everything is connected so that everything is forming rather than contained or finished. As Elena Lamberti has it, “Joyce taught McLuhan how to bring past and present together through language; in Joyce’s works analogy replaces logic, and words are elaborated following their evocative power, not their traditional syntax” (Mosaic 181). Joyce explores/explodes/exploits the limited potential of language as a way to capture and encode meaning. Abandoning language as buttoned-down and referential, he pursues wordplay that reveals its evocative and fluid nature. As Donald Theall has noted, McLuhan, like Joyce, “consciously demolished the stability of the sign symbol and began playing with the bits and pieces of a fragmented society” (51). Joyce creates a world of mixed media and multisensory experience, using words in deliberately fluid and evocative ways, so that readers are engaged in thinking about meanings and discerning associations and patterns. This, we have noted, is a mental world McLuhan both inhabits and creates. For readers or audience, Joyce appeals not to reasoned thought and the conscious mind; indeed there is an aural appeal to his wordplay in the litany of “sounds like” puns [McLuhan too loved the pun, moving

70

Chapter 2

to Joycean territory with the conflation of “alphabet” and “absent mindedness,” as “abcdmindedness” (Counterblast 117)]. Joyce’s texts engage readers in the process of thinking about multiple meanings and sensations, and thus appeal not to reasoned thought and the eye, but to our sense of sound and rhythmic patterns. Finally, satisfying McLuhan’s fascination with the connection between abstraction and representation, Joyce built his word city without “fixed trace” and studied communication and information flow without making a permanent or physical structure. McLuhan wrote against making more things on the face of the planet: “All hardware ‘growth’ is destruction. It is merely additive, as in cities or industries” (Cliché 49). Joyce’s Ullyses is not a product, artifact, even finished text but an offer to his audience of involvement in the process of making. This corresponds with McLuhan’s own statement of the purpose of art: “The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually organized but a direct participation in an experience . . . in a process rather than apprehending of concepts” (McLuhan, qtd. in Gordon 156). CODA McLuhan’s perspective on the need to control and shape technology, designing or handcrafting it rather than allowing it to forge forward with machinedirected impetus anticipated the marquee role of design in our current culture. In their recent small book Are We Human? Colomina and Wigley strike many McLuhan-inflected notes, using the term “design” to convey human and thing interactions (human-directed activity) which might have served McLuhan as a substitute term for his use of “media”—which for him was not inert matter nor even a conduit but was always embedded in ecological connections and always related to human activity. McLuhan announced that we live in art and design following the “blue marble” photos taken by Apollo from space in 1972. Similar observations continue as definitional in Colomina and Wigley’s analysis of the centrality of the design to “the state of our species” (9); they call the blue marble photographs “transformative” (16) and argue that “humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding . . . design has become the world” (9). In a recent interview, Wigley proposes that the designed world is “screwed up” and “magically ripe” for redesign; he is providing an update or variant on McLuhan’s similar expression of design hope for a new society “where magic will live” if fostered in a “programmed environment” that responds to all human needs and engages human interests (Playboy 17, 18).

Sensorium City

71

The aim of sensory design is not simply the aesthetic gain of seeing more fully, but the ontological urgency of gaining the understanding of pattern and meaning in one’s own life and in connecting one to others and place. McLuhan’s call for an attunement of the human sensorium anticipates current art and architectural dialogues that review exhibits, installations, and architecture as part of the communicative setting. By cultivating and achieving environmental attunement, people understand their role and responsibilities as active world makers, in ways that implicate not only personal creativity but also social and civic responsibility. Although I have presented McLuhan’s call to citizens and artists as distinct, there is often a blurring of boundaries, and “participation” and “engagement” are words he used to describe the involvement of all citizens in creative developments. When environments are new or unknown, unprecedented in ways McLuhan believes the electric/digital world is, we rely more heavily on artists to create maps and orientation. He used the example of outer space exploration, where we are dependent on narrative and images to shape our conceptualization: Man in outer space as yet has no means of imagining the nature of his own experience in space. Until artists have provided him with adequate forms to express what he feels in space, he will not know the meaning of the experience. (Vanishing Point 30)

To the extent the earth is a better-known terrain, he suggested the opposite: the gap between artists and others has narrowed so that making and creativity are increasingly a shared enterprise in many projects: “Artists have, during the past century, been vividly aware of the ever increasing measure in which the audience shares in the creative process . . . [and] the increasingly creative awareness of people who are deeply involved in one another by means of electric circuitry” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 94). Artists can be trusted to provide insight and orientation, particularly on emergent matters, in our informationrich age characterized by Here-Comes-Everybody energy. McLuhan was clear that his method of interpreting and understanding city patterns and futures was based on careful observation of the present, which reveals emerging patterns. Yet he was also willing to leave strict observation behind to move into the speculative and futuristic territory. Sometimes, his descriptions are not fully precise and consistent. In particular, the interactive role of the artist and of the citizen in shaping technological options and city futures is left open, a gesture in itself a strategy of engagement for we are enjoined to think about this bond. Moreover, his understanding of who can be considered an artist is also broad, and he stated that artists work in various fields: “The artist is the man in any field,

72

Chapter 2

scientific a or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of the new knowledge in his own time” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 96). He further claimed that our electronic (cum digital) age is scientific or technologized to the core, and so scientist is as much implicated as an artist in helping us comprehend and manage the built environment: “Science, quite as much as art, is concerned with the construction of anti-environments. In the electric age the anti-environments of science incorporate the nervous system” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 93). McLuhan often painted us as caught in a transitional time, mid-transformation. This observation raises another form of the question left open at the end of chapter 1—did he imagine and court radical change or imagine a blend of old and new? Piecing his observations together seems to say that for now our work is the blending old and new. We are in the position of preparing for explosive radical change: “The next phase of this extension will naturally concern the action of making consciousness technologically” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 93). Inevitably and eventually, he predicted, we will live without any of the solid formations we know. What is painful about our current moment is that we are struggling, even unconsciously, with old approaches and certainties now out of step and too slow. He hoped to ease the transition away from an environmental blitzkrieg, to reduce “the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful co-existence with the new retribalized society” (Playboy 74, italics mine). This chapter (on the role of art and literature) raises the question of whether McLuhan imagined with any optimism a world without words—one of the types he tells us is incoming, dependent for communication on a universal computer-based language. We inhabit an electric world where we can no longer see how things are connected, where lines and paths are invisible in quantum theory and communications practices, where the practice of observation itself has been proven via quantum thinking to change outside matter. He advises us to give up directing a blind gaze outward and attempting to take shelter in and pleasure from things, a wasteland of commodities and images, the “city [become] superjungle” (Cliché 78). He suggests we attempt to reactivate perceptual powers, follow conceptual concerns [putting aside “Stupefaction and ‘tranquilizer’ drugs” (Verbi-Voco-Visual 61)]; he suggests we attempt full feeling, following the Yeatsian recommendation “to lie down where all ladders start,/in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” (Cliché 20). He twinned loss of linguistic precision with loss of a linear and rational sense of space in a letter to Tyrwhitt: The problem of urban planning today . . . in the global village is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times

Sensorium City

73

comprise all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. (74)

He further related the exercise of urban planning to the search for a universal language (such as the constructed Esperanto) in From Cliché to Architype: A comparable situation to that of the town planner and the ideal city is that of contrivers of ideal languages for international use. By removing all the superfluous junk, they present us with a sterile husk. It’s as if some Herculean effort at “cleansing the Augean stables of speech” also got rid of the “rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” so indispensable to the artist as the starting point of his creations. (79)

We will still have language in the world McLuhan imagines, although it may not be the pictographic or alphabet versions we have known, but a computerassisted wordless way of communicating: “The future of language will not be as a system of classified data or meaning. The future of language, as a complex structure which can be learned without learning the words at all, is a possibility that the computer presents increasingly” (“Invisible” 167). In the meantime, as we live in transition, he asks us not to go silent but to get to work on igniting the senses and even on synesthetic awareness—on recovering an “imaginative life by creating multi-sensuous interplay” (“Emperor’s” Kepes 91). As a resource to explain the resonant power of language, often disregarded in the everyday trade of surface cliché, he quotes a passage from Eliot that explains the primal and connective power of words: What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality. (qtd in Verbi-voco-visual, np)

Cultivating sensitivity and creativity prepares us to humanize the changes which are, after all, of our own devising, since our technologies are simply extensions of ourselves.

Chapter 3

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning Collaborating with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Mixing with Ekistics

McLuhan collaborated with many designers and artists, and was familiar with visual and art theory and practices. His interest in graphic art and design, and the combined rhetorical power of images and text, are apparent in experimental publications like Counterblast, Culture Is Our Business, and The Medium Is the Message—all of which explore the rhetorical effects of collaging images and photographs with short texts. There have been a number of scholarly examinations of his connections to artists and art theorists (Lauder and McLeod Rogers), perhaps most notable among these his interest in Sigfried Giedion (Scott), and his collaborations with Harley Parker (Genosko). His abiding fascination with perception eventuated in the nontraditional, experimental and highly visual presentation of his ideas, which has led several scholars to consider McLuhan himself a creative artist figure (for example, Mosaic Lamberti). This chapter examines his interest in, and interactions with urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, to make the case that it is beneficial to read each through the other when their ideas are mutually enriching. McLuhan and Tyrwhitt met in an introduction proffered by Sigfried Giedion (Gordon 160) when Tyrwhitt came from Europe to take up a planning post at the University of Toronto. She became an active affiliate of the interdisciplinary Explorations theory group, attending the first group meeting in 1953. In the decade following, she was instrumental in drawing McLuhan into participating in the Delos Symposiums and the Ekistics planning movement, led by architect Constantinos Doxiadis. The first such symposia was held in 1963, when a group of intellectuals— Tyrwhitt and McLuhan key among them—boarded a yacht for an eight-day meeting, afloat around the Greek islands, for a “radical mixing of intellectual activity and sensual pleasure” (Wigley 84). His affiliation with this group expanded McLuhan’s exposure to contemporary design thinking and urban 75

76

Chapter 3

planning, and influenced his thinking, in ways this chapter considers. His ultimate disavowal of their commitment to global housing and settlement coincides with the strengthening of his belief in impending urban change—in the extent to which technology was changing and would continue transforming both inner and outer realities. It was not so much that McLuhan refused to take up their sense of social purpose and mission as that he felt this mission was already outmoded, and more pressing was the need to address less structured goals of building for tomorrow in a technologically orchestrated world. As Chapter four will reveal, studying McLuhan’s relationships with Gyorgy Kepes and Jane Jacobs, his direct interactions with Tyrwhitt and connections she helped him forge in the design community do not capture the full extent of McLuhan’s work with planners, architects, and designers. He followed the work of Kepes, an artist who explored the interactions of art and technology and who founded the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, inspiring urbanist Kevin Lynch to examine how we use the city in Image of the City. In something of a footnote, he was also affiliated with Jane Jacobs, with whom he developed a short film, A Burning Would, as activist intervention to prevent the Toronto Spadina Expressway. Yet his connection with Tyrwhitt stands out for spanning what are arguably his most productive years and reflects the range of his commitment and exposure to design thinking. The intellectual friendship between McLuhan and Tyrwhitt should not be read as simply a connection between two minds, for both brought a network of traditions and active contemporary influences. The shared perspectives evident in their work have broader methodological and theoretical implications, for they present a model of knowledge as pattern-based and shared and of knowledge production and circulation as collaborative. Much has been said of McLuhan’s “mosaic” method as a combinatory approach to aggregate ideas and learning that mitigate against fixed perspective and connections and requires a more sweeping environmental scan. Elena Lamberti defines this approach as helping to cultivate “a new frame of mind conducive to a different approach to knowledge, wherein knowledge can be conceived of as a continuum to be investigated in all its complexity” (Mosaic Lamberti 7). More recently, Richard Cavell plumbs the implications of this method in the presentation of McLuhan’s own ideas, arguing that they can be understood as continual reworkings or remediations, rather than as developmental or expansive, or as marked by linear progress and newness. The mosaic element I mean to emphasize by reading Tyrwhitt and McLuhan into each other is connected to guild-like co-production. Alexander Nagel’s gloss of mosaic production conveys McLuhan’s approach to making which often involves collaboration and blending old and new material: “In mosaics the artist uses chunks of readymade material and patches them into

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

77

a composition that is understood as an application of a program—a program typically not of the artist’s invention. Once it is in place the mosaic has a very long life, not only because its materials—glass and stone—are more durable than pigment on canvas or panel, but because it is by nature structurally amenable to ongoing restoration. Many ‘ancient’ or ‘medieval’ mosaics are in fact the ongoing work of succeeding generations” (159) Whereas Nagel contends that McLuhan knew but never fully articulated the contrast between medieval guild craftsman and modernist notions of individual creativity, I would counter that he may have avoided definitive statements because he himself never totally committed to one mode over the other. He was reluctant to abandon values of individualism, privacy, and personal authority associated with the modernist approach—for these are values he is on record as quietly preferring when he refers to himself “as a man molded within the literate Western tradition” (Playboy 21). Despite this preference, he nonetheless purposefully experimented with the medieval approach to knowledge-making and reception—wherein insights and ideas are ambient and circulatory and open to revision, neither devised by a single mind nor owned by an author with copyright stranglehold. Some of McLuhan’s ambivalence, coupled with his determination to explore the return of collective conditions, is captured in a letter to Tyrwhitt sent in 1960, wherein he notes somewhat ruefully that electricity and technologies have eliminated the option of stand-alone living and thinking—done away with “divisions between inner and outer, private and communal” (Letters 278). Tyrwhitt, on the other hand, was entirely devoted to a shared knowledge production. Trained in postwar Europe to implement pragmatic and collective solutions to hasten massive reconstruction projects, she was a master at seeking ways to share, circulate, and extend ideas, without reckoning the need for personal signature or ownership. In a recent biography of Tyrwhitt, Ellen Shoshkes tells us that she was schooled by her mentor E. A. A. Rowse to believe in the “collective mind” (53). Tyrwhitt often served as designated secretary in male-heavy organizations and in this role made interventions that smoothed social relations and led to the publication of landmark notes and journals. Shoshkes describes Tyrwhitt’s dedication to knowledge sharing: “Adept at mobilizing ‘the collective brain,’ Tyrwhitt was unconcerned with the ‘ownership of ideas’” (186). If judged by our current standards, Tyrwhitt can seem to be a rather beleaguered figure, the woman behind the men, mostly muse-like, inspirational, and even self-sacrificing. Such standards also fail to flatter McLuhan for other reasons: he becomes the avaricious egoist who recognized sharp ideas and made off with them, without commitment to fair attribution. According to architect and scholar Mark Wigley, Buckminster Fuller noted that McLuhan willingly acknowledged retrieval and remix as part of his epistemology:

78

Chapter 3

“Fuller told his friends that McLuhan never had original ideas, nor claimed to. He simply remixed available material in an original way” (86). Partnering with Tyrwhitt may have given a boost to his collaborative spirit. Urban design was not McLuhan’s specialty, and he deliberately sought out field experts, Tyrwhitt chief among them, to contribute, guild-like, to building a knowledge mosaic. JAQUELINE TYRWHITT: STUDYING PERSPECTIVE AND PERCEPTION IN THE CITY As an urban planner, Tyrwhitt was concerned with the need to reshape and repurpose the city to be more welcoming and engaging, to enrich the experience of citizens on both a personal and social or collective level. She explored how contemporary environmental conditions discourage us from being fully responsive in two articles published in Explorations, “The Moving Eye” and “The City Unseen.” Insensitivity to urban surroundings is really triggered, she argued, by the prevailing design elements of the modernist city environment—whose repetitive character, flat and linear elements and closed surfaces discourage citizen curiosity and engagement. In “The Moving Eye,” Tyrwhitt contrasts the design and structure of Western and Eastern cities as well as differing visual practices exercised by citizens to navigate and orient themselves to the city. Visiting Fatehpur Sikri in northern India, she remarked on its structural elements designed to avoid drawing the eye to any one fixed point, so that no one feature stands out as dominating, scene-stealing, or culminating. Because there is no “fixed center” of attention, citizens or visitors never feel they have “taken it all in” or found a defining perspective for “nowhere [is there] a point from which the observer can dominate the whole” (90). Instead, the experience is immersive, and the citizen or visitor “becomes an intimate part of the scene, which does not impose itself” (90). The architecture of Western cities, by contrast, directs the eye to certain establishing or staging points, often usually vertical or axial lines. Tyrwhitt defined “linear perspective” as key to the Western way of looking and as having “the single ‘vanishing point’ and the penetration of landscape by a single piercing eye—my eye, my dominating eye” (91). Linearity is supported in design by the concept of establishing “the view,” which city dwellers look for, find, and then rely on; a view is established by “the penetration of infinity by means of a guided line—usually an avenue of trees or a symmetrical street.” As well as an established view, there is also a vista, which organizes what the viewer beholds; “the vista” she described as “the termination of the organized view by an object of interest, often the elaborately symmetrical

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

79

façade of a large building, that could only be rightly beheld from a central point at some distance from it” (91). These regulatory perceptual concepts— linear orientation, providing a framework or matrix to organize view and vista—lead Westerners to believe, “consciously or unconsciously,” that any other perspective is impossible or “wrong.” What is most and least important in the environment is pre-packaged or—determined, with unimportant elements becoming recessive or indistinguishable, falling into the ether of “the city unseen.” The Western city demands that we rely on our visual sense and is designed to direct our gaze, and this regime discourages not only other ways of looking but also extinguishes human awareness of other sensations, such as smell or sound or sway. More than a perceptual mode, this is, Tyrwhitt claims, an “intellectual approach,” one that is human-centered and imagines a static universe and objects, fixed in a grid, which humans create to dominate. This way of making, seeing and knowing is reductivist and conformist, involving shared norms rather than calling up the imaginative intelligence of “vision in motion” (94). It is interesting that Tyrwhitt refers to this “seemingly solid” city of Fatehpur Sikri as resembling a transparent screen for its capacity to engage the sensations and feelings of those who make their way through it. By this, she means that it allows visitors to take in more than a single object, to feel as well as to see, and to have a unique and creative encounter with buildings and space. The urban environment is not inexorably mapped out, and citizens/ visitors are not expected to respond programmatically. It does not dictate what one sees or disregards nor the order in which one takes in the field or moves through it, nor the speed and direction of one’s passage. In a 1955 Explorations article “The City Unseen,” Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (in collaboration with Carl Williams, a psychologist and co-member of the Explorations group) published the results of a study that demonstrated that Ryerson students had a limited sense of their environment, which prompted her to conclude that they demonstrated an “almost deliberate refusal to see what lies about them” (95). Shoshkes describes Tyrwhitt’s study this way: “Students were asked in December 1954 to complete a questionnaire ‘to discover what particular aspects of the environment of the campus communicated to them—or in other words—registered in their minds’” (155). The results demonstrated that the students noticed only what they found useful: “The subject can afterwards identify those sensory impressions that interest or serve him; otherwise he remains unaware that he has seen an object” (95). She expressed regret at finding students “supremely uninterested in critical appreciation of the environment,” and drew the conclusion that by leaving their aesthetic sense underdeveloped, “beauty passes them unseen” (96).

80

Chapter 3

MCLUHAN’S STUDIES OF PERSPECTIVE AND PERCEPTION IN THE CITY While it is not unusual for McLuhan to jag into observations about human perceptual habits and capacities even as he explores other topics, he takes perception and perspective as his main topic in Through the Vanishing Point, City as Classroom, and “The Invisible Environment”—texts on which I will rely in comparing his approach to Tyrwhitt’s. McLuhan’s aim in Through the Vanishing Point is—much like Tyrwhitt’s in “The Moving Eye”—to point out the limits of the organizational principles of linearity. While McLuhan often takes up the contrast between Eastern and Western perspectives (and while he has a short section on Japanese influences), his approach here emphasizes a time-based contrast—presenting his argument that we are in the process of abandoning the principles of linearity that have dominated with print since the Renaissance and are returning to less representational values that were significant in earlier oral cultures. For him, linearity goes with literacy, and he explores how this ocular-centric regime of representational values and fixed perspectives is being dissolved in avant-garde twentieth-century art that features abstraction, multiplicity, and complexity and that engages the viewer in an exercise of perceptual responsivity. The shift from preferring linearities affects more than spatial or material practices, for it seeps into our cultural practices and consciousness. Giving up linearity means loosening our sense of the need for borders and division, and our desire for everything to have a particular place and fixed meaning. He describes how we have begun to lose our interest in lineal arrangements, in the tools we make, our work and our entertainment, so that we are less determined that everything lines up. He puts it this way in “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium”: “The chorus line, the stag line, the assembly line, all have gone the way of the clothes line” (49). Tyrwhitt’s title “The City Unseen” hearkens McLuhan’s “The Invisible Environment”—in common referring to all the organic and inorganic artifacts and infrastructure we ignore as we sleepwalk through life as “motivated somnambulists” (Counterblast 6). While we may take in popular landmarks (those approved as having cultural significance) and identify markers for individual wayfinding, we are numb to most else. McLuhan’s mediated urban environment is a total surround, which has seduced and silenced us. One of his goals—in Understanding Media, for example—is to analyze the different forms of media and their affects and influences; in reporting his “Ryerson Media Experiment,” he provides curriculum developed to enable the study of communication, culture, and mass media, which as Terrence Gordon notes was aimed at enabling students to control rather than simply know about media: “Achieving increased awareness of

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

81

the forms of media is not an end in itself but provides a means of anticipation and control over powerful new environments” (478). In City as Classroom, he speaks to readers as students and assigns a variety of perceptual tasks to increase environmental awareness. He invites readers to conduct a personal inventory of responses to media in the city, undertaking a program of self-questioning, asking themselves, for example, “What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car, or the radio?” (166). City as Classroom furnishes observations and exercises aimed at encouraging readers to activate their senses to take in more of the urban environment, rather than simply moving through it by rote. In a letter to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, he noted that his “phrase for city planning is that the city has become a teaching machine” and he defined the task of planners being to “program the entire environment by an artistic modulation of sensory usage” (299). He makes clear that our senses are out of balance, and that a key problem is our over-dependence on vision, to the exclusion of other senses. He suggests this malady has developed or set in overtime, as print and other technologies have cultivated our dependence on the eye; we have given up orality for literacy and community for individualism so that we have become isolated selves looking at a world of others and otherness. His framing of the problem in “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” is that alphabet literacy introduced “a peculiar monopoly and separation of visual experience. At the expense of the other senses” (51). Forming the basis of McLuhan’s oft-made claim that our senses are out of balance​.​is his belief that our Western habit of privileging sight—albeit a blinkered form of vision that is regulatory and exclusive—comes at the cost of ignoring the other senses. We are only dimly aware of hearing or smelling, for example. Apart from ignoring nonvisual data that reveals details about the world, we are also numb to the sense of touch and to sensory-induced feelings. Our experience is visual and cerebral—disembodied and incomplete. We forget to feel. In City as Classroom, he recommends we exert conscious effort to activate all the senses and then to blend their inputs, to attain an inter-sensorial or synesthesic understanding. He reminds us that while in preliterate medieval times, the sense ratio was in better balance; in our times this sort of equilibrium has increasingly eroded with technological developments that extend our senses. Without balance or proportion—indeed with explosions of new media continually eroding the balances we attempt to strike—we are losing our balance and wits. In a letter to Tyrwhitt, he makes his case that our attention is drawn to and absorbed by media images and gadgetry and that we have lost both ability and inclination to be aware of surroundings for “we have not been driven out of our senses so much that our senses have been driven

82

Chapter 3

out of us” (278). In “The Invisible Environment,” he refers to conducting what amounts to an extension of Tyrwhitt’s study of Ryerson students when he proposes to collect similar data from the entire population of Toronto. He describes a large-scale quantitative study that measures “the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactile, visceral and other senses as a matter of daily use,” and he goes on to offer a variant description of the far-reaching ways in which our tools shape us: “Anything that alters a sensory threshold alters the outlook and experience of a whole society. . . . We are concerned with what shifts occur in a sensory threshold when some new form comes in” (166). It is striking that like Tyrwhitt, McLuhan often referred to the city using screen and filmic images. Yet against her image of the eastern city as a transparent screen of unending openings and possibilities, he compared Western cities of his day to a flat projection screen—screens that do the work of our own senses and reflect collective ideas, values, stories and dreams. Rather than having inner orientation or drive, we have extended our senses outward and live by looking at external stimuli and features, as the filmic metaphor helps to convey: we are spectators of our own lives and watch one collective program. This connects to Tyrwhitt’s point that concludes “The Moving Eye,” when she says inner and outer need to cooperate, with the outer world stimulating inner response, not simply bombarding it with a program aimed at its shut down (95). By citing the allures of Eastern design, Tyrwhitt proffered at least a partial antidote to McLuhan’s diagnosis of cultural narcosis. If together we have watched one cliché film in the abandonment of engaging with urban life and using the full human sensorium, we need variety and stimulus in the material and changing city to bring us back to sensory life and help us not just see but become fully sensate. At the end of “The Moving Eye,” Tyrwhitt suggested West can learn from East to build structures meant to stimulate the senses and feelings of pleasure and ease—involving citizens and visitors, rather than channeling them through a prefabricated maze. Yet she urged us to avoid adopting Eastern principles in a rushed way that might lead to unleashing unbridled individual responses without a common overview. Responsivity should not be overly individualized and idiosyncratic, leading participants to be overwhelmed by indirection, but the principle of freedom should be matched by a collective appeal: Here is our contemporary urban planning problem: how to find the key to an intellectual system that will help us to organize buildings, color, and movement in space, without relying entirely upon either introspective “intuition” (“I feel it to be right that way”) or upon the obsolete and static single viewpoint based on the limited optical science of the Renaissance.” (95)

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

83

Almost in paraphrase form, McLuhan offers this description of the challenge facing planners in a letter to Tyrwhitt written in 1960: The problem of urban planning today . . . that we have now to face[is] in the management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness. Thus the human community would assume the same integral freedom as the private person. (Letters 278)

Another architectural directive appeared in “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” where he charged architects with adapting linear patterns to emergent, more organic and free-flowing patterns: “How to breathe new life into the lineal forms of the past five centuries while admitting the relevance of the new organic forms of spatial organization . . . is not this the task of the architect at present?” (54). MCLUHAN IN TYRWHITT’S EKISTICS After Tyrwhitt left Toronto in 1955, she and McLuhan maintained correspondence and connection. It was partly through her influence that McLuhan was an invited attender of the inaugural Delos symposia in 1963, a gathering of architects, designers, and scholars meeting to discuss urban changes and futures. Tyrwhitt organized these symposia for Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, founder of the Ekistics movement, committed to predicting and controlling human settlement patterns on a global scale. This movement favored the development of a single planned “city of the future,” one mobile and responsive to layers of invisible life-sustaining networks. After reading The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Doxiadis wrote an invitation to McLuhan, May 12, 1963: “I have just finished reading your wonderful book ‘Gutenberg Galaxy,’ in which I found so many of the things that we also believe in and so many of the ideas which I think are relevant and essential to human settlements and their problems” (Letters 289). He also noted a similarity between his own conception of architectural form as like the human body and McLuhan’s descriptions of technologies extending the human body. Doxiadis recommended that design decisions be based “on the internal operations of the body. The architect elaborates the human body rather than houses it” (quoted in Wigley 94). He applied this concept to the design of Ecumenopolis, the world city he proposed would be connected by layers of mostly invisible networks— “a continuous network of centers and lines of communication” in which “all parts of the settlement and all lines of communication will be interwoven into a meaningful organism” (Wigley 88). Whereas modernist cities were defined by visible transportation arteries—“modern architects like Le Corbusier only

84

Chapter 3

used the word ‘network’ to describe the old street pattern and the new ones they proposed” (94)—Ecumenopolis would respond to air and signal mobility, and was pictured in a variety of maps and models as being connected by layers of mostly invisible networks. The flow of electricity, for example, exemplified the sort of invisible network that Doxiadis believed needed to be made visible in plans and designs and coordinated with all other flows: “We must coordinate all of our Networks now. All networks, from roads to telephones” (quoted in Wigley 94). This attempt to impose measured order on material place eventually failed to appeal to McLuhan, who was less interested in changing design and building practices than in imagining futures based on current evidence and trends he believed pointed toward a highly mobile and penetrable future world with walls and boundaries removed. At the tenth Delos Symposium in 1972, McLuhan raised questions about formative concepts that had generated and shaped the movement and argued that physical configurations were becoming “redundant.” He asserted that James Joyce’s Ulysses was “the greatest piece of city planning and building in this century” (quoted in Wigley 113), emphasizing that each of us live in cities of the mind that commune with past and future states, rather than being defined by our life in a material and time-bound place. Tyrwhitt maintained her affiliation with Ekistics’s planners, who were interested in remaking physical urban spaces and governing housing in the spreading single city. Their way forward was to generate regulatory plans and predictions, updated annually, on the basis of Delian dialogue conducted by a changing roster of design and social theorists. These manifestos were neither stagnant nor narrow-minded, although in 1972 McLuhan implied as much by denouncing members as “earnest men, rather all 19th-century types, still preoccupied with bricks and mortar” (Letters 455). While McLuhan dissociated himself for a complex of reasons (considered in the section ahead), the group continually tackled forward-looking issues—and are on record, for example, for making design elements responsive to regional and local influences as well as to green and sustainable outcomes. Recent reassessments have credited the visionary commitment of the movement to principles of relational being and sustainability, such as is evident in the Delos Ten statement, published by Tyrwhitt: As we enter the global phase of social evolution, it becomes obvious that each one of us has two countries—his own and the planet earth. We cannot feel at home on earth if we do not continue to love and cultivate our own garden. And conversely, we can hardly feel comfortable in our garden if we do not care for the planet earth as our collective home. (cited in Pyla 26)

This notion of the earth as a small planet and shared home remains compelling.

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

85

MCLUHAN, DOXIADIS, AND EKISTICS: DISENGAGEMENT Several propositions about the purpose of architecture that were key ­talking points of Doxiadis and the Ekistics movement held limited appeal to McLuhan. First was Doxiadis’s insistence that designing and building ­housing—often in the form of social housing—should be the primary concern of architects. Doxiadis held that architecture should develop systematic habitat for those without or needing better shelter, rather than creating elegant facades and freestanding homes for the privileged. This concern for social equity and service is apparent in his question, “what percentage of the people, in fact, have the privilege of a proper house or a proper school building?” (35). With a strong sense of social obligation and mission, he advocated for global consistency, for housing systems with “the same ecumenic character” that made use of replicable prefab forms and modules (186). Yet, he also anticipated a time when “the solutions will vary” (186), with designs responding to a local character as well as being regulated by individual users. He objected to current housing as being simply thrown up by builders replicating surrounding styles, without the benefit of design or plan: “Nothing is offered but conformist solutions and a docile imitation of local fashion. Architecture is thus created not by the architect but in spite of them” (37). A related concern for Doxiadis was that many architects, in lieu of being concerned with housing mankind and creating a global form of urbanism, remained more interested in erecting monumental structures, “non-repeated types of buildings” (192). He suggested they did this on the assumption that this was architectural tradition, understood historically as punctuated by important buildings so that “we remember only the non-repeated monuments” (193). He wanted urbanism on a global scale, which required adapting old and new, local and global, and meeting inner needs with outer forms. He imagined Ekistics—“the science of settlement”—as a team-based approach to coordinate responses from various sectors, allowing the architect to enrich his knowledge by cooperating “with the community developer, the urbanist, the planner, the economist, the geographer and the social scientist”; yet, he also saw the architect taking a key role as “leader of a democratic movement and the interpreter of people’s desires” (97). Elements of Doxiadis’s vision and the Ekistics project intrigued McLuhan, especially in the early 1960s. First, McLuhan was drawn to the interdisciplinary collaborative component of world-building that inspired Ekistics. Another draw, as already noted, was that McLuhan was invited to Delos 1 in 1963 by Doxiadis, who cited their common thinking about change, dynamism and technology, particularly as reflected in McLuhan’s theory of extension. Once they had met, it seemed to McLuhan that Doxiadis’s interest

86

Chapter 3

in science and technology was somewhat limited. In his book, Doxiadis argued, for example, that modes of transportation were the most influential forms of technology shaping “urban settlements” that he defined as now having four drivers, “man, car, aeroplane, and rocket” (100). McLuhan, along with fellow conference participant Buckminster Fuller, was already moving away from thinking about artifacts, even those dedicated to mobility, and was thinking about computers and digital signal and flow. Yet despite being blinkered by some traditional forms of thinking, Doxiadis pursued several areas that appealed to McLuhan. First, he argued that the human should maintain a role of mastery and “be the one controlling the synthesis of the city” (106), a position crucial to McLuhan. Secondly, he argued the need to view the world as being in transition—even that change was the predominant characteristic of the city, calling it “dynopolis” (100); this is McLuhan’s view too, although he imagines that the speed of change exceeds what we see and measure. Notably absent from McLuhan’s project was a drive like Doxiadis’s for social equity and global sharing. McLuhan’s lack of direct social critique and engagement—“his apparent failure to address social processes”—has been critiqued (see, for example, Friesner np). Yet such disavowal on McLuhan’s part was principled. He believed in transition and change, accelerating and immanent. Constructing brick-and-mortar settlements, no matter how permeable and movable, was to him a displaced throwback effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about equitable housing but that he cared more about exploring the emerging option of an engineered environment that would change how we think about and build housing. He speculated in Understanding Media that we would soon no longer need clothes nor houses—we would discard such skins and shells (“Clothing: Our Extended Skin”; “Housing: New Look and Outlook,” Media 162–77). He would have had a little zest for Doxiadis’s stalwart commitment to conducting careful environmental scans followed by building dwellings shaped to and offering services meeting current standards. Although McLuhan was not parochial, he was as a North American comparatively unfamiliar with social and mass housing developments predominant in Europe. He was aware of the challenges of suburban sprawl shaping the character of cities like Toronto and New York. Architectural historian Alan Colquhoun explains the architectural ethos and environmental differences: [In] the two decades after the Second World War, European domestic building was largely confined to government housing programs, which consisted of mostly high-rise apartments or row houses in the cities or the new towns. In America, by contrast, most new housing took the form of large suburban settlements, made necessary by the acceleration of white middle-class families from the cities to the outer suburbs and carried out by private developers. At the same

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

87

time there was a large market in one-off family houses, extending from the modest and pre-designed to the lavish and purpose designed. (233)

McLuhan’s own family home was large and traditional, pre-modern and in the craft-era style. Such exposure and predilection may also have fueled his disengagement from the central mission of improving large-scale housing projects explored by Doxiadis’s Ekistics group. To McLuhan, Doxiadis’s pragmatic “bricks and mortar” concern with fixing current problems was the result of rear-view mirror thinking. McLuhan believed a better challenge was to prepare for changes ahead. Doxiadis was concerned with taking action in the present, making a better world by addressing actual needs as he witnessed them; he wanted what he called a “contemporary architecture,” one neither bound to traditions nor to futuristic ideals. He understood the 1960s as a time for laying the foundation for what he imagined developing into an “ecumenic” future: The proper road is to start from the utilitarian buildings and be concerned only with them, to develop a utilitarian architecture and let it gradually grow into a monumental one. No reasonable effort toward architectural creation in the future can begin unless it is based on utilitarian buildings. They are the buildings that everybody is concerned about, it is to them that the greatest force of industry, of government, and of private individuals should be allocated, and it is at this level that we can create an architecture which may someday find its monumental expression in some few buildings of extraordinary importance, if our culture creates a content and a meaning for them. (Doxiadis 193)

There was also a question of differing styles and rhetoric. As resounds in the passage above, Doxiadis traded in rules and rubrics, staking positions in detailed declarations, an approach antithetical to McLuhan’s own preference for probing ideas and engaging publics. Differences like these may have contributed to his delinquency from Delos 2 to 9 and his expressed discontent at the proceedings of Delos 10 in 1972. EKISTICS AND EXPOSURE TO AVANTGARDISM: FULLER AND MEGASTRUCTURES McLuhan likely always felt some reserve in his support for Doxiadis’s view that the planet could be saved by planned settlement, rooted as it was in long-standing socio-ethical considerations motivating European construction and reconstruction (and absent from North American expansion) throughout the twentieth century. At the end of Delos 1, Doxiadis called for solidarity

88

Chapter 3

to support “creation of a universal city” (“Ekistics” 252). Yet, as Wigley notes, Doxiadis feared over- or unplanned development and ended the first Delos Declaration warning that even his dream of a single global city could grow “out of control, with the human species portrayed as the victim of the uncontrolled growth of architecture” (“Network” 90). For McLuhan, Doxiadis placed too much weight on outer forms and material surroundings, as if adjusting the stage and set would improve the human drama and script. McLuhan wanted a primary focus on realigning human consciousness and inner life, not on building mass housing structures to improve physical circumstances or civic parity. This is one of the reasons he stepped forward at the last Delos meeting in 1972 to nominate Joyce as the best city planner of the twentieth century—Joyce, who explored the confluences of self and other, inner and outer life, real and imaginary, mind and language. Following that meeting he was candid in dismissing the group as small minded and unadventurous in a letter to Margaret Mead: “I may say that I consider the Delos meeting of a very dubious quality and performance. The participants of all such gatherings seek reassurance for their convictions rather than new awareness of their inadequacy” (Letters 464). McLuhan’s association with the Ekistics group was nonetheless invaluable in testing his thinking about city and place change and connecting him to experimental thinkers in the world of urban design. Interestingly, it was the value of collaboration and association that McLuhan stressed in his closing statement during the ceremonial signing of the first Delos Declaration. He had hopes, he said, of building his own interdisciplinary center modeled on the conference and of keeping “in constant association with all of you” (“Ekistics” 253). Foremost, the cruise and conference provided him the opportunity to meet Buckminster Fuller. Their relationship is one still awaiting a more thorough scholarly investigation, but there are several salient areas of confluence as well as disagreement. When they met, Fuller had already been espousing a theory of human/technological extensions similar to McLuhan’s for many years. McLuhan is on record protesting in a letter to Walter Ong that he did not get the idea from Fuller, saying it can be found in William Blake: “[Edward T. Hall] says he got the idea of our technologies as outerings of sense and function from Buckminster Fuller. I got it from nobody. But now I find it the core of Wm. Blake” (Letters 287). Fuller is on record turning over the question of influence in a somewhat more gracious way, opining that McLuhan’s encyclopedic and combinatory mind often leaped to connections, sometimes without considering source attribution: [McLuhan] really said, and deliberately said, he was enlarging on my ideas. We’re very, very good friends, and these things we’ve said very much out loud

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

89

on the stage platform together, so that I know . . . I’m not saying something [that]is offensive. He says that he’s an English scholar, literature scholar, and his memory, incidentally, is incredible of things he has read, and he began to feel that a great many people who he read many books which society didn’t know about, and society was missing some very important things, so he decided really, taking things he had read about that other people had written and began to get society to know about it. But he gets so enthusiastic that he didn’t necessarily always say, I am extending this person’s idea. His idea he began to make his own as he began to develop it, which is very reasonable. But he is a man of integrity, so if you check with him about it, he will say, yes, that is correct. That his enthusiasm carried away and he forgot to give footnotes of where he got that. (cited in “Like-minded” np)

These passages reveal that both Fuller and McLuhan were aware not only that their views were connected, but also of the influence and infiltration of other influences. While both appreciated being recognized and even lionized, both were aware of drawing from traditional sources, which meant that neither made pronouncements that were entirely new. Both likely recognized too that while they were working on a similar project—helping humans use and control technology—each had different perspectives or points of entry, McLuhan concerned with understanding how technology could improve inner life—expand consciousness, promote human connections—and Fuller, with an engineer’s interest in physical improvements—in improving the spatial arrangements of objects. Fuller was active in design from the 1920s with varying success. When he met McLuhan in the 1960s, he was enjoying a wave of notoriety with young architects interested in applying technological properties to building and even with publics who were being introduced to his geodesic dome (“a sphere made up of rectangles”) at various public exhibitions (Aaseng 45). While never adopted to meet mass housing needs as he hoped, the geodesic dome was nonetheless showcased as a symbol of futuristic design. The dome house reenvisioned the use of domestic space, putting all the services in a central pillar, rather than doling out functions on a room-by-room basis. Architectural critic Reyner Banham explains: “The Dymaxion concept was entirely radical, a hexagonal ring of dwelling space, walled in double skins of plastic in different transparencies according to lighting needs, and hung by wires from the apex of a central duralumin mast which also housed all the mechanical services” (Banham, Theory and Design 326). Fuller was outspoken in denouncing the international style of modernist architecture for celebrating a formal machine aesthetic without taking advantage of technological materials and tools to offer a fresh take on design concepts. He argued that modernists sold “the more appealing simplicities of the industrial

90

Chapter 3

structure” to a wide public, making superficial alterations, such as replacing “yesterday’s exterior embellishments” with “formalized novelties of quasisimplicity,” that continued using the same layouts and materials, constructing the illusion of innovation while delivering “a technically obsolete world” (Cited in Theory and Design, Banham 326). Fuller wanted to establish “the remoteness of the Bauhaus concepts” from those of his own and derided their lack of interest in the “ratio of invested resources per units of performance abilities”: “Do any of them publish what their structures weigh and what their original minimum performance requirements must be, and later prove to be, in respect to velocities of winds, heights of floods, severity of earthquakes, fires, pestilence, epidemics etc., and what their shipping weights and volumes will be, and what man hours of work are totally involved?” (“Influence” 64) Fuller believed that by measuring and balancing energy use, we could plan to live better and longer, that “total success for humanity is possible” (cited in Aaeng 62). The term “dymaxion” means “to do the most with least”: “The name was a combination of words Fuller liked to use: ‘dynamic’ and ‘maximum,’ with another scientific-sounding word ‘ion,’ thrown in at the end” (Aaeng 29). Fuller applied the term to various designs, cars, and buildings alike that abandoned traditional linear shapes, squares, and rectangles, for more pliant forms such as triangles and circles, domes, and capsules. He imagined buildings that were prefabricated and portable, modular and responsive to human needs, and disposable rather than solid. McLuhan echoed similar architectural tropes in passages about housing in Understanding Media and elsewhere. He said, for example, “Modern engineering provides means of housing that range from the space capsule to walls created by air jets” (174). He suggests that housing will have more portability. Along with sharing some of Fuller’s sensibility about incoming structural changes, the two also shared a view of accompanying shifts in governance and polity. Fuller sees a world without boundaries, nations, or political strife, without “economic competition” and “the onerousness of ownership” in a “world economy” (Earth 177, 178). He imagines everyone engaged in “lifelong research”: “All objective work must be spontaneously inspired and co-operatively initiated as with children’s games” (Earth 176). Similar words and visions appear in McLuhan texts if shorn of imperatives and dedicated optimism. McLuhan approved such forward thinking but was neither as optimistic nor as rooted in reason-based and formulaic thinking. For him, there is always a gap—the possibility of reversal is always in the air. McLuhan has sometimes been placed in the company of Fuller for trading in techno-utopian dreams, yet his views were more tempered—first by his own lack of enthusiasm for this future-without-walls; second by his awareness that things were as likely to go wrong as eventuate in orchestrated harmony and machine containment; and finally by his view of linguistic communication as

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

91

imperfect, a making not matching, so that one should avoid edicts presaging futures, words serving instead only as “stuttering extensions” (Understanding 176) to present probes and possibilities. McLuhan was not being offhand when he eventually referred to Fuller as “too much of a ‘linear’ thinker” (cited in Wigley 86). As Tim Gough reminds us, linearity for McLuhan means more than using thinking patterns associated with Gutenberg’s machine age—it means being trapped in a complex of limiting habits, being overly dependent on reason and words to explain what you see, know and value. As well, Fuller put and knew science before art, and McLuhan was on record for being dismissive of those who veered too far from art, as in the reprimand he delivered a younger scholar in a letter: “You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet, or you would have no problem in understanding my procedure” (448). In short, McLuhan likely recognized that Fuller’s ideas and designs, while prepared with the environment, technologies, and the future in mind, failed to consider human needs and dreams on a deep level; hence, his cars and domes, as efficient and innovative as they were, were never widely taken up to become part of our way of life. By the 1960s and in connection with Ekistics, Fuller was of course not the lone designer exploring the role of technology in design and building. He was celebrated as something of a master by several groups of younger architects, the Metabolist and Archigram groups that Reyner Banham sometimes discussed together as those creating “megastructures,” which he described as “large-scale public works projects” designed to showcase architects as “comprehensive designers” able to tackle the problems of urban crisis, such as “pollution, crime, congestion, dysfunctions of municipal services and the rest of the litany of Nekropolis” (Megastructure 11). To explain the components, he borrowed this four-part definition from Berkeley planning librarian Ralph Wilcoxon: 1) constructed of modular units; 2) capable of greater even “unlimited” extension; 3) a structural framework into which smaller structural units (e.g., rooms, houses, or small buildings of other sorts) can be built—or even “pluggedin” or “clipped-on” after having been prefabricated elsewhere; 4) a structural framework expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units which it might support (qtd. in Megastructure 8). Apart from architectural vision and structural elements, megastructures were designed to meet human needs that Rob Wilson says were prioritized as play and change: these “endless interlinking ‘ludic’ spaces—for free-play—where people could enjoy eternal leisure . . . [were] designed to enable elements to be continually changed and replaced as required” (Wilson 9). Key to these

92

Chapter 3

conceptualizations was a participatory element so that those forming communities would create and influence the environment and services: “Many were conceived, few were built, but all tended toward a vision of a vast monumental framework or structure, transportation and services, within which individuals or groups or whole communities could contrive their own environments”; each made an attempt in various ways “to reconcile the irreconcilable” (6). The Japanese “Metabolists” group often interacted with Ekistics, with associates publishing in the journal and attending the conferences, becoming known even in the public mind for creating frames and “plug-in capsules” (Wendelken 280). To distill their admittedly complex principles might be to say they worked with the theory of extensions to explore connections between humans and what we build, they recognized organic characteristics in materials. Cherie Wendelken describes, for example, how 1958 Sky House was built to respond to the environment and human use: “The house featured a large central space resting high above the site on piers and could be expanded by what he [architect Kiyonori Kikutake] called ‘movenets’ plugged in beneath the floor to provide bathrooms, storage space, and removable children’s rooms for an expanding and contracting family” (283). Members of the Archigram group also exerted a presence and published in Ekistics magazine, citing McLuhan in some of their founding theory and establishing working relations with Fuller. Like him, they agreed that technology should shape dwellings, buildings, and cities. They are now best known for depicting the city as a megastructure, moving, changing, modular, and even disposable. Perhaps best known of these illustrated blueprints for a selfcontained city structure is Ron Heron’s “Walking City,” which “resembled a mammoth mechanical insect with a spherical body sprouting telescopic legs and tubes for locomotion and linkage with other mobile cities . . . ‘an enclosed environment of colossal size that is mobile enough to traverse the world,’ able to meander from one hemisphere to another in search of a temperate climate or a place in which to relocate in event of disaster” (Steiner 196). As the name of the group suggests—blending “arch” with “gram”—they were interested in drawing architecture as much as in realizing actual forms, for drawings had the advantage of being responsive “to spur of the minute changes” (Steiner 196). While physical examples of modular and futuristic architecture were making their way into popular culture and imagination during the 1960s, McLuhan had a ringside seat and even a role in developing its theory. Architecture theorist Mark Wigley states that McLuhan and Fuller together influenced both Ekistics and “all the experimental architects obsessing about networks in the sixties” (112). There is further evidence the Archigram group was familiar with McLuhan, for they directly used his phrase “global village”

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

93

to explain their departure from traditional modernist architecture with weight and visible presence (qtd. in Steiner 60). If McLuhan influenced design thinking, the question I am raising here is how this innovative and pop-style design theory and practice affected his world outlook. Likely, he would have commended their investment in invisible architecture—in unrealized projects that live on paper rather in the world. Interested in principle in the unseen more than the seen, McLuhan would have endorsed speculative plans escaping what architectural theorist Rob Wilson calls “the banalities of the built” (80). McLuhan might also have been drawn to the exploratory nature of their designs, for as he told Mead in his letter complaining about Ekistics he wanted no part in the “shoring up of existing knowledge” (Letters 464). Further, as noted above, he was uninterested in the production of more buildings, and attracted instead to more mysterious and mystical investigations: questions about how to house discarnate bodies in a wordless world without work—how to construct a transparent structure to encourage unimpeded flow and interaction, rather than to lavish and furnish any visible display. And where would he have pulled away? For McLuhan, human life always came first, inspiring his fervor for recapturing psychic wholeness and connection to others. In Fuller’s world—and in the architectural plans of Megastructurists, such as Archigram—the emphasis was otherwise placed on technology and machinery—their privileging of the designed space as engineered and material construction likely struck him as upending the problem, concerned primarily with creating spaces to house humans rather than with interactive spaces to engage, entertain and educate. Fuller and other designers argued that they were shaping technology to serve us and in turn leaving openings for citizens to engage in responsive ways, yet the worlds they imagined and created are obdurate and encompassing—not leaving room enough for variant forms of human activity, engagement or imagination. Rob Wilson notes that these movements and their monuments suffered critical backlash for being “impermeable to the everyday world [they were] meant to transform” (11). I think McLuhan would have shared this critical view, perhaps pushing further to note that those imagining and drafting these worlds needed to think more about human roles and everyday life, itself continuing to transform even after the completion of blueprints. He might have objected to their using a design process aimed at generating finished models as lacking foresight and responsivity. Even if designs remained ideas never realized in built structures, they none the less traded in images too detailed and closed: furnishing a visual narrative without gaps or caesura--without points of entry to allow for imagination and change. McLuhan would not have been surprised that few of these designs were realized. He likely would have found them too aggressive in attempting to remodel the planet from a present-day

94

Chapter 3

perspective, offering forms that were anachronistic from the moment shovel would hit ground, and allowing technology, also subject to aging, a too-active role. In a sense, these projects continue architecture’s traditional role, and the designers failed to think hard enough about responding to inner or human needs. McLuhan says time and again that we are on the cusp of a huge change, and indeed that such transformation is already upon us: a city of roads and buildings for civics and community is dissolving. He said we will likely not need actual walls at all; that computers may be able to help us develop a new commons and shared vision; that actual structures and monuments belong at fairs and exhibitions—places that were indeed the sites of dymaxion buildings and megastructures. According to Reyner Banham, many architects shared McLuhan’s doubt that it was possible to build structures to accommodate incoming and impending change: “At the present time, many of us (including architects) begin to doubt if architecture has the resources to accomplish the tasks which its times demand” (Theory 3, 5). The gravest doubt of all was whether—or how—architects could continue to sustain their traditional role as form-givers, creators, and controllers of human environments, with the demand for people to control their own environments. Producing functioning visual spaces, without fully imagining the lived human lives within them, was an academic exercise without existential bearing. TYRWHITT’S GREEK GARDEN AS PROGRAMMED ENVIRONMENT: TERRA-FORMING BEAUTY Tyrwhitt wanted to change and improve living conditions in the world we have; McLuhan was concerned that practical programs for urban and housing developments stood to impose old solutions by continuing unresponsive to human needs, as well as potentially introducing new problems—that maps and plans would no longer be visionary once built, unable to outstrip “best before” expiry dates. Planners, he worried, were failing to attend to fastevolving technological changes, each affecting human attunement and the environmental whole. McLuhan often encouraged us to rely on the direction provided by artists who were working with technology toward “programming the environment.” By this, he was envisioning technology mediating our experience—but doing so in ways that stimulate and complement the human senses. He describes the programmed environment in the Playboy interview this way: “The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their overall needs, creating a total media experience,

Marshall McLuhan and Urban Planning

95

absorbed and patterned by all the senses” (19). He imagines as immanent the possibility of computerized regulation of the environment in ways that appeal to our senses and calm our emotions: “The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. . . . There’s nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they are able to conduct carefully orchestrated programming of the sensory life of whole populations . . . whole cultures could now be programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate” (18, 19). To be effective in offering a safe and hopeful future, planners need to understand sensory needs—to conduct studies to determine “the sensory life of the entire population” (“Erosion” 166) and from this, to “rearrange the patterns of human association and community” and of the sensory life. In Understanding Media, he applies his understanding of the programmed environment to housing and community more directly: “Electric technology, extended to the job of providing global thermostatic controls, points to the obsolescence of housing as an extension of the heat control mechanisms of the body” (176). Setting aside practical planning and housing projects that did not appeal to McLuhan’s interests, for a positive example of what he had in mind when referring to “a programmed environment,” we can turn to one of Tyrwhitt’s personal projects. The process she followed to develop her Mediterranean garden in Sparoza involved blending technological intervention with human crafting, all in the service of developing a garden as an artifact that engages viewers and rewards the senses, and that archives information about plant and animal life. In the last chapter of her biography of Tyrwhitt, Ellen Shoshkes provides a detailed account of how Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, beginning in 1965, built Sparoza as her retirement home in Greece, with a Mediterranean garden surrounding it. Apart from cultivating the garden itself, she invested in becoming part of the local community, eating local foods and exchanging goods like olives, grapes, and wine for labor (“Making” 521); she also used these years to become an expert in regional flora and fauna, planning a year-round garden. When her plantings failed to flourish after several seasons due to inhospitable conditions, she mobilized technology to terraform the rocky hillside into fertile soil beds. She used dynamite to blast into the rock face and had soil brought in as infill. With fertile beds established, she introduced plantings that represent a wide variety of Mediterranean plant species. Her garden still thrives today as an iconic landmark—a space exuding multisensory appeal and serving as a botanical archive. Also of note is that she had a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller built as a guest cottage—further introducing technology into the bios so that nature is cultivated and connected to transnational currents and media developments—creating a complex interface of innate and constructed worlds.

96

Chapter 3

Tyrwhitt’s project reveals how the human hand and mindful stewardship can direct technology to engineer an environment that is sustainable, responsive, and improving. The garden—a blend of local and transnational knowledges, of the human mind and media, of the organic and technological—provides a concrete example of McLuhan’s idea of the advantages that can emanate from a programmed environment that is properly responsive and inviting rather than prescriptive of effects. The project does not confine, reduce, or overregulate human energy but instead engages and improves the lives of all who access its dynamic character: it does not establish/impose technologically defined boundaries or limits. It does not require language and human definition to have meaning; here, we might borrow Tim Gough’s description of McLuhan’s praise for the cool medium as one that “refuses to allow itself to be interpreted or given a meaning in the way that the printed text has a meaning, and as such it gives place for a high degree of interplay with those who come to exist with it” (16). The programmed environment, as this example demonstrates, is not about technological fanfare or exhibit. It is not about producing designs for new spaces to house or hold people. It requires slow and forward-looking investment—like planting a garden that will be years in the making, that will realize its form (which can be modified by human hands) in the future. It aims to appeal to, exercise, and “turn on” human senses. Tyrwhitt’s Greek garden, terraformed yet embedded in the local, alive itself yet responsive to human cultivation and requiring human engagement, provides a positive if the small-scale model of what McLuhan had in mind when he spoke of the attractions of a programmed environments. The garden, amalgamating nature and culture, technology and human effort, connects to the overall project of “transform[ing] the planet into an art form”—a lifebalancing feat accomplished by creative and hopeful acts of “resiliency and adaptability” (Playboy 23).

Chapter 4

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers Gyorgy Kepes and Jane Jacobs

MCLUHAN AND KEPES: [RE-]MAKING THE ENVIRONMENT FROM THE CONTROL TOWER McLuhan and Gyorgy Kepes knew of each other’s work and corresponded throughout their scholarly and creative careers. Here are some direct points of contact: 1) McLuhan cited Kepes in several articles and books, notably (and discussed below) in Understanding Media and “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium”; 2) McLuhan’s essay on art and culture, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” appeared in Kepes’ edited collection of art theory The Man-Made Object in 1966 (one of his Vision + Value series, for Braziller); 3) McLuhan and Kepes interacted closely at Delos 10—the final symposium in 1972, convened by Doxiadis and his Ekistics group. Following the symposium, McLuhan noted their shared interests in a letter to Kepes: You were certainly the person at the [Delos] conference most near my own interests and concerns, if only because of your understanding of the world of design. The bulk of the people there were fairly brick and mortar or hardware men who belong almost certainly in the 19th century. Ecology is the most they are prepared to concede to our time and their approach to that problem is almost entirely piecemeal. I think that we are already living in a new kind of world city that is far outside the ken of Doxiadis. (Letters 453)

Although I hesitate to rank either man as a primary influence on the other, reading them together and through each other helps reveal surprising networks of conceptual overlap and, perhaps more arresting, the depth of their shared conviction that artists and scientists should work together, toward the goal of involving all humankind in designing a life-sustaining environment—one 97

98

Chapter 4

that mobilizes technological affordances favorable to human life and growth. Reading them together also conveys their mutual belief in the high seriousness of their goal, which they understood as opening the sole portal to liberate humans from subservience to media and technologies. Both were committed to public pedagogy to educating a broad audience. McLuhan, we know, linked understanding technology with gaining control over it and imagined artists leading the way by revealing cues to unseen elements in the surrounding environment, which might then alert an audience to shapes and patterns and engage them in meaning-making. He described his educative commitment as his “central purpose,” conveying the message “that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them” (Playboy 74). Kepes’ public education program emphasized training vision rather than, like McLuhan’s, the full range of senses. Yet for both, the problem with conventional ocular vision was its learned limitation. Most people see what they expect to see, and there is no such thing as natural appearances. In Kepes’ understanding, vision can be adjusted, and such adjustments can change what we think: “Vision is by no means an automatic function of our physiological apparatus. There is much evidence that vision is itself a mode of thinking” (“Preface” New Landscape 17). His characterization of perception as subjective is reminiscent of Tyrwhitt’s reference to interpretive cultural bias in “The Moving Eye” or of McLuhan’s to visual bias in The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he noted that “single-plane lineal, visual, and sequential codification of experience is conventional and limited” (62). Moreover, his argument that improving and extending our capacity to see brings us one step closer toward expanded consciousness and greater ability to control our world and place in it is reminiscent of McLuhan’s similar contention that we organize how we see in the same way we organize how we think and feel. As McLuhan noted in City as Classroom, figure-ground relations have explanatory power in defining not only how we take in our external surroundings but also how we manage thought, feelings, and values—how we attend to some things and ignore others. Kepes produced many books meant to provide readers with a visual training regime, providing disparate images and photographs in pairs and groups, “organized to help the reader see, with the hope that [he or she] will grasp significant connections for him[her]self”; using language evocative of McLuhan, he tells us “the text is not the ‘message’” (“Preface” New Landscape 17). The unconnected images, often unaccompanied by explanatory narrative, provide readers with opportunities for unmoderated acts of vision and interpretation: The method—for which preparing this book has served as a kind of laboratory experiment—fuses visual images and verbal communication in a common

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

99

structure. The visual images—the pictures brought together here—are the content. The verbal statements–comments and documents—are illustrations. They do not constitute a connected systematic account. (“Preface” New Landscape 17)

Indeed, this method resembles McLuhan’s, which over the course of his career increasingly featured images and shrank accompanying text, offering verbal statements as open-ended prompts to stimulate readers rather than to impose a narrative arc or coherent argument. To provoke readers to see previously unrecognized connections, Kepes often selected visuals with special effects produced by lens capturing high speed or slow motion, for example, or by processes controlling image tone and density. The various devices and lenses introduce radical adjustments and subtle refinements, changing scale and prompting us to reconsider what we see and what it means. Modern science, he claimed, has “allowed us to push back the limits of the very far, the very big, the very small,” and what we need to do is consider how we fit into this world replete with unexpected repetitious pattern (“Introduction” New Landscape 20). Introducing the volume by noting the symmetry of the constellated images drawn from different fields of science, John Burchard, the dean of MIT at the time, wrote, “We can see the repetition of forms in little things and in big, in slow-moving things and in fact a unity of nature that is sometimes hard to understand as we look at an expansive natural landscape” (“Forward” New Landscape 14). In a recent book-length study of Kepes that draws heavily from unpublished archival notes, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (2019), John R. Blakinger states that Kepes’ vision was “motivated against the rational, technical, logical worldview common at MIT; it was an alternative to the deadening effects of science and technology—a counterdiscourse” (144). We might note that this oppositional vision—“counterdiscourse”—­ corresponds to and even fleshes out McLuhan’s many references to artists creating “counter-environments” to help us see into the life of our current environment. Yet perhaps a more important point of comparison is that both acknowledged the need for interactive art and science thinking. Kepes envisioned that an artistic/mystical mode of vision should be informed by or placed in balance with—and not a replacement of—a scientific approach to knowing. A contributor to the Kepes collection, The New Landscape, Heinz Warner (a developmental psychologist) expressed this related view of the need for artistic intuition and emotion to be balanced with “geometricaltechnical” perception of the sort dominant in Western culture: “The richness of a culture and its impact upon individual experience will forever depend on the growth and coexistence of both modes of cognition” (“On Physiognomic Perception” 282). In a similar vein, McLuhan exhorted us to mobilize a form

100

Chapter 4

of “understanding” that embraces the human-techno interaction and tensions and to attempt to imagine how these two forms of energy and ingenuity might work together under human control. Both were aware of staking unorthodox positions and suffered criticism. A number of contemporary figures objected that they gave technology too wide a birth and paid too little attention to social life and systems. For his allegiance to MIT and the science it supported, Kepes was often chastised by other artists, who noted the close connection between science and militarism, especially in the Vietnam anti-war protest years. With Jewish ancestry and a history of escaping Europe and losing family to internment during World War II, Kepes remained steadfast in maintaining both an anti-war stance and the belief that avoiding destruction and creating new vistas of the world and human development required the union of art and science. Living in the “atomic age” and walking the corridors of MIT where experiments were being visibly advanced, he reckoned both “the promises and menaces inherent in our potent technology” (“Civic Art” 73). His exposure to atomic weaponry produced by “the imagination of disaster” of his MIT scientist colleagues only strengthened his call for artists to reveal the complementarity of technology and social awareness, in a focused bid to avoid ecological tragedy by cultivating freedom and peace, “a sense of beauty and a sense of purpose” (“Civic Art” 73). While dismayed by being mired in controversies and accused of supporting military technocracy, he responded without vitriol to all such attacks, as when he accepted artist Hans Haacke’s withdrawal from the Sao Paulo exhibition, but explained that in his own view attending a site of political unrest was itself a form of protest—that “‘what one says’ is always more important than ‘where one says it’” (qtd. in Blakinger 337). McLuhan was also attacked by critics, particularly for his assertions about the power of media. He attempted to meet such onslaughts with neutrality, although he could not entirely stifle resentment. His personal letters rebuked detractors, as, for example, when he chided publisher Robert Fulford for misreading: “It’s amazing you got anything out of my writing at all, since you misconceive my entire procedure” (Letters 300). Yet, overall, he attempted a stance of goodwill, as, for example, when he satirically enthused about “a man’s detractors [who] work for him tirelessly, and for free” (Playboy 158). Like Kepes, he persisted in his course, convinced of no truer calling than serving as an emissary to awaken and involve the public and to tame technologies otherwise prolific and undirected. Indeed, as well as being vulnerable to criticism, both were aware that their platforms were vulnerable to failure and that such failure would, beyond muddying reputation on a personal level, lead to collective destruction. Success for both required public recognition and action—rested on widespread public uptake and outcomes. Both couple utopian and dystopian

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

101

speculations together, offering either/or scenarios. To support the possibility of utopian outcomes, both speculated about futures rather than being constrained by the appearance of things in the material moment. Both defined the times in which they lived as pivotal and charged, for technology has intervened in evolutionary processes, and we have been changed: media inserted everywhere into the environment has augmented our perceptual and cognitive abilities and changed how we create and communicate. McLuhan and Kepes did not offer blueprints for better cities based on improving extant models but instead imagined new environments and engineered landscapes supported by technologies. TO THE CONTROL TOWER John R. Blakinger introduces his recent critical study of Kepes, Undreaming the Bauhaus, by risking the supposition that Kepes was the model McLuhan had in mind when he described the artist as a figure capable of responding to the full environment—of sensing conditions invisible to the public at large. Blakinger hails McLuhan in his introductory chapter “From the Ivory Tower to the Control Tower” and provides this direct textual link: “As Marshall McLuhan explains, likely with Kepes in mind, ‘the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower’” (11). In my view, Kepes should be identified as one of a variety of figures animating McLuhan’s notion of the artist as sentient sentinel. In Understanding Media, for example, McLuhan referenced Kepes’ aerial photographs of urban light patterns taken from the night sky as provocative of new understandings. By altering how we normally see earth and light, the photographs treat the earth as an art form (in a literal way). These photographs, McLuhan said, show the earth in a new way, not in the hustle and frenzy of immersion, but as “a delicate embroidery on a dark velvet ground. Gyorgy Kepes has developed these aerial effects of the city at night as a new art form of ‘landscapes by light through’” (Understanding Media 175). For McLuhan, the role of the artist was to create counter-environments, revealing emergent patterns invisible to most of us, using tools of media and technology to assist in this purpose. Certainly, Kepes’ night sky photographs accomplish this, showing the unseen, revealing patterns, and exposing our environment as already bonded with or changed by technologies. Kepes’ experimental water and light installations provide another example of art devised on principle interactivity to “render visible invisible phenomena” and stimulate an “environmental response through a series of intersecting systems, a system of systems, all based on feedback as a means of linking relationships” (Blakinger 374). McLuhan might have had these techno-elemental

102

Chapter 4

works in mind when he spoke of the potential of “so-called light shows” to act as more full-blown sensory provocateurs, “probes into the environment . . . beneficial in an educational sense” (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 253). As his interdependent light, water, wind, and air structures suggest, Kepes, like McLuhan, imagined an earth alive with hidden energy and connections, which artists were able to reveal by wielding technological tools, and ultimately, in world-making projects, “to contribute to the creative shaping of the earth’s surface on a grand scale”: Major environmental plasticity, for example, has become a fact of great import. Until now man was tied to the earth’s crust: he could move only on the land or swim in or skim across the water. Except for the rare vantage points of high mountains our globe was given to us only in limited horizons. The new technology has freed us from the ancient bondage . . . we are shifting frames of reference and thus perspectives. (Arts of the Environment 10)

Artists might use camera media to show unexpected patterns, or they might move from screens to installations, using media to simulate natural phenomena—and, according to Kepes, to improve on it. In the first collaborative exhibition held in 1970 by the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, Kepes offered viewers “an immersive group experience” in a variety of installation pieces that, according to Blakinger, attempted to transform lifeless technical media, all the electronic equipment and clunky machines, into something natural— to turn rote technology into an environmental ecology. The show’s phenomenological technics—interactive sculptures, responsive materials, and ephemeral sensation of flashing lights and frenzied motion— enveloped viewers in a sensory-rich simulacrum of a natural landscape (295). Blakinger further notes that in the informal manifesto for the show, “Toward Civic Art,” Kepes expressed hope that the realm of natural experiences, produced in the show through technological means, might both return viewers to a purer past and lead them toward a better future, especially because the exhibition was an interactive experience, invoking “‘the dream of human community’” (qtd. in Blakinger 295). What needs equal emphasis, Blakinger’s gloss aside, is Kepes’ belief, like McLuhan’s, that sense ratios are out of balance in our current surround and that technology linked to aesthetics might take the lead in reactivating dormant senses and balancing the sensorium. His “techno-sensorium” exhibits were aimed at encouraging sensory life. As Kepes noted: “Whenever outside forces impinge upon our senses a relative equilibrium tends to be established through the mobilization of our entire self, regardless of what sense organ is involved receiving and registering impacts from the outside. There are no separate sense modalities; all levels of sensory function are interdependent and blend together” (“Civic

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

103

Art” 72). An awakened sensory life introduced the potential for personal fulfillment and wholeness, with accompanying intellectual, spiritual, and moral understanding, as well as with the promise of renewed bonding with others: “The imaginative power of the artist, in its luckiest moments, creates models of sensibility and feeling that will enable us to live the fuller, richer life possible at this time in an everchanging world” (“Civic Art” 69). Other of Kepes’ larger art projects revealed his fascination with designing an improved environment. He proposed water gardens and walls, for example, with the potential to moderate climate, noise, and pollution, to provide entertainment, to provoke a sense of beauty and awe, as well as generally to stimulate a sensory response. Many of the ambitious projects and programs that Kepes designed to administer or engineer light and earth elements were never realized beyond sketch form and notes. Various practitioners of futuristic architecture and design projects similarly created designs never actualized: Buckminster Fuller generated many plans that remained blueprints as did the British Archigram group, inspired by and sometimes collaborative with Fuller. Now often considered speculative rather than failed design, unrealized projects have been theorized as potential problem solving and future oriented, as current MIT designers Ratti and Claudel explain: “Whether or not an idea is realized is largely irrelevant. . . . Methodologically, futurecraft dissolves prediction anxiety rather than delivering products and systems” (6, 8). In the case of Kepes’ design-heavy but unrealized projects, Blakinger invites us to consider that they were “not entirely imaginary” to the extent that they exist conceptually and theoretically in plans. They are available for future adaptations, perhaps like Bacon’s The New Atlantis, a utopian fable from 1627, whose elements Kepes intentionally replicated in his MIT lab—and whose features have often been manifest over time, if with slight adaptations, illustrative of the point that design ideas can lay dormant, slowly incubating, and eventually emergent. COMMON FEATURES: MCLUHAN AND KEPES Many interstitial points connect McLuhan and Kepes. To consolidate the general comparisons offered so far, it is possible to distill five major areas of overlap pertaining to their perspectives on perception and environmental change. I will summarize each area and provide examples to align their observations of how we can expand perception and create an optimal interactive environment, one in which technology improves and supports life. 1) As a first commonality, both recognized that individual identity and expression were giving way to new forms of collectivity and sharing, yet we were still in of a commons, of overarching shared principles. Both

104

Chapter 4

were concerned about the possible dangers of such a shift; yet rather than lament the change, both worked on exploring the transformative potential of increased connectivity and collectivity—benefits such as a better informed and more creative populace living in a carefully managed environment, with technology programmed to assist human needs. In letters and private correspondence, McLuhan claimed a personal sense of loss with the approach of post-literacy and new tribalism, yet his more scholarly publications emphasized the energizing potential of “transformation into a complex and depthstructured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society” (Understanding Media 75). He noted too the spread of opportunities for sharing and making counteracting the isolation and alienation of modernist individualism: “The mechanical culture and environment produced the spectator and the consumer instead of the participant and co-creator. . . . [Now the] art object is replaced by participation in the art process. This is the essential meaning of electric circuitry and responsive environments” (“Emperor’s Old Clothes” Kepes 95). Kepes also counted the gains of our ever-increasing interdependence (and increasing awareness of this interactive condition). He expounded theories addressing how technology and media may enable our collective awakening to how everything is connected in profound and revealing ways. Here is Kepes on interconnectivity as a force of sensory stimulation and creativity— one that technology can foster: The more powerful the devices we develop through our scientific technology, the more we are interconnected with each other, with our machines, with our environment, and with our own inner capacities. The more sensitive and embracing our means of hearing, seeing and thinking become through radio, television and computer technology, the more we are compelled to sense the interaction of [humans and their . . .] environment. Our new tools of transportation, communication, and control have brought a new scale of opportunities to inter-thinking and inter-seeing: the condition of truly embracing participatory democracy. (“Art and Ecological Consciousness,” Arts of Environment 7–8)

It is also true that Kepes and McLuhan conceptualized artistic production as shared or interactive. Both worked in concert with others, informed by cross-disciplinary currents and historical precedents, performing as epistemic polymaths. Kepes speaks of the connected nature of ideas and vision when noting that the “individual artistic imagination is neither self-generated nor self-contained; it belongs to the larger environmental field of nature and society” (“Civic Art” 69). Like McLuhan, his approach is animated by mosaic-like characteristics of construction and reception, and indeed he referred to drawing from models of creativity from the past: “A centuries

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

105

old discarded framework for the artistic process has thus been revived in the newest evolutionary step in the development of the artistic community” (“Civic Art” 71–72). Both have been accused of depending too heavily on the work of others, without providing sufficient attribution. Yet both may have risked exploring or extending ideas already circulating because they were imbued with a sense of knowledge as shared and thriving through networked uptake. Both McLuhan and Kepes were concerned that architectural and art forms were no longer a source of common understanding or good. McLuhan often referred to the loss of a “sensus communis,” which Eric McLuhan recently complicated as drawn from several reservoirs and linked to faith. In a letter to Ong, Marshall McLuhan connected the concept of a sensus communis to that of a balanced sense ratio and declared providing a new commons to be the heart of his project. He hoped Understanding Media would stimulate readers to coalesce around his call to reawaken their senses and share his “hope of some rational consensus for our externalized senses”: “A sensus communis for external senses is what I’m trying to build” (Letters 281). He said more about this in “Five Sense Sensorium,” although exactly what he sought remained somewhat abstract. He linked the work of construction to architects and designers and their task to balancing the flows of media—so that no one form would dominate and there might be instead a complementarity of options and influences—but as to whether they were building an actual structure or an interactive hub for more virtual connectivity and sharing is not clear: “Is it not time that we begin to think seriously about a consensus for our media, as we already try to think of some social relevance for structure and design in our buildings? If our massive new electric media are direct extensions of sight and sound and touch and kinesthesis, is there not an urgent need to consider a possibility of a consensus or ratio or balance among these for our collective sanity? . . . The problem of design is to understand the media forces in such wise that we never sink into that zombie tribal state” (54). In McLuhan’s view, in literate times up to the age of modernism, we have lived in assigned and bounded spaces, and property ownership regulated our actions, commerce, and sense of shared purpose: “So long as the externalization of senses were rudimentary in the form of writing and architecture, the pressures for consensus could be met by urban order” ( Letters 279). But we are in the process of de-materializing: our connection to the external environment has loosened as accelerating media capture more of the duties formerly performed by bodies in place. Losing our purchase on the body and materiality, we are no longer excited by places or united in awe of built monuments; we no longer spend days doing physical work; we no longer look to city centers to showcase human values and ideals, to provide a service hub for law and order, trade and commerce, education and ingenuity. To compensate,

106

Chapter 4

we need to develop, McLuhan speculates, common ways of exercising and balancing our senses as well as common knowledge of what we share. Kepes too talked of restocking a commons. Creating a tangible commons was actually what he had in mind with his term “civic art”: “There is a need for those who have the imaginative power to discern the essential common denominators of this complex late twentieth-century life” (“Civic Art” 73). Avant-garde as always, he proposed the artist should take the lead: “The great scale tasks to be performed with the new tools need urgently to incorporate the deepest qualities. This cannot be done without artists” (73). Yet a commons is at heart a populist venture, and Kepes allows for the role of the public as adopters and adapters: “For whatever influence we wish to and must put on our common goals, in the final reckoning both the beginning and the end of action lie in the individual experience” (73). “Interthinking” and “interseeing” are also key Kepes concepts. Kepes acknowledges borrowing them from George Gaylord Simpson, who “has commented that, as organic evolution was brought about by interbreeding, so our further cultural evolution today will come about through broadscale ‘interthinking’” (qtd. in Blakinger 181). Blakinger says Kepes evolved the term “interseeing” to suit his project: “Ideas and images might be read through and against each other, producing new ideas and new images. Such intellectual miscegenation would create new knowledge: to think between ideas, to see between images, might then advance human culture” (181). This reading may too firmly imply Kepes believed in progressive evolution; instead, closer to McLuhan, he followed a model of change and retrieval. By linking interbreeding and growth, Kepes conveys his belief that patterns and structures are not infinite, but replicable if always shifting. In art, he saw unexpected (usually unseen) overlap in multiple images, discerning symmetry between organic and inorganic objects, as well as between those that are large and small, past and present, and so on. His career-long preoccupation with unexpected symmetries may have been his way of fielding the possibility that cross-connections and relationships are growing and that they point to our moving into an undifferentiated future—even a time when species disappear and we become unified. Certainly, there are intimations of a future state of cosmic unity in McLuhan. Along with theorizing loss of individuality for new tribal relationships, he also made more mystical predictions about augmentation and new consciousness—a wordless future of “global telepathy” circulating without borders, as he described in the Playboy, when he extrapolated that computers might move beyond their current capacity to translate codes and languages to enable thought transfer, “a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer . . . bypassing [languages] entirely in favour of an integral cosmic unconsciousness” (18).

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

107

Passages at the end of War and Peace provide intriguing explorations of oneness that mark the end of nature as we have understood it. McLuhan intimated that we are heading for a future without species differentiation— that we might become a single species or entity, perhaps with some variety among our genetics and features, but working with a common mind. To indicate the risks and dangers, he quoted biologist Ernst Mayr’s description of the disordered and disruptive outlook of an interbred world without species differentiation: Now let us assume that one of these recombinations is particularly well adapted . . . but when the time comes for mating this superior genetic complex will inevitably be broken up. There is no mechanism that would prevent such destruction and there is, therefore, no possibility of a gradual improvement of genetic combinations. (188)

Mayr argued for the reproductive isolation of species to maintain hardihood: “The reproductive isolation of a species is a protective device against the breaking up of its well-integrated co-adapted system” (188). In the riffs concluding War and Peace, McLuhan imagined that we may be on the way to losing species independence and moving into a “matrix of that macrocosmic connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist” for being indiscriminate and nonprotective of species advantage. McLuhan does not minimize loss and risk, yet he suggests the human experiment of integration and intermingling may yield some positive results. In general, the book scrolls through various sectors comprising the culture supporting literacy to warn that all that has been solid is melting—the city, borders, nations, and language are dissolving, and what the conclusion is that along with these we may also be losing the human body as an entity. Thus, to say that McLuhan and Kepes believed the era of individualism had come to an end needs to be bolded. Not only was art becoming a collective enterprise, but the human body (along with nonhuman bodies and objects too) was vulnerable to being rebuilt and restructured in the new mediated environment. 2 To the second point: Both believed we inhabit a world made up of patterns and forms, most of which go unobserved and remain invisible. Artists can fulfill the valuable role of revealing patterns, expanding what we see and know of our surroundings. McLuhan refers to artists as “Dewline” (distant early warning systems) inhabitants, providing alerts and danger signals (Vanishing Point 244). Picking up McLuhanesque terminology, Kepes also referred to artists as “like distant early warning systems” (“Civic Art” 70). Both argue that artists work with what is actually present in the environment, aware of objects and relations unseen by most of us who (as McLuhan often

108

Chapter 4

said) look at the world around us from “a rear-view mirror perspective” (Message 75). In addition to exploring how technology permits new light effects and angles of vision, Kepes examines patterns of resemblance in photographs and images of unlike things—juxtaposing past with present artifact, or animate with inanimate—creating what Blakinger refers to as an “optical constellation” of images arranged “with a formal precision that hints at hidden meaning” (103). Referring to such “pseudomorphosis” as “Kepes’s favorite aesthetic tool” (216), Blakinger notes that Kepes presented unrelated objects with identifying tags but without explication or narrative uptake, leaving viewers to identify analogous qualities. Blakinger estimates that although art historians have dismissed pseudomorphosis as an “art fallacy” of false comparison, for Kepes it provided an “enigmatic realm of imagination” and “demands that we invent a reason for these visual affinities, making meaningful what is otherwise meaningless” (105). Blakinger concludes that Kepes borrowed this approach from ancient sources associated with the mystical and mythological understanding: The task is not factual but mystical and mythological, similar to ritual acts of divination like counting stars deciphering tea leaves or gazing into a crystal ball (there are starry skies, leaf samples, and all manner of crystals in the book). Kepes recuperated these ancient arts through the photographs of mid-century science. Studying his images is like reading entrails. (105)

Kepes’ approach—providing image with minimal textual gloss, connecting past and present, inviting audience involvement, introducing spiritual dimensions—has much in common with McLuhan’s “mosaic” style. If Kepes was informed in his approach by “ritual acts” and “ancient arts,” the mosaic style is similarly out of time, something old brought to the present (and in the process of time transfer, transformed, so that with retrieval there is reversal). Like Kepes, McLuhan depended on assemblage, the juxtaposition of image and text, and increasingly and experimentally on minimal textual explanation or explication, seeing this evacuation as an invitation for audience participation in meaning-making. Moreover, like Kepes, he often drew on literary and arcane sources to explore his ideas, rather than following a more traditional scholarly route of citing established sources. While part of McLuhan’s mosaic strategy was to create juxtapositions and suggestions enlisting participant response, in another strategy, also paralleled in Kepes, he exposed unobserved relationships: between concepts and things, like and unlike. One of his “laws” of media is the principle of retrieval (with change), and templates of these laws at work provide examples of how disparate things are better understood as intimate. For example, he connects the human foot to the bicycle wheel.

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

109

Figure-ground thinking may be closer still to Kepes’ notion that things share structural similarities—to see ground is not to see something separate, for in McLuhan’s view figure and ground are interactive and the qualities of one alter the other. Apart from proximal exchanges between figure and ground, McLuhan acknowledges other forms of connectivity as in his Joycean references to intimacies of man and bird: “What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest” (Finnegan’s Wake, qtd. in War and Peace 192). Overall, an overriding point of commonality emerges from Kepes and McLuhan’s insistence that we seek connections among unseen and disparate elements. Together, they imply that even though we are poised for more big changes—to add to our already media-saturated lives and environments— there are resonant forms and recognizable patterns that can help make sense of the transition experience. Poe’s mariner found systematic principles even in the heart of a maelstrom. Kepes and McLuhan alike invite their audiences to engage in finding patterns in surface mixity and chaos, patterns that provide reassurance that the present is not free-flying and unprecedented but connected by unseen links and related to the past. 3 As a third point of comparison, both study human perception as an aperture to adjust, filter and thus shape what we know. For each, our current perceptual dilemma arises from our over-reliance on a blinkered form of sight—so that we look only or mainly for linear arrangements that replicate the logic of print production that has defined our culture. Both expose how sight has come in our time to dominate the other senses, as well as how what we see is often restricted by assumptions and associations. Chapter 2 dealt extensively with McLuhan’s concept of the human sensorium as in the process of being fully “outered,” and as such ripe for reactivation in an environment designed to appeal to the collective and to touch and tempt sensory responses. He encouraged us individually to consciously exercise each of our senses, re-ignite and train them, and in this process discover their power to work alone or synesthetically. At the same time, he provided (albeit sketched in probes) the prediction that eventually, our senses will respond in common to an external, engineered mechanism, an environment programmed by computers to pattern life in ways that optimize human awareness: “The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their overall needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses” (Playboy 72). He speculates that such environmental change may occur without entirely eroding individual will and feeling, for humans possess a “stabilizing” energy; he parses the poem of a second grader, written to mark the launch of Sputnik, as capturing the human capacity to balance seismic change with stability: “The stars are so big/The earth is so small/Stay as you are” (Playboy 70). If as individuals

110

Chapter 4

we actively grow our understanding of our sensory capacity and take note of how it has been affected by media takeover, we are empowered to participate in and inform the development of a computerized environment that supports our humanity. To protect against the imposition of such systems against our will—to provide the “best civil defence against media fallout”—we need to cultivate understanding and inform the process (Playboy 74). Kepes too felt that as individuals we could respond to a sensory training program, one that might return us to feeling pleasure and sensing beauty in the environment. He invokes preliterate early human culture when sensory perception was not yet defined by a “hierarchy of organizations, but [there was perceived] connections amongst all things,” with “no break in the spectrum of life”: “The pearly iridescence of sea shells, the sparkling of a crystal, the phosphorescent glow of the sea at night and the sunlight caught in droplets above a waterfall are all signs of an embracing living thing. . . . Everything is permeated by life. Everything seems in contact, interacting, interliving” (“Civic Art” 72). Kepes further speculated that we still possess our innate ability to sense and form connections, yet it has grown dull in current technologized, polluted, and crowded surroundings. Our “wildly proliferating man-made environment” has “shrank living space, polluted air and water dimmed light bleached color and relentlessly expanded mass, dirt, speed, noise, and complexity” (69). He proposes applying “new-scale tools” to remake life and environmental conditions, “using this realm to guide us, mold us and transform us” (72): “The change of seasons which throughout our history has enriched our lives is now for a large fraction of urban dwellers only a rare experience. If we are to turn our cities into congenial human environments, color and light, form and texture will have to be domesticated in a creative sense” (“Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration” 133). Futuristic in his thinking, Kepes provided a glimpse of how technology can augment our capacity to take in information and make meaning. For example, his series of aerial photographs—of a river bed, mountains, a desert, and a rice paddy—captured unexpected pattern repetition and linkages among these environmental elements. There is a symmetry of peaks and curves that would go unnoticed if we remained on the ground rather than elevated to the bird’s eye heights. He would concur with McLuhan that we are entering a time when technology may allow for an augmented consciousness—making us more aware of our environment and of what we are experiencing. To sum this area of comparison: McLuhan counselled us to wake up to the world and take into account how media and technologies change our perception and experience. He directed us to take in our material surroundings, as well as to consider the counter-environments proposed in art. It might be said that Kepes, as artist creating installations and pseudomorphic images, provided curricular materials suitable for McLuhan’s training project. He united

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

111

technology with art to create images and installations aimed at stimulating sensory recognition of connectivity. The names and classifications of each item displayed for comparison were not relevant: Kepes wants us to use our senses to apprehend pattern and thus make nonlinguistic meaning—to use what he called The Language of Vision. 4 As noted in the previous point about sensory perception, both McLuhan and Kepes worked to create conditions enticing everybody to be more directly engaged in the environment, making and co-forming the surroundings, not slavishly accepting pre-programmed arrangements. With unleashed and rampant media and technologies threatening the environment and all life forms—Kepes waxing eloquent about environmental degradation and McLuhan impassioned when warning of unchecked human over-extension— both focused on how it was still possible (certainly desirable) for us 1) to understand how technology is pushing and limiting us; and 2) to begin to push back by asserting agency and becoming more alert and aware. Kepes characterized us as finally “cornered” and forced to take stock of “our goals” and “what has gone wrong” in order to “reject what is toxic and find what is useful and meaningful” (“Arts of Environment” 5, 6). The overlap between how each envisioned using technology to alter or “program” an engineered environment is close enough to encourage the belief that they had read each other. The following passages wherein each describes elements of a programmed or engineered environment reveal creative cross borrowing. Both, for example, cited the example of houses without walls, using air-jet currents to control temperature and air quality. Kepes described increasing structural portability and transparency in architecture and engineering, with buildings “losing their solidity and opacity to become light and transparent”: Buckminster Fuller’s airy dymaxion structures are important milestones on this road. Imaginative younger architects and engineers have moved still further away from weight and have touched upon the possibilities of enclosing space with air currents. Like instant envelopes these currents could be turned on or off as needed by sophisticated sensing and computing devices regulated by weather conditions. Architecture is making fundamental departures from its traditional position as a discrete, independent, heavy and solid form catering mainly to the visual sense and is becoming a responding bodiless dynamic interdependent structure. (“Arts of Environment”)

McLuhan’s speculations followed similar lines. He imagined terms ranging from “space capsule[s] to walls created by air “global thermostatic controls” adjusting the atmosphere to suit body, pointing to “the obsolescence of housing as an extension control mechanisms of the body” (Understanding Media 176).

housing in jets,” with the human of the heat

112

Chapter 4

Both Kepes and McLuhan have been unfairly criticized for being technological determinists or technological utopians who uncritically hailed new developments as human assets. Both have been criticized for attempting to defend or legitimize technologies owned and driven by and bound to a five-sided conglomerate of forces, such as Mumford’s Pentagon of Power: “power (energy), political domination, productivity, profit and publicity” (qtd. in Carey 177). They are said to have put too much faith in technology as a multilevel transformative agent and in its power to make us more sentient, intelligent, and engaged to create a more hospitable world. Yet, the very word “faith” is telling, implying as it does the mix of doubt and hope involved in such a stance: both McLuhan and Kepes chose (and struggled) to hold on to a belief in positive transformations for they knew the possible path of destructive if science was left to dominate the field. Both, far from being noncritical technological enthusiasts and adopters, argued the essential leadership role of humans in human–computer interface situations. With art informing science, technology might be (and become) a positive and purposeful force, serving and enriching our lives, they argued, if directed by principled and creative people to meet public needs and stimulate minds. Technology should not be allowed to develop, unguided, at a breakneck pace, as a siloed and dangerous scientific project. McLuhan has often been criticized for overestimating the power of technology and disregarding the controls exerted by social organization. Urbanist Lewis Mumford, a one-time intellectual ally, ultimately denounced McLuhan for putting the need to control technology ahead of the need to reform social organization as key to improving the human community. James W. Carey describes how Mumford began his career as a techno enthusiast, believing electricity was a form of energy able to clean up the pollutions of steam-age industrialization. Yet Mumford eventually concluded that instead of correcting past ills, electric energy introduced new blights, leading him to campaign against the image of man as toolmaker and “to cut down the received view of technology as the central agent in human development and to emphasize art, ritual and language as the decisive achievements in human development” (177). Carey tells us that Mumford found McLuhan’s world view frivolous and dangerous, especially his “vision of the universe and everything in it as machine and, in the name of that machine, the extirpation of all human purposes, types, values, and social forms that did not fit within the limited scope of machine civilization” (177). What this assessment of McLuhan underemphasizes is that he never unreservedly welcomed the new world of incoming technology and machinery but said it needed to be understood and humanized, setting aside nostalgia for the glory of past human accomplishments to imagine humanity transformed yet preserved, augmented by technological energy. Electricity

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

113

and technology alone would not save the world, but ignoring them or overlooking possible ways to harness them to build new order and assets would not make them go away. Raymond Williams’ critique of McLuhan’s determinism strikes some similar notes, as in his observation that McLuhan saw us as helpless in the grasp of media and tools, our psyche and social forms disfigured by these powerful forces. Yet in McLuhan’s conception, if we are changing, it is still within our grasp to direct the force of change; we can shape our own responses and exert control over media which, still only human-made tools, remain within our grasp to mold. Like his close intellectual associate Walter Ong, McLuhan observed patterns rather than attempting to impose a closed system, die inexorably cast. Ong characterized the change in culture and communication as sweeping yet processual and responsive, avoiding a reductivist explanation of everything because “the thesis is relationist: major developments . . . in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word” (“Preface” 9). Kepes, less famous as a public intellectual, has not been a lightning rod for criticism in the same way as McLuhan, although he suffered various attacks in his day. Reporting these, his biographer Blakinger is rather severe in his assessment of Kepes’ alignment with MIT military and social organization, describing him as increasingly compromised, “attempting to resist technocratic culture while still becoming part of it” (409). He suggests Kepes was tortured by self-doubt and ultimately aware of failing to bring into being Bauhaus’ dreams of improving civic life through design. Yet against this, I would observe that doubt and struggle were inevitable elements of his highstakes undertaking: for him, success depended upon awakening humankind to sharing in his task and goal. Kepes voluntarily gave up his private life and art—work he found rewarding—to assume a high profile role in the cold war avant-garde art community, performing as “the foremost artist actor—the first to join MIT’s tenured faulty . . . on the forefront of advanced science, and, in a way, advanced art” (12). Blakinger suggests Kepes may have lost himself in this role and joined ranks with the technocrats, becoming “the Man in a gray flannel suit”—in an assessment not unlike that of McLuhan’s friend, anthropologist Ted Carpenter, who observed that McLuhan lost himself to the media he critiqued, “converted into an image media manipulated & exploited” (qtd. in Lamberti, Mosaic 26). In another assessment of Kepes’ artistic and personal character, Blakinger places Kepes in the tradition of Christ “as a martyred figure” (216) for taking principled risks and suffering terrible abuse. He describes Kepes as critical of the MIT environment, yet committed to working within it to attempt to understand and control it: “While other artists would have taken the easier path of denouncing MIT’s technocratic culture, of condemning the

114

Chapter 4

military-industrial-aesthetic complex, Kepes instead remained part of that culture, even while he resented what it represented” (216). This description accords almost exactly with McLuhan’s self-admission of finding current technology-saturated developments abhorrent, yet accepting that personal and human survival depends on immersion to discern a pattern in apparent chaos—he vowed to act like Poe’s mariner he so often cited who survived the maelstrom by observing its currents. Here is some of McLuhan’s statement about abjuring resentment and judgment to attempt neutrality, understanding and agency: [For many years] I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the industrial revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. . . . [But gradually I ] discovered a totally different approach based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. . . . I ceased to be a moralist and became a student. (Playboy 19, 20)

Reading Kepes and McLuhan together reveals that alike they engage the task of finding ways to involve us in technology. McLuhan says collective awakening is within our grasp if we follow the lead of artists to control media, yet without exercising effort things may go badly “in the millenium” that holds “the potential for realizing the Anti-christ” (Playboy 22). Kepes shared McLuhan’s sense of the precarity of his liberatory mission. His commitment to a militaristic “atomic” atmosphere was not a ploy for personal ­advantage—not as Blakinger darkly speculates “an opportunity to meet important people.” UTOPIAN TECHNO-SENSORIUM DREAMS: WHO DREAMT BIGGER? There was a visionary quality to their thinking. The techno-sensorium world McLuhan hinted at and sketched involved transformations of both human and earth—technological alterations we now accept as part of our world and commonly refer to by terms such as biogenetics and terra-forming. McLuhan repeatedly described the earth as an art form, his pronouncement based on human ingenuity having captured the planet in a photo and encircling it with surveillance satellites, making what was once too big to imagine seems as small as a blue marble. Kepes, as a practicing installation artist, makes this somewhat abstract and general observation more meaningful by providing a way to connect it to real design projects. In design installations, he fused technology with physical elements of light and water, aimed at providing

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

115

an improved experience for human users and audience for whom natural elements had receded with pollution and urbanization. To offer sensory reexcitation, he designed Boston’s Charles River project, proposed to create “transformations of space”: flashing lights that would change in response to environmental conditions, sprays of water pumped upward to create “artificial clouds, with animated surfaces . . . like simulated rainbows” (Blakinger 367). He was giving us nature in an amplified and augmented form, on the assumption that the original and pure form was no longer viable, and we needed to be reminded of its enchantments and energy. Both made high-flying utopian professions of faith in the future, rewarding human growth and unity. McLuhan’s Playboy interview ends with high hopes: “The new [human] linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and place, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art” (23). Kepes’ rhetoric strikes similar, if not identical, notes, for he also imagines us as shaping and caressing the stuff of our world: “To be aware of the visual blight of our cities, one needs to have experienced nature’s configurations or man’s peak achievements in shaping, caressing, invigorating and enriching urban forms” (“The Artist’s Role” 170). Yet for both, it is human consciousness that is the great artifact, not just salvageable but capable of expansion. Both often speak of matching outer and inner development. Kepes says: “Artists and poets on the one hand, scientists and engineers on the other, appear to live in two different worlds. Their common language, their common symbols, do not exist. To develop vision which brings the inner and outer worlds together, we need common roots once more” (New Landscape 20). McLuhan is perhaps even more insistent that the reshaping of human consciousness is his primary target of interest, although (following the logic of this book) any steps toward reshaping human minds and bodies part of a dance with environment and media change: “The making and shaping of consciousness from moment to moment is the supreme artistic task of all individuals. To qualify and perfect this process on a world environmental scale is the inherent potential of each new technology” (“Emperor’s” in Kepes 95). While it exceeds the mandate of this study, an expanded comparative study of McLuhan and Kepes is bound to reveal even stronger cross-currents than those identified here (or to use Kepes’ terms, more examples of “interseeing and interthinking”). For both, everything is at stake: all will be lost if they fail at reshaping subjectivity, collectivity, the world stage and the planetary environment, “with the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart, the painter’s eye” (The New Landscape 20).

116

Chapter 4

MCLUHAN AND JANE JACOBS: ACTIVISM AND ECO-CONSCIOUSNESS The story of the collaboration between Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan is relatively short—compared to his extended career-spanning friendships with Tyrwhitt and Kepes. Yet it spotlights McLuhan in two under-recognized roles: 1) as activist, protesting political decisions and 2) as environmental ecologist. In 1970, he joined with Jacobs in a successful political protest against the proposed Spadina Expressway in Toronto, planned to connect downtown Toronto to the new Yorkdale Mall, north of city center. In the late 1960s, Jacobs stepped to the fore of the “Stop Spadina Expressway” campaign, much as she had stood against similar Robert Moses’ development projects in New York. When McLuhan joined the activist campaign—that was ultimately successful in halting freeway development—he co-wrote with Jacobs the script for a 14-minute movie, The Burning Would. Jacob’s opposition to overdevelopment and car culture is well documented. In one of her last books, Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs tells us how Fordism not only killed neighborhoods by going through them with roads and noisy freeways but also derailed more ecologically friendly electric trolley systems, converting public transportation into combustion-engine buses. Her story of how car transportation hijacked other interests in the development of our cities resounds with regret and is often punctuated by calls for action. McLuhan tells a similar story of car culture aggressions yet usually presents his critique in a deliberately neutral voice. Unlike Jacobs, he does not celebrate past accomplishments—like the electric trolley—to speak against technological gains. He often said outright that he was not interested in reaching “moralizers” who want things labelled as “a good thing or a bad thing” (Culture is Our Business 8). From this, we might have surmised his opposition to protest and advocacy roles familiar to Jacobs. Indeed, some have dismissed McLuhan’s determination to stop freeway expansion as mere self-protectionism. The Expressway was slated to cut through McLuhan’s beloved Wychwood neighborhood, as well as break up a number of other residential and park areas, and his uncharacteristic protests might be taken for NIMBY outrage. While the desire to protect his home and the pastoral surroundings no doubt spurred him to break his avowal to hold back judgment and remain neutral and objective, the depth of his love for his home and surrounding community and the length of his opposition to car culture suggest that taking on the role of protest was an easy fit. McLuhan’s biographer W. Terrence Gordon describes McLuhan’s passion for his Wychwood home, where he moved with his family in 1968, just two years prior to the Spadina Expressway threat. Gordon paints an idyllic picture (which holds true today, if one takes a walking tour of the vicinity)

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

117

reporting that the main access street Wychwood Avenue was quiet, “free of heavy traffic, even at rush hour” and that this was the only open access road leading into Wychwood Park, a heavily treed and gated area with fifty-four residences (232). The area had been designed as an artist’s colony by English landscape painter Marmaduke Mathews, who came to Canada in the 1860s. In a letter, McLuhan described the pastoral appeal of residence in a park-like setting: “We are the only house on a beautiful pond filled with large goldfish. It is fed by an artesian spring and is the headwaters of a little river that runs across the Toronto campus” (qtd. in Gordon 233). In a letter to Frank Kermode, McLuhan declined to write a book for the Modern Masters series about Joyce or Eisenstein and offered instead to write about Wychwood Park, a tract of land replete with sensory rewards housing a community capable of fostering in residents a sense of being both independent of and connected to others residents. McLuhan claimed the park offered both intimacy and sanctuary (closeness and isolation) largely because of its circular design—with houses clustered around the pond and the main estate— rather than having been designed according to the usual principles of linearity to establish measured separation: “The pond ripples outward into a heavily treed neighborhood of twenty-two acres and fifty-four houses. The park has no roads or sidewalks, but simply these Viconian circles of homes and people in a most unusual dramatic arrangement. Naturally I could tie these patterns into many features of cities past and present” (qtd. in Gordon 233). In McLuhan’s estimate, Whychwood Park promoted different angles of vision and ways of seeing—rather like Tyrwhitt’s reference to Fatehpur Sikri where there are spheres rather than divergent lines. Also of note is his assumption that this spatial arrangement puts people in harmony so that the residents—in this “unusual dramatic arrangement”—are aware of and interested in each other, yet indirectly companionable. Apart from extolling the graces of Wychwood as home, his letters provide some of his strongest statements about residential planning and community building. The circular design, McLuhan explains, promotes a sense of relationship and community, naturally widening “the family circle” (Medium Is Message 14). Circularity promotes a sense of sharing and support, rather than cutting neighbors off from each other: Previously I have lived only on streets which sometimes have the quality of neighborhoods, but lineality is not compatible with community. The community character of Wychwood Park is a direct result of the circular composition of the houses, resulting from Wychwood pond. When houses interface by their circular or oval compositioning, a kind of social resonance develops that does not depend on a high degree of social life or visiting amongst occupants. Rather there occurs a sense of theatre, as if all occupants were in varying degrees, on a

118

Chapter 4

stage. Something of the sort happens in any small village, and builders and planners could easily achieve rich community effects (even without a pond) simply by locating dwellings in non-lineal patterns. (qtd. in Gordon 234)

In miniature and with low-tech support, Whychwood is a version of McLuhan’s techno-sensorium ideal, an environment engineered to stimulate and balance sensory life, a place at once restorative and engaging. In miniature, here is a space for global theater, a surround that enables the recognition of others without the necessity of interference or interaction and of self as part of the informal/ unscripted performance. It nurtures inner life—sensory experience, perception, and cognition—and simultaneously sponsors social life by making visible one’s connectivity to others. Far from being dismissive or ironic, then, McLuhan may have wanted to write about Wychwood in place of Eisenstein or Joyce [whose Ulysses, as noted earlier, he called “the greatest piece of city planning in this century” (qtd. in Wigley 113)] to further explore his appreciation for design and arrangement capable of exciting the senses and establishing connection between self, other, and place. This housing development captured an ideal: unlike Eisenstein’s giant mediatized panoramas of struggle, a montage of Whychwood scenes might instead document living with each other and the environment peaceably. While there is no obvious machine in the garden (so that McLuhan might appear closer to Mumford than Kepes in praising pristine biological elements and natural background), the opposite is true in that the organic conditions and landscape are themselves an aesthetic production—named, arranged, and human-built. While McLuhan was undeniably protecting home and idyllic community by raging against the Expressway, it must also be reckoned that he was protesting against the imposition of destructive and pollutant car culture— against a freeway he referred to as “a cement Kimono for Toronto” in a letter of protest (Letters 432). Some of his theory opposing car culture and industry explored the powerful influence of cars on culture—North American culture in particular, for our cities have grown up alongside the automobile, and “the car has fashioned not only our physical environment but also our psychic and social lives” (McLeod Rogers 141). McLuhan described how cars have scored the shape of cities and urban culture, eliminating distances and making casual delivery and exchange possible by increased mobility: The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape, in which the car was a sort of steeple-chaser. At the same time the motorcar destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. (Understanding 33)

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

119

The fourteen-minute film, The Burning Would, composed in montage style, resulted from an afternoon meeting between Jacobs and McLuhan. According to Jacobs’ biographer Robert Kanigal, Jacobs left the one-hour session in McLuhan’s office believing nothing would eventuate from their exchange: “Got it all down?” McLuhan asked his secretary. “Well that’s it,” he said turning to Jane. “We’ve got the script.” Jane was horrified. They had no script at all, just a collection of variants of “Hey what about this?” (287)

When she saw the transcript pre-filming, she remained skeptical, confronted by a jumble of ideas “without beginning or end,” the flimsiest of threads holding it together (287), yet she admired the final cut. “I couldn’t have been more astonished,” Jane recalled. McLuhan had really worked it over. “There was shape to it. . . . It did have a thread and raised a lot of important issues. . . [she was surprised] that something tangible, coherent and constructive could have come of that mess.” (288)

Visually the film builds by juxtaposition, with scenes of urban overgrowth and devastation interwoven with those of people relaxing in pastoral green spaces. It cuts, for example, from children picnicking in a park to cars crashing in a demolition derby, to images of over-crowded highways and industrial waste. The film does not concentrate only on criticizing cars and freeways but looks more broadly at urban waste and pollution. Apart from the visuals, a sound script mixed music, song, and noise with brief sound bites providing facts about the detrimental effects of unchecked urban growth. Interspersed with urban cacophony—sirens, phones, jackhammers—there are snippets of classical music and traditional folksongs. Without smooth edges or connected narrative, the film enacts again McLuhan’s commitment to a methodology designed to provoke audience involvement. The film (now available on YouTube) holds up as a critique of urban overdevelopment and environmental decay. Many of the problems it exposes continue rampant and rotting today’s urban areas (although, of course, the seventies’ style automobiles and phones look dated). A film like this, making commentary with lasting power, indicates that McLuhan possessed more than a passing or ephemeral interest in environmental protection. In addition to his own history of critiquing car culture and technologies gone wild, we might also note his long-standing collaborations with colleagues committed to environment protection and renewal. Tyrwhitt, of course, was landscape architect first and foremost, and her final legacy was her Mediterranean hillside garden. When the Delos symposiums ended in 1972, she redirected the

120

Chapter 4

group agenda to a greater emphasis on greenspace and sustainability issues, recognizing our planet as a shared home needing ecological balance; architectural theorist and Professor Panayiota Pyla provides an excerpt from the Ekistics group statement: As we enter the urban phase of social evolution, it becomes obvious that each of us has two countries—his own and the planet earth. We cannot feel at home on earth if we do not continue to love and cultivate our own garden. And conversely we cannot feel comfortable in our garden if we do not care for the planet earth as our collective home. (qtd. in Pyla 26)

Kepes, too, made impassioned pleas for environmental awareness and protection, if he was—like McLuhan—sensitive to questions of how we might discover ways to insert technology in an aestheticized remaking of an improved original earth home. Making the film overtly didactic about present urban and ecological dangers, McLuhan played an activist role he usually avoided. Yet such an apparent jag is countenanced by his own understanding of polyvalent identity—his rejection of seamless and unified presentations—and thus this collaboration and project adds a strand, thin yet undeniable, to McLuhan’s lifelong commitment to urban environmentalism and sustainability. MCLUHAN AS ANTI-PLANNER: ENVIRONMENT, NOT CITY McLuhan may have espoused the goal of protecting the earth against overand exploitative development, but he was no acolyte of planning, which struck him as having too many throwback tendencies resulting in models aimed at recreating heavy structures and footprints—the architecture of literacy and modernity. He had a well-worn and annotated copy of Death and Life of American Cities in his private library of books. Yet rather than recording his appreciation of Jacobs’ textual insights, he placed the word “cliché” beside many passages, likely signifying he found in her calls for renewal and mixity too much hearkening back to past norms and values. He was unmoved by her passionate commitment to urban accessibility and the redistribution of resources like wealth and status, dismissive of these concerns for putting too much stock in the values and features—in currencies, policies, and activities—animating the modernist city. He admired elements of the modernist city but found it a space that was already passe in our unstoppable charge into more placeless associations and virtual forms of connection. This does not make his activism opposing Spadina Expressway expansion an act

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

121

of hypocrisy, for he agreed in principle that building cities for cars rather than people was wasteful of resources and destructive of community. Yet his own program was more forward looking, even futuristic, for in his view the modernist city was already fading, and it was past time to anticipate a new framework for living. In his own phrase, he believed “Environment is process, not container” (Counterblast 30). McLuhan was aggrieved by the shortsighted, provisional, and outmoded plans generated by urbanists; as he wrote to Kepes, discussions of improving the city were too much given to “piecemeal” approaches or solutions, renewing or building more “brickand-mortar” dwellings and structures, insisting on recreating old patterns of permanence and weight rather than accepting the “collapse in existing establishments” and attempting to plan for greater mobility and unsettlement (Letters 453). He anticipated us eventually ensconced in structures without walls, open to ubiquitous software networks. Mark Wigley reports that at the final meeting of Delos 10 in 1972, McLuhan sided with Buckminster Fuller in urging the group to recognize the incipience of “Unsettlement” rather than the continuing to redo and renew fixed structures with an eye to establishing permanence. McLuhan was never interested in urban design and planning as a standalone or dominant activity. A gap separated him from his contemporaries who struggled as designers and planners to make material accommodations—from Jacobs, Tyrwhitt, and even from Kepes with whom he shared so much, but who over-emphasized the visual sense and who was thus too much in concert with the biases of literacy. Compared to these figures, McLuhan was less a materialist—concerned with housing and supporting the body—than humanist idealist—concerned with conditions for nurturing inner life and mind. Perhaps emblematic of the gap that separated him from Tyrwhitt, Kepes, and Jacobs and their commitment to the visual and to design and spatial thinking is that in 1952, all three figures attended an inaugural North American urban planning meeting, which Tyrwhitt organized for Josep Lluis Sert (Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design). At this meeting Jacobs, offered a speaking role at the last minute, exploded her manifesto about mixity and community; at this meeting Kepes attended as a distinguished delegate. McLuhan was not there. In the end Jane Jacobs—like Tyrwhitt and, in some ways. Kepes—wanted to reshape the city—to impose the configuration and material forms she believed conducive to sociability, community, freedom, and fairness. She and other urbanists and planners believed in the city as a place for the instantiation of values and abstractions and placed their focus on the outer, geographical environment, committed to designing it to suit and complement our needs. For McLuhan, the problem needed to be addressed in reverse order: instead of designing and building material forms to suit current social values and

122

Chapter 4

practices, he preferred a more open and exploratory relationship between inner and outer. Instead of reproducing the human-made and mediated environment—more furnishings, buildings and structures, and infrastructural supports, like roads, posts, towers, and cables—and adding innovations based on the new affordances of “accelerated change,” he recommended measuring environmental forces to discover their effect on the human senses, “outlook and expectations” (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 253): New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These in turn alter our outlook and expectations. The need of our time is for a means of measuring sensory thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology . . . [in order to] program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 253)

Whatever we build both shapes and changes us. Rather than continue to build more and new—even if planners oversee such construction and the placement of parts—we need to take stock of how elements in the environment shape the human condition—both inner lives and social arrangements. Otherwise, he fears, we may be overwhelmed, anesthetized, and annihilated, fated to the suffering implied by Bertrand Russell’s observation that “if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream” (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 253). The city whose elements Jacobs alongside other planners wanted to save or reorganize was already “outmoded”; as he said to Kepes, “we are already in a new kind of world city” (Letters 453). Rather than continuing to allow the city to structure/stricture our movements—alongside many planners still enforcing a modernist playbook of formalisms such as those articulated by CIAM—he wanted an interactive environment devised by artists to appeal to and draw on and out our common humanity. Artists, not planners, should take the lead, for the artist recognizes how new and mediated challenge and disable human sensibility: “The artist studies the distortion of sensory life produced by new environmental programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form” (“Emperor’s” Vanishing 238). Only artists are positioned to understand and expose our current conditions, countering and correcting these by imagining more fully engaged lives. McLuhan’s drive was to renovate and repatriate sensorium and sensibilities rather than outering them. He was at odds with applied/pragmatic city planning material world because material features and conditions were adjunct to his primary concern with human health and happiness. He designed his sensorium project for the purpose of “trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences” (Playboy 3). Clothes,

McLuhan and Other Contemporary Urban Designers

123

housing, and city structures were an index to the human condition, and he examined them—visible/tangible—as a way into less-visible inner territory, to ask how technological innovations affected inner conditions. His concern for inner before, if not over, outer life is noted by the editors of his letters who contrast Innis’ work on resource media and culture—studying the effects of “the oral tradition, parchment, papyrus, paper and the printing press in disseminating information, and the impetus these media provided for cultural change”—to McLuhan’s interest in media’s effects on human life and psyche, “on the senses rather than on social organization” (Letters 220). Current conditions, unless addressed and altered, he argued, would lead to further disincarnation and disorientation, with our bodies and senses “outered” so thoroughly as to leave us with little to no control. He hoped for the creation of a counter-environment, one allowing for the repatriation of the sense life and an expansion of consciousness and community; he further hoped that technology might be used to support us in this goal. Nurturing and circulating such a hope and goal does not isolate McLuhan as lost in the dreams of his day, reliant on orthodox faith and optimism about technological resolved, disseminating what James Carey dismisses as “New Jerusalem” parables “on the restorative powers of media” that attempt “to offer a justification of optimism” (“Innis” 38, emphasis mine). Justifying hope has become a common current academic pursuit, often considered territory for bold and innovative thinkers, creative and critical both, evident in various studies from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene to Bernard Steigler’s Neganthropocene, both of which insist on redefining our relations to science and planet, to institutions and others, in place of studying and awaiting anthropocene annihilation. Rolling out all the potential dangers ahead in his recent New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, British artist and writer James Bridle advocates for understanding and controlling technology as the best sane step toward a future, in passages that could come straight from McLuhan’s playbook: How we understand and think our place in the world, and our relation to one another and to machines, will ultimately decide if madness or peace is where our technologies will take us. (11)

Chapter 5

McLuhan Now In New Materialist, Media Ecology, and Visual Theory

This chapter situates McLuhan as he both fits and resists current materialist and post-humanist thinking. McLuhan is often overlooked as a theorist who anticipated many tenets of new materialism, often because he is relegated to the more limited role of literary or media/communications theorist. Understood as an urban and spatial theorist, McLuhan espouses a form of materialism that emphasizes the powerful—often under-recognized—role of media/tools and the built environment on planetary life; his materialist thinking, however, is always inflected by humanistic and even spiritual concerns. It is paramount, he argues, for us to grasp how the human-made planetary environment both restricts and enables what we do, think, and imagine, particularly since our survival—indeed, the survival of the planet itself—depends on humans to provide direction to correct human/environmental contact and interaction. While his vision corresponds with current interdisciplinary thinking about the world as an assemblage of organic and inorganic matter, he would have stopped short of post-humanist arguments that minimize human agency to ascribe volition to assemblage itself. McLuhan might comfortably have conceded that we live in anthropocentric times—might even have adopted “anthropocene” as a term to describe the forceful impact of humans and technology on the entire planetary environment—a situation to which he often referred. Yet he would not have embraced fully post-humanist assemblage thinking. While there are areas of convergence between his and this way of thinking, McLuhan never anticipated with welcome a world organized by or for nonhuman species—never anticipated a good outcome if humans were to step away from controlling the environment already in his day fashioned and claimed—“worked over”—by media and technologies. In place of brick-and-mortar cities, regulated by police and politics and enlivened by commodity, artifact, and performance 125

126

Chapter 5

spectacles, he imagined the implementation of artist-led technologically-rich counter-environments, which he envisioned as being so deeply satisfying as to discourage deviance and so interactive in design—responsive to a collective ethos and aesthetic yet with flexible, programmable options for individuals— as to move beyond the need for political governance. In his incoming technosensorium world city, interactivity and engagement would tie individuals to others and the environment in a new compact, redefining the role of media and technologies in human subjectivity, social relations, and the environment. In place of the notion of assemblage—with life-force energy making random, expandable, and expendable (if inter-constitutive) connections—he would have preferred mosaic imagery—imagining the environment as human-made structure, embodying ancient patterns that nonetheless respond to and reflect immediate environmental pressures. MCLUHAN AND NEW MATERIALISMS: HUMANS/MATTER Locating McLuhan as practicing a form of materialist thinking establishes his relation to the philosophical position that has driven much of the scholarship of the last few decades, popularized through new materialism and posthumanist thinking. An interdisciplinary scholar and public influencer who in our time enacts a role similar to one McLuhan played in his is Bruno Latour. To be sure, I am pointing out that they take up similar issues, not that there is full symmetry in their responses. There are correspondences in terms of how they define the consistency and constitution of knowledge. First, Latour has challenged social science and humanistic inquiry and the “artificially maintained controversies” of critique (“Has Critique Run Out” 227); what is needed instead, he argues, is the convergence of diverse forms of inquiry drawn from multiple disciplines, with the goal of assembling components to understand the process and formation of “concerns”—rather than a critical approach that aims by default to debunk popular beliefs as mere fetish. This echoes McLuhan’s call for interdisciplinary teamwork—and indeed his calls for science to intersect with art—to generate probes that raise questions and open possibilities in place of studies enacting conclusions. Second, both refer to the end of nature and consider how this affects our understanding of the earth as an unbounded whole. In McLuhan’s view, “nature” has been from inception a made-up construction, named by the Greeks to suit their cultural need for categories to organize space; he wrote that “twenty-five centuries ago the Greeks invented nature by extracting it from total existence” (McLuhan and Nevitt 2). He frequently observed that nature became art when we launched satellites to ring the planet and reduce it

McLuhan Now

127

to the image of blue marble. McLuhan believed it was up to artists to remake and save the world, using available technologies judiciously and selectively to craft a more sustainable and creative environment. He was not speaking metaphorically when pronouncing the end of nature and evolutionary change and the dawning of a time when the earth is not only malleable to human hands but requiring planned interventions and reshaping to fit collective needs: When we put satellites around the planet, Darwinian Nature ended. The earth became an art form subject to the same programming as media networks and their environments. The whole evolutionary process shifted, at the moment of Sputnik, from biology to technology. Evolution became not an involuntary response of organisms to new conditions but part of the consensus of human consciousness. (Counterblast 143)

He is arguing that satellite technology changed our orientation so that we went from feeling ourselves independent to recognizing our unbreakable connection to others and forces outside the body. Satellites did not simply herald exposure to more information and faster circulation but a new principle of relationship, a sense of everything having “simultaneous” rather than sequential or even individual presence: Perhaps the largest conceivable revolution in information occurred on October 17, 1957, when Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and ecology was born. “Ecological” thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art. Ecological thinking and planning have always been nature to pre-literate man, since he lived not visually but acoustically. Instead of having external goals and objectives, he sought to maintain an equilibrium among the components of his environments in order to ensure survival. (“Global Theatre” 49)

Latour continues and in some ways updates and extends these claims. In his view, science and technological machinery treat soil as a resource, owned and exploited, and as separate or apart from human life and culture. He recommends we move to reconsider soil—“the terrestrial”—as shared planetary resource, a de-territorialized ground we all need to protect: “Bound to the earth and land, it is also a way of worlding, in that it aligns with no borders, transcends all identities” (Down to Earth 53). He views the anthropocene as a time of rapid change, as the environment becomes increasingly technologized by competitive and selfish claims rather than managed by any thoughtful

128

Chapter 5

exercise of stewardship; what makes our moment stand out from others is that now figure and ground are shifting places, to use McLuhan’s preferred terms to explain Latour’s observation: Humans have always modified their environment, of course, but the term designated only their surroundings, that which, precisely, encircled them. They remained the central figures, only modifying the décor of their dreams around the edges. Today the decor, the wings, the background, the whole building have come on stage and competing with the actors for the principle role. This changes all the scripts, suggests other endings. (43)

Still like McLuhan, Latour uses words like “vertigo” and “panic” (8) to capture his sense of the crisis upon us. Borders fail and fall, the center doesn’t hold (to catch a line from Yeats that McLuhan liked), and we are forced to redefine our sense of identity and belonging in de-territorialized, de-politicized terms. Comparing McLuhan to other materialist thinkers is further revelatory. We can take up McLuhan’s concept of “formal cause,” for example, to map his position in relation to Deleuzian materialism. McLuhan’s concept of “formal cause,” which assumes that everything is related to and productive of other things—“At instant speeds the cause and effect are at least simultaneous” (“Global Theatre” 57)—is similar to what Deleuze had in mind when he considered “lines of force” that affect the meaning and interpretation of a situation or thing. Brian Massumi might be explaining McLuhan’s interactive environmental ecologies when he explains “an infinity of processes” at interactive play in the Deleuzian conception that “meaning is the encounter of lines of force, each of which is actually a complex of other forces” (11). Yet McLuhan was firmly humanist, always imagining we can save ourselves and our environment by exercising control and restoring balance and proportion. Gary Genosko’s study of Guattari’s urbanism and attendant description of the techno-ecological condition helps sort McLuhan’s position from post-humanist assemblage theory. Guattari sees the city as megamachine, tangling humans and machines together with increasing complexity, providing megamachinic animism and producing a “[m]achinic species” (18). There may still be some room for human voice, but machines “model sensibility, intelligence, interrelational styles, and even unconscious phantasms” (cited in Genosko 16) and cities similarly condition (“subjectivate animistically”) our sensibilities, “absorbing, calling, manipulating their denizens concretely and abstractly . . . to catalyze the amassing of components into a consistent assemblage of subjectivation” (18). This vision of human–machine relations corresponds with McLuhan’s in several ways. McLuhan likewise imagines a network of long-standing connecting

McLuhan Now

129

organic and inorganic realms, reaching to the past and influencing the future in ways that exceed human direction and intervention. Yet, despite recurrence and reversal, there is an evolutionary component in his view, which is not part of Guattari’s theory, and with it a leadership role for humans that defies immersion in the machinic. Guattari’s theory posits “generalized ecology,” described by Erich Horl as a “new type of rationality wherein subjective, collective and environmental domains come together,” led by machinic logic—what Guattari called “machines of subjectivation” (General Ecology 15). While in common McLuhan and Guattari imagine us moving into a nonlinguistic stage of meaning and the unconscious, for McLuhan an emancipatory outcome would require the human never to fully merge with or be moved by the machine but always to retain a measure of difference or distance and, with this, control. Characterizing McLuhan’s view of our condition and stage as post-literate rather than fully post-humanist highlights what sets him apart from many currently influential thinkers like Guattari who picture us, not as leading this change or reassembling ourselves, but simply within a melting or hybridizing assemblage of the organic/inorganic and machinic/animate. Post-literacy speaks to our having moved beyond human-based arts of communication and meaning-making and implies that we may be awaiting a new ontological role, rather than implying that the period of human influence is over and theorizing our part in a new agglomerate formation. Post-humanist theory, materialist at heart, has been effective in addressing political and environmental issues of privilege and power imbalance, disempowering human claims and advancing instead the claims of other forms of life. It has, however, come under critical scrutiny, for too often depicting humans as being without agency and destined for inevitable extinction—merely one player among many, in a big game whose rules have changed as we have gone deeper into techno-ecological crisis. Valuing human purpose and agency and imagining its rescue or recovery, McLuhan sees an interwoven network that reaches across time to connect everything, with humans centrally positioned and responsible for having made and still making much of this web and for its maintenance. It is possible for human actors to ascend to the control tower and use technology to untangle and restring a reformed web, altering design directions to support life and better connections. MCLUHAN’S FAITH ONTOLOGY AND MALLEABLE MATTER: SACRED PATTERNS OR PROFANE PROLIFERATIONS This may be a place for a brief consideration of how a Christian framework influenced McLuhan’s vision. For McLuhan, the first stage of change

130

Chapter 5

occurred with the Christian Incarnation which, by bringing sacred energy to the earth, opened the door to huge human accomplishments. (As noted in chapter 1, he often avoided making doctrinal connections and preferred linking the injection of creative energy to the spread of literacy.) With the Incarnation, matter became vibrant and vital, “now capable of superhuman manipulation” (War and Peace 56). Yet this sudden increase in terrestrial energy was both gift and burden for it led to innovations, but these changed our sense of proportion and unbalanced our senses. For McLuhan, our sense of proportion, revealing patterns and relationships, is linked to an innate sense of meaning, allowing us to recognize interrelations and echoes: “Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the analogy of proper proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself” (Vanishing Point 240). Our powerful late-stage tool, the computer, can simply generate and organize more data or can be harnessed to fulfill its emancipatory potential by linking universes and creating environments designed to reawaken the range of human senses and encourage harmonious and proportioned responses: Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way. For centuries the lack of symmetry and proportion in all these areas has created a sort of universal spastic condition for lack of inter-relation among them. In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. (War and Peace 90)

Currently we are experiencing overload and breakdown: the dissolution of material forms, environmental instability, disincarnation of the human body, and dangerous dependence on computers and technological systems. To take a utopian turn depends on using the computer, he argued, to rebalance the world and ourselves, inner and outer realms, restoring our sense of analogous pattern and proportion. McLuhan’s position can be understood as a form of Christian humanism; in his model, we are not evolving with steady linear progress, nor transforming toward the certain promise of collective reward. Instead, history is a series of retrievals and recombinations. These returns, not necessarily regressive nor restorative, can involve reconnecting matter with sacred energy. He was fascinated by chiasmus as a powerful rhetorical device, one capable of releasing unexpected, underlying, and meaningful connections. He applied chiasmic play to discover or reveal “truths,” such as in a statement like “the consequences of the images are the images of the consequences” (Cliché 150). Often drawn to such wordplay, he used switch-and-substitution to

McLuhan Now

131

explore how discursive signs provide fluid and constructed momentary stays that nonetheless have the power to illuminate vital underlying concepts. He praised artists who used language to capture insight and epiphany—creating anti-environments to expose and render vulnerable dominant or traditional environments. Such crossing or reversal had revelatory power, he said, for many artists use a form of chiasmus as a defamiliarizing strategy, bringing forward something formerly hidden, and in so doing changing the expected/ accepted environment. Not incidental is his statement that the Incarnation transformed matter and that humanity, through this sacred transfer, became more powerful as makers, related to Christ and bestowed now with God-like power. The tools and technology we have made are not alien, ungovernable instruments and bodies, but extensions of ourselves to be disciplined and regulated like our own bodies. If language gave us prayer, as McLuhan asserts in “media as translators” (chapter 6, Understanding Media), then the passage into post-literacy may mean we can talk to God without words, which is perhaps what he means by saying we are “translating our lives into a spiritual form of energy” (Understanding 90). His editor Terrence Gordon glosses chapter 6 of Understanding Media by noting the section was significant for revealing “McLuhan’s media analysis can accommodate a spiritual dimension” (84). McLuhan imagines we will integrate into the computer—transfer our consciousness to the computer world in a machinic meld or merge (89). This, of course, differs from Guattari’s machine consciousness in that McLuhan images the transformed entity as more human than machine, with humanness linked to godliness or spiritual energy. We will, he hopes, take back the sensory balance, knowing we exercised in earlier stages of human development, when we had the “human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind.” What is different now is machinic augmentation or assistance, enabling us to translate “our entire lives into the spiritual form of information” (Understanding Media 90). The cosmic harmony he envisions in our future—“a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space” (Playboy 23); “a single consciousness” (Understanding Media 90),—while sketched as “science fiction” and left with gaps, invokes some of the features put forward by Teilhard de Chardin in his theories that culminate in an omega moment of unification and the noosphere. Teilhard’s theories, now associated with soft science and new ageism, have not fared well as philosophy, although there has been some critical reconsideration (see, for example, Sr. Kathleen Duffy). For the purposes of this study, there is no need to reckon the details of Teilhard’s forecasts, for McLuhan kept Teilhard’s worldview and speculations in the background and

132

Chapter 5

deliberately constructed a theory with secular dimensions—one that might potentially appeal to, embrace, and mobilize the world community. For those of us outside a faith-based position, some of this may sound like benighted mysticism or misplaced hope. Yet faith aside, designers often invoke the wonder and transformative powers of art and design, in its capacity to reveal unanticipated depths and unexpected bursts of feeling. In Nesting, for example, architect Sarah Robinson enthuses about the restorative power of design ingenuity and beauty so that we are able to make homes that calm and comfort us and open us to others and to feeling. Quoting Lewis Mumford, she notes we are “our own supreme artifact” (16) and that architects struggle with the task of “creating a fusion between the internal landscape of our minds and our constructed reality” (21). While technology changes what we can make and do, opening options, these effects aside, some human qualities—feelings and imagination—are “perennial.” To feel at home is to experience a universal feeling. Orthodoxy aside, then, Robinson expresses faith in eternal human principles and in the human capacity to make satisfying, if not sacred, places. A contemporary media theorist who revives the spirit of McLuhan in thinking about the metaphysical and existential relevance and universal significance of mind and humanity is John Durham Peters: There is clear intelligence of some kind in planetary physiological and genetic feedback loops. We do not need to posit some kind of superintending mind that keeps the operation afloat, but rather should understand intelligence at all scales, as the dynamic, restless, inarticulate genius of life forms evolving in their environments. The most intelligent thing in the universe is the totality of life in all its forms, with human brain intelligence just one glorious outpost of organic evolution, one of the most exquisite things it has yet brought forth. . . . I regard mind and evolution as facets of the same process of experimentation and adaptation. . . . Both mind and nature reach towards the future, intelligently sorting options and seeing what works. (Clouds 381)

Although there are intimations of McLuhan in Peters’ imagination of patterned unfolding of all things, Peters makes a different move in working out his “Philosophy of Elemental Media” to find hope in eventual human extinction—what others have found hopeless. He tells us in his conclusion that once we, along with our cities, are gone from the planet, as compensation there will still be the cosmos and stars—and the possibility of unexpected forms of renewals. McLuhan’s humanism would not have countenanced this outcome with such equanimity. He imagined a central human presence—if mutated—through to world end.

McLuhan Now

133

MATERIALIST MEDIA HISTORY: WHERE’S MCLUHAN IN THIS? A strong recent strand of media studies has involved reconstructing media history and understanding sources and interactivity. In general, this reconstructive practice augments McLuhan’s dictum that “new media do not replace each other, they complicate each other” (Gutenberg). To work on such pattern identification, the approaches of media archaeology, media geology, and/or media ecology are available. Key elements of McLuhan’s thinking resonate in each. Most closely, McLuhan can be understood as taking a media ecology approach, a deliberate fit given that its practitioners hail him as a guiding force. Lance Strate explores the concept and practice in his study Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, grounding the definition in Neil Postman’s development of the term and inquiry practice: “Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feelings, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impacts on people” (Postman 161; qtd in Strate 5). Media ecology builds on explicit recognition of the interactive exchanges between media and culture. Media ecology takes into account the universe of human-techno interactivity: it explores the interaction/intersections of everything we have built, as well as the materials and effluents of production while doing this from a humanist perspective and with attention to human culture. Understanding mix and interaction is its central drive: studying sociotechnical complexities, it tests the links between cultural communication practices and material media, such as infrastructure, signals, symbols, and artifacts. Its conduct has always been aimed at public education and activism: based on the concept that media education is the essential groundwork for civic engagement and interventions. The purpose of media ecology is foremost to promote understanding, yet beyond this is a goal of sparking reader/citizen engagement/involvement, leading to “co-production” (Lamberti xlii). It allows for understanding, and issuing from this is a call for action and involvement: thus, intervention or change is written into the agenda. The landscape of change is both inner and outer, touching human consciousness as well as technical and environmental elements. Perhaps most important, a media ecology approach is not static for it encourages making and responsivity, causing a triggering of knowledge. Media geology, a post-humanist approach, is geared to generating critique and intervention. It aims to identify and record all we have made and discarded: the air, water, and earth hold the waste products and residue of the chemical pollutants that have arisen from the apparatus of production

134

Chapter 5

and circulation. Far from endorsing the potential of cosmopolitanism and globalism for human communitarianism and egalitarianism, a media geology approach points out that our getting, spending, and building has put the earth, air, and water, and all life forms, in jeopardy. Attaching the anthropocene to a legacy of devastation, this perspective carries little hope of recovery as we continue our march toward inevitable extinction—anticipated less as tragic demise than as turn-taking that results in planetary quietude. Jussi Parikka, one of the founding figures, often expresses moral outrage in reciting instances of planetary degradation. McLuhan took a similar tone and approach in his early work. Looking back on his early work, McLuhan says he took “an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology” and “abominated cities”; he further described his decision to abandon derision and critique for understanding, seeing this as a commitment to “get[ting] down into the junkyard of environmental change” (Playboy 20–22). If “media geology” provides a method of critique and advocates for swift and deep change—even if such undertakings are too late for the human cause—a “media archaeology” provides historical contextualizing and understanding that does not necessarily result in change-oriented outcomes. Its practice recovers links between present technologies and those of the past—often making a case for the long duree of urban mediation and uncovering how new media replace older forms. Shannon Mattern’s work in this field traces how sounds, images, and language have given shape to the cultural community and material forms—with ancient settlements providing precedents for today’s cosmopolitan and smart cities. As an example of such linkage, she points out that modern algorithmic architecture—often disparaged for dehumanizing design—has ancient roots in the use of uniform building materials; pyramids and mosques as much as our towers of glass and concrete have been dependent on algorithmic codes and structures for their architectural shape; bricks are “instruments for regulating—and not just building—buildings” (106–7). Media archaeology has been critiqued for attending too narrowly to artifacts or technical things, ignoring the social and cultural implications and interplay; in this vein, John Durham Peters notes that as much as Friedrich Kittler’s media history has filled out our notion of how media objects work, it is too focused on matter as separate from human use, culture, and context: “Kittler gives us media studies without people” (5). This anti- or post-humanistic turn has been a powerful force in interdisciplinary thinking: for the offense of ruining everything—the earth, air, and water, and any sense that life is fair or equitable—humans have been de-priorized, and an array of other claims come to the fore. Yet this post-humanist stance may be losing some of its intellectual appeal—as it becomes clear that to decenter and even disregard the human actor who has long been part of the network is to exchange

McLuhan Now

135

one bias for another; that there are human achievements worth defending; and that human agency may be our best hope of mounting defense tactics. These are all articles of McLuhan’s thought; in his view, the history of things was interwoven in human history and culture. Raymond Williams overlooked the deeply implicated relationship McLuhan saw between human tools and culture, each styling and changing the other, when he challenged McLuhan for conducting media studies without sufficient interest in the force of human culture, such as when he argued that media are humanintentioned cultural forms: “The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind” (14). Likewise, contemporary art theorist Tim Gough also misreads what media means to McLuhan as if he viewed it as a stand-alone force. For McLuhan, media as human-made tools do not act alone to commandeer and capture society and culture—yes, the medium is the message, yet the medium expresses/exudes human will and intention. Gough says McLuhan saw only media, as a single term, where Deleuze was able to recognize assemblage. Yet McLuhan never saw a medium or technology where he did not also see the human hand and mind. McLuhan has also been critiqued for being inactive, without social vision or force—even an impractical aesthete, as in James Carey’s characterization: McLuhan’s discovery was not situated in the domain of practical action but at the level of aesthetic experience. His important argument about printing was not merely that it changed the conception of space, but that it altered what we took to be an aesthetically satisfying pattern of spatial arrangement, whether this was the arrangement of a page, a city, a house, or a theory. (167)

While Carey accurately notes McLuhan’s interest in human perceptual power, he underplays the social implications of McLuhan’s program directed at reactivating the human sensorium. More than offering an aesthetic remedy—aimed at correcting misdirection and misperception—he wanted to change individual minds and practices and, as a corollary, collective organization and institutions. It’s a matter of order and emphasis: changes to reform individual lives should happen first, and these usher in broader social and governance changes and prepare for even further transformative conditions already in process. POST-LITERATE VISUAL THEORY We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. (from Counterblast 17)

136

Chapter 5

In Graphesis: Visualizing Data (2014), Johanna Drucker examines how the way we observe, record, and analyze the world is going through a period of transformation as we abandon our dependence on textual and mathematical systems of notation and instead explore the affordances of the screened and networked media for information visualization. She posits that these new media change not only how we produce, store, and consume information but provide “structuring regimes” (177) that affect broader areas such as human values and thought patterns: If the armature of print, now much imitated in electronic environments, has organized argument to accord with its conceptual capacities, then what will the emerging features of networked digitally supported interpretation be like? How will they differ from those that have instructed our pattern of thought for millennia? . . . Will we think differently because of the ways interpretation takes shape across networked contingencies? (180–81, 191)

She is adamant that with so much at stake, we need human intervention in the design process so that it is not left to unfold as a technological and scientific undertaking. Her central arguments about the powerful and ranging impacts of visual forms of knowledge production resemble those developed and explored by McLuhan almost fifty years earlier to explain the transformative power of communication media. He is generally well-known for popularizing the idea that media in past ages such as the alphabet and print changed both culture and psyche—our inner and outer worlds. Yet he also proffered many speculative considerations about how our unfolding move to electric immediacy and information would change our world, lives, and values. He also dedicated many probes and passages to arguing the need for humanistic presence and agency in the technological undertaking of “programming” a new environment. Let me gloss here some of the arresting correspondences. Both Drucker and McLuhan argue, for example, that the mediated environment structures how we live. Here is Drucker’s argument that ontology is an ideology, although seldom recognized as such: “Ontologies are ideologies through and through, as naming, ordering, and parametering are interpretive acts that enact their view of knowledge, reality and experience and give it form” (178). She identifies all “data as capta” (130)—only ever subjectively formed and always open to further interpretation. This recuperates and in some ways extends McLuhan’s similar observations. For example, he sees truth as forming and processual, developed in creative acts of making that are becoming increasingly communal and interactive, not as fact for consolidation. He sees language as an invisible environment that operates like

McLuhan Now

137

propaganda, especially because we are unaware of its capacity to shape and model how and what we know: language acts like propaganda, he argues in “The Invisible Environment,” because it provokes actions that are “total and invisible and invincible” (np). Alike, Drucker and McLuhan advocate for humanism to curve and “gentle” scientism, making design choices more responsive to human users. Drucker advocates for the cultivation of “humanist computer languages, interpretive interfaces, and information systems” so that “the humanist dialogue with digital environments will have at the very least advanced beyond complete submission” to create instead “an interface that is meant to expose and support the activity of interpretation, rather than display finished forms” (178, 180). She says, “We have to have a way to talk about what it is we are doing, and how, and to reflect critically and imaginatively if tools of the new era are to be means to think with, rather than instruments of a vastly engineered ideological apparatus that merely has its way with us” (194). McLuhan likewise passionately advocates for human presence in developing technological systems, often arguing that technological development should be led by imaginative artists, yet involve all of us, for the “making and shaping of consciousness from moment to moment is the supreme artistic task of all individuals . . . [and] the inherent potential of each new technology” (“Emperor’s Old Clothes” 95). He makes a plea similar to Drucker’s for human intervention and mastery over technologies that otherwise threaten our will, energy, and way of life, captured colorfully in a passage from the Playboy interview when he recommends we “charge straight ahead and kick [electric technologies] in the electrodes” so technologies become “servants rather than masters” by exercising our power “to act without reaction” (22). Looking forward futuristically, both anticipate the possibility of humans becoming less dependent on language-based and verbal communication and relying instead on computer-generated forms of rhetoric, optimistic that this signals positive human growth. Drucker imagines advances in “graphic grammar,” increasing our capacity “to express ourselves in those forms and formats” so that we will no longer rely on language “to translate grids, outlines, schematic patterns and configured fields into verbal language” (196). She imagines “graphical rhetoric” shaping communication in ways “that print could only hint at,” using “new conventions of legibility that structure and organize expression and communication” (197). McLuhan is perhaps less linguistically adept at wording his speculations, relying on the term “ESP” (which now has hoary/hoaky afterglow associations). Yet the lines of confluence are there when he speaks of imagining “the prospect of the forthcoming demise of the spoken language and its replacement with global consciousness. . . . We will develop an awareness that transcends conventional

138

Chapter 5

boundaries of time and space . . . [in a magical] world of ESP” (Playboy interview, 17). McLuhan ends the Playboy interview imagining humankind “on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family” with consciousness “freed to roam the cosmos” (17). Drucker soars to similar heights in furnishing an enthusiastic vision of the computer as an interface for our collective mind, acting like “a cog engine engaged with the collective life of the embodied mind” (197). Like many contemporary theorists exploring current media developments, Drucker overlooks how her work is connected to McLuhan’s. My efforts to situate her argument as a continuation of McLuhan’s helps distinguish both. It provides a historic context for Drucker’s observations, one that establishes a precedent for the changes she is observing and predicting. Equally, reading McLuhan into Drucker increases the power of his probes and ideas. First, some of McLuhan’s more hapless phrases can benefit from keeping updated company (e.g., his “electric world” comes into sharper focus when we think about Drucker’s digital world of screens and networks). Perhaps more interesting, Drucker mounts a traditional, fully connected, and referenced argument, using a form McLuhan himself abjured in his push for leaving gaps and using visual forms and metaphors. Without specific reference to McLuhan, Drucker alludes to avant-garde writers who attempted to accommodate the imaginative possibilities of such features as “constellationary writing, graphic interpretation and diagrammatic writing” (183). Her description reads like a gloss of McLuhan’s innovative mosaic style: he increasingly moved to a collaborative model of production and juxtaposed short aphoristic text with visual images, fonts, and text, presenting discontinuous elements as a rhetorical strategy to invite reader participation. He was attempting to change the scholarly conventions established by years of print literacy and was thus engaged in the work that Drucker calls for in our day—work she says is still “in the incunabula period” (176). There are important implications for urban futures implicit in the Drucker/ McLuhan arguments about structural changes deriving from changing human–computer interface. If we move—as they speculate we will—toward an expanded and shared consciousness and become ever less reliant on language—if the language is no longer a trusted representational/referential system—then what happens to codified systems in the areas of law, policy, and government? We might note here that McLuhan often imagines a world that reverses the one we know; certainly, economics and civics will undergo reversal in a new spirit of sharing, without borders, governments, and politics—all slated for dissolution—and with pity for perpetrators or outsiders replacing our current expectation that crime deserves punishment. McLuhan directly connects the loss of language to urban dissolution: “The problem of

McLuhan Now

139

urban planning today in . . . the global village is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times comprise all he senses, but in ever shifting rations” (Letters 278). AUGMENTED HUMAN REALITY AS CITY TECHNO-SENSORIUM Perhaps “Augmented Reality” is beginning to be understood in ways that prepare it to serve as a substitute term for “techno-sensorium,” a word I have used in this study to capture the sort of human-oriented human-machine bond McLuhan imagined here and forming in the urban surround of artificial or human-made things. Defined commonly, “AR is the digital overlay on top of the real world, consisting of computer graphics, text, video, and audio, which is interactive in real time” (Papagiannis 3). AR affects every major urban industry and civic service: “Augmented Health, “Augmented Learning,” “Augmented Retail,” “Augmented Work,” and “Augmented Entertainment” (8–9). Researcher and innovator Helen Papagiannis tells us AR has increasingly found entry ways to the human senses and is poised to create a new sensorial experiences and even a new sensorium: “The next wave of Augmented reality (AR) explores creating new sensorial experiences that include other senses beyond just vision . . . it is important that we also consider and explore new ways in which we can use augmented touch beyond merely replicating physical reality” (23–24). Rather than getting rid of the body, new AR programs aim at using it as a direct interface, without intervening screens and glass. Papagiannis argues that we have pushed past the first- and machine-infatuated stage of discovery—“Can we do this?”—to a more thoughtful, sustainable, and human-oriented phase.” Now that we know we can do this what will we do with the tech?” (123). She reassures us that concerns have shifted to creating meaningful technological experiences for users, aimed at such ends as filtering and calming, rather than bombarding and thieving. In linguistic “crossing” play McLuhan would have liked, she says that AR affordances can be expressed in the claim “I, a human, show you the world as only I can see it” (21), a sentence that alters the original expressed by pioneer filmmaker Dziga Vertov fetishizing the power of the camera “I, a machine, show you the world as only I see it” (11). As she notes, playing on McLuhan’s aphorism “we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us,” “we design our technologies, and in turn our technologies design us” (121). Developing enabling, sustaining rich environments using the artificial and technological means of our devising was also McLuhan’s hope; he might be describing an AR world: “We have now become aware of the possibility

140

Chapter 5

of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery” (Medium Is the Message 68). He argues that as city worlds, developed alongside phonetic literacy, “dissolve,” we will inevitably experience “a complete shift in our sensory life” (War and Peace 25). We are poised to undergo “an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation” (Understanding 177). Whether for good or ill will depend on our being awake and aware, expecting and responsive to a programmed environment that complements human sensibilities. A cartoon he referred to several times showed a young 1960s style little boy in a kitchen, telling his concerned mother, “I’m going to be a computer when I grow up” (War and Peace 58; “Invisible Environment” 58). Including this in several texts, McLuhan never provided context or interpretation to define meaning. The child recognizes the process of transfer and fusion that many of us, like the nonplussed mother, resist. As to whether this merger, as it continues its transformative process, will be a continuance of what younger people have experienced and expect and promote human connection and awareness, or whether it will reduce what it means to be human and promote machinic power and animism, McLuhan will not say. This question still rings.

Chapter 6

McLuhan Now City Theory, Architecture, and Art

McLuhan appears to have been wrong in his prediction that the city in its material form was dissolving, as he wrote, if we look at the visibility and expansions of cities around the globe and consider oft-circulated decrees that ours is an urban century. There is, for example, the textbook style observation that “2007 was the year when, for the first time, more people in the world lived in urban than in rural areas” (Ritchie and Roser np). Urban theorists urge the imperative of their studies by characterizing the current period “as an urban era, in the sense that more and more of humanity lives in distinctively urban settlements” (Storper and Scott 31). As citizens, we remain aware of place identity and continue to raise questions about how developments in the built environment fit and represent local city character. Yet studying urban spread, dissolution, and fragmentation is at the fore of urban theory, and, related to this, many architects and artists are concerned about human-scaled and interactive sensory and atmospheric effects. Malcolm McCullough, a professor of architecture whose ideas are examined more fully later in the chapter, notes that the urban, now become an ambient and invisible media surround, has replaced the noisy, “thoughtlessly layered,” and visually aggressive city scene that had crafted sensibilities prone to distractibility and “overconsumption.” Leaning on the assumption that media remake us and sounding like a modern-day McLuhan, he shares his hope that when cities fall silent, citizens will be encouraged “through good design” to “develop some participatory new sensibility to surroundings”—will become more focused on and fascinated by an environment designed for stimulation and involvement (Ambient 276–77). Other urban theorists imagine cities as linked and on the move, emphasizing such elements as flexibility, adaptability, and even bio-responsivity. There is a generic recognition that we are more dependent on invisible infrastructure 141

142

Chapter 6

than on roads, parks, monuments, and structures. The urban world is often mapped as a decentralized networked mass. Within cities, many buildings are designed to minimize footprint. There is an increasing movement toward lightweight and flexible—even bio and bio-composite—building materials and structures. Moreover, we have come to expect museums and galleries “without walls,” meaning that art often escapes the frame to be expressed in impermanent performativity or environmental effects: ethereal and transitory. This chapter explores McLuhan’s often quiet presence in current city studies and in design and aesthetic theory. Discourse in these fields is of course vast and varied, and I want emphatically to acknowledge that I come to this as a McLuhan specialist with a restricted understanding of aesthetic and design theory—especially of cutting-edge developments. My hope is that experts and practitioners in visual and design fields may recognize affinities with McLuhan in my text and explore further ways that his perspective informs current concerns about pervasive city technologies as well as current works appealing to and exploring the sensorium using environment technologies. Given the recent pandemic that has catapulted our withdrawal from cities and our dependence on media, McLuhan’s visionary probes about making discarnate lives matter in a “spaceship earth” community may have gained resonance for planners and designers adapting urban environments and for visionaries and makers imagining alternatives. ASSEMBLAGE CITY THEORY AND PLANETARY URBANISM Strong elements of McLuhan’s city imaginary are evident in the environmental and urban studies text Seeing Like a City. Although the authors—British critical geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift—do not identify McLuhan as a source, they work in the fashion of McLuhan and media ecology: scanning the urban environment to account for “a combinatorial ecology, a constellation of assemblages” (30) that recognizes the complex mangle of “machines, infrastructures, humans, nonhumans, institutions, networks, metabolisms, matter and natures” (9). McLuhan shares this view that there are a range of human and nonhuman interactions or relations, although he says we use the technology of language to create “relationships between people and people, between people and things, or things and things” (166). There are further echoes of McLuhan in their reference to Doreen Massey’s concept of “the throwntogether ontology” of urbanicity, in a tangle of “networks, infrastructures, and built forms, technical systems and institutions, diverse structures of authority, power and intelligence” (15). Although Amin and Thrift invoke anthropocene conditions and the values of a post-human

McLuhan Now

143

world that animates matter and human-made things in ways that limit the assertion of human agency—and in doing so depart some steps away from McLuhan’s cornerstone faith that remaking the world is a human task, hopefully within our grasp—they share his commitment to seeing accumulating constitutive interplays. In short, if Amin and Thrift downplay McLuhan’s hope that humans will find a way to control tangled and growing energy and matter, they share his view of the city as a combinatorial network of connectivities and disjunctions, always changing. Yet Amin and Thrift do see a role for humans to play in making cities more equitable and in fact argue that infrastructure improvement is a deliverable goal that can eventuate from urban thinking and planning. They urge other urban researchers to gain an understanding of complex and evolving city formations by paying careful attention; they discourage imposing prescribed policies or crafting ideologically motivated interventions. Committed to the principle of remaking more equitable cities—and in support of the reform-oriented doctrine of “the right to the city”—they nonetheless argue that imposing predetermined plans may result in unpredictable and unhappy outcomes, given that cities are a tangle of forces, each one moving and changing with rhizomatic energy. Thus while they engage with a politics of equity and the common good, their approach to problem solving follows McLuhan’s lead in urging the effort of understanding precede edicts for change drawn from dogma and fetish. Understanding the city and culture should precede efforts to shape the urban environment. They are hopeful of the “worldmaking capacity” of civic involvement to correct urban problems. Changemaking requires different forms of citizen engagement and commitment, “the full range of ‘sneaky’ activist techniques such as gossip, rumor, gift giving, compliance, mimicry, comedy, remote control, meaninglessness, misdirection, hacking or entrepreneurialism” (166). Like McLuhan, Amin, and Thrift retain the heartbeat of humanism in studying urban media—and abjure the cliché that depicts city dwellers as lost and beyond the agency, although they put their faith in individual interruption and improvisations rather than imagining a future time for a human team to reassemble everything. Finding no reference to McLuhan in the bibliography of Seeing Like a City at first struck me as an odd oversight given that the text builds on key McLuhan themes and even invokes some of his signature phrases. Foremost, Amin and Thrift echo McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions of the human body and nervous system. They make reference to technology as “prosthetics” that give ease to the human body (19) and also insist on the reciprocity of this relationship. Like McLuhan who frequently explored how we make our tools and then they make us, Amin and Thrift “acknowledge the interactive intelligence of the provisioning infrastructures, built forms and associational networks, and their reciprocities with thinking and acting humans” (18). They

144

Chapter 6

describe media and machines as our externalized “nervous systems” (31) and, further like McLuhan, describe the “urban landscape, as sensorium, habitat and directional intelligence” (20). The whole approach builds on an assumption that the material city has a sentience: it sees; it feels; it is an actor in Latour’s sense. Yet such a conception was implicit too in McLuhan’s notion of media as enlivened extensions; we resign bodily and nervous functions to various new forms of media, watching life take place outside ourselves. Such unattributed echoes of McLuhan in current city theory attest to the spread and seepage of his ideas across disciplines; Amin and Thrift can be understood as participating in the mosaic of interinfluence and cross-reading that McLuhan both described and entered. Assemblage city theory, such as Amin and Thrift articulate, has its critics. In their article “Current Debates in Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment,” Michael Storper and Allen Scott are largely dismissive of assemblage theory for failing to take stock of the essential components of cities, let alone furnish management strategies. While they concede the importance of recognizing the complexity and contingency of objects and practices in urban settings, they recommend against identifying networks and picturing relations as a proper end of planning in itself and instead call for more analysis, interpretation, and directional thinking. They are especially dismissive of seeing life and force in objects—locating this as a whimsical feature of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and an unfounded fetishism when taken into planning. Geographer Colin McFarlane contributes little to our knowledge of cities, they argue, when he draws upon assemblage thinking to describe how inhabitants of Mumbai use train tickets to make pay phone calls, in the act of “hacking” the city they consider merely whimsical. What McFarlane offers as an example of resilience and repurposing that alters city assemblage in multiple ways— in a cluster of influences, many unpredictable and even unapparent—is for Storper and Scott a story that requires little exegesis—McFarlane’s treatment of it marks, they say, his failure to differentiate small from large matters and refusal to develop theoretical and practical urban concepts. They advocate for establishing “a foundational concept of the urban” (4) and for asking questions about improving the built environment rather than accepting the city-asassemblage; they want critique and solutions, more than knowing parts and learning connections. Yet Storper and Scott exaggerate when they say that an assemblage approach cannot provide developmental direction or generate change. For their part, Amin and Thrift depose this critique by citing their commitment to an epistemic principle of active knowing as well as to an ethical vision of equity and rights—so that they do not impose an agenda but seek to find how improvements fit and flow. They point out that their way allows for watching how a particular infrastructure works and where it stops and

McLuhan Now

145

for thinking from this how it might be remade for more equitable delivery/ service. They contrast “seeing like a state”—imposing agendas for change based on corporate and government expediencies and preconceptions—to the more experiential and immersive slow-change agenda of “seeing like a city”: Advocates of “seeing like a state” will argue that these are problems to be tackled and not just accepted, and best tackled from a vaulting vantage point floating above the fray of the living city, unhampered by the nuances of urban process or complex thinking . . . this thinking fits into a long tradition of programmatic urban planning . . . [the] logic of intervention has been to mould—perhaps bludgeon is the more correct term—rather than work with underlying dynamics and feedback loops. (29)

The McLuhan who walked away from a cadre of intellectuals gathered under the banner of Ekistics to devise planning principles, maps, and blueprints— calling them “bricks-and-mortar or hardware men who belong almost entirely to the 19th century” (Letters 453)—would surely have sided with the impulse to foreground understanding before acting that underlies city assemblage theory. Moreover, Amin and Thrift’s claim that observation need not be neutral or objective—but can privilege equity values—veers away from sheer assemblage toward McLuhan’s mosaic metaphor, which implies assemblage takes place, along with a shaping human hand and a principled sense of pattern. Along with understanding the city as an assemblage—albeit one improved by being ordered or modeled by the human hand—McLuhan also understood city spread and creeping urbanizations in ways that correspond to an approach now known as “planetary urbanism.” Although this is an evolving theory, its proponents Brenner and Schmid work from key observations that correspond with points to which McLuhan adhered. They argue that in place of a model of the globe marked by cities as discrete locations, we need instead to think about unbounded global processes and exchange. Like McLuhan they discourage imaging an urban and rural divide, on the basis that there is nothing left in a natural state—not even “spaces that lie well beyond the traditional centers of agglomeration” (http​:/​/ww​​w​.urb​​anthe​​oryla​​b​ .net​​​/visi​​on/)—​for everywhere has been touched by human and technological influences. Brenner and Schmidt want to deemphasize boundaries and barriers, claiming that “settlement based understandings of the urban have now become obsolete”: “The urban cannot be plausibly understood as a bound enclosed site of social relations that is to be contrasted with no-urban zones or conditions” (Brenner and Schmid 750). Their position is reminiscent both of McLuhan’s attachment to proposing we live in a world of everything without walls—leading to his predictions of open borders and cities dissolving—and

146

Chapter 6

of his contention that all earth is artifact and artifice following the launch of satellite surveillance for we shifted our sense of access, relationship, and proportion. In current urban literature, a vision of floating planetary urbanism often meets with criticism. For example, adamant “about the integrity of the city as an object of theoretical inquiry” (25), foundational urban theorists Storper and Scott critique planetary urbanism for needlessly rejecting concepts like “rural” and “urban” that are never used as if to refer to entirely discrete regions but provide helpful categories. They want a foundational concept of urbanism to enable urban planners to provide practical agenda—to evaluate land use and create “policy-relevant research.” This impulse to work from definitions runs counter to McLuhan’s preference to take a more empirical approach. There is in city assemblage and planetary urbanism an emphasis on epistemic quality of city experience—on the city as lab for learning. This, of course, resonates with McLuhan’s concept of the city as a classroom, a place where we learn about inner and outer lives and about how we might nurture meaningful connection and interaction between zones. BALANCING THE SENSORIUM: SENTIENT ARCHITECTURE AND CITIES The practice and theory of sensory architecture is refulgent with the core McLuhan theory. Although there are various advocates of this perspective— including Canadian architect and scholar Alberto Perez-Gomez—Juhani Pallasmaa stands out as the foremost proponent. He is a Finnish architect, educator, and critic whose Eyes of the Skin (first published in 1996 but reissued in a third edition in 2013) has achieved renown and influence in architectural schools. According to Peter MacKeith in “A Door Handle, A Handshake: An Introduction to Juhani Pallasmaa and his Work,” Pallasmaa “believes in the tactile over the visual and acknowledges as well a metaphysical dimension to the task of building” (104). He reveals that in Pallasmaa’s poetics, outer spatial forms are appreciated for stimulating and complimenting sensations and feelings, recognized as unique to each viewer. McLuhan’s work comes to mind when MacKeith describes the mosaic or “collage” quality of Pallasmaa’s architectural compositions, designed to create a slow and immersive process for viewers/users that engages sensory experience and evokes “tactile memories”; Pallasmaa cultivates these effects “by the thoughtful placement of architectural elements, by the careful use of coloured surfaces, by the introduction of shafts and washes of natural light from subtly placed roof lights, clerestories, and framed wall openings, by the considered juxtapositions of materials, by the subtle imposition of ordering geometries in

McLuhan Now

147

both plan and section, and by the intense concentration on the precise crafting of each specific component and detail” (105). Apart from building structures, Pallasmaa writes theory that clearly outlines the role of the senses in design, citing many of the same key points as McLuhan. Like McLuhan, he begins by observing our devotion to an occularcentric culture that has limited design ideals and individual development: “I believe that many aspects of the pathology of everyday architecture can . . . [be understood by] a critique of the occular bias of our culture at large, and of architecture in particular. The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of neglect of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system” (21). We are awash in visual stimuli, for we continue mass-producing more of what we have learned to depend on and expect, reinforcing the “hegemony of vision” (24). He advocates for an architecture with a wider sensory appeal, which requires surrendering established and even superficial ideals of beauty and creating structures that provide moving and immersive environments and experience—that reveal something of ourselves when we respond to them—a “life enhancing architecture” that “address[es] all the senses simultaneously . . . to fuse our image of self with the experience of the world” (12). Like McLuhan, Pallasmaa believes other cultures—earlier and Eastern— furnish us with models of a different orientation of human and world. Pallasmaa says, “Construction in traditional cultures is guided by the body in the same way that a bird shapes its nest . . . born of the muscular and haptic senses more than the eye” (29); modernist and current architecture are often frozen and flat, exuding a “chilling desensualization . . . by speaking to the intellect and the conceptualizing capacities rather than addressing the senses and the undifferentiated bodily responses” (35). He argues, as McLuhan does (particularly in “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium”), that touch, hapticity, is primary among senses, “All the senses including vision are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility” (12). Like McLuhan, Pallasmaa believes separating sensory data is an outcome of overemphasis on vision and reason, and he heralds synesthetic, multisensory, or polyphonic awareness: “Qualities of space, matter, and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle . . . architecture involves several realms of sensory experience which interact and fuse into each other” (45). He tells us, reminiscent of McLuhan, that we lose much of what it means to be human and to know by observing only cliché stand-out figures shorn of ambient grounds, and he recommends building to excite a “complex of impressions” (48). Like McLuhan, Pallasmaa is adamant that above all else spaces are for human engagement and the introduction of any artifice should lead to

148

Chapter 6

increased engagement. Over-reliance on sight alone has led to a culture dominated by abstract reason and written language, and he quotes Walter Ong’s observation about the way in writing can tyrannize objects and lock things “into a visual field forever” (28). Rather than experiencing the world holistically in a “situational bodily encounter,” everything is seen head-on and “flattened into a picture and loses its plasticity” (33). Once freed from the role of observer, Pallasmaa argues, we are able to engage in place. If the architect undergoes place immersion, it is possible, even likely, that the viewer will share some of this original experience: Similarly, during the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/ her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body as tensions in the muscular system and in the positions of the skeleton and inner organs. As the work interacts with the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is the communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later. (71)

Perhaps most important is that Pallasmaa spells out how inner and outer worlds need to be made more in tune and interactive and provides passages that can be read as an extended and scholarly gloss of McLuhans’ published notes and probes (and occasional epistolary outbursts) on the need to secure this connection. He contends that the primary role of the architect is to explore and reveal the deep connections we have to place and world and that architecture can be a bridge or conduit, allowing us to experience feelings and dreams and imagination; he observes that art can “stir a consciousness of the metaphysical dimension superseding the everyday” and provoke recognition that there are spiritual dimensions to this bond that exceed quotidian experience: “The job of architecture is not to beautify or ‘humanize’ the world of the everyday fact, but to open a view into the second dimension of our consciousness, the reality of dreams, images and memories” (qtd. in MacKeith 99). To achieve such effects, buildings should not be integrated or conceptual wholes, but deliberate agglomerates, designed not for visual coherence but for the experience of “actual physical and spatial encounter, . . . ‘in the flesh’ of the lived world, not as constructions of idealized visions” (76). Pallasmaa notes that many continental philosophers have been “critics of occularcentricism” and have examined the limitations to culture and thought that result from this perceptual bias. While he makes no direct reference to McLuhan, he refers to many of McLuhan’s associates and contemporaries— Ashley Montagu, Edward Hall, and Walter Ong—and such features of their thought as he quotes are often those McLuhan also hailed. The quotation

McLuhan Now

149

from Ong (at the end of part 1 of Pallasmaa’s two-part study) that considers the connective and potentially healing capacity of communication technologies could as easily have come from McLuhan: “In Walter Ong’s view, ‘with telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the age of “secondary orality.” This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of communal sense, its concentration on the present moment’ ” (41). In Counterblast McLuhan traces a similar pattern of return and recovery, albeit with poetic flourish (that turns Ong’s “participatory mystique” into “the human heart throb on a PA system”) and with more emphasis on change: “TELEPHONE, PHONOGRAPH, and RADIO are the mechanization of post-literate acoustic space. Radio returns us to the dark of the mind, to the invasions from Mars and Orson Welles; it mechanizes the well of loneliness that is acoustic space; the human heart-throb put on a PA system provides a well of loneliness in which anyone can drown” (np). A final connection linking McLuhan to Pallasmaa is more whimsical. Let us recall that McLuhan chose Joyce as the best urban planner of his century; it is striking to note that when Pallasmaa describes the meaning of buildings, he might be describing the structural qualities of the urban world in Joyce—full of myth, echo, and dreams: I see as the fundamental task of architecture the mediation between the world and ourselves, history, present and future, human institutions and individuals, and between the material and the spiritual. This is nothing short of a poetic calling . . . it is the task of art and architecture to re-mythicize, re-sensualize and re-eroticize our relationship with the world. (cited in MacKeith 108)

SMART OR SENTIENT?: ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND ATMOSPHERE IN THE URBAN SURROUND McLuhan imagined improved living conditions ushered in by various engineered environmental elements, filled with sensors responsive to human needs—responding, he thought, to improve sensory life and capacity. As an example of engineered living, McLuhan speculated in several places about the modulation of regional climates to support the sensory well-being of populations by providing physical comfort; we might rely on “global thermostats” to “by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses” (Understanding 177). He also speculated about modulating the availability of media, and by this affecting the capacity of individuals to feel and the direction of cultural interests. Done right, this programmed adjustment would beneficially lead citizens and populations away from over-reliance on certain

150

Chapter 6

forms of media and help them explore others, expanding the human sensory repertoire. He imagined it might be productively possible for “whole cultures” to be “programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate” (Playboy 19). In Ambient Commons, architectural theorist Malcolm McCullough considers how many of McLuhan’s speculations about the structure of engineered atmospheres are now in place, part of our contemporary environment on the level of art, architecture, and cities. He testifies to the coming of age of McLuhan’s predictions of programmable spaces by exploring how such spaces, as they exist now, are often devised and guided by creative minds and have multisensory appeal and user interface. Art installations manipulate sensory atmospheres; buildings provide climate control to the degree that building skins allow the outside inside, equipped with systems of air and light exchange; and cities create conditions that enable labor and leisure. As McCullough has it, the very air we breathe is engineered: “Air is not a single pure element but a composition that includes Oxygen” (167). Art installations as programmed environments play with sensory experience—artists in this capacity taking the lead role in showing us how to feel more intensely, as McLuhan had forecast. McCullough cites the example of an ambient sculpture that is moved by the flow of outdoor air; he cites recent neuroscience theory that traces how images and patterns can create rather than simply mimic or reveal “holistic environmental perceptions”: “Atmosphere, then, goes past the play of signs, which so overloads everyone, to a more intrinsic kind of information. It does so through embodied cognition which works well at the scale of built volumes” (Ambient 172). Similarly observing the influence of atmospheric aesthetics, German philosopher Gernot Bohme (whose theory has been understood and published alongside Pallasmaa’s) has claimed that the primary purpose of art is to provoke feeling by atmospheric alteration and environmental interplay: “The primary task of aesthetics is no longer to determine what art is and to provide means for art criticism but [to describe] the full range of aesthetic work, which is defined generally as the product of atmospheres” (cited in Ambient 170). Bohme’s depiction of artists striving to produce noncognitive, non-semantic feeling, or affect, rather than meaning—helping to reveal unseen elements, formerly in the background—is in McLuhan territory: to reveal the unseen; to do so in a way that creates a counter-environment; to avoid semantic singular rational meaning; to leave openings to encourage engaged response. Bohme points out that “atmospheres” as an aesthetic concept have a peculiar, indeterminate “intermediary status,” in that “we are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them” (“Atmosphere” 2). His framework establishes “atmospheres” as a way to signify the unboundaried, ethereal space

McLuhan Now

151

that connects us to objects and ecologies: the unseen space (to McLuhan, the “ground”) that supports the multifaceted network. “Atmosphere,” then, is evocative of what McLuhan refers to as (often hidden) ground—as the multiple environments or ecologies whose presences and capacity to create contexts and meaning are often overlooked. Boehme calls for a “new aesthetics”—for a general theory of perception that accounts for “the aesthetics of everyday life”—which he says involves accounting, not for objects, but for atmospheres, “against whose backgrounds the analytic regard distinguishes such things as objects, forms, colours, etc.” (“Atmosphere” 15). This notion of the ground as a definitive yet quiet force brings to mind McLuhan’s idea of counter-environments, significant for revealing unexpected or unseen yet vital everyday realities. Buildings, too, are no longer structures built primarily to be seen. Some come with organic skins that can breathe and open to the environment. Biometric buildings change in response to atmospheric changes: Walls move about to resize spaces to the needs of the moment. Openings expand and contract with the weather. Building envelopes filter and breathe on demand. Data murals suggest the general co-presence of colleagues or display particular long-term derivatives of organizational performance. Fixtures interoperate, and remote-controlled devices from sunscreens to security doors to the coffeemaker, serve as “proprioceptors,” in the parlance of cybernetics. (Ambient 189–90)

Organic and responsive, these systems, McCullough reports, use a “neural metaphor, called ‘digital nervous systems’” (190). The echoes of McLuhan’s extension theory are obvious and indeed conjure his letter to Doxiadis, wherein both were interested in thinking about how buildings function as extensions of our nervous system. They, of course, wanted a balancing or harmonizing of this operation—not more extreme outering, rendering humans ever more reliant on machine affordances. If the process of extension as McLuhan observed it had an incidental and dangerous character—lacking deliberate orchestration—McCullough reports that technologized materials in contemporary building are now often designed to reward, ease, and calm the “outering” process. Many building materials and technologies have deliberately copied structures in nature, productively mimicking biological systems. Whereas, as McCullough traces, we have a Western cultural history of fearing “going native” as “a lapse of discipline, and descent into chaos,” contemporary advances have revised this bias so that there is now a more generous recognition of interplays with and guidance from “complex natural systems”: Whether as mathematicians, biologists, or urbanists, we recognize how there can be more, not less rigor in complex, only superficially disordered systems.

152

Chapter 6

In a word, we have begun to understand ecologies, and to design within them. As the dynamics of complex natural systems increasingly inform the design of artificial systems, ecological principles have become relevant to human organizations, services, even industries. (Digital Ground 212–13)

McCullough’s observations of the connectivity and interactivity of bio and artificial worlds suggest that contemporary design may offer some appeasement of McLuhan’s concerns that human impulse was simply being disappeared by machinic takeover. These borrowings between natural and artificial systems are significant steps toward re-bonding inner and outer worlds. McCullough describes in positive terms how the smart city offers adjustments and supports to improve our lives. He differentiates a bottom-up smart city, which grows from what is in place, responding to locale, local culture, and individual needs, from top-down smart cities that are all about economics, surveillance, and regulation. He provides as a positive example “the U city,” where citizens make data. Yet he acknowledges problems. There is the question of whether all humans are eager or able to take on the added responsibility of adjusting the environment—“does participation in environment provide some grounding or calming, and thus a balance in kinds of attention, or does it become just one more type of annoyance adding to a sense of overload?” (Ambient 194). But strong engagement trumps alienation: “The microstructure of engagement stands in dramatic contrast to the disengagement of city dwellers dulled by mass media” (Ambient 223). When he says, “Rejecting technology outright is not an option” (Digital Ground 213), he modernizes McLuhan’s similar pronouncement that “resenting a new technology will not halt its progress” (Playboy 19). McCullough identifies a number of technological innovations designed to tune human perception and to allow individual human agency; rather than being lost in megastructures such as those schemed in the 1960s, with no resources or goals, we are now alive to a rich mix of senses and drawn into co-making the space. McCullough suggests that allowing individual points of entry achieves a form of engaged living that has long been a philosophical ideal: “According to philosophers from many different ages, those habits of skilled purposeful engagement make better citizens” (Ambient 204). For him, responsive and engaging environments have eliminated many of the past ills of under- and mass-servicing. We are no longer the target of one music/one color/one strength of light or exposed en masse to one generic temperature but are often able to exercise choice and thus have agency in determining the atmosphere and environment. We now enjoy what some call “read/ write” urbanism: “Where an ethics of street computing engenders citizen science and notions of commons, the microstructure of engagement stands

McLuhan Now

153

in dramatic contrast to the disengagement of city dwellers dulled by mass media” (Ambient 222–23). Apart from place engagement—beckoning and rewarding our entry into whole environments and ecologies—there has been a collective draw to DIY and maker culture. The motives are complex: in broad terms, crafting for oneself is an advance over consuming mass-produced commodities and may even prepare practitioners to meet the eventuality of crisis or shortage. As David Gauntlett observes in Making Is Connecting, “People are rejecting the givens, and are making their world anew” (28). Human engagement in crafting and production requires immersive commitment, and as such cultivates an attitude of understanding like the McLuhan was calling forth in all his writing. This element of maker culture—moving from the passive stance of consumer or observer—would have appealed to McLuhan, as well as representing an element of the return to tribalism he forecast, for maker culture is a disavowal of modernist product fetishism. THE TROUBLE WITH SMART CITIES: PRODUCING CITIZENS Most so-called smart cities have the shortcoming of being designed to monitor activity, collect data, and offer services, without room for third-space oddities or human input and in service of government and corporate managers. As Rob Kitchin et al. observe, citizen rights are curtailed in smart environments, which are not about making life easier for citizens but about systematizing neoliberal illusions of choice and freedom based on economic manipulation and social inequity (14–16). These are places to be feared: taking not just our data, but independence, sense, kindness, and resistance: “producing” citizen automatons who access services as a way of life and move on cue without imagining resistance. In speculative narrative form, Kitchen captures the dilemma imposed by an over-wired world that defaults to machinic arbitration so that “people are entitled to what the data says they deserve” (How to Run a City, 40). As Kitchen et al. explain, the 2000s has seen the global uptick of “smart cities” both as aspirational concept and as realized project. They rehearse the problems of neoliberal power and capital, controlling development: The smart city is the latest attempt to use and reconfigure the city as . . . a techled version of entrepreneurialism . . . through which private interests seek to: deepen a neoliberal political economy, capturing public assets and services by offering technological solutions to urban problems; use financialization to capture and sweat or disrupt and replace private infrastructure service; foster local

154

Chapter 6

economic development and attract foreign direct investment; drive real estate investment; and set in place the architecture of neoliberal governmentality and governance. (6)

They do not want to cancel the inevitable rollout of urban technologies, noting that many can be used to increase general comfort. What they explore are conditions that might promote fair sharing of digital information and even the development of digital rights as an accessible commons, so that “key infrastructures and resources, such as municipal data, are corralled within a commons and citizens have the right to use smart technologies to help solve shared issues ‘by networked publics’ who convene around a shared matter of concern” (19). While related to larger issues of economic and social justice, citizen-power in smart cities is specifically tied to the right to access and control data and surveillance so that citizens understand how data is collected and used and might be empowered with “the ability to challenge and reconfigure these uses.” The development of such a set of rights remains aspirational, not yet in place to guard against corporate and government forces. As Kitchin et al. reveal, so far and too often promises that the smart city can liberate us from dirty work and provide participation options—“citizen centric” opportunities—are empty. Forms of participation are both limited and regulated so that, for example, social media apps invite us to say how much we like an innovation but not that we wish it away or recommend an alternative. Grassroots initiatives are coopted by government or corporate powers. There is a pretense that dialogue and input are valued, yet the restricted form of consumer activity that unfolds is often one “fostering increased choice with less meaningful participation” (13). City planners have long aspired to full and authentic citizen participation—at least since Sherry Arnstein placed this at the top of her eight-rung schematic popularized in urban planning in 1969—but as Cardullo and Kitchin show, real citizen control remains aspirational and “there are to date few successful examples of co-produced and citizen-led initiatives” (17). Moreover, smart cities induce citizens to nod off, for there is nothing to be done when everything is done for and to you. McLuhan often seemed to gloss or toss off the question of how citizen participation would actually work in a techno-sensorium city, simply invoking it as a necessary condition. Yet in “at the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors”—a 1974 article whose uncharacteristically long-winded title in itself provides a statement of citizen engagement—he looked with care at a model of human investment in culture and governance, subscribing, he said, not to an ideal but to necessary operant conditions affecting “immediate realities”; it is here he said, “On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew” (50). This is not just 1960s sci-fi chatter, but a substantial

McLuhan Now

155

image of new citizenship conditions and compact in the tech-made and floating city. No longer detached, we are integrated with others and technology. While elsewhere he speaks about artists and scientists organizing the course—suggestive of a technocratic order, or at best a voluntary ceding of responsibility—here he places emphasis on citizen involvement. His deliberate avoidance of political terms underscores his point that the coming order has never before been known. In a benevolent unfolding, leaders remain in place only so long as what they generate reaches and appeals to humanity: “On spaceship earth or in the global theatre the audience and crew become actors, producers rather than consumers. They seek to program events rather than to watch them” (57). Bombarded with unbounded information, citizens, he argued, would feel an increased need for participation, to avoid a sense of vertigo. “There is a need to anticipate events hopefully rather than to participate in them fatalistically. . . . The possibility of public participation becomes a sort of technological imperative” (“global theatre” 57). Similar to Lefebvre (1996 [1967]), McLuhan imagined inclusive cities designed for citizens: Kitchin and Cardullo remind us that Lefebvre championed “the idea that citizens should not just have the right to occupy and use space, but that space should be shaped according to its inhabitants needs” (17). Unlike Lefebvre, however, McLuhan did not see economic inequity as driving the call for social justice so much as the mounting pressures of a technologized world, and the twofold problem of corporate control and human decapacitation. Imagining humanity as united against a common foe (which could be brought to heel and even made to help), he envisioned a benign leadership endorsed by citizen users. He did not name the form of governance he had in mind, but it was not a technocracy of enforcement and regulation but a form of governance the success of whose leadership would be judged by citizen endorsement and engagement, in a cooperative and evolving “spaceship earth.” Providing an example of smart-city development, Orit Halpern describes the corporate drive to build Songdo, Korea—perhaps the flagship of smart cities—as an utter failure to create a fresh and sustaining environment. Overplanned, a soulless remix of landmarks and buildings that have given life to other cities, it is also surveillance heavy and corporate driven: Songdo is a disposable architecture, whose material manifestations are banal and constantly mutating. The city is not a space full of top architectural names and monumental features. What it is full of is screens and interfaces. Apartments come replete with surfaces that allow users to engage with building management systems and import telemedical and other data. The urban landscape is full of LED screens, and vast control rooms monitor the cities’ activities, even though human intervention is rarely necessary. (6–7)

156

Chapter 6

Situated on terraformed land, it escapes government taxation, and as an entire new build, accommodates all forms of service delivery infrastructure. Halpern notes the felt presence of hollowness even in designated attractions—a lack of heart and variety in this expo of contemporary living. The dreadful verticality of Steven Graham’s smart cities strikes similar dread. They take over air space with planes, drones, and signals, and further pierce the skies with empty towers—spaces habitable only to the very rich who can afford “luxified” (214) versions of what are otherwise lifeless boxes. They upset the soil, descending deep underground to house infrastructure and wastes. The dogged and destructive linearity in Graham’s picture of urban growth would have been one McLuhan disavowed as dangerously regressive. Describing smart cities as formed in “infrastructure space,” Keller Easterling warns of the principle of replication at the heart of smart-city urban arrangement, “engineered around logistics and the bottom line” (12). Such spaces spell the death of art and architecture, for “infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city,” a powerful medium that demonstrates again how the medium (infrastructure creation/delivery) is generative and shaping, more potent than buildings and streets: She says infrastructure and operating systems are “something like ‘the medium’ in Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum ‘the medium is the message’ . . . what the medium is saying sometimes prevents us from seeing what the medium is doing. In the urban context, we can identify the singularly crafted building—the stone in the water—as the declared content. Yet, the activity of the medium or infrastructural matrix—what it is doing rather than what it is saying—is sometimes difficult to detect” (13). She says city life and activities are all defined by the codes that make “certain things possible and others impossible . . . dictating the rules of the game in the urban milieu” (14). Moreover, corporate powers and powerful private interests dictate the shape of the infrastructural operating system. She argues that left to develop according to corporate dispositions, they are dangerous but can be rendered less so if each technology—“hidden in plain sight” (21)—is examined. Here we are returned to McLuhan’s argument that we need to understand the whirlpool so we can prevent its destructive force. Ground up, smart cities, with everything built new, drawing their “boxed” inspiration from generic skyscrapers and redos of landmark buildings would have been anathema to McLuhan—no way giving shape to his hope for a newly formed/forming city as techno-sensorium—urban space using technology to complement, balance, and engage human senses. Of far greater appeal would have been developments in art, architecture designed to incorporate

McLuhan Now

157

old and new, such as experimental attempts at creating more vibrant atmospheres and more responsive structures. Smart cities, especially those without any blend of old and new—hived off sections of established cities that are bulldozed and redone as well as fully new cities popping up across Asia, sponsored by corporate and government funding (Halpern 239)—represent the opposite of what McLuhan had in mind when he placed his hope in technological improvements and environments engineered to promote engagement and affirmation. Rather than engaging and enriching the human sensorium and collective enterprise, smart cities do everything for us, answering questions we don’t ask to further isolate individuals and “attenuate the nervous system” (Halpern 239). As Halpern traces, they constitute “non architecture,” without an artist’s hand, generated by algorithms, and “vestigial odes to a now long gone concept of space and value” (241). This sort of “ditto” city was the stuff of McLuhan’s nightmares. He opposed mindless repetition, which he recognized as the legacy of imagining technologies—especially those like “xerography” built only to reproduce text wholesale, “A ditto, ditto device” (Medium Is the Message 123). This is connected to McLuhan’s derision toward our dedication to screen time, watching movies and television, depending on simulations to show us a way of life and preferring mediated to actual experiences. When smart cities are the sets of our global theater, scripting is controlled by systems and infrastructure, ruling out many situations and conditions. Moreover, McLuhan was on record protesting city as service environments grown out of control, referring to them as junkyards and jungles: One might query town planners when they try to surround the jungle of the city with super service environments or try to repair the service environments which, added together, have created the city. A service environment, by providing more or less impersonal automatic services, kills or numbs the natural probing and explorations instincts of [humans]. The city becomes superjungle. (Cliché 78)

McLuhan’s “service environment” has been subsumed in present urban development lexicons by the term “infrastructure”—referring to all the visible and invisible forms of network and connection. Programmed for efficiencies, these provide a quality of life we have come to expect and depend upon—delivering water, removing waste, and providing electricity and the internet. Yet these forms of assisted living, while necessary to improving urban standards, come at the cost of blunting human curiosity and initiative and, by doing the heavy lifting, propel our turn to robot/zombie life.

158

Chapter 6

SENTIENT CITIES: HERE COMES MCLUHAN’S TECHNO-SENSORIUM The sentient city—one less regulatory and more responsive, developed for interactive human use and expression—comes closer to McLuhan’s concept of an engineered techno-sensorium. Indeed some of this position is captured in the motto of architect and urban designer Usman Haque, whose design group Umbrellium claims as their mission “to design and activate urban environments with technology” (https://umbrellium.co.uk/). Haque strikes further McLuhan-inflected notes when he says: “The real innovation—the reinvention of what city-making can be—is found in the entrepreneurial and creative action of citizens, not big businesses, real estate companies, or the omniscience of city planning” (“What Is a City”). Yet the fully sentient environment McLuhan imagined remains aspirational, explored‑ in art projects that are more decorative, aesthetic, and even whimsical than full-scale and environmental. The catalog published to represent Mark Shepard’s Sentient City exhibit, for example, reveals a range of projects designed to explore responsive and interactive urban technologies. In one, lake sensors make urban aquatic life visible and audible and thus initiate a feedback loop between human and underwater life (“Amphibious Architecture”); in “Too Smart City,” sensor-activated outdoor furniture discourages loitering by ejecting those who linger too long, in this case mocking civic and cultural norms by making them tangible and tactical. Yet as designer Dan Hill notes, such projects remain small scale and follow too closely the “internet of things” devised by science and industry. The challenge of exploring “an urban fabric suffused with rich forms of civic interactivity” (np) remains unfulfilled in Hill’s estimate yet continues, as in McLuhan’s day, to compel aspiration and ingenuity. Developments in bio-architecture—creating sustainable forms, using organic or bio-composite materials—continue to show growth and innovation, using technology to develop materials and structures reliant on organic and environmental elements. Building projects increasingly adopt engineered building products and materials as key structural elements—forms of wood that use less energy and bear more load than iron; living green walls providing plant life; walls and windows constructed to open and “breathe,” mastering ventilation techniques to improve environment and atmosphere. Housing has been exploring the use of geo- or earth materials, some deliberately designed for impermanence and bio-degradation (“The Disintegrating House”). There is also work in the area of 3-D printed housing, some designed to use organic materials. Kinetic architecture, for example, creates structures that have movable facades made to be responsive and responds to environmental stimuli in more

McLuhan Now

159

interesting ways than ever; kinetic facades are those that “change dynamically, transforming buildings from static monoliths to ever-moving surfaces.” A flagship example of kinetic architecture is The Shed, a community building and gallery in Hudson Yards in New York, with a resilient skin, which the architect referred to as “a pneumatic cushion,” that is lightweight and “designed to be as flexible as possible”: “The 200,000-square-foot building has been made to glide along tracks in order to provide maximum flexibility.” A leading proponent and practitioner of bio-design work is Neeri Oxman, whose team at MIT explores variant ways to merge organic and inorganic materials in synergistic exchange and relationships. A recent MOMA exhibit displays a variety of pieces that experiment with how biodegradable organic materials combine biological or organic principles. Rather than examining how humans have become machinic, then, she explores in reverse how the built and made can have organic and biodegradable characteristics and structure. It is of note that she charts a trajectory of creating pieces that are less about the display and aestheticized experience and are instead larger and more integrated into life needs and practices: “We are finally ready to tackle the next phase of our work which involves the translation and transformation of our research into real-world contexts and applications” (Cogley np). In Chicago, architect Carol Barney’s river project stands out as another example of the design that harnesses current technologies to reclaim water and land and rebalance environmental elements. Polluted waters have been restored to support aquatic life and promote recreational activity—allowing citizens, many low-income, first-time access to riverfront recreational property. Her redesign implements water purification and creates “habitat lattices”—piers, docks, and floating planting beds—designed to support flora and fauna as well as to allow people waterfront access. The reclaimed riverfront parkland combines human infrastructure networks [transportation and power lines] with managed greenscapes, “melding gray and green infrastructure” (Mortice 83). This environmental architecture is visually reminiscent of several of the environmental design projects developed by Kepes and his MIT group (particularly, the Charles River project plans). Germane to McLuhan, Barney’s project is a literal enactment of his core belief: technology, controlled by a humane and adept visionary, can alter the environment in ways that are life promoting and engaging. Other larger terra-forming projects pinpoint the dilemma of over intervention or over insertion. With climate change and rising oceans, there has been widespread concern about coastal flooding. Setting aside the question of addressing the problem of warming, designers are working out ways to hold back water that can destroy land and settlement areas. Some projects raise alarm, environmentally invasive in themselves. Heavy seawalls to protect New York and Dar es Salem, on the coast of Tanzania, are under construction, for example,

160

Chapter 6

yet these create as many problems as they attempt to solve—not only by using massive amounts of earth material and energy to reconfigure waterways but also by provoking unexpected outcomes related to flooding and displacement. On the other hand, there is promise in the terra-forming reefs outside Maldives, built to create protective sand catchments as artificial barriers to sea erosion. This project provides an example of environmental engineering that uses technology and earth elements to solve techno-environmental challenge. The techno-sensorium ideal—using technology to furnish world-making opportunity and to create environments that nourish, activate, and connect the senses—can be identified in projects that promote sentience and sustainability and continues an aspirational notion. It provides a model of good guidance and hope: the city, as it assumes techno-sensorium dimensions, can be crafted to draw us in and both develop perception and teach about relational complexity and responsibility. MCLUHAN’S ART AND MAKING A NEW ENVIRONMENT Along with McLuhan’s narrative probes about city life and futures—assembled ideas drawn from rich sources that continue resonant—we need to consider the avant-garde aesthetic of his presentation, particularly the collaged mix of narrative and visual images designed to have both conceptual and perceptual appeal. He experimented via remix with a variety of hypertext forms to create visual and textual constellations “putting one space inside another” (Cliché 170), open to and inviting reader/audience engagements. As Richard Cavell documents in Remediating McLuhan, McLuhan moved increasingly away from the argument to aphorism and toward blending text and image, hoping for the participation of his readers in associative thinking; often reframing his own points and concepts, he used what Lamberti has called a “Mosaic” approach, drawing on literature and art—products of the creative mind—rather than on conceptual philosophy. Thus, we might note that he was exercising retrieval on at least two levels. Not simply trying to reach new audiences in new ways, he was experimenting with revitalizing late-stage literacy, refusing to assume words have denotative anchorage and releasing them from square-framed paragraphs and left-to-right, linear sentences. He challenged centuries-old conventions governing scholarship, textual production, and readership, retrieving old elements to create new forms. Always attendant to patterns and imagining multiple analogies among ecologies rather than random assemblage, McLuhan imagined sustaining the city in our time—an interstitial period between literacy and full post-literacy—as requiring a similar blending of old and new.

McLuhan Now

161

Although seldom wholesale, his ideas and positions are often echoed in studies today. Many websites continue his experiments with form. Using an accretive style, urban scholar Shannon Mattern adopts methodological flexibility that resembles McLuhan’s in studying urban media and form: she calls hers a “travelling discipline” characterized by “mobile concepts and shifting institutional affiliations” and also by lack of a “defining method and unifying objective” (xv–xvi). According to her, the practice of understanding urban media systems still involves looking for patterns by combing through a variety of archives, sites, and artifacts, and reading “as widely as possible across the disciplines: weaving together insights from classics, material science, art history, geology, urban history, engineering, media studies and elsewhere” (xxxvi). Mattern’s recent co-project, How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables, picks up other McLuhanesque themes in key areas. In this text-based narrative collection, a variety of scholars and writers explore the implications of various technologies on governance and performance—on civics and subjectivity. Interesting is that font and type play large, whereas words are offered as hesitant rather than definitive markers, conveying that we are losing our words in step with losing our humanity as various systems of media and technology take over organizing how we live. For example, in “City of Loops: Alphabet,” Mark Graham uses digital inking to create random splotches and intermittently mixes alphabet letters with other signs. Throughout the pieces in this collaborative collection, no one imagines that technology can furnish direction or fulfillment. We are in or headed for a tech-based crash. Imagined as fully empowered and bullying, these systems are shown as dominating us, not vice versa, in tales that parse out McLuhan’s darker dream of humanity lost to machine life. McLuhan’s interests in studying and training perception, and in seeing in this the antidote to over-rationalized literate culture, are those informing the atmospheric studies of philosopher Gernot Bohme. It may be of interest to McLuhan scholars to observe the development of an almost-parallel European tradition. Like McLuhan, Boehme describes studying how to use technologies to adjust the unseen environment in ways that provoke multiple sensation and total engagement and that work against the orientation of modernity “toward geometry, technology, and the industrial production of buildings”: In philosophy, and more specifically in phenomenology, the concept gained prominence through the work of Herman Schmitz to whom the term was mainly related to the theory of perception. Schmitz was inspired by among others the psychiatrist Hubert Tellenbach, who wrote a book on taste, smell, and atmosphere (1968) . . . [and] discussed the smell of the nest, the feeling and smell

162

Chapter 6

of the home, and the possible psychic disturbance that may arise if you lose the sense of smell. This forms part of the background for the phenomenological interest in atmospheres. But Schmitz also drew on Rudolph Otto and his ideas of the numinous, i.e., the godlike powers that overcome us. Indeed in Schmitz’s work atmospheres are mainly conceived of as things that overcome you. Therefore his approach is much closer to a theory of the aesthetics of perception. (“Atmospheres, Art, Architecture” 91, italics mine)

“A theory of the aesthetics of perception”—one that veers away from modernist linearities and literacies, that considers the quality and promise of numinosity—this too was McLuhan’s pursuit. To explore and propel this loosely formed theory, he resisted over-reliance on language, reasoned argument, and fully coherent “linear” development and provided open-ended (sometimes vague) provocative probes meant to engage audiences rather than provide conclusive, fully finished evidence. In his own words, he tried “to see the patterns in things” without bias, without “playing along with the dominant theory” (Letters 540). For him, atmospheres were “unseen environments” whose influential energies are commonly disregarded, limiting us to partial and biased understandings. He wanted us to be simultaneously aware of both visible and invisible environments, of materiality and immateriality. He wanted coordinated and synesthetic sensory intake and imagined those among us already achieving or practicing such advanced levels of sensory awareness might be able to shape the outer environment to make it more nurturing and encouraging. The new environment would return to or recover some elements of aural and tribal life, yet the old would be made new in an electric environment. Much as Symbolists envision a connection between art and truth, the new environment might also reveal our connection to the cosmos, by throwing new light on how the “deep structure of the human mind corresponds to the deep structure of the universe” (Gerould 81). McLuhan’s publications expose his interest in both atmospheric effects and environmental backgrounds, explored in his medium or site as well as in message. Equally, he used language as metaphor or symbol, a human-made system capable nonetheless of revealing patterns, echoes and revelations. Increasingly, he abandoned attempts to craft or trade in fully realized arguments and theory and instead issued probes marked by pauses, invitations to awaken us to join him in sounding the bond between minds and place/space. CONCLUSION: INNER LIFE IN ENGINEERED ATMOSPHERES This chapter ends by amending its beginning: for McLuhan, it was the modernist city, visible and inhabited when he wrote and still in the remnant form

McLuhan Now

163

now, that is obsolete and outmoded. It is too heavy and physical. It was created to bring people together in an urban center, yet the effect of technology is to push us apart so that goods and services are delivered to our doors, communication and entertainment are online, and many jobs no longer require live presence and proximity. For McLuhan we were entering a time when, ourselves discarnate, we would no longer need places to meet and walk and work: no longer need urban structures providing transportation, entertainment, and assembly. In a late letter dated April of 1979, he observed that our transformation to becoming creatures of (and on the) air was well under way, undermining our sense of the body as significant if not sacred: 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. T.S. Eliot has a line that seems to indicate awareness of the discarnate state of electronic man: “We all go into the silent funeral; nobody’s funeral, for there’s no one to bury.” (543)

He was aware of living in a transition time, one which he felt to be and called painful—aware of giving up a robust and material culture with the continual generation of extensions that render us disincarnate, inhabiting air, and atmospheres of our own design. From our current vantage point in the twenty-first century, despite having experienced more extreme disembodiment with the advance of time, we remain trapped in the transition stage McLuhan described. We still have a life of the body and seek material spaces for accommodation and congregation yet are simultaneously submerged in virtual and dativized lives, reliant on e-communications for social concord and control. Indeed, widespread frustration and outrage expressed during the pandemic isolation of 2020 testify to the ongoing corporeality of existence and experience. Yet this world health crisis also revealed how much all our lives are and can be conducted online, and that, even with inequities in the distribution of digital devices and internet resources, this is a global condition. There is no question that media is invasive and everywhere but, still looming and dangerous, the question remains about who controls and benefits from its development and operation. McLuhan insisted we needed a cadre of interdisciplinary experts, led by humanists—not policy makers, politicians, technocrats, or moguls. Equally, he emphasized we needed grassroots buyin—that the mediated environment needed to be crafted for users, responsive to the point of being modified by them, and successful if able to expand sensibilities and promote engagement. This is not far from directives that continue to issue from various media theorists, despite differing emphases. An advocate of cultural diversity and minority rights like Ramesh Srinivasan

164

Chapter 6

critiques media’s current global grip—its encircling network, owned and operated by elite agents—that steps on cultural expression and squeezes out minority rights. To the McLuhan-inflected question that forms the title of his study Whose Global Village?, he responds that mediated place should belong to citizen publics expressing localized interests, not regulated en masse by “top-down” understandings (231). As Srinivasan himself notes, the McLuhan who coined the phrase “the global village” was perhaps an ally, for he “did not advocate for such a village to only support the voices and agendas of a limited few” (6). Indeed, eschewing universalist principles, McLuhan speculated about an engineered environment capable of responding to regional differences, making it possible, for example, to “program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election in Venezuela” (Playboy 19). The overriding point here is that McLuhan was not envisioning a mediated system devised to control citizenry but one attuned to recognize, fulfill, and even expand human needs and resources. The question of who should control information and media also animates James Bridle’s study New Dark Age. Like McLuhan, he does not blame our tools and technologies but is adamant we need to take stock of what we have made, less worried that media takes control in an AI heyday than the already present grasp of corporate and government powers: “None of this is to argue that the satellite or the smart phone themselves create violence. Rather, it is the uncritical, unthinking belief in their amoral utility that perpetuates our inability to rethink our dealings with the world” (245). Like McLuhan, he is aware there is a human locus of control, and this prompts his call for a benevolent and populist Guardianship that “calls for change while taking on the responsibility of what we have already created” (251). Geared to the scale of city management, McCullough also troubles the question of oversight: “Urban markup invites new curation, civility, and restraint—but by whom?” (Ambient 278). Like the others, he avoids simplistic solutions, yet perhaps comes closest to McLuhan in twinning benevolent design with informed use. Yet all these recent questions about social isolation, technological dependency, inequity, and control update those McLuhan posed and underscore his call for individual and collective engaged in defining our living conditions. It should be emphasized that McLuhan was intentionally not a micro thinker. He left gaps in explaining how we might transform ourselves and the planet following a period of cataclysmic change to find a sense of order and purpose. He said little about how we might form a peaceable world alliance—how we might give up identifying with subgroups or tribes established in the early stages of global village life, affiliations forged on the basis not of common ground but of common interests but nonetheless divisive of common enterprise.

McLuhan Now

165

He anticipated a possible utopian fellowship uniting us all in action on spaceship earth, yet said little about what it would mean to be human at this juncture; we would have a rewarding inner life of feeling and sensation but would be changed in outer form, living without body or language, dependent on advanced computer technology to monitor and adjust environmental conditions. Perhaps more troubling than the paucity of detail is that he imagined a bevy of gifted humans in charge, yet said nothing about checks and balances on the power of those assuming such leadership roles. His vision of a world led by a brains trust of benevolent humanists is not entirely inviting or reassuring, for it would demand citizenry to trust the decision-making of an allied elite. To his credit, we might note that he built a failsafe into this potentially elitist political design: the new order would only be successful to the degree that it stimulated public support and participatory involvement—to the extent it mobilized engagements and showed itself responsive and adaptive to human actors and users whose needs it was designed to serve. To his further credit, he skipped over details because he was speculating about a future whose pattern could only be glimpsed, offering an imaginary rather than constitutional utopia. In this vein, as recently as 2018, Bruno Latour notes that no one has yet mapped out a political structure to replace those we have known and to provide an alternative to local or global affinities. The utopian future McLuhan imagined involved an idealistic form of political organization, cooperation and participation we have never known. To invoke it, he preferred probes to fully developed theory or narrative, inviting readers to buy in and do some of the thinking and detail work, canvassing attitudes of involvement and critique rather than servitude and discipleship—attitudes he said would be needed for human continuance and sustenance. Some have objected to the language McLuhan used to convey his vision of how we might control technology to our collective advantage. He based his hope for a safe and improved future on “environmental programming” (Playboy 19)—making several references to the desirability of environments engineered to regulate the delivery of media to improve human lives. For many of us, an “engineered” environment still conjures tragic and terrifying associations and presumably these associations would have been even stronger for McLuhan who was writing decades closer to World War II and Nazi forays into genetic and social engineering. McLuhan defended his word choice by saying that difficult truths do not go away because of inattention. He dismissed arguments for preserving individual rights and freedoms by saying they were as baseless as arguments against municipal lighting systems already ensconced in the urban landscape as safety and organizational devices. For him, the apex of our challenge was not opposing but controlling technology for humanistic and benevolent outcomes, programming “entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and

166

Chapter 6

nations” yet placing the content of such programming “in our own hands” (Playboy 19). Putting faith in technology and in the strength of the human hand to control it is not a whimsical position but one he describes as born of taking responsibility for the inevitable. He is not suggesting we experiment with technology to see what it can do or to give one group advantage over another. He says we need to acknowledge its increasingly ubiquitous power and our role as its makers in using it for collective good. Note too that his willingness to curtail individual human rights for the greater good corresponds with mainstream contemporary ethical arguments about limiting individual rights to balance systemic strains—the argument for example that the right to the city is best understood as addressing collective inequities and claims, rather than promoting individually-held schemes or desires. To appreciate the generosity and utopian reach of McLuhan’s forecast despite its being constricted by biases of his time, it is helpful to consult Orit Halpern’s assessment of the legacy of other postwar figures who studied technology and aesthetics. She discredits some as being over-eager futurists and bureaucrats—techno-idealists applying science to life and culture without compunction, assuming that such a marriage was fruitful in itself. Norbert Weiner and even Buckminster Fuller express unbridled joy in pursuing informatics and data-driven equations—believing that science, technology and computers are poised to pull answers from heaps of data to make the world manageable. She turns from techno-bombasts to defend more temperate figures who spoke in terms of hoping that technology might save rather than destroy us and who expressed such hope with a note of sadness. Here, she features environmental designer Isamu Noguchi as a creative artist who “believed in this possibility of a future, perhaps the virtual, even if his optimism about its emergence was not infinite” (257). I would submit that McLuhan is another such figure. He sought a path for humanity to salvation through technology. He feared technology had already exceeded safe bounds and knew human survival would come at great cost: we might hold onto values and sensibilities, with a vibrant and attuned inner life, but our existence in an atmospherically responsive world, programmed to be adjustable, would be without bodies, language, or structures. We might remember McLuhan’s personal disclaimer of being a technological enthusiast—“I do not take delight in . . . disintegration”—and his preference for “a stable changeless environment of modest services and human scale” (Playboy 22). In McLuhan’s view, unfettered technological development was the shared enemy of all humanity. He often emphasized its threat to inner and social life, its “revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions” (Playboy 20). Implicit in his position was a concern with planetary degradation. We have left nothing to nature, he said; humans have taken control of the earth, encircling it with signals and satellites. In this, his position aligns

McLuhan Now

167

with those who now fight climate change and planetary degradation as our foremost struggle—one that unites us all. As I write this, fires floods and viruses threaten populations and ecologies around the world. As McLuhan warned, we have unleashed powerful forces, threatening rather than serving us. McLuhan’s dream city transformed to a techno-sensorium surround, built and adjusting to engage us individually and collectively, speculative in his time, is now alive in a number of architecture, design and engineering projects and developments that use technology to recoup and sustain environments. The spread of data-driven corporate and governmental urbanism powering “smart cities” invigorates the destructive future McLuhan urged us to avoid when he called for a humanistic commons and public engagement. Closer to his vision of a sustainable and desirable outcome are design projects that move toward producing a sentient city, one responsive to the needs and input of publics. Nor is his hope of life-sustaining and productive citizen-tech interaction, with human leadership at the helm, lost in current architectural and design projects that experiment with data-driven and computational design and algorithmic construction. Buildings that are the result of programs are still said to be only as good as the architects controlling the input and programs. Along with CAD visualization and design, architects, builders, and engineers are turning to engineered building products, building on terra-formed surfaces and considering how building and design might retain or renew rather than use up planetary resources. McLuhan’s faith in human ingenuity—that design and technology might save us and earth—continues vital and—as hopes go—viable.

References

Aaseng, Nathan. More With Less: The Future World of Buckminster Fuller. Minneapolis: Lerner, 1986. Allan, Kenneth R. “Marshall McLuhan’s Counterenvironment within the Stream of Defamiliarization.” Imaginations, 8–3 (2017): 111–28. Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. Seeing Like a City. Cambridge: Polit, 2015. Amin, Ash and Stephen Graham. “The Ordinary City.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 22.4 (1997): 411–29. Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” Journal of American Planning Association, 35.4 (1969): 216–24. Uploaded March 2, 2010. https​:/​/ww​​w​ .par​​ticip​​atory​​metho​​ds​.or​​g​/sit​​es​/pa​​rtici​​pator​​ymeth​​ods​.o​​rg​/fi​​les​/A​​rnste​​in​​%20​​ladde​​r​ %201​​969​.p​​df Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Second ed. New York: Praeger, [1960] 1967. ––––––. Age of the Masters. England [Guide to Modern Architecture, 1962): Architectural Press, [1962] 1975. ––––––. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Trans. H. Eiland. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Bingham, Neil, Clare Carolin, and Peter Cook. Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. London: Hayward Gallery, 2004. Blakinger, John R. Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Bohme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Trans. David Roberts. Thesis Eleven, 36 (1993): 113–26.

169

170

References

Borch, Christina, ed. “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture: A Conversation between Gernot Bohme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson, and Juhani Pallasmaa.” In Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture. Basel: Birkhauser, 2014: 90–107. Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban.” City, 19.2–3 (2015): 151–82. https​:/​/s3​​.amaz​​onaws​​.com/​​acade​​mia​.e​​ du​.do​​cumen​​ts​/57​​55620​​4​/Bre​​nner_​​and​_S​​chmid​​.CITY​​.2015​​.pdf?​​respo​​nse​-c​​onten​​t​ -dis​​posit​​ion​=i​​nline​​%3B​%2​​0file​​name%​​3DNei​​l​_Bre​​nn​er_​​and​_C​​hrist​​ian​_S​​chmid​​ _Towa​​rd​.pd​f &X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256 &X-Am​z-Cre​denti​ al=AK​IAIWO​WYYGZ​2Y53U​L3A%2​F2020​0304%​2Fus-​east-​1%2Fs​3%2Fa​ws4_ r​ eques​ t &X-Amz-Date=20200304T164021Z &X-Amz-Expires=3600 &X-AmzSignedHeaders=host &X-Am​z-Sig​natur​e=022​874a6​f58c4​5bf1b​9a230​1b426​08d87​ 44748​961e7​8ec72​63acf​72be3​46e22​a Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso, 2018. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Burchard, John. “Forward.” In The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956. Cardullo, Paolo and Rob Kitchin. “Being a ‘Citizen’ in the Smart City: Up and Down the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation.” The Programmable Working City Paper 30, May 17, 2017, progcity​.maynoothuniversity​​.ie Carey, James W. “Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan.” The Antioch Review, 27.1 (Spring 1967): 5–39. ––––––. “McLuhan and Mumford: The Roots of Modern Media Analysis.” Journal of Communication, 31.3 (Summer 1981): 162–78. Carpenter, Edmund. Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972. ––––––. “That Not-so Silent Sea.” Canadian Notes and Queries, 46 (1992): 3–14. Cavell, Richard. Remediating McLuhan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016. Cogley, Bridget. “Neeri Oxman’s Body of Work Displayed in MOMA Exhibition Body of Ecology.” Dezeen. March 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.dez​​een​.c​​om​/20​​20​/03​​/04​/n​​eri​ -o​​xman-​​mater​​ial​-e​​colo​g​​y​-mom​​a​-exh​​ibit/​ Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are We Human? Zurich: Lars Muller, 2016. Colquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture: Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Correa, Gracea P. “Landscapes of Synesthesia: View from Art, Science and Philosophy.” in Arts and Sciences in Dialogue. Ed. Isabel Ponce de Leao, Maria Do Carma Mendes and Sergio Lira. Porto: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2015: 69–7. Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. Cramer, Florian. “Understanding McLuhan: The Medium is the Message.” 2017. https://vimeo​.com​/238062342 Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.

References

171

Darroch, Michael. “Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951-57.” Canadian Journal of Communication, 33.2 (2008): 147–69. _______. “Medial Translations and Human Unsettlements: Planetary Urbanisms in McLuhan and Flusser.” In Sherry Simon (ed.), Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes the City. Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2016: 169–89. Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999. Doxiadis, Constantinos A. Architecture in Transition. London: Hutchinson of London, 1963. Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Duffy S.S.J., Kathleen. Teilhard’s Mysticism: Seeing the Inner Face of Evolution. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014. Ekistics. [“Comment on the Delos Symposium”]. 16.95 (October 1963): 204. Farias, Ignacio and Thomas H. Bender. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2010. Fisker, Jens Kaae, Letizia Chiappini, Lee Pugalis, and Antonella Bruzzese. Enabling Urban Alternatives: Crises, Contestation and Cooperation. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. Friesner, Nicholas. “Cyberspace, Hypertext and Critical Theory. [A Review of] Method is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan Through Critical Theory by Paul Grosswiler.” Spring 2005. http:​/​/www​​.cybe​​rarts​​web​.o​​rg​/cp​​ace​/i​​nfote​​ch​/mc​​​luhan​​ 1​.htm​l Fuller, Buckminster. “Influences on My Work.” In James Mellor (ed.), The Buckminster Fuller Reader. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970: 43–66. ––––––. Earth Inc. Garden City: Anchor, 1973. Gauntlett, David. Making Is Connecting: The Social Power of Creativity, From Craft and Knitting to Digital Everything. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays. New York: Basic, 1979. Gendall, John. “Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Moving Shed at Hudson Yards will Amaze You.” Architectural Digest. May 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.arc​​hitec​​tural​​diges​​t​.com​​/stor​​y​ /she​​d​-​hud​​son​-y​​ards Genosko, Gary. “Megamachines: From Mumford to Guatarri.” Explorations in Media Ecology, 14.1 and 2 (2015): 7–20. Genosko, Gary, ed. “Harley Parker.” Amodern 5. http:​/​/amo​​dern.​​net​/i​​ssues​​/amod​​ern​ -5​​-harl​​​ey​-pa​​rker/​ Gerould, Daniel. “The Symbolist Legacy.” PAJ-A Journal of Performance and Art, 91 (2009): 80–90. Gioia, Ted. “Why Gregory Bateson Matters.” Los Angeles Review of Books. July 4, 2020. https​:/​/la​​revie​​wofbo​​oks​.o​​rg​/ar​​ticle​​/why-​​grego​​ry​-ba​​teson​​-matt​​ers/?​​fbcli​​

172

References

d​=IwA​​R0WjJ​​h3j​-T​​h6WDl​​KxG4w​​KXoZt​​9gsm2​​tHcks​​​0Zfqk​​nDhne​​UexiN​​yUfhp​​ AHU Gordon, Terrance W. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. Toronto: Stoddart 1997. Gough, Tim. “Are We So Sure It’s Not Architecture?” Architecture and Culture, 4.1 (2016): 9–29. Graham, Mark, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw. How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables. Meatspace Press, October 2019. Graham, Steven. Vertical: The City from Satellite to Bunkers. New York: Verso, 2016. Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Haque, Usman. “What Is a City that it Would be ‘Smart’?” https​:/​/ww​​w​.haq​​ue​.co​​.uk​ /p​​apers​​/V34_​​page_​​140​-1​​42​_Us​​​man​_H​​aque.​​pdf Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Hill, Dan. “Toward a Sentient City: Reflecting on Possible Future Trajectories for Architecture.” October 10, 2009. https​:/​/me​​dium.​​com​/b​​utwha​​twast​​heque​​stion​​/ towa​​rd​-th​​e​-sen​​tient​​-city​​​-405f​​ac2be​​864 Horl, Erich, ed. General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Houston, Stan. “Reflecting on Habitus, Field and Capital.” Journal of Social Work, 2.2 (2002): 149–67. http:​/​/cit​​eseer​​x​.ist​​.psu.​​edu​/v​​iewdo​​c​/dow​​nload​​?doi=​​10​.1​.​​1​.100​​ 6​.123​8 &rep=rep1 &type= Howes, David. “Sensation and Transmission.” In M. Bull and J. Mitchell (eds.), Ritual, Performance and the Senses. London: Bloomsbury, 2015: 153–66. Kanigal, Robert. Eyes on the Street. New York: Vintage, 2017. Kepes, Gyorgy. “Introduction.” In The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956. ––––––. “Preface.” In The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956. _____. “Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration.” Daedalus, 94.1, Science and Culture (Winter 1965): 117–31. ––––––. “Art and Ecological Consciousness.” The Man-Made Object. New York: Braziller, 1966. ______. Arts of the Environment. New York: Braziller, 1970: 1–7. ––––––. “Toward Civic Art.” Leonardo, 4.1 (Winter 1971): 69–73. Kitchin, Rob, Paolo Cardulla, and Cesare Di Feliciantonio. “Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City.” October 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.res​​earch​​gate.​​net​/p​​ublic​​ ation​​/3283​​97574​​_Citi​​zensh​​ip​_Ju​​stice​​_and_​​the​_R​​ight_​​​to​_th​​e​_Sma​​rt​_Ci​​ty Kriesberg, Jennifer Cobb. “A Globe, Clothing itself with a Brain.” Wired. June 1, 1995. https://www​.wired​.com​/1995​/06​/teilhard/ Lamberti, Elena. “Not Just a Book on Media: Extending The Gutenberg Galaxy.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, [1962] 2010: xxv–xlv. ______. Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2012.

References

173

Langlois, Ganaele. Meaning in the Age of Social Media. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014. Latour, Bruno. “Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (Winter 2004): 225–48. ––––––. Down to Earth. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Lauder, Adam and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, eds. “McLuhan and the Arts.” Imaginations. http:​/​/ima​​ginat​​ions.​​glend​​on​.yo​​rku​.c​​a​/​?p=​​10182​ Lusseyran, Jacques. And There was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran: Hero of the French Resistance. New World Library, [1963] 1968. MacKeith, Peter. “A Door Handle, A Handshake: An Introduction to Juhani Pallasmaa and His Work.” In The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2012: 78–109. Marchand, Trevor. “Place Making in the ‘Holy of Holies’: The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem.” In M. Bull and J. P. Mitchell (eds.), Ritual, Performance and the Senses. London: Bloomsbury, 2015: 63–84. Marchessault, Janine. Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media. Sage: London, 2005. Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” 1991. http:​/​/www​​.augh​​ty​.or​​g​/pdf​​/glob​​ al​_se​​nse​​_p​​lace.​​pdf Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Mattern, Shannon. Code and Clay/Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2017. McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ––––––. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2013. McFarlane, Colin. Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Oxford: Wiley Black, 2011. McLeod Rogers, Jaqueline. “McLuhan and the City.” In Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Tracy Whalen, and Catherine Taylor (eds.), Finding McLuhan: The Mind/the Medium/the Message. U of Regina Press, 2015: 135–56. ______. “Self and the City: Teaching Sensory Perception and Integration in City as Classroom.” Explorations in Media Ecology, 15.3 &4 (2016): 287–302. McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon, 1951. ––––––. “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium.” The Canadian Architect. June 1961: 49–51. ______. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1962. ______. “Notes on Burroughs (1964).” 1–6. Reality studio. Web. https​:/​/re​​ality​​studi​​o​ .org​​/crit​​icism​​/note​​s​-on-​​​burro​​ughs/​ ______. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. Terrence Gordon. Berkeley: Gingko, [1964] 2003. ______. “The Emperor’s Old Clothes.” In Gyorgy Kepes (ed.), The Man-made Object. New York: George Braziller, 1966: 90–4.

174

References

______. “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion.” Perspecta 11 (1967): 161–7. –––––. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Berkeley: Gingko, 1967. ––––––. Verbi-voco-visual, Explorations. New York: Something Else Press, 1967. ––––––. “The Emperor’s Old Clothes.” In Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (eds.), Through the Vanishing Point. New York: Harper and Row, 1968: 237–61. ______. Counterblast. Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1969. ––––––. “The Playboy Interview—Marshall McLuhan.” Playboy, (March 1969): 53–74. ––––––. Culture Is Our Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. _______. “At the Moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in which there are no spectators but only actors.” Journal of Communication, 24.1 (March 1974): 48–58. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​111​/j​​.1460​​-2466​​.1974​​​.tb00​​354.x​ McLuhan, Marshall and Barrington Nevitt. “The Argument: Causality in the Electric World.” Technology and Culture 14.1 (1973): 1–18. McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988. McLuhan, Marshall and Harley Parker. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. McLuhan, Marshall and Jane Jacobs. A Burning Would. Reason Association Productions, 1970. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=GDz​​​kjL7r​​5zg McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the Global Village. New York: Bantam, 1968. McLuhan, Marshall and Wilfred Watson. From Cliche to Archetype. New York: Viking, 1970. McLuhan, Marshall, Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Agincourt: Book Society of Canada, 1977. McLuhan Galaxy. “An Unpublished Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Walter Ong: McLuhan and the Bicameral Mind.” February 17, 2016. https​:/​/mc​​luhan​​galax​​ y​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​/2016​​/02​/1​​7​/an-​​unpub​​lishe​​d​-let​​ter​-f​​rom​-m​​arsha​​ll​-mc​​luhan​​-to​-f​​ ather​​-walt​​er​​-on​​g​-sj-​​the​-b​​icame​​ral​-m​​ind/ McLuhan Galaxy. https​:/​/go​​o​.gl/​​HCt9f​​8&​#x0​​0A0​;h​​ttps:​/​/mcl​​uhang​​alaxy​​.word​​press​​ .com/​​2016/​​07​/17​​/like​​-mind​​ed​-vi​​siona​​ries-​​marsh​​all​-m​​cluha​​​n​-and​​-buck​​minst​​er​-fu​​ller/​ Molinaro, Matie, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Mortice, Zach. “Carol Ross Barney.” Metropolis. January 2018: 76–83. Nagel, Alexander. Medieval Modernisms: Art Out of Time. London: Thames and Hudson, 2012. Ong, Walter. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Culture and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977: 9–13. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: John Wiley, 2005. Papagiannis, Helen. Augmented Human: How Technology Is Shaping the New Reality. Sebastapol: O’Reilly, 2017.

References

175

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pyla, Panayiota. “Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and EnvironmentalDevelopmental Politics.” Grey Room 336 (2009): 66–35. Raby, Fiona and Anthony Dunne. Speculative Everything: Design Fiction and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Ratti, Carlo. “Digital Tools for the City of the Future.” ARQ (Santiago), no. 96, (August 2017): 48–51. Ratti, Carlo and Matthew Claudel. The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers and the Future of Urban Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Richie, Hannah and Max Roser. “Urbanization.” Our World in Data. 2018. https:// ourworldindata​.org​/urbanization Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Robinson, Sarah. Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind. Richmond: William Stout, 2011. Sacks, Oliver. “What Hallucination Reveals about our Minds.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.ted​​.com/​​ talks​​/oliv​​er​_sa​​cks​_w​​hat​_h​​alluc​​inati​​on​_re​​veals​​_abou​​t​_our​​​_mind​​s​?lan​​guage​​=en Sacks, Oliver. “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See.” In David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses. New York: Berg, 2004: 25–42. Sandak, A., J. Sandak, M. Brzezicki, and A. Kutnar. “Biomaterial for Building Skins.” Bio-based Building Skin: Environmental Footprints and eco-design of Products and Processes. Springer, Singapore Online March 5, 2019. https​:/​/do​​i​ .org​​/10​.1​​007​/9​​78​-98​​1​-13​-​​3747-​​5​_2; https​:/​/li​​nk​.sp​​ringe​​r​.com​​/chap​​ter​/1​​0​.100​​7​/978​​ -981​-​​13​-37​​47​-5_​2 Scheffel-Dunand, Dominique. “The Invisible and Visible: Intertwining Figure and Ground in The Gutenberg Galaxy.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, [1962] 2010: xlviii–lix. Scott, Allen J. and Michael Storper. “The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (2015): 1–15. Scott, James F. “Space on the Edge: Marshall McLuhan’s Marginalia and Annotations of Sigfried Giedeon and Ernst Gombrich.” In Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Catherine Taylor, and Tracy Whalen (eds.), Finding McLuhan. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015: 65–88. Print. Shepard, Mark. Sentient City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Shields, Rob. “The Virtuality of Urban Cultures: Blanks, Dark Moments, and Blind Fields.” In Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault (eds.), Cartographies of Place. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2014: 41–54. Shoshkes, Ellen. “Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Founding Mother of Modern Urban Design.” Planning Perspectives, 21 (April 2006): 179–97. ––––––. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design. New York: Routledge, 2013.

176

References

Simanowski, Roberto. Waste: A New Media Primer. Trans. Amanda DeMarco and Susan H. Gillespie. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2018. Srinivasan, Ramesh. Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Steigler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018. Steiner, Hadas A. Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Stinson, Liz. “A Strange Peanut-shaped Building Designed by Algorithms.” Wired. July 3, 2014. https​:/​/ww​​w​.wir​​ed​.co​​m​/201​​4​/07/​​this-​​peanu​​t​-sha​​ped​-b​​uildi​​ng​-wa​​s​ -des​​​igned​​-by​-c​​omput​​ers/ Storper, Michael and Allen J. Scott. “Current Debates in Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment.” Urban Studies 53 (2016): 11114–36 (1–35 Online). Strate, Lance. Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. Sudjic Deyan. The Language of Cities. New York: Penguin, 2016. Taylor, Alan. “1964: The New York World’s Fair.” The Atlantic. June 2, 2014. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ph​​oto​/2​​014​/0​​6​/196​​4​-the​​-new-​​york-​​w​orld​​s​-fai​​r​/100​​749 Teilard de Chardin, Pierre. Christianity and Evolution. [1969]. New York: Mariner Books, 1974. “The Disintegrating House.” moremargie [Interview]. April 28, 2015. http:​//​mor​​ emarg​​ie​.co​​m​/int​​ervie​​w​/the​​-disi​​ntegr​​​ating​​-hous​e Theall, Donald and Joan Theall. “Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media.” Canadian Journal of Communications, 14.4 (1989): 46–66. Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline. “The Moving Eye.” Explorations, 4 (1956). ––––––. “Making a Garden on a Greek Hillside.” Ekistics, 52.3/4/5 (1985): 520–2. Web. Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline and D. Carleton Williams, “The City Unseen.” Explorations, 5 (1955): 88–96. Umbrellium. “Make Cities Work for Everyone.” https://umbrellium​.co​.uk/ Urban Theory Lab. Harvard Graduate School of Design. http:​/​/www​​.urba​​ntheo​​rylab​​ .net/​​publi​​catio​​ns​/pl​​aneta​​ry-​/u​​​rbani​​zatio​n Wendelken, Cherie. “Putting Metabolism Back in Place; The Making of a Radically Decontextualized Architecture in Japan.” In Sarah Williams and Rejan LeGault (eds.), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Werner, Heinz. “On Physiognomic Perception.” In Gyorgy Kepes (ed.), The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956: 282–5. Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” Grey Room, 4 (2001): 82–122. ––––––. SCI-Arc (2017). https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=43l​​​DV6​_j​​Jd8 Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974. Wilson, Rob. “Fighting the Banalities of the Built.” In Neil Bingham, Clar Carolin, Peter Cook, and Rob Wilson (eds.), Fantasy Architecture 1500-2036. National Touring Exhibitions, Hayward Gallery, 2004: 18–23. Zhang, P. and E. McLuhan. “Conversation: The Interological Turn in Media Ecology.” Canadian Journal of Communication, 41.1 (2016): 207–25.

Index

acceleration (-ism) and speed up, 6, 14, 31. See also dystopia; time-space compression and simultaneity activist, and activism, 1, 4, 14, 24, 118– 19; public education, 98, 100–101 Allan, Kenneth R., 54 Amin, Ash and Stephen Graham, 35; and Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City: 14, 44–45, 142–44 anthropocene and post humanism, 127, 129, 142–43 Archigram, 18, 23, 92–94. See also Ron Herron and Walking City architecture and design, role of, 11, 42, 83, 85, 92–94, 105, 122, 142, 146–60; balancing inner and outer, 122–23, 148–49; balancing old and new, 46, 83, 93–95, 156–57; and literacy, 56, 120; and science, 158, 167; responding to senses, 93–94, 146–60; limits of, 78–79, 85, 87–88, 92–93, 120 Arnstein, Sherry, 154 art, and artists, role of, 53–54, 63, 65–66, 101; control tower, 16, 17, 64–65, 101; environment as art, 11, 17, 65, 102, 122, 125; public involvement, 48, 71–72, 104, 115, 142. See also counterenvironment; environmental art

assemblage, 14, 24, 125, 142, 145–46 atmosphere, 3, 24, 149–50, 161–62; and attunement, 71 augmentation, 101; and augmented reality (AR), 139–40 authorship, as collaborative, 2, 19–21, 77–78; experimental formats, 98–99. See also mosaic avant garde, 53, 87, 138 Bacon, Francis, The New Atlantic, 103 Banham, Reyner, 89–91, 94. See also megastructures Barney, Carol, 159 Bateson, Gregory, 7 Benjamin, Walter, 59 Bennet, Jane, Vibrant Matter, 61–62 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, 59 Blake, William, 88 Blakinger, John, R., 97–103; Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus, 97, 101 Bogart, Humphrey, 26 Bohme, Gernot, 150–51, 161–62 borders and boundaries, dissolution of, 5, 10, 12, 107. See also “without walls” Bourdieu, Pierre, 9 Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid, 145–46 177

178

Index

Bridle, James, New Dark Age, 123, 164 Bruns Axel, 33 The Burning Would, 116, 118–19 Burchard, John, 98 Carey, James W., 112, 123, 135 Carpenter, Edmund, 58 Cavell, Richard, 19, 76; Remediating McLuhan, 160 Christian faith, 5–6, 24, 48, 54, 129–32; Incarnation, 28–29, 130. See also dystopia, disorientation and disincarnation citizen involvement, 4–5, 152, 154, 157–8. See also “right to the city” city, unsettlement (and dissolving/ fading), 2–5; 138–39; decentralization, 8, 11. See also modernist city; urbanism Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley, Are We Human?, 6, 38, 43, 70. See also Mark Wigley computer, 12, 131, 140 commons, and public engagement, 15, 17, 152; “sensus communis,” 105 control (human control of technology), 6, 128–29, 164. See also art; control tower counterenvironment, 7, 17, 40, 54, 98, 125–6. See also environmental art Coupland, Douglas, 59 Cresswell, Tim, 38 cyber citizens, 2, 4–5 cyborg, 32, 34–35, 131 decentralization, 22, 39, 142. See also global village Deleuze, Gilles, and Deleuzian, 24, 128, 135 Donald, James, 27 Doxiadis, Constantinos A., 20, 42, 75, 83–87, 97. See also Ekistics Drucker, Johanna, 136–39. See also graphic rhetoric

dystopia, 3, 161; disorientation and disincarnation, 114, 123, 130. See also utopia Easterling, Keller, 43, 156 Eisenstein, Sergei, 117–18 Ekistics, 23, 42, 68, 83, 88, 93, 97, 145; Delos, 75, 84, 88, 97, 119; Ecumenopolis, 83 Eliot, T.S., 48 environmental art, 166–67; as garden, 94–96; as sculpted earth, 102–3 environmentalism, and degradation, 13, 119, 134; environmental activism, 116–20, 133–34, 159–60 E.S.P. (extrasensory perception), 10, 13, 67, 137. See also language Explorations, 19, 59, 75, 78, 79 Expo 67, 45–47 extensions, 2, 12, 47, 64, 73, 83, 105, 123, 151; theory of (and amputations), 6–7, 8; tools change us, 31, 34–35, 136. See also medium is message figure and ground, 9, 27, 55, 62–63, 98, 109, 147; gestalt, 55; seen and unseen, 78–79, 108–09, 150–51 Fulford, Robert, 100 Fuller, Buckminster, 19, 23, 77, 88–94, 121, 166; Dymaxion structures, 40, 90 futurism, and city futures, 1, 39, 44, 46, 48, 121 Gauntlett, David, Making is Connecting, 153 Geertz, Clifford, 28 Genosko, Gary, 128 Giedion, Sigfried, 75 global village, 3, 12, 47, 92, 164; planetary urbanism, 142, 145–46; portability and spread, 40 Gordan, Terrance W., 65, 69, 80, 116, 131

Index

Gough, Tim, 91, 96, 135 Grable, Betty, 26 Graham, Mark, “Alphabet Loops,” 161. See also Mattern, How to Run a City Graham, Stephen, Vertical, 39, 41, 155–56 graphic rhetoric, 136–39 Guittari, Felix, 128–29, 131 Gutenberg, 36–37, 52; end of literacy, 73. See also language Halpern, Orit, and smart cities, 43, 155–57 Haraway, Donna, 123 Haque, Usman, Umbrellium, 158. See also smart cities Heron, Ron, and Walking City, 18, 92 Hill, Dan, 158 Horl, Erich, 129; technosphere, 14–15 houses, and housing, 10, 85; Whychwood as ideal home, 116–18. See also Whychwood humanism, agency and control, 125, 143; balancing science, 137; Christian humanism, 130; hope, 14; making, 28, 41–42, 130, 137, 153 infrastructure (“service environment”), 157 Innis, Harold, 18, 123 interactivity, of humans and technology, 2, 8, 42, 58, 104, 129–30, 136, 154, 163. See also cyber citizens; cyborg Jacobs, Jane, 23, 116–21; Dark Age Ahead, 116; Death and Life, 120; Kanigal, Robert, 119 Joyce, James, 7, 53, 68–70, 84, 88, 117–18, 149; imagination, 69; inner and outer balance, 69 Kepes, Gyorgy, 20, 23, 42, 97–115, 121; CAVS, 76, 102; installations as techno-sensorium examples, 114–15; interseeing/interthinking, 106; The

179

Language of Vision, 111; The ManMade Environment, 97; The New Landscape, 98; “Toward Civic Art,” 102. See also pseudomorphosis Kermode, Frank, 117 Kitchin, Rob, 153–57; and Cardullo, 154 Kitler, Friedrich, 27, 134 Lamberti, Elena, 19, 69, 76, 160. See also mosaic Langlois, Ganaele, 48 language, end of, 69–70, 72–73, 137, 162; cosmic consciousness, 39; postliteracy, 104. See also ESP Latour, Bruno, 126–28, 144 laws of media, 3–4, 18, 32–35, 108 Le Corbusier, 41, 42 Le Febvre, Henri, 28, 155 linearity, and lineality, end of, 9–10, 80; vs. circularity, 117–18. See also modernist city Lynch, Kevin, 42, 76 MacKeith, Peter, “A Door Handle, A Handshake,” 146 Marchand, Trevor, 62 Massey, Doreen, and local place (village) , 34, 142 Massumi, Brian, 128 Mattern, Shannon, 134; How to Run a City, 161 McCullough, Malcolm, 31, 141, Ambient Commons, 150 McFarlane, Colin, 144 McLeod Rogers, Jaqueline, “McLuhan and the City,” 1 McLuhan, Eric, 53, 55, 105 McLuhan, Marshall: City as Classroom, 7–9, 53, 54, 58, 60–63, 80–81, 98; Counterblast, 25, 75, 149; Culture is Our Business, 36, 75; From Cliché to Archetype, 73; “The Emperor’s Old Clothes” 97; The Global Village, 37; The Gutenberg

180

Index

Galaxy. 99; “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” 80, 83, 97, 105; “The Invisible Environment,” 60, 80–81; The Mechanical Bride, 26, 36; The Medium is the Message, 75; Playboy Interview, 22, 47, 94, 106, 115, 137; Through the Vanishing Point, 80; Understanding Media, 25, 33, 36, 39, 46, 80, 86, 90, 95, 97, 101, 105; War and Peace in the Global Village, 27, 28–29, 47, 53, 107 Mead, Margaret, 88 media archeology, 134–35. See also Mattern media ecology, 133; relatedness, 14, 142 media geology, 133–34 medium is message, 29–30; tools shape us, 30–32 megastructures, 91, 93–94, 152. See also techno-utopia Metabolists, 92 mobility(ies), 8–9; unsettlement, 38 modernist city, dissolution of, 4–5, 8, 39, 122, 125–26, 162–63; mediasaturated, 25; values (privacy, individuality and autonomy), 77, 120; visible and heavy buildings and structures, 10, 151 mosaic, 19, 20–21, 76, 108, 138, 145, 160; medieval mosaic, 57 movies, 25–27; mediated culture and representation, 26 Mumford, Lewis, 112, 132

networks, networked city, 8, 83–8 Nevitt, Barrington, 9

Nagel, Alexander, 20, 57, 76 narcosis, (somnambulism), 9, 27, 157 nature, the end of, 4, 15, 51, 166–67; planet as art, 51, 125–27; organic/ inorganic blend, 151 new materialisms, 24, 125–29. See also anthropocene New York World’s Fair, 45–47. See also futurism

Ratti, Carlo: and Matthew Claudel, 18, 49, 103–21 rear-view mirror thinking, defined, 13, 41, 108; modernisms as, 76, 86–87, 120. See also modernist city Rickert, Thomas, 55 “right to the city” 143, 153–57 Robinson, Sarah, Nesting, 132 Rowse, E.A.A., 77

Ong, Walter, 88, 105, 148–49 orality and literacy, 81 Oxman, Neeri, 159 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 24; The Eyes of the Skin, 146–49 pandemic, 3, 142 Papagiannis, Helen, 139 Parikka, Jussi: A Geology of Media, 134 Parker, Harley, 75 pattern, and patterned change (and recurrence), 3–4, 6; old and new, 42; patterned environment, 11, 107–08, 145; pattern recognition, 9, 18, 60, 130; translation, 14, 131. See also pseudomorphosis perception, 23, 31, 80, 151. See also senses Perez-Gomez, Alberto, 146 perspective, 78–80 Peters, John Durham, 132, 134 Poe, Edgar Allan, 114 Postman, Neil, 133 programmed environment (also engineered environment), 4, 5, 9, 11, 17, 41, 56, 70, 81, 94–96, 101, 140, 149–50, 163–67. See also technosensorium; terra-forming pseudomorphosis, 98–99, 108. See also Kepes; mosaic

Index

181

Sacks, Oliver, 68 senses, 8, 81; reactivation of, 9, 161–69; sensorium and sensory ratios and balance, 54, 81–82, 102–03, 109–10, 130, 135, 146–60; tactility, 55, 139, 146–49 sentient cities, 17, 22–23, 144, 146–60, 158–60. See also techno-sensorium Sert, Josep Lluis, 121 Shepard, Mark, Sentient City, 158 Shields, Rob, 28 Shoskes, Ellen, 59, 77, 79 Simonowski, Roberto, 56 Simpson, George Gaylord, 106 smart cities, 17, 24, 43, 153–57 Sparoza, as techno-sensorium example, 95–96 speculative urbanism, 1, 4, 12, 150; speculative futurism, 5; science fiction, 15. See also programmed environment Srinivasan, Ramesh, Whose Global Village? 163–64 Steigler, Bernard, 123 Storper, Michael and Allen Scott, 144, 146 Strate, Lance, 133. See also media ecology Sudjic, Deyan, and Apple ring city, 44 synesthesia, and multi-sensory interplay, 61, 73, 81

See also extensions; programmed environment techno-utopia, 90–94; drawback of, 93–94. See also Banham; Fuller; megastructure

technological dangers, 100. See also dystopia techno-sensorium, defined, 2–4, 9–12, 21–22, 49, 96, 114–15, 126, 151–52, 156, 158, 160, 166; balancing science and art, 96, 97–98, 102–3; bio-materials and structures, 151–52, 158–60; controlling technology, 16, 94–96, 120, 126, 162–63, 166–67; human (citizen) involvement, 17, 49, 139, 154; sensory balance, 13–14, 32, 94–96, 104, 139, 149–50.

vision, and seeing, 58; limits of vision/ occularcentrism, 9, 10, 52, 78–79, 147–48; vision and values, 52–54, 78–82, 98, 147 visual language, 24, 98. See also graphic rhetoric

Teilhard, de Chardin, Pierre, 54, 131–2 terra-forming, 94–96, 120, 159 Theall, Donald, 69; and Joan Theall, 18 time-space compression, 6; simultaneity, 40, 127 transformation, 3, 136, 163; recurrence, 33. See also laws of media transportation (roads/rails), 36–37; automobiles, 37, 118 tribalism, 10, 13; new tribalism, 104 Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline, 23, 52, 68, 75–85, 94–96, 119, 121; eastern principles (Fatehpur Sikri), 78–80, 82, 117; McLuhan letters to, 8, 10, 20, 32, 51, 65, 72–73, 77, 83; urban planning, 19, 20, 23; “The City Unseen,” 59–60, 79, 80; “The Moving Eye,” 80, 82 urbanism, 28, 152 urban planning, goal of, 23, 83; limits of, 43, 87–88, 94, 120–23, 145–46 utopia, utopian possibilities and hope, 3, 5, 35, 49, 165; cosmic harmony, 3, 106, 131; sensory activation, 16, 32

Warner, Heinz, 99 Wendelken, Cherie, 92 White, Lynn, 30–31 Whychwood, as techno-sensorium example, 116

182

Wiener, Norbert, 166 Wigley, Mark, 39, 77, 88, 92, 121 Williams, Raymond, 113, 135 Wilson, Rob, 91, 93 Wired, 67

Index

“without walls,” dissolution of physical barriers and identity, 5, 7, 12, 22, 145–46. See also decentralization Yeats, William Butler, 53, 72, 128

About the Author

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers (PhD) is a professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her recent publications (co-edited) include Finding McLuhan: The Mind, the Man, the Message (2015) and “McLuhan and the Arts” (a special issue of the journal Imaginations, 2018). She is beginning a co-authored project examining linkages between McLuhan’s probes and theory and communications policy and law. She is also currently co-editing a volume on technology and family practices, Mothering/Internet /Kids (Demeter Press).

183