Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School 9780773565012

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Unthinking Modernity Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School

Most readings of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan have assumed that their theories were based on a form of the "technological determinism" associated with modernity. Judith Stamps shows that this is a systematic misunderstanding and that both Innis and McLuhan were critics of modernity who looked to a dialogic sound/oral-based practice as a way of challenging and transcending it. She demonstrates that Innis and McLuhan created variations of the "negative dialectics" proposed by members of the Frankfurt School, specifically Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and in doing so invented a uniquely Canadian version of critical theory - a fusion of critical political economy and the critical rationality associated with the early Frankfurt School and its followers. Unthinking Modernity explores the idea of negative dialectics and highlights the unique Canadian contribution to this concept. Stamps argues that Innis and McLuhan, rather than being crude empiricists, were dialecticians who developed an alternative route to a critique of reason through a mediabased study of the limits of the positivist traditions that still inform much of Western thought. Unthinking Modernity explores and explicates lucidly the work of Innis and McLuhan, reassesses its nature and significance, and raises issues about how best to understand modernity. For students of media and culture in general, it offers unique perspectives on how economics, politics, and media intertwine to create personal and social consciousness. J U D I T H STAMPS is a visiting assistant professor of political theory at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

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Unthinking Modernity Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School J U D I T H STAMPS

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1995 ISBN 0-7735-1232-2 Legal deposit first quarter 1995 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Stamps, Judith, 1946Unthinking modernity: Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan in dialogue with Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1232-2 i. Innis, Harold A., 1894-1952. 2. McLuhan, Marshall, 1911-1980. 3. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. 4. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940. 5. Philosophy, Modern - 2oth century. 6. Critical theory, i. Title. 08428.575 1994 191 094-900578-9 Typeset in Palatine 10/12 by Caractera production graphique, Quebec City

For Bill

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments xvii 1 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics 3 2 The Frankfurt School, Adorno, and Benjamin 23 3 Innis's Formative Years and a Negative Political Economy 41 4 Innis: Communications and the Negative Dialogue 65 5 McLuhan's Early Years and Philosophical Framework 97 6 From Visual Society to No Point of View 122 7 Theorists in Dialogue: Parallel Tracks? 151 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 201

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Preface

Introducing the work of two Canadian theorists by comparing them with two European giants poses interesting and challenging problems. Not the least of these is the need to answer the question: why compare them at all? When, as a doctoral student, I first scouted out this scholarly territory, the response from my supervisory committee was enthusiastic but somewhat fearful. What if the Canadian perspective were to lose something of its uniqueness in the process? What if it became distorted? Stumped for a way to address these concerns - indeed, befuddled by them - I turned to fellow students for advice. Be simple and straightforward, one suggested. Tell them not to worry, since it is the European school you plan to distort. A bizarre suggestion this was, but a transcendent one too, for as surely as it drew laughter, it demonstrated something unique about the questions I was facing.1 They were quintessentially Canadian. Who would worry about distorting European philosophy or undermining its uniqueness? The enormity of the literature, not to speak of its reputation, stands against such as worry. Recognizing that I was dealing with a marginal literature proved to be useful. As it turned out, marginality played an important role in the analysis of culture that the Canadian and European theorists developed. Among the various themes they explored - themes that centered on the origin and nature of modernity - I found a unique, sustained meditation on how marginal cultures, thoughts, feelings, and ways of communicating affect the formation of human consciousness. I came to learn that such a meditation, at its best, leads to a novel understanding of movements in history. For these theorists, it led to a critique of behaviourist notions of action and reaction and to a commitment to demonstrate the open-ended nature of dialectical movements. Illuminating these movements is one of the central tasks of this book.

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Useful thought it was, this happy view of marginality did not eliminate the need to address some aspects of my committee's concerns. In a globalizing world that forces us to reconsider the meaning of difference, attempts at cross-cultural comparison are surely to be welcomed. Yet serious questions must attend all efforts to compare ideas that have evolved in different settings. Is it really possible to compare such ideas? If it is, how do we bridge the respective vocabularies? Do we use the language of one school exclusively? juxtapose them? search for root similarities? If we do any of these things, at what point does the comparison become credible? Can similarities in expression be taken at face value, or do we require in addition exhaustive historical and biographical comparisons? If we engage in the latter, will they help? Questions of method depend ultimately on questions about the nature of truth. In the culture of modernity, still with us today, what too often passes for truth is a set of so-called facts buttressed by a simple correspondence theory - formal epistemology, it is sometimes called. According to this theory, the world is made of objects that are clearly distinguishable one from the other. We find more or less neutral methods to determine what these objects are. We name them correctly, and this provides us with a picture which, if not perfect, is adequate for understanding the world. On this view, identity and difference are simple concepts. An apple is an apple, not an orange. This is not the theory on which the present comparison is based. Absolute identity never holds for two sets of ideas, even when the persons in question are raised in the same culture. It rarely holds for ideas expressed at different times in the life of one person. Still less is it likely between theories nurtured in different cultures. Difference is one of the mysteries of life. Language is part of that mystery. Although we need language to compare ideas, verbal exchanges are hardly candidates for neutrality. They can be so elusive. There are differences in how conversants use words. There are similarities that go unnoticed because words are superficially different. Even at the best of times, there are ambiguities in the terms used. This situation points to an interesting paradox in correspondence theory: if we take these worries seriously enough, we have to conclude that comparative studies are inevitably misguided because communication is in the end impossible. So much for the search for truth. If we wish to avoid this kind of absurdity, our judgment on comparisons will have to rest on something other than the modern expectation of "scientific" correspondence. The comparison presented here rests, in part, on a faith in transhistorical realities: shared human conditions, similar sets of difficulties,

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and similar compromises. Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin shared a unique 20th-century experience: the difficulty of coming to terms with reason and civilization, so-called, in the post-Second World War era. They also shared a counter-rational response to that experience. As is well known, this century has been extraordinarily anguished and bloody, a fact that contrasts starkly with the rational aspirations of its finest liberal and socialist Utopian theorists. We look wistfully now at the work of Canada's J.S. Woodsworth and its Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and at their 19th-century predecessors, such as Egerton Ryerson, whose ideals once fired those movements in mass education designed to enfold us in elevated, rational dialogue. We respond with impatience, if not cynicism, to the hopeful words of Mill and Marx. That the age of reason did not lead to peace and generalized prosperity is a matter that calls us to reconsider reason's foundations and their possible relation to violence. Both sets of theorists responded to this call by probing the origin and character of reason, paying special attention to how it excludes alternative, non-violent (or less violent) definitions of rational thinking. In sharing this approach, they shared a vocation. All four were critical social scientists, acutely aware that the paradigms governing their disciplines were potentially destructive. Reflecting on these paradigms drew their attention to the power they exercised by classifying what they studied and to the power the institutions of the day exercised by sanctioning their classifications. For each theorist, the result was a commitment to understand the relations between classifying and colonizing - between naming the objects in the world and dominating them. In comparing these projects, I was also guided by the belief that it is best to take theorists' actions and their statements about their own actions more or less at face value. There seemed no reason to do otherwise. I thus took seriously the facts that Innis, in his later years, turned to a study of Western philosophy because he believed that something had gone tragically wrong with how the West had learned to reason; that he offered a new perspective on reasoning through an innovative look at what he called oral dialectic; and that he viewed modernity critically, calling it a culture obsessed with space and spatially biased ways of thinking. I noted that McLuhan took on a similar task which he, though informed by distinctive beliefs, developed through his encounter with Innis's work. I thus took as my starting point their attempts to address broad Western philosophical themes, to comment on Western culture as such, and, in the process, to reach far beyond the local setting in which they wrote.

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For this reason, I chose to read them as philosophers and neodialecticians, even though they have rarely been read this way. To further clarify their work, I paired them with two theorists who expressed similar concerns: deep dissatisfaction with Western rationality understanding of the West as a culture that privileges spatial over temporal concerns, and an attempt to rethink dialectic by retrieving its oral origins. The two schools did use distinctive vocabularies. But in my view, they are not different to the point of irreconcilability. Consequently, I based much of the comparison on textual analysis. I supplemented this approach by describing the circumstances in which each theorist formulated his ideas. Without doubt, the resulting analysis favours seeing the theorists in a similar light. But it does not favour a theory of convergence if by convergence we mean that each man can be shown to have had in his mind exactly what the others were thinking. In his innovative work on Western epistemology, the late Gregory Bateson argued that we always gain a more holistic view of an issue if we can see it demonstrated or hear it described in more than one theoretical language.2 For Bateson, this was the cognitive counterpart of binocular vision. His idea serves as a better guide to my style of comparison than do the empirical theories that dominate the social sciences today. As I show below, the Canadian and European schools offer a description of a theoretical territory in two languages. Reading them both will result in greater appreciation of the distinction of each, as well as a more wellrounded view of the questions on modernity at issue. Although this project is new, recognizing the need for such a comparison begins neither with this author nor with this book. This study adds consciously to a small and as yet tentative literature that points in its direction. In this task, the first trail-blazer was certainly Marshall McLuhan, for it was he who first noted that mnis's themes were European rather than North American.3 In more recent years, similar suggestions have come from a number of quarters. Of these, special mention must be made of Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott's The Faces of Reason, an assiduous study of responses to reason in Canadian thought. Although it limits itself to Canada, it is one of the first works to recognize Innis as a philosopher and to set him in the company of others concerned with the limits of Western rationality.4 More overt ties to European thought have also been suggested. Some have leaned towards France. William Kuhns has suggested a thematic link to the writing of Jacques Ellul;5 James Curtis has seen McLuhan as a natural complement to the semiotician Fernand Saussure;6 Paul Heyer has suggested situating Innis and McLuhan in a framework bounded by Rousseau at one end and Foucault at the other;7 and

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Linda Hutcheon has called them Canada's contributors to Jacques Derrida's "phonocentric conspiracy" - his rejection of the oral bias in some contemporary philosophy.8 When I first envisioned this project, I was aware of some of the aforementioned similarities. Innis and McLuhan developed a biting critique of the obsession with certainty that lies at the core of modern science. Like others critical of modernity, they rejected that concept and the associated notion of progress as notions nurturing conquest and empire. And, like others, they struggled to make sense of what it might mean to know, and thus to have a science (social or otherwise), without that kind of certainty. Since Foucault and other contemporary French post-structuralist theorists also explore these questions, possible dialogues between these and the Canadians may well be worth investigating. But as I looked more closely at contemporary French theorists, I noted an element that distances them from the German and Canadian theorists and, at the same time, makes the latter more similar. Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, to name three, appear ready to dispense with certainty (or objectivity) in favour of a very diffuse idea of plurality. Lyotard, for example, has argued that Western science's search for objectivity is little other than a language game, no more or less useful than traditional myth.9 The Canadian and German scholars, by contrast, were anxious to retain some idea of objectivity, albeit newly defined. If only for this reason, they make a better starting point for a European-Canadian comparison. A few comparisons lean in the Germanic direction as well. On the continental side, Jean Maribini has asked hopefully if McLuhan's new global villager might not turn out to be a version of Herbert Marcuse's erotically civilized human living in a world in which work had become an intensive form of play.10 James Curtis has considered McLuhan's work in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche.11 Donald Theall and Andrew Wernick12 have suggested tying Innis's and McLuhan's work to that of the Frankfurt school, and Theall, in an all-too-brief passage, has suggested an affinity between Innis's work and the idea of negative dialectics.13 In response to a recent surge of interest in Walter Benjamin, John Fekete,14 James Carey,15 and Pamela McCallum16 have also noted similarities between Benjamin and McLuhan. To date, however, these remain straws in the wind. Only Carey and McCallum have engaged in extended comparative essays. The rest have offered fleeting suggestions. This situation makes for a comparative ground that is philosophically interesting but also treacherous. The lack of extended comparisons may result partly from the iconic role that Innis and McLuhan have come to play in Canada. It is not

xiv Preface

a question of inattention. As many know, the two theorists have received considerable attention in Canada. But attention can take insidious forms. Innis, for example, has become a part of the Canadian landscape, as witnessed daily by Torontonians. A low red-brick building, one of many on the downtown St George campus of the University of Toronto, bears his name. A free-standing plaque outside gives a few biographical details: he was born in 1894 near Otterville, Ontario; he is renowned for a unique theory of Canadian development; and he had begun late in life to develop some interesting ideas about communication. Not far away, a less formal sign lets pedestrians know that Innis College, as it is called, is open for breakfast and lunch. By way of enticement, it lists the quiche of the day. The juxtaposition would suggest that Innis has arrived, although to what it is not clear. In contemporary Canadian studies, as one theorist has noted, Innis is often ritualistically acknowledged and then avoided.17 The Innisquiche collage corroborates this observation. Recent texts on communication theory in Canada, useful and informative in their own right, support this judgment as well.18 Authors devote space to Innis's and McLuhan's work but carry out their own analyses without appealing to their insights. Under these conditions, one might expect that opinions on the content of Innis's work would at least remain flexible or would differ from one another. But the opposite is true. Iconic images, it seems, lead to static interpretations. In this case, the interpretations stem from an overly empiricist view of what Innis was trying to say. For both Innis and McLuhan, the phase "technological determinism" had stuck so hard one gets the impression that "uniquely Canadian" has become a polite phrase for "uniquely crude" - a theory with a roughly hewn set of concepts that, like the fur trade, is an interesting but odd spin-off of the Pre-Cambrian Shield. In this context, those who wish to read either theorist as a dialectician have their work cut out for them. McLuhan's image, equally iconic, poses a different sort of problem. What this book calls the "later McLuhan" so overshadows the more subtle writer of the early works that to engage with his theories publicly is already to risk dismissal. The May 1988 issue of Saturday Night puts this point as clearly as could ever be done. It features an article entitled "False Prophet"; to interest potential readers, it supplements the listing in the table of contents with the claim, "We always knew McLuhan was a windbag." When readers turn to the article itself, they learn from its author that McLuhan's work provided interesting food for thought for about 15 minutes in the 19605. At least it was 15 minutes.

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This obsidian judgment highlights the danger of keeping Innis and McLuhan exclusively Canadian and helps to answer the question posed earlier of whether to compare them. Time has passed. The concern with media, culture, and globalization - in brief, with the consequences of modernity - has resulted in an explosion of critical literatures. Most of these look to Europe for theoretical inspiration, and few show awareness of Innis and McLuhan. The time has come to see the two Canadians' work in this broader context and to consider closely what they had to say about the making of the modern world. However, the standard judgments and the paucity of existing comparisons suggest some limitations. It might be tempting to cast the net wide in order to show a link between Innis's and McLuhan's work and wide variety of European authors. But, as those who have engaged in pioneering projects know, not all things are possible at all times. Or, put more positively, some things must be done before others are possible. This book carries out two special tasks - it demonstrates that Innis and McLuhan were critics of modernity, and it shows them to be critics of a specific kind. The argument developed in the following chapters is that they invented a uniquely Canadian version of critical theory - a fusion of critical political economy and of the critical rationality associated with the early Frankfurt School and its followers. But Innis and McLuhan are not yet identified widely as theorists of modernity, critical or otherwise. They are still too often read as crude empiricists, and hence as examples of modernity. Since no such extended analysis has been done before, an in-depth comparison rather than a broad-ranging one is called for. This study, carried out within a relatively narrow compass, is a necessary starting point. It is to be hoped that others will build on its findings, bringing new insights to the work of a very unusual pair of Canadians. The same obtains, mutatis mutandis, for the theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. They have yet to be compared extensively with any North American theorist. For many whose background has been primarily Canadian politics, economics, or history, this analysis provides an introduction to two members of one of the more unusual and innovative schools of German neo-Marxism. For those well grounded in the work of the Frankfurt School - most commonly, political theorists, literary theorists, and philosophers - it is likely to provide a first indepth encounter with Innis and McLuhan. For students of media and culture in general, this book offers unique perspectives on how economics, politics, and media intertwine to create personal and social consciousness. For all readers, the intercultural dialogue that follows is intended to inspire still more dialogue in an intellectual world that has become all too specialized.

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Acknowledgments

This book has its earliest roots in 1987 when, as a master's student at the University of Victoria, I took a directed study in Canadian political economy under the guidance of Warren Magnusson. We had been reading some of Harold Innis's works, and when the course was over, Warren lent me a copy of Empire and Communications. He suggested that if ever there had been an original Canadian theory, this was it. It was the strangest text I had ever seen. I could only vaguely make out its meaning, but I had the sense of being in contact with something profound. The first word of thanks, thus, belongs to Warren. The project reached its next evolutionary stage at the University of Toronto, where I studied, as part of a doctoral program, Canadian political thought and the philosophy of the early Frankfurt School. The former subject was taught by J.T. McLeod; the latter, by Gad Horowitz. McLeod's course gave me the opportunity to delve into Innis's work again and to compare it with McLuhan's. Under the pressure of assignments and massive reading lists, as I moved back and forth between the Canadian and European thinkers, I started to speculate on some interesting parallels. During that year, J.T. convinced me to turn that speculation into a doctoral thesis. So the second word of thanks must go to him. Speculative projects can be dangerous and require an "allowing" form of guidance. I had the support of a very liberal thesis committee. Many thanks are owed to my supervisor, Alkis Kontos, ever enthusiastic, insightful, and generous in his praise, and to other members - Gad Horowitz and Abraham Rotstein. I am indebted also to those who read and commented on the book manuscript that later emerged from the thesis. Norman Ruff cheerfully read and scribbled helpful notes throughout the entire text; Diane Crossley provided

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many hours of intensive conversation as well as written commentary; Mike Doyle offered expert advice on writing and editing; Warren Magnusson proved especially helpful during panic attacks (mine, not his); Rob Walker provided key insights into my project; and John McDougall posed helpful questions. Bill Stamps listened endlessly as I read aloud passages with which I was having difficulty - if this text has succeeded at all in moving beyond the confines of academic language, it is because of his help. Throughout, I have been grateful to receive the enthusiastic and highly professional support of Philip Cercone and his staff at McGill-Queen's University Press. On the financial front, I am happy to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the doctoral fellowship that allowed me to work full-time on the original thesis and the Social Science Federation of Canada's Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program for a grant in aid of publishing this book. Thanks must be given as well to family, friends, and others without whom I could never have managed. I am indebted to the encouragement offered by Charlotte Atlung Sutker, Diane Crossley, Abraham Drassinower, Ilan Kapoor, Evan Leeson, Ben Livant, Trisha Morris, Tish O'Reilly, Brian Richardson, Anne Swannell, and Ray Vickery. My parents, David and Malka Weiss, were helpful in more ways than I can say. My mother did not live to see this book finished, but I am sure that it would have made her proud. My daughter, Casey, who was not nearly as wrapped up in this project as I was, offered muchneeded light-hearted commentary. Finally, my husband, Bill Stamps, gave unfailingly of his time and his emotional support, frequently setting aside personal goals the better to help me with my own. I happily dedicate this book to him.

Unthinking Modernity

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CHAPTER

ONE

Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

Between 1930 and 1975, central Canadian scholarship produced two pioneering theorists who studied Western consciousness by shining a shaft of light along a forgotten aspect of its history - namely, the development of communications systems, or media. The first was Harold Innis, originator of the staples thesis of Canadian development (of which more later) and author of Empire and Communications; the second was Marshall McLuhan, prophet of the global village and the retribalized West. The focus on media, perhaps the most salient feature of Innis's and McLuhan's work, received wide recognition in the 19605. Since then, it has spurred the founding of communications studies at Canadian universities, now in full bloom at Simon Fraser, McGill, and elsewhere. Beyond academic borders, such phrases as McLuhan's "the medium is the message" have become part of our everyday language. As a consequence, studying media has rightly come to be regarded as a valuable contribution to understanding contemporary society. Important as this recognition is, it misses a key part of the project that Innis and McLuhan had in mind. Their histories of media were intended as thoroughgoing critiques of the thoughts and habits that have come to characterize the West as a whole. They were thus intended as critical theories of modernity. By all rights, then, they ought to be enjoying a great revival. Growing awareness of Western technology's darker side has generated an explosion of writings that probe its cultural origins, and a good number of these focus on the modern experience of space and time, key emblems of Innis's and McLuhan's thought. Yet their work remains marginal. In part, this reflects a Eurocentric bias in our thinking; texts on Western culture have always drawn heavily on European philosophy. Hence, by contrast, names such as Foucault, Habermas, Lacan, and Marcuse are

4 Unthinking Modernity

well known to students of modernity, whilst the ideas of their predecessors Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche have become subliminally embedded in our culture. The present literature on Innis and McLuhan reflects this bias as well. Studies that recognize the larger themes in their work too often set them in an exclusively Canadian or North American empirical context.1 This view has led to too many mechanistic interpretations.2 Other studies that situate them more broadly either refer to them fleetingly3 or simply dismiss them.4 All of this robs us of their insights on the West. This book responds to the current bias by taking on two main tasks. First, it challenges the narrow readings of Innis and McLuhan by showing that they have much of universal import to contribute to our understanding of modernity. To do so, it brings their work into dialogue with the writings of two German theorists - Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, members of a school of thought known since the 19605 as the Frankfurt School. The comparison shows that Innis and McLuhan, like the Europeans, engaged in a radical critique of predominant Western views of objectivity by tracing them to historically developed rigidities in Western reason. Second, it introduces and explores a new development in dialectical theory - negative dialectics. So named by Adorno and Benjamin, negative dialectics is a creative and transcendent response to rigid forms of reasoning. This aspect of the comparison links Innis and McLuhan to a long dialectical tradition, showing that they have contributed to exploring the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity in the West by developing a unique and interesting version of negative dialectics under a different name. Why this particular comparison, one might ask, and why these themes? Whilst there is necessarily some arbitrariness in all such choices, the comparison here is based on parallels in the authors' respective approaches to their subject. Critical theory is a tradition that explores modernity by combining a radical critique of Western political economy - in particular, property relations - with a critique of Western rationality. Innis's and McLuhan's work represents just such a fusion. In this sense, it is a Canadian variant of critical theory. For the theorists of the Frankfurt School, the economic dimension is grounded in Marxism, itself a critique of the earlier, classical economics of Adam Smith. For the Canadian theorists, it is grounded in Innis's own work, similarly critical of the classical school. The four authors also converge in moving beyond this critique by linking the topic of political economy to the more general one of culture and communication. They do this because they believe that any economic system will generate concepts of reason or knowledge specific to it

5 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

that will, in turn, be deeply influenced by communication systems. This shared set of perspectives makes them an ideal foursome for a first extended Canadian-European comparison. The dialectical theme is also of special importance. Since the igth century, dialectical theory has popularized the idea that the so-called dichotomy of objectivity and power relations is false, that our ways of perceiving and classifying the world, and therefore of talking about it, are influenced by political and economic forces. But the task of formulating the relationship between them too often remains mired in dichotomous thinking. In everday life, such thinking surfaces as growing bitterness in conflicts over the meaning of multiculturalism or the respective rights of local and state interests. Rigid objectivists believe that we can be saved by imposing a single, strict set of interests or cultural values; rigid subjectivists, that we are doomed to endless wars because different value-systems are irreconcilable. In the world of high theory, this same dichotomy takes the form of intractable debates on the relationship between identity and difference. Some theorists believe that we ought to abandon the idea of objectivity and live in post-modern worlds of multiple perspectives or differences (whatever that might mean); others, that we must reformulate it as a meta-theory encompassing all difference. As we see below, negative dialectics, especially as revealed through a dialogue with its Canadian contributors, sheds an usually clear light on these issues. Despite its unique approach to modernity, critical theory also bears some interesting thematic similarities to the larger critical literature on the modern condition. It is part of a broad scholarly convergence on the belief that the West is caught up in a static and dichotomous paradigm. It also shares in a general attempt to transcend the old paradigm by developing a dynamic, non-dichotomous one based on the special qualities of sound. Understanding this will provide a background against which we can see more clearly the communications focus in the work of Innis, McLuhan, Adorno, and Benjamin. As many who are familiar with Innis and McLuhan know, they used their study of communication as a vehicle to retrieve something of a lost oral tradition - a sound-based tradition. It was their belief that this loss, essentially a loss in the art of dialogue, is a key to understanding modernity. I try to show below that this retrieval links their project to that of Adorno and Benjamin by virtue of the four theorists' concern with the special qualities of oral communication and with developing a new concept of dialectic in the image of an open-ended dialogue. Let us look at this larger literature. As a quick trip through almost any scholarly bookstore today demonstrates, critical responses to

6 Unthinking Modernity

modernity are legion. They come out of a variety of cultural settings and cover an amazing array of disciplines, including - besides the social sciences - philosophy, literature, and art. Yet if we stand back, we can see an interesting similarity in substance. Virtually all the authors see modernity as a pathological kind of present-mindedness or, since present-mindedness negates time, a kind of spatial bias. From this vantage point, the problem of objectivity or rigid reasoning can be seen as part of a larger problem involving a static cast of mind that is insensitive to the role of time in human affairs. How is this so? One of the earliest and most graphic descriptions of this kind of spatial bias comes to us from the 19th-century work of Karl Marx. Writing in the age that saw the rise and entrenchment of mechanized factory labour and the railway, each running according to schedules more rigid than had ever been imagined before, Marx put the point this way: "The subordination of man to the machine situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is the speed of two locomotives ... Time is everything, man is nothing ... Time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable things ... in short, it becomes space."5 Time sheds its flowing nature and in so doing becomes spatialized. Marx's dramatic passage highlights a radical distinction between human time and clock time. For us, time is a flowing thing experienced through changes in mood and inclination and coloured by the events that touch our lives. In a world governed more by machines and mechanized processes than by people, this time is denied expression. Indeed, it is negated. More recently, these and similar insights have been extended and deepened in a number of interesting ways. There has been much speculation on the effect that mechanized labour might have on the inner lives of individuals and, through them, on society as a whole. In the 19205, Georg Lukacs built on Marx's analysis, offering the view that working under mechanistic constraints caused individuals to suppress a personal sense of time and, in so doing, to take on something of the robotic attitudes of machines themselves. He referred to this condition as "reification" - literally, a turning of processes into a-temporal things. Responding to the rapid growth of consumerism, later theorists used the concept of reification to describe modernity as a generalized treadmill, a place where the superficial novelty of products is mere window-dressing for the meaninglessness of a life dedicated to accumulating things. Time becomes space in the consumer treadmill, because the dynamism that sustains it is nothing

7 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

more than an endless set of repetitions. The related issue of meaninglessness is reflected in opposing schools of philosophy - nihilists have engaged in a bitter denial of all meaning; hermeneuticists, in a heartfelt attempt to show that creating meaning is the very essence of human life.6 Taking the analysis of reification a step further, some theorists have attempted sociological analyses linking time-suppression to mental illness. Joseph Gabel, a psychoanalytic theorist, has argued that this suppression underlies all modern pathologies. For Gabel, the schizophrenic is a person psychically locked into an eternal present, a state with no apparent differentiable past and, hence, no hope for an alternative future.7 Other theorists, more outwardly oriented, have seen the spatial bias as an obsession with conquering territory.8 Critiques of imperialism and colonialism fall under this heading. In this version, suppressing human time takes the form of destroying traditional ways of life deemed inferior to the spatial life of technology. Equally interesting have been two epistemological responses - phenomenology and existentialism, both aimed at debunking modern positivism by exposing it as a static view of the world.9 And on the artistic front, movements such as cubism and impressionism have offered aesthetic ways of understanding the static bias, with the first mocking its machine-like qualities and the second fragmenting its subjects.10 By all these accounts, the spatial bias is a state of mind created by suppressing the qualitative sense of time associated with bodily and seasonal rhythms in favour of uniform time segments. It is common to all social systems that run by the clock and, as becomes clear in the chapters to follow, is central to the kind of objectivity that Innis, McLuhan, Adorno, and Benjamin wanted to counter. Each adopted a combination of the perspectives we have just looked at. Innis combined the inward and geographic approaches. McLuhan extended this work by exploring its sensory dimension. Adorno and Benjamin, most keenly critical of consumerism, referred to the suppression of personal time by Lukacs's term, "reification." Moreover, as we see below, the theorists enhanced their understanding of modernity by demonstrating that the spatial bias is also a visual bias, a mentality that favours vision or seeing over hearing or listening. As a counterpoint to the static paradigm, a number of writers have tried to show what it might mean to retrieve a personal or historical sense of time. In this, they have been at one, as Stephen Kern has put it, in defining that time as heterogeneous, fluid, and in some cases even reversible.11 Efforts date back to the early part of this century. Some theorists, recognizing that a static or mechanistic outlook

8 Unthinking Modernity

entailed seeing time as a set of discrete segments, worked on demonstrating how different real time was from this. Henri Bergson, for example, coined the term "duration" to emphasize the idea that experienced time is always indivisible.12 The American psychologist William James, who influenced Innis and McLuhan as well as a number of European thinkers, made a similar point. Employing a wording now best remembered as the origin of the phrase "stream of consciousness," James argued that human consciousness is a flowing stream and so could never be understood from within a static, segmented frame.13 Marcel Proust, who influenced Benjamin, affirmed human time by documenting its special qualities as embedded in memory.14 G.W.F. Hegel, whose work influenced not only Europeans but a wide variety of North Americans, including Innis, saw the epistemological dimension of this time problem. Recognizing the stasis that hung over Western approaches to truth (with horns locked, as usual, over whether it was objective or subjective), Hegel attempted a historical, and at the same time dialectical, resolution by arguing that, whilst truth is always subjective, it is also objective because it evolves through a single historical trajectory. And Marx, of whom more is said below, responded with his renowned theory of historical materialism. Viewed as a whole, this critical literature yielded a new paradigm based on sound - the physical and sensual basis of dialogue and, as we see below, an important element in dialectic, properly understood. The new paradigm took two main forms - polyphonic music15 and oral communication, with the latter clearly detectable in 20th-century social and political theory's increasing interest in language. As it is crucial here to appreciate the usefulness of such an interpretive framework, it is well to look more closely at what is involved in believing that real time is not personal at all. This view, common in the modern empirical sciences, first gained ascendance in the i/th and i8th centuries, the era that saw the rise of modern industry and capital. Its special character came from mechanistic physics, a discipline founded on the notion that space and time are entirely independent of one another. Its special appeal came from its aura of certainty, a quality that promised predictability and ultimate control of the world. To early modern and modern social theorists, this science seemed to point the way to overcoming the age-old tension between centralized state authority and individual interests. In short, if one could define these poles objectively in the absolute sense, one could teach people these objective meanings and so bring the individual and the state in line with one another.

9 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

In the i/th century, Thomas Hobbes offered one of the most detailed and eloquent descriptions of this outlook. If modern institutions have been responsible for bringing the mentality of modernity to our everyday lives, Hobbes was our early warning system. The warning took the form of a pioneering application of Galileo's theory of physics to social theory and psychology. Examining that application can clarify in what way modern science is static in its outlook and how this poses problems for communication. At the same time, it can show in what way it is primarily visual in its orientation. In this way, we can see why a sound-based paradigm is important. One can best grasp the outlook Hobbes provides by engaging in the following visual phantasy. Imagine for a moment that the universe, both physical and social, is divided sharply into two components. One is an endless and uniform expanse of space. The other is a set of objects or particulars contained within that space; you have no sense that these objects have come from anywhere or are going anywhere - they seem just to be there. The objects are in constant motion, governed by simple and unchanging rules of attraction and repulsion. Where the objects are persons, attraction is caused by the search for pleasure, and repulsion, by the avoidance of pain. The division between these components is sharp in the sense that each is qualitatively independent of the other. The space does not affect the movements of the objects; their movements do not affect the space.16 As a consequence, this is a universe that is simply a collection of its parts. Imagine next that each of these objects (people, chairs, or whatever) is subdivided into two similarly separate components. One is a set of characteristics, exactly four in number: mass, shape, location, and speed; the other is a larger, indefinite set that includes characteristics such as colour, smell, texture, taste, and emotional appeal. The first set is designated as primary or objective because its members are always visible, tangible, and measurable. You can go out there with rulers and gauges and reduce them to a set of numbers. The second set is designated as secondary or subjective for two reasons. First, its members are considered to be after-effects of the primary set, caused by the way primary characteristics bounce off our sensory equipment, and these after-effects are not all visible and tangible. Thus they cannot be reduced to numbers but will remain attributes about which opinion can differ. Second, for this reason they are also considered to be less real. If you say that the colour is orange and I say that it is red, who is to say that we are both not imagining things?

io Unthinking Modernity

As in the larger space-object relation, each of these subsets is qualitatively independent of the other. The primary or real qualities do not affect the secondary or subjective ones, and vice versa. Moreover, it is the primary set that actually defines objects, whether they are rocks, trees, or persons. This way of defining things has interesting consequences. If objects are real only in terms of their primary characterstics, then they differ from one another only in a strictly numerical sense. If we apply these same criteria to people, we will be defining them by spatial attributes that, from the standpoint of human or social need, carry very little weight. Mary and Martha may differ in their location, mass, height, and anything else that we can measure in this way, but the measurements would normally play a small role in deciding which would make the better friend, lover, or social leader. Moreover, relegating their less visible attributes to secondary, merely subjective status means ignoring the things that make them true individuals. In this Hobbes/Galileo vision, the world is a place composed entirely of numerical objects; there are no real subjects. This has further consequences for how we relate to those objects. Taken seriously, it means that, as a human observer of this scene, you can, in principle, classify and predict the motions of the things around you in an entirely objective way, since you too are an object whose essence is unaffected by the things that might render your outlook subjective. In this kind of world, one could look forward to devising powerful methods of control, both social and biological. Mechanical interactions caused by unchanging sets of motives can always be predicted, and what can be named and predicted without fear of subjective bias can always be mastered. Yet oddly enough, this sort of control yields no real change because the world in which it occurs remains a mere collection of parts moving in repetitive, clockwork-like patterns. So in this world, there is no real time, since time is a measure of change. There is no real history, since history involves qualtitative changes over time. There are no traditions, since traditions grow out of relationships that develop historically. There are no cultures, since cultures are characterized by traditions. There are no uses for long-term memory, since all changes - internal and external - are like the changes demonstrated by the movements of a wind-up mouse. They are reconfigurations of endlessly similar interactions. Or if there are any such things, they can be hived off into a large and amorphous bin labelled "private," "personal," or "subjective" and safely forgotten. Consider next the alternative provided by a paradigm based on sound. Music, an example that McLuhan and Adorno liked to use, provides an important contrasting model of interaction. Unlike the

ii Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

atomistically separate bodies in Hobbes's picture, and more like the members of a real social group, the parts of a musical piece are, to some degree, mutually constitutive. None makes sense as music except as part of a whole composition, and each would make an entirely different kind of sense in a different composition. Oral dialogue, an important subject for Innis, McLuhan, and Benjamin, has similar qualities. Conversants are individuals or parts, but they also influence and shape one another's perspectives, sometimes very profoundly. Neither the conversants nor the words they use can be described adequately as collections of objects in collision. In addition, music and speech show internal thematic development. They contain motifs or ideas that unfold and evolve in unique, often irreversible ways. Simple mechanical motions, in contrast, are always reversible. Further, over time the languages themselves, whether musical or verbal, evolve. At all levels, therefore, they do have histories. They thus serve as far better models of social reality than do the stars and planets as described by Galileo. Applied to individuals, they allow us to understand consciousness as based on memory or time, not as a set of simple mechanical motions. If the latter were the case, we would be unable to hear music or speech; we would hear only disconnected sounds.17 Applied to groups, the sound-based paradigm reminds us, as both the Canadian and European theorists try to make clear, that there is a relationship between oral communication and cultural remembrance; that a group is a community only when its members have a shared set of memories; and that they share such memories only when they can maintain ongoing dialogue. Applied to culture, the same paradigm offers an alternative to the obsession with control. Music's quality as an event to be taken in and appreciated provides a model for enjoyment that does not involve dominance. Dialogue's participatory quality provides a model for similar possibilities in social activities. In their approaches to dialectical methods, the Canadian and European theorists were centrally concerned to develop the implications of this alternative. Their solutions were variations on a new dialectical theme. As a preface to examining these, let us look at the ideas of dialectic and dialogue in the context of these contrasting models. We may start by noting that dialectic, as currently understood, is a post-Hobbes idea about how the parts of the world interact. It has its roots in Socratic dialogue, a method of learning based on conversation. As in any conversation, its main elements are opposing principles or ideas that meet and fuse in a way that results in something truly new. The dialectical process opens when one party holding

12 Unthinking Modernity

a set of beliefs encounters another with an alternative set. It closes, at least temporarily, when they have shared their views so as to arrive at beliefs that are different from either of the original ones. In dialectical processes understood more abstractly, the parties can be cultures, social classes, economic systems, or, as in the work of Innis and McLuhan, communications media, each of which represents a bias, equivalent in essence to a set of ideas. So where the parties are persons, dialectic takes the form of a real dialogue. Where, more abstractly, they are systems, it lacks some of the qualities of dialogue. As many of us have learned, you cannot hold much of a conversation with a system. At its most complete, dialectic is a dialogue that tries, by way of resolution, to overcome the distance between participants. This latter point was of special interest to Innis, McLuhan, Adorno, and Benjamin. For them, hearing and listening, together with the institutions that promoted them, were key carriers of a fluid and personal sense of time. And these, in turn, made the difference between a superficial interchange and the meeting of minds required to advance our knowledge of the world. As a consequence, they were especially interested in how the idea of resolution between speakers was to be understood. A dialogue has to take place through a medium, and media always carry with them certain sets of concepts or bounded ideas. Conversants have to employ these concepts to capture whatever part of the world (trees, commodities, civilizations) is under discussion. But if, like Hobbes, each conversant assumed that the world was composed only of numerically definable objects, then the only purpose for a dialogue would be to arrive at the right definitions - or perhaps better said, numbers. Or, to use Karl Popper's more nuanced formulation, if each assumed a set of definitions condoned by an unquestioned consensus of scientists, the only purpose of dialogue would be to determine whose consensus would prevail.18 And there lies the difficulty. In either case, one has to conclude that some person (or group) would have the right to claim possession of the true definitions. This obsession with number has serious implications for the future of dialogue understood dialectically. Once objectivity is defined in this rigid way, no further dialogue is possible. If, in defining the world around them, the conversants agree, their separate minds effectively collapse into one. Their thinking becomes identical, a condition at its political deadliest when they represent a power engaged in an imperialist campaign. If they disagree, one of them will become dominant (the stronger, undoubtedly) and the other will have to submit, since, in this world, disagreement always leaves one party in the wrong. In either case (for these alternatives are not so

13 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

unalike), the conversation is then necessarily and permanently over, and the dialectical process, dead. With it goes the thematic development of social, political, and moral ideas that would have led to the real unfolding of human intelligence. For our four thinkers, something like this had really happened in the West. Its implications were no less than tragic. Moreover, they were at one in recognizing that the problem did not stem entirely from Hobbes's era but was rooted in important developments in the ancient West. They thus shared in exploring its origins through studies that stretched back to the dawn of Graeco-Roman civilization. In developing their respective ideas, they pulled together the various themes that, as we have seen, surround the eclipse of intelligence or critical thinking in the West. They studied the problem of objectivity, or, in Adorno's words, "identity-thinking" - the peculiar Western fusion of industrialism and capitalism - its role in creating a commodity or consumer culture, that culture's inability to foster human time, and the unique relation between time and dialogue. As these interrelations may seem a little remote and abstract, let us pause for a moment to look at an example of how they work in contemporary society. Consider the social dialogue, or, perhaps better said, non-dialogue, on one of the starker questions facing the industrial West, "Are our forests disappearing?" Environmentalists warn us that they are. To support their case, they document receding woodlands, eroding soils, the attendant decline of animal populations, and the more complexly related signs of global warming. Corporate opponents point to a set of documents that appear to tell a different story. Forests are amply replanted, and other environmental changes, a mere case of self-generating cycles. Part of the problem in assessing these positions, of course, is the technical nature of the information at issue. Few of us possess expertise in the complex biological processes involved or in the statistical designs needed to capture them. However, it does not take a highly specialized understanding to wonder intelligently whether the direction of these debates is ultimately off the mark. Under the code of empiricism that dominates present-day institutions, including our media, those who seek radical change in environmental policy (or any other policy) must provide objective proof of damage. The problem is not that data are unimportant; we do need to understand the changes in our planetary landscape. But objectivity in the sense demanded involves assessing phenomena whose effect is global in scope. Even from the simple quantitative perspective of preserving life, the number of variables that one needs to consider in making such an assessment is overwhelming. Given the added

14 Unthinking Modernity

difficulties posed by conflicts between contending parties over methods of analysis and intepretations of data, and the conflict's politically interested nature (in itself inescapable), we would not be far off if, despite our inexpertise, we concluded that the stagnation currently hanging over this so-called dialogue is likely to remain its key outcome. By extension, we might wonder reasonably at being chained to a form of science whose main products are static banks of data, on one hand, and their market equivalent in dead piles of pulp on the other. Given this dilemma (false though it may be) some people have, not surprisingly, reacted by chaining themselves instead to the one set of objects that transcends this dilemma - the trees. The larger picture is more confused still. If the quantitative side of this conflict evades resolution, its qualitative side remains even more elusive. Qualitative judgment concerns the type of life experience we wish to preserve or nurture. Tree farms are not ancient stands of wilderness growth, and concrete buildings serviced by hydro-electric dams are not valleys capable of supporting native cultures. As guides to questions raised by these contrasts - fundamentally, questions of competing values - modern materialism fails us absolutely. It provides no grounds for choosing between the values. Collections of data will tell us nothing about how to value the objects they describe. Indeed, the very act of dwelling on them pushes the concern with values to the margins of consciousness. More than this, the very attempt to understand value differences requires a historical temperament which, as we saw above, is antithetical to modern science. One comes to value a particular way of life through a process that takes place over time. Values are temporal or historical things. By extension, conflicting sets of values represent different and distinctive historical developments and, thus, distinctive cultures. Since the confrontation between modernity and other traditional cultures is fundamentally a conflict of histories, it invites a response grounded in a historical overview of the practices at issue. The battle over data, however, can serve to fix our attentions only, to borrow Siegfried Giedion's phrase, on an "eternal present." As such, it co-creates the stagnation in the media debates over trees and their cultural implications. Production, communication, and epistemology here move into a deadly gridlock, resulting in general failure to perceive the historical dimensions of what is at stake. The overall result is deepening incomprehension, which turns differences in expert opinion into an endless series of non-dialogues. This is a failure so profound that few of us who have followed it seriously can have entirely avoided the plummet from hope to resigned cynicism. And if the burgeoning stocks of commercial

15 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

products bearing the images of endangered species and industrial wastelands are any indication, the economies that thrive so well on non-dialogue are only too ready to seal that cynicism by reducing the issue to a set of items from the catalogue. In the world of the catalogue, the difference between systemic destruction and the new politics of protest shades off into the difference between the plain coffee mug and the one depicting a stand of pines. For those who would move beyond this level of engagement, language itself poses a problem of the first order. The catalogue is the condensed and congealed expression of the failure to grasp the historical dimensions of the global issues at hand. It is Hobbes in thought and action today. From inside the catalogue, there are no histories and there are no cultures. The shapes, sizes, weights, localities, and prices of its contents are its meaning. They are its culture. To the degree that they express our everyday lives, they are ours as well. In a key sense, the catalogue is the cultural text of modernity. It is the modern language primer. To speak a different language in this stagnant world poses difficulties not to be underestimated. What, then, one might ask, is the alternative? For Innis, McLuhan, Adorno, and Benjamin, the answer began with a new way of understanding that temple of Western public life, the "objective fact." All four worked with an epistemology that, whilst respecting the concrete realities of life, did not see them as timeless or immutable. They paid attention to how economic necessities affected the communication process. Innis and McLuhan, in addition, offered detailed discussions of the physical properties of media. As part of this new understanding, the theorists also dropped the pretence of value-free analysis. Instead, they adopted a stance, integral to critical theory, that looked to human emancipation. Yet in taking this stance, the theorists did not slip into relativism. They avoided this by taking the position that all analyses and their classification systems express values that marginalize someone or something and that the solution is to listen to, or develop an effective dialogue with, those people, cultures, or activities that have been so marginalized. The ability to listen in this way was tied to retrieving some kind of orality. The resulting dialogue, a recognition of margins as essential sources of critique, is a key element in the concept of negative dialectics. The foregoing analysis of time and dialogue brings us a step further to understanding these authors' similar - though, as we see below, by no means identical - approaches to dialectical analysis. We begin our examination of this analysis now by looking more closely at its underlying epistemological approach - in essence, a form of

16 Unthinking Modernity

materialism. Since the term "materialism" has meant many things to many people, it is best studied from a historical standpoint. This can demonstrate the relationship between materialism and the theme of emancipation. It can also reveal some interesting continuities between Hobbes's materialism and that of the Canadian and European theorists. At the same time, it can set the stage for considering a negative, or neo-dialectical version of dialogue that points in an open, emancipatory direction. Despite wide variations in substance and style, materialist theories share a human-centred doctrine that ties truth to sense experience. This doctrine has two aspects - ontology (a theory of being) and epistemology (a theory of knowledge). The first says something about reality: it asserts that reality is a sensual and sensible thing; the second, something about how we know reality: it asserts that we can grasp reality because we ourselves are sensing beings. Now if we reflect on this doctrine for a while, we soon come to see that it contains a contradiction - it places its confidence in the senses, but, as doctrine, it can never be verified by them. As finite beings, we cannot know all that is real, and so our senses can never confirm the idea that all of reality is material. Moreover, this is a tension that no reformulation of materialism can remove. This dilemma places important limits on how materialists, properly so-called, can classify the objects around them. It means that they will always be modest in naming the parts of the world and the rules that govern interaction, working with hypotheses rather than final truths. It means, further, that they will resist those who claim to have final truths, whether through reason, revelation, or gut-level intuition. Understood in this way, materialism has maintained a long and venerable history of political resistance. Its key historical opponent has been idealism, a philosophy whose traditional task has been to assert final truths. From the ancient Epicurus to the early modern Galileo, materialists have squarely opposed the idealist dogmas of their day. In this effort, a key tactic of theirs has been to move the debate onto political terrain by exposing such dogmas as attempts to gain political preeminence. This strategy has made them traditional opponents of ruling agents and classes. In the early modern era, the opposition took the form of a rebellion against the Catholic church and the power wielded by its earthly chapter, the nobility. The rebellion was hardly gratuitous; the counter-response, as is well known, was decidedly hostile. Materialism is thus a traditional patron of social and political equality. This is no accident. The idea of equality stems from the very doctrine of sense experience. In Plato's time, knowledge was thought

17 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

to be the province of a natural elite. In the medieval era, it was tied to the mastering of certain learned texts which, by their nature, were accessible to very few. By contrast, knowledge that derives from one's senses is in principle available to anyone, and the authority exercised on its foundations, a privilege open to many rather than a few. As materialism gained ascendance in early modern times, its emphasis on sensory life also supported the movement away from preparing for an afterlife towards the modern practice of finding comfort in this one. This new emphasis obtained even for those puritanical sects that actively renounced material comforts. For even they placed heavy emphasis on accumulating material goods - a decidedly modern preoccupation. Accumulation provided at least the subliminal pleasure of knowing that they could have such comforts if they wanted them. It was more overtly true for those who followed the hedonic teachings of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, according to which pleasure was a natural and acceptable goal for all persons. These elements make materialism the definitive emancipatory doctrine - historical in its outlook, anti-elitist, and supportive of pleasure for all. But materialism did not develop in a coherent universe. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and many of their materialist contemporaries wrote in favour of elite rule rather than against it. What they offered with one hand they thus took away with the other. The idea of the primacy of sensory experience gained wide acceptance from the iyth century onwards. It did so, however, neither through any philosophical merits nor because it was useful in championing the cause of the poor, but because of its spectacular success in fostering the growth of the physical sciences and, along with them, modern industry and capital. From compasses to mechanized weapons, from mass-commodity manufacture to mass communication, this kind of materialism produced a dazzling display of the power of matter in motion. With it, one could secure prosperity at home whilst subduing large portions of the world abroad. But this way of being a materialist had its price. The more its enthusiasts identified with the power to transform the world, the more they forgot the modesty appropriate to materialism. And the more they revelled in the heady certainty aassociated with that power, the more they identified not with the historical, emancipatory task of the materialist but with the here and now. In some quarters, this outlook is known as bourgeois or crude materialism. But in many ways it is not materialism at all. For it is founded on a will to absolute control backed by absolute knowledge. Neither of these things can be derived from the idea that we learn through our senses.

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In the mid-i9th century, Marx made a first sustained attempt to challenge this version by calling for us to remember materialism's emancipatory project. The result was historical materialism, or, in Friedrich Engels's variant, dialectical materialism. Marx argued that all knowledge is imbued with the values of those who own and control the production of wealth. This proposition drew attention to something that should have been obvious - that science can never be independent of those who underwrite its growth. For Marx, knowledge was something that emerged historically through the interaction of production processes and consciousness. Labouring was a kind of language, a practical language whose living vocabulary grounded all human thoughts and feelings. Labouring joyfully, therefore, was central to living well. But given the long history of class domination in the West, labouring processes for the vast majority were predefined and imposed rather than freely chosen. This situation had a profound effect on the labourers' intellectual and emotional development; it created an intractable sense of alienation from self, from others, and from the natural world. As a consequence, the production-consciousness dialectic took the painful form of class struggle, the struggle between capital-consciousness and labourconsciousness. Unhappily, Marx argued this point in a way that subverted some of the historical dimensions of his dialectic. First, he attempted to tie consciousness exclusively to production. Although he referred to production as a kind of language, thus realizing that both production and language involved material processes, he brushed this realization aside by assuming that language simply flowed out of production processes. This theory reduced all language, religion, art, and philosophy to functions of labour, suggesting a mechanistic interpretation of how material life produces consciousness. This reduction was easily as unhelpful as the mechanism plaguing modern science. Second, Marx believed that working-class consciousness was potentially universal. He had imagined that working people, given their suffering, would be the first to envision a world beyond class rule and the first to work towards its achievement. But his presupposition only preserved the notion of value-neutrality, or crude objectivity, by displacing it onto a class whose views were supposedly pre-ordained to prevail. Innis, McLuhan, Adorno, and Benjamin moved beyond this kind of impasse by developing variants of materialism that worked both with and against a historical materialist perspective. In keeping with the emancipatory spirit, they defined their objects not in valueneutral terms but in terms of what did or did not cause suffering;

19 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

they attempted to alleviate suffering by bringing its sources to light.19 Here Innis and McLuhan were attuned particularly to the importance of preserving culture; Adorno and Benjamin, to the problem of class within culture. To develop this new way of defining, they traced the historical roots of crude materialism and its dominating concept of objectivity. In addition, they adopted the idea that knowledge was the outcome of a dialectic of material life and consciousness. But they developed a distinctive approach to this theory. They resisted dichotomous readings of either element by concentrating on the one aspect of social life that cannot be conceived as a dichotomy of matter and consciousness - namely, culture and its extension in communication. In maintaining this focus, they were especially keen to point out the sensual, oral aspects of effective communication. This innovation greatly enhanced the explanatory power of the theories they developed. Benjamin, Innis, and McLuhan contrasted earlier, oral societies with ones in which oral communication was in eclipse. All four theorists considered how responsiveness to sound had become eclipsed in the modern world. The result for all was a novel exploratory journey into the politics of knowledge through study of how production, communication, and their parallels in social and political culture have unfolded in the West. In keeping with a dialectical method, as we see below, they examined the interplay of the material and ideal forces that led to the eclipse of dialogue and dialectical processes in the West. Innis and McLuhan shed light on the technological developments within media that fixed dialogic boundaries; Adorno and Benjamin, on the philosophical developments that kept these same boundaries in place. The theorists overlapped in a common concern with modern cultural forms such as mass advertising and the press. They tried to understand the interrelationships of dualism, the static world-view, domination, and the positive process of "identity-thinking." In response, each sought a kind of anti-positive - a concept of knowledge that did not posit a pre-given reality. Given this goal, they were committed to working in a new way. Since they wanted to stress the importance of non-identity (of not identifying everything in a rigid manner), their own methods had to be anti-systemic and could not be allowed to dissolve into yet another non-dialogue. This kind of project called for a negative dialogue. What does such a dialogue entail? In Hobbes's dialogue, examined above, the main emphasis was on arriving at an end product - a set of concepts defined objectively in the absolute sense. The dialogue involved interaction, but simply as a step towards finality. By contrast, in a negative dialogue, the focus is on airing different perspectives. Participants assume that any

2O Unthinking Modernity

synthesis of opinions will be provisional because any resolution is bound to leave something or someone out of the account. So they worry less about end products and correctness. They concern themselves instead with revealing the ambiguities in the terms they are using and the difference between these and what they are describing. They also make a special effort to discover what aspects of their topic they have heretofore ignored. Now, by definition, dialecticians of this sort cannot carry out their work in isolation from others: they must always be listening to, or "in dialogue with," marginal, dissenting voices. Applied to social science, such an approach might mean listening to social movements or groups that challenge the actions or projects of social scientists. Applied to scholarly work, it might mean paying attention to cognate disciplines and alternative perspectives that show up the weaknesses of one's own research. In either case, the process would have a "negative" character because progress in knowledge (the "Aha") would be expected to emerge precisely from those junctures. The knowledge gained in this manner would be objective, but in a way that took into account the subjectivity of the participants and their objects of study. For the Canadian and European theorists, negative dialectics was primarily a method of studying social phenomena, a new way of studying history. They understood history as an open-ended series of qualitative changes that emerged at the margins of dominant institutions. Negative dialectics also provided a new way of producing a scientific text. The theorists developed texts that simulated a negative dialogue by juxtaposing multiple perspectives on the topics in question. Although they never described it so explicitly, we might usefully think of their approach as operating according to the following rules. Each perspective studied was to be seen as an effective "conversant," capable of offering information on the object of study. No conversant (no perspective) was to have a monopoly on what would count as legitimate evidence for, or insight into, the object. Moreover, the conversants would not all have to address the object at the same level of analysis. Several types of perspectives emerged - psychoanalytic, which took the individual as a point of departure; economic or sociological, which considered the group primary; or, as for Innis and McLuhan, technological, which centred on communications media. This multiple approach would allow authors and readers to see their object of study as a totality. But it would not allow them to define the object, in lockstep fashion, as having a single founding cause or essence. No perspective would appear dualistically as a base, to borrow from Marx, in relation to which all others

21 Space, Sound, and Negative Dialectics

were superstructural. This approach would yield a holistic view that Martin Jay has called "a de-centred totality."20 As becomes clear below, Innis referred to this kind of decentredness as "flexibility." In McLuhan's language, it became the paradoxical "no point of view." For Adorno and Benjamin, it was the more philosophical "non-identity." Adorno and Benjamin called their totalities "constellations"; McLuhan, by conscious extension, called his "galaxies" or "mosaics"; and Innis developed the practice but had no special term for it. The resulting writings were negative or decentred in two main senses. First, they presented a number of analytical perspectives. This variety encouraged participants (authors and readers alike) to read the spaces between the juxtaposed perspectives and thus to meditate on the relations between them. In this way, the writings demonstrated concretely that each prespective was a margin in relation to the others. Second, their descriptions encompassed different modes of causation: they exhibited processes that were mechanical, functional, dialectical, and so on, thus demonstrating that it would not be possible to link perspectives on the world in any single manner. This dialectical approach also provided an occasion for intense selfreflexiveness. Challenging positive theory, reading history negatively, and developing new methods came together for these theorists in an attempt to be its nexus point. They not only spoke about marginalized realities; they consciously represented them. Innis saw his version of history as both a theory about margins and an instance of them. McLuhan wrote about marginal counter-environments as antidotes to rigid institutions and, at the same time, represented such an antidote. Adorno and Benjamin spoke about negative dialectic and tried in some sense to be that dialectic. This awareness of being embedded in the very processes they were analysing produced interesting, though often tortuously self-conscious formulations. As Adorno put it, "If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true - if it is to be true today, in any case - it must also be a thinking against itself."21 By definition, its creators had to be theorists against themselves if they were to represent a positive theory of margins and still avoid developing a new super-positive. In the next five chapters, we look at how this method emerged and was used by two contrasting schools of thought. Chapter 2 concentrates on the Frankfurt School. There, in considering Walter Benjamin's work, we encounter a further version of negative dialectics, paralleled in some of McLuhan's writings. Since the Frankfurt School

22 Unthinking Modernity

was firmly grounded in a philosophical tradition, we find that it dealt fairly abstractly with the effects of production and communication on consciousness. Chapters 3-6, on the two Canadian theorists, thus provide a clear contrast. While Adorno and Benjamin had a ready, sophisticated, and nuanced vocabulary with which to express their themes, Innis and McLuhan, who had had little formal training in theory, invented a theoretical language that sometimes made it difficult for them to express their themes clearly. Reading Adorno and Benjamin enhances our ability to see what Innis and McLuhan were up to.

CHAPTER

TWO

The Frankfurt School, Adorno, and Benjamin

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were members of a research group that has been known since the 19608 as the Frankfurt School. This was the first school of German neo-Marxism, or, perhaps better expressed, renegade Marxism, since its members departed radically from many of Marx's beliefs. They referred to their own work as critical theory, a term intended to express not arrogance (one would think that no one else was critical) but rather their strong resistance to the mainstream movements of their day - communism, fascism, and liberal reformism. They are especially renowned for their analysis of how capitalism interwines with and is dependent on deeply held views about what is and is not rational and for their profound critique of capitalist culture. This stance gives their work a thematic affinity to that of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan through the two Canadians' shared concern with what they called modern monopolies of knowledge. As such it merits closer examination. The Frankfurt School was founded in 1923 as an independent research institute and formal affiliate of the University of Frankfurt. Its official name was the Institute for Social Research. A collectivity of mainly German-Jewish intellectuals, the institute emerged in the wake of a post-First World War crisis on the left, resulting from the failure and fragmentation of socialism in Germany, the quiescence of workers in response to the Weimar republic's reformism, and the growth of anti-semitism. In its early phase, it retained a strong orthodox bent. Under Carl Griinberg, its first director, a majority of members remained wedded to the idea that capitalism was bound to destroy itself sooner or later and that a politicized proletariat would then lead the way to a society free from class. Their first studies thus concentrated on capital and what they thought to be specific obstacles to the development of worker consciousness. Although the

24 Unthinking Modernity

institute was clearly mandated to carry out research rather than to involve itself in party politics, members remained hopeful about the outcome of the Soviet Union's Bolshevik revolution. Consequently, some members maintained close ties with German socialist parties, and one, Friedrich Pollock, forged communicative links with the party in Moscow through a friend, David Ryazanov, who was later sent into exile by Stalin.1 At this stage, it appeared that the key task was to mend the rift on the left by bringing together the various streams of Marxist thought, even if only in academic format. It was hoped that these could be combined so as to derive a single and purified strain of Marxism. As shown in the overlapping institute and party memberships, the theorists shared the vision of a historical moment of transcendence - a point at which widespread social and political activism would combine with philosophical understanding to create a truly liberatory set of institutions. This outcome would be the ultimate unity of theory and practice. The vision had consequences for the substance of their research. Although the group studied social consciousness - a focus that was to remain central to the institute - many early members assumed that the problematic kinds of consciousness they were studying - workers' quiescence and anti-semitism - were simply products of capitalist work relations. The corollary assumption was that if one eliminated the latter, the former would disappear naturally. To be sure, this monocausal framework was not without its internal dissenters, and students who attended the institute's early seminars referred to it impatiently as the "cafe Marx."2 By 1930, the political climate in Germany had shattered that framework and was threatening to destroy the optimism that attended it. The Nazis' growing presence was clearly hostile to the group's political agenda, and their anti-semitism posed a direct danger to the members as individuals. Moreover, the working class did not seem to be demonstrating the political resistance that one might have expected. Less disturbing only by virtue of its remoteness, the communist experiment to the east had taken a decidedly totalitarian turn. The latter two developments finished all hope of bringing together the fragmented pieces of Marxism and so brought the crisis on the left into the very heart of the institute. All of these political events destroyed the group's easy faith in the proletariat and in the economic theory that identified it as history's emancipatory subject. They also called into question the attempt to unite theory and practice and the belief, counter-intuitive in the face of racism, that all forms of domination stemmed from a single source and were, in this sense, identical. Writing against this background, Adorno was later to label all such beliefs "identitarian."3

25 The Frankfurt School

The disillusionment caused a decisive shift in the institute's philosophical focus. The shift was facilitated by Max Horkheimer, who took over the directorship in i93i4. Horkheimer, who was to become Adorno's lifelong associate, turned immediately to broadening the group's mandate and widening its disciplinary base. This shift launched the institute's second, eclectic and dialogical phase and set it firmly on the path to a radical critique of modernity. Core participants at this time were Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock. Among them, they encompassed the fields of aesthetic theory, philosophy, political economy, psychoanalytic theory, and, for a time, empirical study based on mass-survey techniques.5 Together, they deepened their study of the West by incorporating into their work the texts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Benjamin, Fromm, and Lowenthal also maintained a strong interest in Jewish mysticism - a perspective that Benjamin integrated into his own brand of negative dialectics. This commitment to openness was strengthened further when, in 1933, the institute's library was seized and the group realized that it would have to flee Germany. After an experimental year in Geneva, Adorno, Horkheimer, and a number of their colleagues emigrated to a temporary home offered them at Columbia University in New York. They were to remain in the United States until 1950; some, like Fromm and Marcuse, never returned. Benjamin chose fatefully to stay in Paris in order to carry out a special project on the commodity culture of western Europe; in 1940, during an attempted escape, he panicked and took his own life. The personal and cultural exile that their flight created gave the group an acutely marginal status - an important part of the backdrop for the work of Adorno and of Benjamin on the role of marginality in a new concept of dialogue. The Frankfurt School's brand of critical theory combined Marx's theory of alienated labour with a thoroughgoing critique of the static bias in Western thinking initially in order to counter certain static elements in Marxist theory. In light of the rigid way in which Leninist political practice was developing, rereading Marx seemed a crucial task. To integrate these perspectives, the theorists adopted a Hegelian intepretation of Marx's work on the relation between labour and consciousness. The new reading shed light on the impulses that had driven Marx into a mechanistic mould by tracing them to a tension in their Hegelian roots. At the same time, it helped to retrieve a more fluid version of this relation already contained in some of Hegel's writings. This reading formed the core of the Frankfurt School's neoMarxism.

26 Unthinking Modernity

For Adorno and Benjamin, the Hegelian focus was especially useful in shedding light on the deep structures of western philosophical thought - particularly on logic. But Hegel was an idealist, and the Frankfurt School's resulting emphasis on a heavily idealist philosophy left its own mark. It etherealized the group's work, focusing it more on the realm of ideas than one might have wanted from theorists concerned about the quality of everday life. This bias provides an interesting contrast to Innis and McLuhan, who studied logic more concretely by tracing the media that had given rise to it. Although these differences produced alternative versions of dialectical analysis, the four theorists were at one in attempting to retrieve a human sense of time and, with it, the aural and interactive core of dialogue. This interest in communication marks Adorno and Benjamin off from other members of the Frankfurt School, making them more appropriate for this sort of comparison. Whilst they shared much with their colleagues, concern with orality and the accompanying theory of negative dialectics were their invention. The Frankfurt School's residually idealist version of this analysis begins by examining difficulties in Hegel's and Marx's concepts of the dialectic. For Hegel, as these theorists showed, dialectic was tied to a developmental theory, according to which the motive force in history was the drive for self-understanding. This view was a point of departure for Marx, and it is a major historical source of the contemporary belief in self-realization as a universal goal. Today, however, it is common to imagine this goal as coming to fruition in a highly individualistic society. By contrast, Hegel tied it to an organic conception of society, intended to counter the atomistic views of Hobbes and Newton. In the organic version, society is not the sum of individual actions, since those actions always occur against the backdrop of socially developed institutions - family, workplace, and state. For Hegel, growth in self-understanding - in our alertness to life and the substance and subtlety of our thoughts - is the outcome of acting on the material world (including its institutions) and reflecting on the results. Social awareness is thus always tied to the institutions of the day, to what there is to act on. This position became the framework for Marx's theory of knowledge. Marx agreed that human knowledge is dependent on the quality of social institutions, but he pushed this point a step further. He argued that if growth in knowledge is tied to acting and reflecting on the world, then what counts as knowledge in any society - its "dominant truth content" as Adorno and Benjamin liked to put it depends on the institutions that control access to the materials and activities available. Poor opportunities lead to impoverished or

27 The Frankfurt School

distorted awareness - interacting with slum landlords induces a consciousness unknown to property owners. Moreover, he argued, such distortions will always serve the institutions that create them. They will always favour the establishment. Since what we hold to be true is invariably tied to the questions we raise, it follows further that the official range of questions in any society will be biased in favour of its key institutions. Obversely, questions that challenge those institutions are bound to be marginalized or left out of account. Marx argued further that where societies exclude some groups from all but the most menial tasks - where, in other words, some live merely to serve others - consciousness develops dualistically. Matter is divided from thought, and human from human, and drudgery is assigned naively to classes of persons (slaves, women, the working class) deemed suitable for little else. In such societies, knowledge becomes fragmented. Science becomes cut off from human reality, and its various subdisciplines from one another - a condition that blocks emergence of the larger sensibility needed to grasp the system as a whole. Efforts to develop interdisciplinary study, such as those carried out by the Frankfurt School, Innis, and McLuhan, thus challenge the institutions that gave rise to this fragmentation. They invite dialogue into a world whose parts have forgotten how to converse with one another. In expanding Hegel's work, Marx was especially keen to show that this fragmentation was responsible for maintaining the illusion that divisions between socio-economic classes were pre-ordained rather than historically developed. Marx's insight became central to the Frankfurt School's analysis of the modern spatial bias. But the theorists did not derive it directly from Marx. Economistic readings of Marx were so common early in this century that it took a groundbreaking Hegelian interpretation of Capital to illuminate the broader, cultural aspects of his work. The interpretation came from Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, published in 1922.6 This study demonstrated that Marx had addressed the spatial bias in modern life and had linked it both to mechanized labour and to an obsession with commodity consumption, which he called "commodity fetishism." We looked above at a quotation from Capital that described how machine labour transforms time into space. For Marx, commodity fetishism was the psychological outcome of this transformation. It was the failure to see commodities as end-products of a historically evolved set of relations. Employers and workers possessed by fetishism became mesmerized by the immediate physical appearance of machine-made products - so much so that they mentally screened out the exploitation behind these products and saw

28 Unthinking Modernity

only their market-value relations.7 They forgot that the objects they were staring at were perhaps produced under slave-like conditions and focused only on comparing prices. In his own work, Lukacs coined a term, "reification," to describe this phenomenon in more general terms. Where commodity fetishism is failure to see the historical dimensions of production processes, reification is failure to see the historical dimensions of any human institution. The reified consciousness is oppressed, a condition that encourages people to imagine social surroundings as simply put there by nature. By the same token, it is dualist, reducing life to immediacy (as with prices) and transforming it into the passionate embrace of the here and now that marks the modern world. But Marx had his own tendency to reify. Again, his Hegelian roots help explain why. The problem stemmed from the two theorists' shared assumptions about how causation works in history. As we saw above, Hegel and Marx adopted an organic view of society rather than an atomistic one, and a historical outlook rather than a static one. In describing social history, they used two kinds of causal explanation - holistic, or circular, and dialectical. Holistic causation explains how social structures and mentalities stay the same and assumes that society and its individuals are mutually constitutive. People's pursuits and dispositions produce institutions; the institutions produce the kinds of pursuits possible and, hence, their members' dispositions. In this kind of causation, neither part of the equation is prior to the other; they form a dynamic, stabilizing whole. It makes little sense here to ask which moment comes first; the answer has to be "neither or both." Dialectical causation, in contrast, explains how things change. It assumes that all societies have internal tensions or contradictory forces. The historical relation between labour and capital is a key example. As Marx noted, labourers try to conserve their energy and earn as much per hour as possible; capitalists pull in the opposite direction by squeezing them and paying them as little as possible. This tension calls for a dialogue and some sort of synthesis, which then becomes the new social development. In the case of the labour-capital dialectic, that development was a labour movement and a set of accommodations made by the state to improve working conditions. Here again, neither of these moments is prior to the other, a significant point, to which we return momentarily. In a dialectical progression, neither pole is prior, because both have emerged from an earlier condition - in the case of capital, from the breakdown of the feudal economy. Integrating these types of causation poses a difficulty for any theorist who seeks a historical outlook; the holistic one suggests stasis,

29 The Frankfurt School

the dialectical, forward movement. Ultimately, theorists must decide how the dialogue between the two is to proceed. Above, we saw that where conversants assume a universe where each object can be defined in a single and absolute way, dialogue becomes deadlocked. Hegel failed in his attempt to be historical because, despite his general disagreement with Hobbes, he shared the latter's beliefs about identity. He assumed that history was a single object, definable in a single way. For Hegel, the conservative and progressive aspects of society ultimately came to the same thing. As he saw it, dialectical processes occurred, but only within a pre-ordained framework. Societies progressed, so to speak, but always towards a condition that was written into their nature. This situation is hardly the stuff of dialogue. Indeed, it is hardly the stuff of organicism, since even organisms evolve in an open-ended way. Marx, who offered a far more materialist and, happily, less consistent theory of history, presented these two types of causation more distinctly. He never claimed that they were identical. He was inclined, however, to make pronouncements that suggested a pre-ordained end of history. This unfortunate tendency made possible the mechanistic construal developed by Lenin and his successors. Adorno's and Benjamin's strength was to see clearly this mistaken identity. Typically, they tackled it by writing more philosophy. Abstract as this approach may have been, it did clarify some interesting difficulties in standard logical theory. They noted that Hegel's problem stemmed from unquestioned acceptance of a central rule of logic - that all objects equal only themselves, or, more prosaicly, that a rose is a rose and never a rabbit. Within these confines, causation itself has to be seen as a single thing. Worse, neither of the types of causation that Hegel and Marx described could qualify as that thing. In the holistic version, for example, people produce institutions and institutions produce people. In a strictly logical world, you cannot both cause and be caused by the same thing. The causal arrow can go in one direction only. The same problem arises for the dialectical variant. Thus, where there can be no complex theory of causation, there can be no dialectic. Since Marx himself had become entangled in this puzzle, it became obvious to Adorno and Benjamin that his critique of capital had to be studied in conjunction with reconsideration of the reasoning process in which it was caught. Now anyone who has looked at the contemporary literature on modernity will know that critiques of reason, or of "linear thought," have become more than abundant. Readers today are faced with a dizzying set of epistemological positions ranging from New Age

30 Unthinking Modernity

mysticism to variations on scepticism and a common (though not necessary) companion, relativism. Adorno, Benjamin, Innis, and McLuhan followed neither of these routes. As a consequence, their work provides useful guidelines for avoiding the pitfalls of what is sometimes called "contemporary anti-essentialism," the flip-side of logic, in which all attempts at objective definition are denied. An integral part of their solution was reconstructing dialectical theory in a way that more closely resembled a real dialogue. Adorno and Benjamin began by realizing that perceiving the world in a static or timeless way had its basis not only in production but in sensory experience. It was founded on a sensibility that suppressed hearing in favour of seeing, and a fluid sense of time in favour of a mechanical one. Taking Marx's theory of fetishism as their starting point, they noted that this visual bias was partly a product of how modern commodities struck the eye. As industrialism had gained momentum in the modern era, grand trade fairs began to appear in the large centres of Europe. Set in the new and magnificent passages and crystal palaces, themselves products of the grand age of iron and steel, these exhibitions gave commodities a level of visibility they had never attained before. There, as they glistened in their display cases for all the world to see, they cast a visual spell on the society that had produced them. By the late igth century, the sheer number of commodities was enough to draw the European public into a prolonged hypnotic gaze. In his own day, Marx had recognized this effect implicitly when he had used the German adjective "phantasmagorisch"8 to capture the essence of commodities. Phantasmagorisch is an application of the English "phantasmagoria," a term coined in 1802 to describe the images produced by the magic lantern, the i9th century's precursor to the modern slide projector. In standard English translations we lose that linguistic continuity, since the term is normally translated as "fantastic." These quasi-images, Marx wrote, were optical stimulations that gave seers little sense of their role in the act of seeing.9 More explicit awareness of this bias appeared in Adorno's writings as early as 1938. In an essay of that year that concentrated on the North American music industry, he contrasted the cognitive and aesthetic experiences of seeing and hearing. He wanted to show that there had been general regression in the Western world's capacity for listening. For Adorno, this decline was the sensual counterpart to what Marx had described as the decline of a fluid sense of time.10 It expressed itself as growing inability to hear, listen for, and so appreciate thematic development in music. The principal evidence for this decline was the quality of music being produced for mass

31 The Frankfurt School

consumption. Written according to formula, Adorno wrote, it displayed a deadly, debased sameness that was matched only by a mass of listeners no longer able to tolerate anything new. This was "fetishized music" - a mass product designed to capture its public's sensual life.11 Whatever its market title, it was, at its core, reification for the senses. Moreover, this development affected more than the capacity for music appreciation. It had an equally insidious effect on conversation. If in popular music it repressed tolerance for the new, in dialogue it reduced the innovative speaker to silence. For Adorno, the reason was clear. In a world dominated by phantasmagoria, the rhetoric of uniqueness or individuation becomes mere window dressing for mass-produced sameness. Where sameness becomes the unspoken rule, the capacity for meaningful individual expression atrophies and, with it, the capacity for communication.12 Where there are no true individuals, there can be no genuinely expressed ideas, and where there are no such ideas, there can be no exchange of them. At best, there will be a bland exchange of prepackaged formulae cliches and pat phrases. In such an exchange, there can be no hope for open-ended development in thought or feeling.13 The regression of listening thus spells the death of dialogue and, in the process, the death of sound as an interactive medium. At the same time, it spells the dominion of the eye over the ear. Vision, Adorno wrote, is the sense best suited to the so-called rational order of modernity. The eye is more capable than the ear of perceiving in a static, identitarian manner. It can be turned on and off by a simple movement of the eyelids, and it can be directed easily. As such, it is more readily harnessed to the technological world run by the factory clock and more susceptible to the influence of commodities. By contrast, the ear always retains something of the archaic. Unlike the eye (or the machine), it cannot be turned on or off, and it cannot be directed easily. Consequently, it cannot be forced into a narrow and exclusive focus. This resistance gives it a natural laziness, a relaxed quality tabooed in the puritanical society dominated by labour markets. But this very quality gives it a special role in maintaining the health of a society. As Adorno put it, music is potentially society's most important weapon in outwitting such a taboo. Properly nurtured, it may keep alive the fluid, developmental sense of time required to understand qualitative social change. Alas, with the regression of listening, even fine music was losing its capacity to carry out that task.14 The fluidity and diffuseness that one finds in music are also present in natural language. It is not surprising thus that Adorno pointed to

32 Unthinking Modernity

language as a model for his new negative epistemology. For him, a dialogue could serve as a good model for an open, or negative dialectic because its natural medium - language - has a dialectical quality. Languages have never been collections of one-dimensional terms designed to fix absolute labels onto objects. Linguistic concepts are inescapably ambiguous. They can never be governed by a visual totality; they stand half-way between the definable and the enigmatic, between objects that one can name and those that elude all names. They are therefore the primal decentred totality. Dialectic, which in its real, or open form also aims at such decentredness, is thus in the most literal sense linguistic. If it is to remain true to its aural roots, it, too, must operate in a decentred manner. It must be freed from the strait-jacket in which logical discourse has placed it. Communication properly understood, Adorno wrote, is neither an exchange of given, preformulated concepts nor the attempt to arrive at them, but the unfolding of the difference between subjects and objects,15 a process in which conversants make clear to one another the differences that they perceive.16 A negative dialogue is thus the only kind of communication that can live up to its fluid, linguistic roots. Freeing communication in this way was far more than a philosophic exercise for Adorno and Benjamin; it had a larger, pedagogical purpose - to promote a historical understanding of the West. It would recover and re-present all that its philosophical tradition had marginalized, by retrieving the particulars of history, the variegated details of everyday life, buried from Plato onwards under a blanket of idealist concepts. In Plato's world, as in medieval Christendom and beyond, material objects - indeed, life as a whole - had been relegated to an inferior status captured by the term "secular." In this world, concepts carried a status that mere objects could never match. This practice, retained in modernity, had to be turned around. One had to regain the ability to appreciate the subtle differences (to return to our environmental example) between the wilderness and the tree farm obliterated by concepts such as "resource" or even "tree." One had to recover the qualities erased in the universe according to the catalogue. Concepts should play a new role, Adorno wrote; they should reveal what their abstractionist tendencies eliminated and highlight what they invariably failed to cover17 - indeed, they should examine themselves. Employing concepts in this paradoxical manner would lead to a method based on "conceptual constellations." The constellation was a new approach to social science. Adorno referred to it variously as an "anti-system,"18 a "dialectic suspicious of all identity/'19 and a means of promoting "open thought."20 In

33 The Frankfurt School

practice, it was an ensemble of conceptual models,21 which, like the conversants in a negative dialogue, "gathered about" their objects of study in order to unlock the processes stored within them.22 The negative aspect of their task was to define the objects by showing what lay at their margins. For an object such as history, this project meant revealing the gaps or contradictions in human institutions and the events that produced them. It would demonstrate that qualitative change in history occurs more often as a result of unintended consequences than because of neatly defined policies, and that innovations in history often emerge in the very gap between those two. Applied to epistemology, it involved revealing the gaps or contradictions in each speaker's understanding of history. It meant showing that new knowledge emerges most often as unintended insight, revealed in the heart of the contradictions between what historicans identify and what they fail to see.23 In holistic terms, it implied a new way of grasping the unfolding relation between the larger historical picture and the individual souls attempting to live it. As we see below, the Canadian theorists were far more concrete in their approach to the dialectic between material history and consciousness. Innis and McLuhan placed a great deal of emphasis on tracing, in a quasi-ecological manner, the interrelation between the irreducible material aspects of media and the cultures that developed in conjunction with them. Despite this difference, all four theorists recognized that to understand this relation one had to give priority to the hard realities within which, as Marx put it, people must make their history. Conversational openness therefore still had to be framed within a larger objectivity that resisted moral relativism. Dialogue notwithstanding, one had to make clear that not all positions spoke equally well on the human condition: not all promoted health. So racists, for example, could not be invited to join as equals. Adorno spoke of "the preponderance of the object" in reference to these hard realities.24 Somewhat cryptic (like many of his expressions), this phrase expressed the belief that, despite the paradoxes of definition, there are some things in life that are objectively true. The preponderance of the object pointed to three aspects of that truth materiality, particularity, and power. Materiality, or "first nature,"25 is that objectivity inherent in the biological and geographical conditions of life.26 Because of his own exile and his horror at the plight of Jews under Nazi rule and German occupation, the material condition foremost in his mind was the human capacity for suffering. "The need to lend a voice to suffering," he wrote succinctly, "is the condition of all truth."27 Adorno argued that there was a meaningful continuity between the pain then spreading across Europe and the

34 Unthinking Modernity

everday misery created by the modern labour process. Both had developed under the umbrella of a logic that subsumed the individual under a single, abstract universal - in modern society, the idea of citizenship. Whilst promising freedom and equality, it remained a firm part of an unquestioned schema that makes politics a public concern and economics a private one. This dichotomy betrayed the promise by permitting some citizens to be reduced to replaceable cogs in the polity's supporting market machinery.28 In the concentration camp, that universal was the idea of the "Jew," under which those who died were no longer persons but mere specimens.29 In both cases, logic was an important but subliminal backdrop. Were it less subliminal, it might have been generally easier to spot the resemblance between modern property relations and 20th-century authoritarian regimes. Both used abstraction to trample the individual.30 Adorno wished at the same time to demonstrate a strength inherent in the individual or the particular - the second dimension of his "preponderance of the object." In his view, the lesson to be drawn from idealism was that particulars - persons, cultures, systems, or whatever - invariably resist all attempts at final interpretation.31 They are always irreducibly "other" to those who perceive them. They are therefore always vulnerable to marginalization,32 but this very characteristic serves an important purpose. Seen rightly, it can become the occasion for the mind's disenchantment with concepts and for its finding a better road to understanding individuals.33 It can help us to realize that paying attention to persons or classes rather than to labels is to see their uniqueness as objective fact. The third and equally objective reality in Adorno's scheme concerned power - the asymmetry in relations between subjects and objects whenever the objects are cultures or socio-economic systems. People, he wrote, are both conscious subjects and objects that can be classified or affected by others, while systems, societies, or historical processes can be objects only.34 The former have thoughts and feelings that can be addressed directly; the latter do not. The former have hearts that can be broken; the latter do not. Consequently, people are vulnerable in ways that systems are not. For this reason, the latter have always proven stronger than their opponents.35 In a world governed by capital and industrialism, people must often obey the system's call or perish.36 In expressing this reality, Adorno threw into relief those situations in which dialectical interaction lacks the vital element of dialogue. Let us begin now to look at this method in action. Adorno applied it to the topic of reification, and the perspectives that he brought to

35 The Frankfurt School

bear on this topic - the elements that make up the constellation were his quasi-conversants. Since we are to see them as participants in a negative dialogue, I refer to them as "voices." The gaps between the viewpoints that these voices express are not closed; there is no attempt to show how they can be linked to one another directly. Further, we are to recognize each as a margin in relation to the others. Each deals with an aspect of reification not covered by the others and, as such, offers both novelty and critique. I begin with a psychoanalytic voice because it is one we encounter again in Innis and McLuhan. In Adorno's case, the account represents a fusion of Nietzsche's analysis in The Genealogy of Morals and Freud's analysis in Group Psychology.37 The voice on psychoanalysis. As human beings, we all experience tension between the drive for expressive mimesis and the urge for control. The former operates in the interests of love; the latter, in the interests of survival. In desiring mimesis, we want to identify and merge with the objects to which we relate; in seeking control, we try to identify and categorize them in order to use them for sustenance or save ourselves from dangers associated with them. In our forest example above, the former approach would be represented by the landscape painter or outdoor enthusiast; the latter, by the logger or architect. Both sides contain some good; in the face of danger or necessity, either can become dominant.38 When the mimetic urge dominates, we become submissive - vulnerable to the dominion of others. Where desire for control is dominant, we become, mutatis mutandis, the reverse. The voice on politics and ideology. Political domination skews the dynamic heavily towards one of these poles. Freud's studies on authoritarianism show that in a regime based on the leadership of a single charismatic leader, the mimetic side becomes socially prominent. The "led" submit to their leader in order to share with him (or her) a vicarious sense of power. Submission transforms them, in a perverse fashion, into a collection of young siblings, who, unlike the children in a real family, never mature. By contrast, a crudely democratic market regime emphasizes control. Individuals suppress their empathic, mimetic yearnings and become the atomized individuals whom that system requires. But suppressing these urges generates tension, which in form creates potential instability. This situation leads to some sort of ongoing, state-led intervention, designed to maintain order. The state, however, works under contradictory conditions. The psychic processes that incline individuals to suppress internal drives (in this case, towards mimesis) also induce them to resist external imperatives.

36 Unthinking Modernity

This latter tendency predisposes them to resist the state's attempts to intervene.39 Governments know this and, as a consequence, operate through sinister forms of persuasion designed to screen out the impulse to negation.40 The result is a set of state-supported ideologies comprised of "cover concepts" which mask the tensions that inspire negative, or dialectical thought.41 In the modern state, the concept of formal freedom is the prime example. The voice on markets. The labour market is a major foundation-stone for the identitarian character of modernity. It is a concrete expression of the principle of identity, which tells us to label each object in the world in a single, static fashion. The modern system of production obeys this imperative by reducing all human labour to the abstract concept of average number of working hours.42 As Hegel asserts that all history is one, so market theory asserts that all labour is a simple, quantifiable sum, derived from multiplying hours and wages. In this process, concerns about whether it provides workers with an adequate medium of expression are erased. This omission debases workers and, in so doing, weakens their ability to resist. In the worst case, it convinces them that they are nothing but replaceable machine parts. The outward effect is the rapid spread of markets, which now threatens to impose this one-dimensional condition on the entire globe.43 The voice on class domination. Hobbes's universe of atomized individuals moving mechanically through space is not simply a philosophical construct. It is a concrete expression of class domination. The theory professes to be a neutral reflection of reality. In fact, its artificial division between objective and subjective qualities denigrates all sensory activity except for vision. In this way, it underpins the classical division between mental and physical labour, because the former depends much more heavily on seeing. This distortion provides a supportive schema for the modern system of formal equality, which permits whole classes of people to live lives of physical drudgery. Consequently, it is yet another variant of mind-body dualism. The prominence and longevity of this view result from its proponents' ability to forget their own positions of social privilege. It has always been convenient for those who force others into menial tasks to imagine that non-physical activities are by nature the superior ones. This hubris of thought is foundational to the hubris of class.44 The voice on dualism. Dualism is not simply a division of things into sets of twos. It is also a way of thinking that creates hierarchies, as can be seen from tracing its logical genealogy. Historically, dualism derives from the notion of a prima philosophia, a single principle

37 The Frankfurt School

from which all else is said to flow. Thus the principle is thought to stand for what is quintessentially real (a first principle could hardly stand for the unreal) and to rank above all other principles. Anything different from it must be said to derive from it and, in this sense, to be secondary, or inferior. Dualism allows no alternatives to this schema. Rival first principles will be classified either as derivative or as false ideas that must be stamped out. Applied to social settings, this kind of thinking creates radical "others" to which it remains hostile and radically separate. Hence, where there is talk of an absolute first, there will always be talk of hierarchy.45 The voice on Utopian thought. Identitarianism - seeking to enclose the world in a fixed set of conceptual boundaries - has a Utopian dimension. It expresses the longing for an end to the antagonism we feel towards the social world we inhabit. Often, we want total unity because we crave reconciliation, peace. Consequently, it is not sufficient simply to criticize this will to fixity. Proper analysis of fixed concepts must also retrieve the Utopian hope - indeed the possibility - that lies behind them, by disclosing the gap between the possibility that the concepts contain and social reality. We can, for example, challenge concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality that have become attached to modern institutions. In the case of democracy, we might contrast the underlying Utopian hope - the dream of equal participation in the creation of a nurturing society - with the existing hierarchical economic relations and then try to understand the gap. Such realization would create a negative dialogue between the actual social situation harbouring the concept and the Utopian promise which, though marginalized, is still visible in it.46 The voice on the philosophical longue duree. The founding of a prima philosophia - the principle that subsumes all particulars under fixed concepts - has its roots in the ancient West; it has been drilled into the Western mind for thousands of years.47 Nonetheless, one cannot simply scrap it and begin anew. Western philosophy remains the point of departure for any critique of the West. One must therefore proceed by engaging in critical dialogue with its key scholars. In the process, one can show how past attempts to grapple with one kind of dualism have ended in entrapment within another. This demonstration refocuses critical attention by pointing to the culprit behind those dualisms - identity itself. Thus far I treat negative dialectics as a method representative of Adorno's and Benjamin's work. Since the impulse to use a constellational style and the first formulation of that method came from Benjamin, this treatment is not unfair.48 Nevertheless, there was a difference in how the two theorists interpreted that approach and, as

38 Unthinking Modernity

a consequence, in how they read the visual world of commodities. Like Adorno, Benjamin accepted Lukacs's critical analysis of the spatial bias of modernity. But he liked to juxtapose that analysis with a mystical outlook which viewed the same bias as a possible source of liberatory inspiration. His was a philosophical union - or perhaps non-union - for which his colleagues, including the younger Adorno, had little patience. It parallels some of McLuhan's work and highlights a difference between McLuhan and Innis, and so we can usefully look at it. Benjamin argued that the present-mindedness of the visual society was already a kind of living montage or quasi-constellation. It had a chaotic, discontinuous quality that was one of the sources from which the new sound-oriented paradigms drew their inspiration. The spatial bias - the very condition to be overcome - might therefore, and paradoxically, provide a basis - perhaps the only one - for the program needed to understand and transcend it. So Benjamin designed his constellations to show this paradox in action. Adorno's constellations always included dialectical arguments systematic attempts to reveal the discrepancy between identitarian concepts and the hard realities of the day. For Adorno, this task was crucial.49 In Benjamin's version of the negative dialogue (at least in one of its variants), the project was not so much to argue as to develop compressed images, which, given enough concentration, could induce a sudden flash of insight. This idea was based on the belief that we can attain knowledge directly, through a kind of transcendental experience. It was informed by Jewish mysticism and developments in surrealism that tried, through the constellational techniques of the montage, to bring about a kind of "profane illumination" of the material world.50 Benjamin's view on this method is complex, and it is beyond the scope of this work to probe it extensively. In the service of the comparisons to follow, however, I consider two of its concepts - that of a mass pedagogy, which focuses in a new way on the distinction between waking and dreaming, and that of dynamic co-presence, which varies and complements Adorno's account of a dialectical synthesis. Bringing the dialectic to life, Benjamin wrote, required a mass awakening; one had to break the stagnation that hangs over the spatial society.51 An awakening on this scale required a transformational pedagogy or its equivalent. The key to that pedagogy was realizing that the spatial bias is a kind of collective dream. As we see below, McLuhan, too, referred to the commodity culture as a collective dream culture. This dream, Benjamin argued, was not a natural, or first-nature phenomenon. Rather, it was a generalized

39 The Frankfurt School

numbness stemming from the way that urban dwellers had taken the commodity culture to heart. Benjamin referred to this process as a mass interiorization of the commodity form. By living that form so deeply, modern folk had begun to dream or imagine that theirs was the only culture possible. Quoting from Marx, Benjamin wrote, "The reformation of consciousness lies solely in our waking the world ... from its dream about itself."52 He responded: "Can it be that waking is the synthesis of dream consciousness as thesis and awakened consiousness as antithesis? Then the moment of waking would be identical with the moments of recognition when things put on their true-surrealistic-face."53 In other words, can the awakening required to move beyond modernity - beyond the spatial bias - come about only in an unanticipated moment in which we grasp the contrast between commodity thinking and critical thinking? For Benjamin, change at such a profound level had to be carried out in an almost surgical fashion.54 The constellations he designed to carry out this transformation were sets of analogic images or compressed, iconic figures. The images were in tension in the sense that they contrasted starkly with one another. The sharp contrasts were intended to furnish the fuel for a sudden, intuitive experience of truth. In keeping with the spirit of a sound-based model, this moment of intuition was to be a caesura, a pause in the rhythmic, temporal movement of inner thought processes. Benjamin referred to this striking idea as "dialectics at a standstill." In his words, "When thinking reaches a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions, the dialectical image appears. This image is the caesura in the movement of thought ... it is to be found wherever the tension between dialectical oppostions is greatest."55 As if to produce that very tension, Benjamin's assessment of the impact of the visual-static culture pointed in opposing directions. On the one hand, he shared with Adorno, Innis, and McLuhan a concern for the loss of sound as a key medium and the resulting disappearance of the capacity to speak or listen. For Benjamin, this loss was to be measured by the devaluing of personal experience. The main evidence for this loss was the long process that had replaced the interactive and aural art of storytelling with communication through standardized print.56 (Of Benjamin's comments on this loss I say more in chapter 7.) On the other hand, Benjamin believed that this same process opened the possibility of transcending class divisions in society. In the realm of high culture, he noted, the uniqueness of expressive forms had always been tied to their irreproducibility. In the centuries that antedated Mona Lisa placemats, for example, paintings

40 Unthinking Modernity

were unique objects, inaccessible to most people before the advent of mass travel. This exclusivity gave them an aura of spiritual superiority, an effect that had supported the notion that there was a natural artistic elite. Techniques of mass reproduction, particularly in the visual arts, shattered this aura, facilitating mass involvement in new expressive forms.57 Further, to bring these ideas full circle, the new forms, represented by the visual media of photography and film, provided unusual possibilities for playing with constellational modes of presentation. They might thus provide a medium through which one could create a new, concrete form of "dialectics at a standstill." In chapters 3-6, we encounter another discourse on these themes; like Adorno's and Benjamin's, it engaged in a historical critique of objectivity, the loss of personal time, and the development of a sound-based, dialectical alternative. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Innis; chapters 5 and 6, on McLuhan. The sets form a parallel pattern. Chapters 3 and 5 are intellectual biographies: they show how Innis and McLuhan, respectively, came to be concerned with the theoretical issues we have been discussing. The other chapters elaborate the theorists' respective media-oriented explorations of negative dialectics. Innis and McLuhan present a highly concrete reading of critical theory. They describe the historically changing media of communication in the West as the modes though which Western societies have developed their key concepts of objectivity. In the process, they develop unusually broad definitions of what counts as a medium, including transport systems, both natural and human-made; timekeeping mechanisms; and modes of speaking and writing where "mode" denotes the concrete materials used (stone, clay, and paper) and the modes of production that these materials entail. The leap from transport to communication provides a useful bridge between their critique of reason and a view grounded in political economy. In its historical reach, their analysis covers the period between 2421 BC and the mid-2oth century, and in its geographical scope, it more or less covers the globe. Indeed, it is so broad that it approaches what I have chosen to call "tactile philosophy," a McLuhanesque term that encompasses the ideas of sound and of the constellation.

CHAPTER

THREE

Innis s Formative Years and a Negative Political Economy

"The conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, western civilization ... My bias is with the oral tradition ... and with the necessity of capturing something of its spirit ... the quantitative pressure of modern knowledge has been responsible for the decay of oral dialectic and conversation."1 So said Harold Innis in an address in 1948 outlining the conditions necessary for critical thought.2 Like his European counterparts, Innis identified critical thought with the prospect of true dialogue, and that prospect with a concept of objectivity that was not dominated by Western science and technology. This appeal to dialogue and its relevance to dialectic, offered 28 years after the start of his teaching career, reflected a lengthy battle with the non-dialogues - social, academic, historical - that pervaded his everyday world. In this chapter, we immerse ourselves in that world in order to seek the roots of those insights and the attendant fear for the future of thought. Although he was not well known outside Canada, Harold Innis was anything but an obscure figure in his national milieu. A native Ontarian, born in 1894, he completed a bachelor's degree at McMaster University in 1916 and served overseas in the First World War. After returning from Europe, he began studies for his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, finishing the degree after he joined the department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. He served in that department from 1920 until his death in 1952 and attained a towering status among Canadian scholars. Innis built his reputation on a series of historical studies describing the extractive industries that linked Canada to the imperial centres of the world. Accounts of the fur trade, the cod fisheries, and the lumber industry - the "staples studies," as they were called - emerged from a fiery

42 Unthinking Modernity

passion for research that astounded his contemporaries and remain classics of empirical investigation. Canoe trips taken to study the effects of transport on production, months devoted to the study of primary documents, and a tireless interest in interviewing workers at all levels of production came together for Innis in a technique that he referred to prosaicly as "dirt research." His boundless energy was equalled only by his feeling for theory, from which flowed a unique and widely celebrated staples thesis, concerning Canadian culture, which we consider below. For Innis, scholarly acclaim was no stranger. It is thus all the more striking that when, in the late 19405, Innis turned from the staples industry to the civilization underlying it from the particular to the universal - those who had so willingly supported the former endeavour resisted the latter, or perhaps were unable to recognize the path that led from one to the other. There were cultural reasons for this result. In Canada, the leap from political economy to philosophy had no precedent, at least not in the social sciences. It might have been grasped better with the help of readings from Canadian neo-Hegelians such as John Clark Murray (1837-1917) of McGill University in Montreal, John Watson (1847-1939) of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and George Blewett (18731912) of Victoria College, University of Toronto; however, interdisciplinary study was not common in the late 19405. As a consequence, Innis was poorly understood. His 1948 Beit lectures at Oxford are a case in point. There scholars from England and Canada were treated for the first time to one of his Hegelian speculations - a discourse on the owl of Minerva as a symbol for the decline of dialogue. Innis's audience dwindled quickly and sadly to a handful of listeners, a response captured by the Canadian historian A.R.M. Lower, who remarked acerbically, "Minerva's Owl took flight in the gathering darkness and flew off into the woods, apparently, and disappeared. Well so did his audience ... he killed every audience that way except for a few accolytes in the front row who were taking down the words of the priest."3 The distance between the "later" Innis and his colleagues could not have been expressed more starkly. These external reasons were heightened by Innis's uncompromising style of expression. However one approaches his writings on communication, they offer a unique initial experience in disorientation. His context is elusive, his insights are surprising, the territory he covers is so vast that he at once inspires and infuriates. How could anyone hope to wrestle with such a large body of history? His vocabulary, which bears the marks of training in modern empiricism, is stretched to express thoughts never intended by its originators. His

43 Innis's Formative Years

writing is discontinuous: fragments of Western philosophy are patched onto detailed media studies, creating a strikingly enigmatic whole. Above all, his orientation is unfailingly concrete; he dedicates an overwhelming proportion of space to descriptions of stone, clay, paper, and other media. This method results in a stylistic immediacy that separates Innis from his European counterparts, despite the clear thematic ties. This description holds to a degree for McLuhan's work as well and hence points to a more general or cultural distinction between the Frankfurt and Toronto schools. But in Innis's case, the material dimension is exaggerated by an almost aggressive tendency to undertheorize. The reason for this trait is surely not to be found in political economy, for economists from Marx through Braudel have been dialecticians par excellence.4 Marx and the inheritors of his tradition, however, were inclined by habit to combine economics with speculation on history and epistemology. From this perspective, Adorno and Benjamin clearly reflect these roots. Innis lacked firm grounding in that kind of tradition, and so he invented a language that served in its stead. This chapter examines the emergence of that language through Innis's own experience of marginality, debates within Canadian academe over theory and practice, the influence of instructors critical of modernity, and his own revolutionary studies of Canadian staples. Innis had two early, personal encounters with marginality that had a formative effect on his scholarly work. The first was an experience of class; the second, of culture. Innis rarely addressed the issue of "class" in his texts; indeed, the rarity is characteristic of Canadian theory. But, as he and his biographers have noted, some class awareness was inescapable, given his rural Ontario upbringing.5 Raised in a home of quite modest means, Innis had had to struggle to support himself whilst at university. Fearful of burdening his family with his upkeep, he had managed a fragile personal economy by taking on extra marking assignments and skipping meals - a strategy that drained him to an extent unknown to most urban students. In his autobiography, he notes with some pain that he had seen childhood friends defeated by this sort of overwork. One example seems especially to have touched him: an old school buddy had written to tell him that his hopes to make a "start in life" had ended in disappointing, dead-end employment. Innis writes that he had never realized before how heavily resignation and hopelessness could bear down on the lives of certain individuals; it seemed that in some situations there was no route of escape. Surely, he commented, this was the true

44 Unthinking Modernity

meaning of class.6 Although Innis notes this bitter event, he was to deal with the issue only obliquely in his work, through an attempt to understand how centralized power works to create marginal groups. But if "class" itself remained marginal in Innis's work, "culture" became its very core. Innis's second contact with the power of given social categories was supplied by an 18-month stretch in the Canadian armed forces during the First World War. After his initial training, Innis had been sent to France, and, like other Canadians, once there had found himself under the supervision of British military officials. He never forgot the experience. He had expected to be welcomed as an ally and a member of a distinct and independent culture. He was met instead by the smug self-certainty of officers contemptuous of their colonial inferiors. It was a bitter awakening: "The treatment of Canadians and all others by officers sent out from Great Britain must have been an important factor in hastening demands for autonomy throughout the commonwealth. Their insolence and brutality [were] such that Canadian recruits could scarcely overlook ..."7 Here was an immediate, if cruel, introduction to the natural link between hierarchy and rigid notions of objectivity. The "treatment" Innis and his countrymen received was grounded in the unquestioned premiss that divided life into sets of contradictory opposites - in this case, those who had a "real" culture and those who did not. As so often occurs in colonial relations, the premiss surfaced as an expression of imperial insolence, a concrete display of the hierarchy that identifies empire with culture per se. From this viewpoint, Canadians and other "colonials" had come to the front to defend the British reality. Canadian reality, if there were such a thing, was merely watered-down Britishness. The British could not imagine that Canadians had come to fight for themselves or for more general concerns of their own. In his subsequent studies in political economy, Innis denounced this attitude. He opposed its universalist pretensions by showing that Canada's institutions were unique, and its static sense of reality by showing that history is always an unfolding of personal, cultural time. This cross-cultural dialogue with Britain distinguished him from the European theorists and set his and McLuhan's work in an interestingly global direction. Innis's lesson in political realism was reinforced by the fighting itself, which awakened in him broader cultural concerns. It forced a serious confrontation with Christianity, an important carrier of the values for which the young man had believed himself to be fighting. Innis was raised a Baptist, and his parents had at one time hoped

45 Innis's Formative Years

that he would train for the ministry; he studied at two Baptist universities - McMaster and Chicago. In central Canada, the Baptist tradition was known for its diverse, undogmatic way of accommodating faith to reason.8 It is likely that this attitude stayed with Innis and informed his own dislike for dogma. But there was nothing in the practice as he knew it to prepare him for the blind and selfserving faith that used rational methods to carry out mass killings. This sort of accommodation raised questions about the rationality of reason itself. It induced Innis to abandon Christianity, a shift that he expressed in his communication studies by exploring the historical separation of faith from reason, or, more concretely, of church from state. To Innis, this schism seemed to have turned out to be entirely self-defeating. Initially intended to promote truth in the form of a rational science, it had succeeded only in tearing Europe into factions whilst fostering new forms of myth not so unlike those promoted in medieval times.9 Life in the trenches also forced him to confront the standard position on democracy and the sanctity of the modern state. His concern with democracy was to find its most nuanced expression in his later studies on the press.10 There, Innis came to see that in modern societies, "freedom of expression," a central tenet in the ideology of democracy, was often little more than a screen for state-granted licences to build monopolies of influence on public opinion.11 At the same time, he developed an acute awareness of the relation between electronic technologies and violence. Whilst at the front, he had served as an artillery signaller - a task carried out by electronic means. This responsibility must have helped to breed healthy scepticism, for he remained suspicious of modern telecommunications and resistant to the popular analysis of electronic (or neo-technic) technology as inherently benign. This stance distanced his work on modernity from the work of "post-industrial" theorists such as Patrick Geddes.12 Thus, by the mid-19405, Innis began to suspect, like Adorno and Benjamin, that the brutality of modern warfare was not a temporary aberration in the West but rather the latter's true face. The threat of nuclear annihilation appeared to him now as merely the modern manifestation of the brutal underbelly of Western consciousness: "The middle ages burned its heretics; the modern age threatens them with atom bombs."13 That new brutality belonged to the same knowledge network that had nurtured machine industry. Its hallmark was specialization, a thoroughly modern condition that was now in danger of destroying Western scholarship. The whole current trend, he wrote, was to exalt science in a way that transformed all other

46 Unthinking Modernity subject areas - ethics, philosophy, sociology - into specialized versions of its own methods. Specialization was reason gone mad: it was knowledge turned to violence.14 Innis's early, personal confrontations with marginality had a permanent effect on the vocabulary he developed to grapple with modernity. He came to understand what Adorno called "identitythinking," or "identitarianism," through its concrete counterpart in empire and empire's theoretical derivative, the socio-economic centre. He came to see that empires operate through a static or identitarian set of assumptions about what is real. He understood the empire's negation, or "other," as the colony or margin, and the problematic relation between the two - the closed dialectic - as the dichotomous clash of centre and margin. As illustrated by his description of the attitudes of the British officers, this clash referred to modes of consciousness as well as to nation-states. In his later work, Innis expanded the concept of empire to include what he called monopolies of knowledge, monopolies, as in scientism, of ways of thinking about the world. For Innis, the dominance of the physical sciences was the essence of the modern empire. It was thus the key barrier, to recall our theme of sound, to the thematic unfolding of "ethics, philosophy and sociology" required for a better concept of knowledge. Concern for identity and the fate of dialogue never became a purely theoretical matter for Innis. He lived this concern through a series of sharp academic debates on the social role of the social sciences debates that seemed always to end in deadlock. This result frustrated Innis but also encouraged him to develop a clear preliminary theory of objectivity that was negative in the sense described above. In Innis's department, these issues had surfaced as factional disputes over the relation between scholarship and politics. In the polarized atmosphere of the years of the Depression and the Second World War, he and his colleagues were frequently pressed to work either for the war effort or as "scientific" managers of the economy. The invitation to work closely with the state was especially appealing to a generation of scholars anxious to promote a managerial concept of government supported, quite naturally, by its own scholarly expertise. This appeal was broadly felt, as evidenced in universities from British Columbia to the Maritimes. Men such as Henry Angus, S.E. Bates, Vincent Bladen, W.A. Mackintosh, A.F.W. Plumptre, and even C.B. Macpherson became quickly identified in this era with a new engineering approach to political life.15 In its wake emerged a new hostility to the philosophic, ethical perspective that had once typified political theory.

47 Innis's Formative Years

In this pragmatic world, Innis represented a clear alternative voice. He was alarmed by the effects that this call to management was having on the university. Courses had to be cancelled or readjusted as faculty members trotted off to join the state, and new lecturers, hard to come by under the circumstances, were hastily hired to replace them. This haphazard atmosphere was destructive to learning and to the reflectiveness needed to understand the larger issues at hand. Like Adorno, Innis responded by trying to define the appropriate relation between theory and political practice, and, like him, he concluded that the two had vitally different functions. For scholarship to exist at all, a critical distance between them was essential. Otherwise the university would be transformed, as he wrote in 1946, into "reserve pools of labour to supply political parties," a process that could end only in liquidating the prestige of learning.16 Innis understood only too well that the chance of gaining power in the outside world was partly responsible for the academy's willingness to collude with the powers that be; the flirtation with power masked the fact that the price paid was loss of intellectual independence. The idea of "scientific" "finality," with its promise of control, was central to this subtle romance.17 Worse, scholarly debate on such alleged certainty was itself impoverished by general acceptance of dualistic terms derived from that idea. This situation threatened to destroy critical thought. In the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, uncritical thought took the form of a supposed polarity between scientific finality and scepticism, or, more philosophically, between absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. Standing at the objective pole were the proponents of the Hobbesstyle, prediction-oriented concept of social science. Their tool in trade was statistics - a method that, to Innis's digust, by 1930 had come to dominate economics. "Economics," he wrote on one occasion, "is an older subject than statistics, but this paper is confined to the period since statistics began to leave its impression on economics and reached that stage, fatal to economics, when it came of age."18 In Innis's opinion, two factors were responsible for that fatality - a static world-view and a related obsession with linear causation. To support this position, he juxtaposed the histories of consciousness and of political economy - a quantum leap from mind to matter foreshadowed the more complex analyses that graced his later writings. He showed that the statisticians' mindset was itself the historical outcome of Western economics. It had originated with the influx of gold into imperial Britain, first home of the market society: the impetus to develop statistical analysis had grown out of attempts to assess the influence of gold on imperial trade. The present-mindedness

48 Unthinking Modernity

associated with this impulse was rooted in the high value that economists placed on liquidity - the quality that allowed gold to be traded immediately for any other commodity. This quality permitted and invited the reductionism and wide-ranging penetration that we have come to identify with the modern market. Its offspring - the price system - carried with it the centralizing logic that had transformed the economy of Europe. At mid-century, Innis observed, this logic was eating its way into the minds of the economists attempting to study it. Like the snake in the proverbial garden, it would soon banish scholarship from the university by turning its faculty into a collection of present-minded statisticians for the state.19 And lest anyone defend this situation by arguing that, after all, the state represented the common good, Innis had written in 1935: "the state is a number of bald-headed men living in offices and most of these men have a strong political, i.e., party, sense. A politician succeeds by detecting and using to his advantage the weakness of others, and the others include the social scientist."20 In Innis's view, state and economy colluded to maintain the ideology of dualism, stasis, and, ultimately, empire. Standing at the opposite pole were the proponents of reason's supposed "other," scepticism or total subjectivism. Innis's colleague E.J. Urwick was a central participant here. Urwick had argued in 1935 that "social science" was a contradiction in terms; social scientists were necessarily caught up in the processes they were trying to examine, and so what commonly passed for objectivity was really a kind of social or class position.21 Indeed, the very notion of a science was a pretence. The best that one could do, therefore, was to understand one's position and take a clear political - that is, party - stand. Innis's gift to this debate was his ability to see objectivity and scepticism as constituting a false opposition. Superficially at loggerheads, their proponents shared a deep commitment to the spatial bias; they cooperated in promoting the idea that the melding of academy and state was unproblematic. But this stance meant abandoning all long-range perspectives in favour of the short-term world of policy. In Innis's view, this outlook was a disaster. Both poles displayed the modern denial of time - the key problem of the West. It was thus the very issue that scholarship needed to address. With the imminent collapse of theory into practice, no one would be left to address it. This dilemma led Innis to take an important preliminary stab at linking objectivity and history in a way that preserved both. Given his previous confrontation with empire, the "rational" pole was easy enough for him to reject. Imperial certainty was clearly not objective and, in any case, denied qualitative change in history. But

49 Innis's Formative Years

its sceptical counterpart troubled him deeply, for it was non-imperialist and sensitive to class history and yet negated any concept of objectivity. But as Innis saw it, the possibility of objectivity was tied to the possibility of history and the possibility of history to the separation of theory from practice. To grasp what was at stake here, let us consider how these elements are related. We saw above that crude materialism, as developed by Hobbes, was dualistic. It vested objectivity in a neutral, observing person living in a world in which objective qualities were radically separable from subjective ones. Innis realized that objectivity in this sense was the philosophical version of imperial self-certainty. This kind of certainty undermined history - meaning, in this context, long-term thinking. But its opposite was no better. The sceptical position just abandoned all objectivity in an embrace of subjective qualities. This position denied history as well, since its followers immersed themselves in a kind of eternal present, however much they based their outlook on class. This part of Innis's critique paralleled Adorno's and Benjamin's concerns about the static assumptions in Marxist theory. It followed that some kind of objectivity was needed to defend a historical outlook and the separation of scholarly theory from political practice. Innis's 1935 response to Urwick showed a nuanced understanding of the issues involved.22 It also showed him moving towards a concept of the object that was tied to a negative theory of history. He argued that the worshippers of statistics did not have a corner on the concept of objectivity. One did not have to define objects within frameworks that advertised themselves as separating non-bias from total bias, space from time, or objectivity from subjectivity. Frameworks of this sort were oppressive: they offered no escape from immediacy. Instead, one could define them - negatively, by studying the biases or limitations of thinking, and historically, by studying how those limitations had developed. Innis put the position as follows: "The innumerable difficulties of the social scientist are paradoxically his only salvation. Since the social scientist cannot be 'scientific' or 'objective' [sic] because of the contradiction in terms, he can learn of his numerous limitations. The 'sediment of experience' provides the basis of scientific investigation. The never-ending shell of life suggested in the persistent character of bias provides possibilities of intensive study of the limitations of life and its probable direction. ... The habits or biases of individuals which permit prediction are reinforced in the cumulative bias of institutions and constitute the chief interest of the social scientist."23 And, of course, biases always indicate marginalization. So here was a concept of social science whose key focus was negative history. It

50 Unthinking Modernity

was a concept of objectivity that focused on the biases of subjectivity, revealed through historical study of the institutions that bore, communicated, and reproduced them. The analysis would be objective in so far as it revealed how human institutions (concrete objects) produced margins and validated such revelations as the sources of intellectual growth. To use Adorno's language, it would be objective in so far as it recognized the ways in which identities (such as institutions) were not identical with themselves - in which A did not simply equal A - and validated that recognition as truth. This objectivity, as Innis had put it, would depend not on attempts to be scientific in the absolutist, predictive sense but rather on being aware of science's limitations. This objectivity would allow one to see how individuals and cultures are never entirely captured by our classification systems. It would allow one, in Innis's language, to see truth as something revealed by the margins (biases) produced by all attempts to identify. We can see this thematic tie to the European theorists more clearly still by considering Adorno's parallel attempt to defend separating theory from practice. Like Innis, Adorno understood that a contemporary defence of theory hinged on waging a successful battle with scepticism, or, in his words, relativism. As Adorno saw it, relativism was partially a consequence of the new, post-Darwinian historicism that saw all dimensions of life, values included, as relative to time and place. Innis would have been no stranger to this interpretation. Darwin's view had also troubled many of Canada's theologians: it was pretty difficult to maintain an unchanging theory of salvation when people were starting to believe that values change with the times.24 As the son of ardent Christians, trained at two Baptist universities, Innis would have understood the questions that this controversy raised. His choice to deal with them through the medium of social science, however, placed him in a camp closer to the Frankfurt School. Adorno's strategy was to argue that relativism was just another form of crude atomism, the theory that reduced societies to sets of more or less identical parts. Like Innis, he believed that this theory was most powerfully expressed through the medium of price. For Adorno, price was the modern market device that reduced labour and its products to mere exchangeable figures. But the effects did not stop there. They extended to opinions, too. Moreover - and this is where Adorno's analysis becomes typically mind-bending - this latter effect operated through a perverse cultural obsession with individual opinion. For Adorno, the high value that modern culture placed on opinion was just a masking device: it was a screen behind

5i

Innis's Formative Years

which astute observers could see steady erosion of critical thought. In the world of exchange value, an opinion was only as good as the price it could fetch on the market. Once in place, this hypocrisy left no solid criterion of truth, and hence nowhere from which to launch a real critique. "Relativism," Adorno wrote in 1944, "is a popularized, shallow materialism," because deeper or more critical forms of thought simply get in the way of money-making.25 Critical thought exposes domination in the marketplace and gets in the market's way, a fact that explains the bourgeois fear of objective knowledge and the modern compulsion to reduce theorists, as Innis put it, to pools of reserve labour.26 If only to warn of this danger, Adorno wrote, theory had to keep its distance from the institutions of the day. In his words, "The call for unity of theory and practice has irresistibly degraded theory to a servant's role, removing the very traits it should have brought to that unity ... Today, with theory paralyzed and disparaged by the all-governing bustle, its mere existence, however impotent, bears witness against the bustle."27 In response, Adorno called for a new human subject capable of questioning his or her acts of identification, or, more cryptically, a form of subjectivity that could think against its own identifications.28 He argued that dialectic's true substance is the resistance that all otherness (each object that we try to classify) offers to our efforts at classification. Dialectic's true substance is negation, the limitations that become obvious in every effort to find truth, or, as Innis wrote, the revelations that emerge from our own and others' biases. This analysis calls for a concept of truth quite different from knowledge in the absolute sense. Innis expressed the difference by asserting that it is the main task of civilizations to question their own presuppositions,29 and the task of their institutions of learning - the universities - to remember that their existence depends on the search for truth, and not on truth.30 His foray into the history of communication was his self-styled attempt to make visible the processes that had stifled that search. A discussion of Innis's intellectual development would not be complete without some reference to the scholars who stimulated his thinking during his formative years. Four theorists are especially relevant here. These are James Ten Broeke, with whom Innis studied philosophy and psychology during his undergraduate years at McMaster; Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark, with whom he studied economics as a graduate student at Chicago; and Thorstein Veblen, whose written work he absorbed in a critical manner. The following brief account is not intended to be representative, for that

52 Unthinking Modernity

sort of survey clearly belongs to another project. Rather, it is designed to highlight Innis's exposure to analyses of modernity as spatially biased and, as in the case of Ten Broeke and Clark, to negative, or open-ended, alternatives. Of these four, James Ten Broeke seems to have had a particularly strong impact; Innis kept the notes he took in his classes - something he did not do for other courses.31 Moreover, he defined the analysis in his own text, The Bias of Communication (1951), as a response to questions that this instructor had raised. A Canadian idealist, Ten Broeke was deeply influenced by Hegelian thought; he saw his task as developing a dialectical method and introducing that method to Canadian students. In his view, Hegel had produced a more solid philosophical foundation for holistic thinking than had Plato or Aristotle.32 The key to that solidity was Hegel's perspective on the interactive nature of all human knowledge. In a manner that foreshadowed Adorno's thoughts on the preponderance of the object, he argued that no mind could express or construct more than a part of the totality. Our ability to share the totality - to share the world was due only to the fact that we are beings that share a language.33 By sharing a language, we share in the many formulations possible and the ability to listen to perspectives other than our own. Innis's indebtedness to these insights and to the Hegelian theme is reflected in his decision to open The Bias of Communication with Hegel's image of the owl of Minerva; in a larger sense, it is reflected in his focus on communication itself. Nominally, Ten Broeke was a theologian - a useful orientation for a man teaching at what was then a theologically minded university. But he had an odd brand of theology that, when examined closely (apparently not done often), made him, in Innis's words, "by far the most heretical thinker in the University."34 Following his linguistic bent, he defined God in terms of what it means to use the word "God." Moreover, as in critical theory, he did so in a manner that showed sensitivity to the Utopian (that is, wishful) aspects of identification. According to Ten Broeke, the word "God" expressed the human need for life in its fulness, belief in God expressed the strength of the human conviction that such a life was possible, and the difficulty of defining God was the difficulty of explaining this need adequately.35 Thus, an ideal always expresses an unfulfilled desire or need. In his later work, Innis developed this idea by showing that the media available for expression have an important role in fostering or suppressing these needs and the awareness of them. Ten Broeke's Hegelian outlook was a more common feature of North American intellectual life than is often realized. In the late

53 Innis's Formative Years

i9th century, Hegelian thought had been much revered and promoted at Oxford, chiefly through the teachings of Bernard Bosanquet, F.H. Bradley, and T.H. Green. From there, it had been carried by scholars such as Edward Caird to the universites of Scotland, which, in turn, were prime sources for the recruitment of Canada's first professors.36 The Germanic influence was more clearly evident in the United States, whence Canada also obtained teaching staff. Between 1820 and 1920, no less than 9,000 American scholars had studied and/or received graduate degrees in Germany. The reason for this choice was simple. Germany had pioneered both the study of modern culture and advanced study in the natural sciences.37 These students had brought back with them the ideas of Hegel and, more immediately, of scholars such as Georg Simmel (well known to Adorno and Benjamin), Wilhelm Windelband, and Wilhelm Wundt. The Germanic ideas became new tools through which returned scholars developed distinctive North American theories of modernity. The early Chicago school, with which Innis did his graduate work, was alive with this influence, as seen from the writings of men such as Robert Ezra Park. In Canada, this influence was as evident as anywhere in the universties, such as McMaster, founded by Baptists. Whilst as Chicago, Innis absorbed some of this Germanic influence through his study of the works of Thorstein Veblen, whom we consider below. But he was also directly exposed to the teachings of two economic theorists who developed a critique of modernity as spatially biased - Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark. Predictably, both were social and ethical theorists as well. Knight was keenly aware of the static character of Western science. In his words, propositions in natural or human history were timeless (a-historical) in so far as they were based on modern scientific criteria for truth,38 for, as he said, in science all time was space.39 Like Adorno and Benjamin, Knight extended this analysis by taking the more radical view that modernity was authoritarian: the "prediction and control" attitude behind science, which applied laboratory techniques to social studies, was best suited to the would-be dictator standing in a one-sided relation of control to a society.40 Knight was equally critical of modern liberal theories, since these, too, were atomistic and so bought into the fetish of prediction and control. Liberal theories promoted the power of the individual over others or over society and, as such, were unsuited to a democracy. "The habit of thinking of life problems in terms of means and ends," he argued, "must be prevented from carrying over into the social field itself if ethical society - which is to say any true society - is to

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exist."41 Liberalism was an ideology that defined human intelligence in purely instrumental, antagonistic, terms.42 So any true society would have to be non-liberal in some sense. John Maurice Clark extended these themes by developing a dialectical method that contrasted starkly with the way economics was taught in his day. Like its ancient predecessor, this new dialectic was an interactive pedagogy. It was designed to do battle with what Clark termed "Euclidean" (or classical) economics, and he called it an experiment in the simultaneous truth of opposites.43 He and his students would look at the definitions in standard economic theory and then juxtapose them with their inverted forms. For example, they would examine a concept such as capital, which was commonly understood as a set of instruments, such as machines and money, that people used to produce wealth and better their lives. To this concept they would contrast the opposite proposition: that people are a set of instruments that capital and machines use for the sake of their own increase and betterment.44 The gap between the two provided the main focus of meditation. It was not Clark's intention to deny the truth of either inversion. Nor did he see this exercise as a mere game of logic. In his view, it was the natural method of revealing human realities inaccessible to Euclidean thought. The inversions often represented truths more urgent and vital for the generation in question than did the definitions on which it had been raised.45 The inversion on capital, for example, raised the possibility that Euclidean thought served machines better than it served people.46 Like Adorno and Benjamin, Clark defined truth here not in terms of an Archimedean point but in terms of its capacity to foster human emancipation. His study in opposites was a negative method: it confronted ideology with its marginalized opposites and derived truth from that juxtaposition. Clark argued that the real learning we derive from technological advances comes not so much from studying their positive capabilities as from recognizing their unintended consequences; in the end, the latter will probably far outweigh the former. Thorstein Veblen, an earlier theorist of the Chicago school, provided a rather different perspective on these issues.47 Known best for his biting critique of North American culture's consumptive excesses, Veblen had no direct contact with Innis,48 who absorbed his ideas rather through systematic study of his texts.49 Innis was especially influenced by Veblen's peculiar way of undermining the theory of psychological hedonism, one of the pillars of crude materialism. Psychological hedonism purports to explain all human behaviour as a simple movement towards pleasure and away from pain. It

55 Innis's Formative Years

received its first overt expression by the 18th-century theorist Jeremy Bentham, but it was already implicit in the simple manner in which his predecessor, Hobbes, had understood the simple to-and-fro movements of the parts of his social universe. As an economist, Veblen had encountered Bentham's idea in the form of price theory, an economic approach that is as common in our day as it was in his.50 According to that theory, the prices that confront us when we enter the shopping mall accurately reflect the usefulness or pleasure-giving qualities of the items attached to them. The money we spend on education, on planting trees, on social welfare, or on transport provides a true reading of the value we place on these things. Obversely, money not spent reflects the areas that give us no pleasure. Veblen responded to this slippery definition with what is often called an institutional approach to social theory. He argued that modern market purchases are governed by a socially defined system that ranks commodities according to a symbolic order of prestige. In the modern world, people do not choose things with pleasure or utility in mind; they buy to emulate the behaviour and status of those who can afford the highest-ranking commodities. The driving force behind these purchases is the human vulnerability to humiliation and corresponding need for social acceptance. In the face of these factors, pleasure and utility often fall by the wayside. Putting this point in the sardonic manner that became a hallmark of his work, Veblen wrote, "As we are all aware, the chief element of value in many articles of apparel is not their efficiency for protecting the body but for protecting the wearer's respectability and that not only in the eyes of one's neighbors but even in one's own eyes. Indeed it happens not very rarely that a person chooses to go ill-clad in order to be welldressed."51 Two things struck Innis as important here. The first was Veblen's collectivist or institutional focus: social values are products not of monads carrying out private versions of the happy calculus but of a historically developed set of rules that set the boundaries for the choices that can be made. Throughout his work both early and late, Innis maintained this kind of sensitivity towards collective values.52 The second and related point is the resistance that this focus offered to any final concept of economics, for such a concept can exist only beyond the pale of culture.53 In practice, every culture has distinctive ideas about prestige, and so no two economies are ever identical. Innis praised Veblen for his willingness to demonstrate his own distinctiveness by avoiding absorption into current intellectual movements, a quality that undoubtedly grew on him as his work on media and his subsequent alienation proceeded.54

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There was, however, one major point of disagreement between the two theorists, and that was over Veblen's concept of the relation between machine industry and the price system (the system of capital) in which it was ensconced. Despite his dim view of modern culture - indeed, in contradiction with it - Veblen had a fondness for modern machines. He believed that mechanical inventions were the outcome of a natural enterprising spirit. But, he thought, that spirit was threatened by the motives of businessmen - the managers of the price system - whose collective will to monopoly worked against it. So Veblen imagined an ideal world governed by a technocracy of engineers, an elite whose unfettered creativity would serve the best interests of growth in every sense of the word. In spite of himself, Veblen remained a solid supporter of the Enlightenment and its notion of progress. Innis rejected this view because he denied that a technology could be understood separately from the economy in which it had developed. Machines and economies were single, interactive wholes: the values inherent in social systems were always expressed and transmitted through the kinds of technologies developed.55 Whether arrived at independently or through his rethinking of Veblen's work, this holistic insight was to remain a constant in his subsequent work. Innis's first major contribution to the critique of modernity was an economic analysis of Canada that showed the modern view of structure and of time to be inadequate for describing a historically constituted world. Though concretely conceived, his critique had profound theoretical implications. It challenged the space-time social framework conceived by Hobbes and offered a dialectical reading of the West as the historical battlefield between imperial and marginal areas. It developed a negative version of that dialectic by emphasizing the contingent rather than the positive aspects of that history and by-seeing margins rather than empire as the "cutting edge" of historical change. In so doing, it described a fluid world beyond the strictures of dualism, a world in whose light one could see history as a process that was simultaneously integrated and decentred. Let us look more closely at Innis's version of that dialectic. When Innis set out to sketch the development of Canada, he worked from an image that could not be described in the current standard vocabulary on economic growth. Instead of commodities those featureless characters that bowed endlessly to the laws of supply and demand - he saw the staple, an unprocessed material, either grown (as in wheat) or extracted (as in fish), whose very structure set the boundaries for the institutions needed to appropriate

57 Innis's Formative Years

it. He saw, instead of the happy road to global integration, a vortex - an industrial core with a spatializing momentum that drove it constantly to exploit its surroundings as sources of staples and marginal outlets for its own factories. He saw, instead of the Enlightenment road to progress, violence - the centrist drive to suppress manufacturing at the margins, the better to colonize them as markets. And surveying the empire-margin relation from this perspective, he began to see more clearly the essence of the Canadian culture that had drawn such contempt from his military superiors. He saw an entire livelihood caught in the orbit of a relation of dependence that could not but determine much of Canada's subsequent - or lack of subsequent - development.56 For Innis, the story of Canada was the story of the staple, and it could not be told in the standard language of commodity-obsessed economics. This insight into colonial dependence stood in stark contrast with the theories so plentiful in his day and so much more favoured than those of Clark, Knight, and Veblen. Those theories conveyed no sense of history or origins, no sense of culture - indeed, no sense of time. Yet, having originated in the age of imperial commerce, they carried the cultural bias of modernity - the tendency to assume that markets had somehow antedated themselves, that the hidden hand behind Adam Smith's economies had begun its work in prehistoric times by sketching in their future boundaries.57 In the same way, they conveyed no awareness of domination. Yet they dominated the study of economics. In what must have been his earliest recognition of the power of media, Innis described how the textbook industry fostered and perpetuated that domination. New countries, he wrote, were always handicapped by dependence on outside texts. As a consequence, their economic exploitation was always exacerbated by parallel exploitation in intellectual life. Under the pressure of establishing new universities and courses of study, young and struggling Canadian scholars had had little time for theoretical innovation. They had thus been obliged to teach the economic theories of "old countries," as Innis called them, and to fit their own reality into a foreign background. The only escape from this bed of Procrustes was a philosophy of history suited to Canadian needs.58 For Innis, that philosophy ran as follows. Canada had no primordial existence as resource or market awaiting finished goods. It had no pre-existence as a margin. Indeed, it had no single foundational cause at all. It had emerged from a web of contingencies so complex that it belied all efforts at simple classification. Its story had begun with Britain's competitive drive for supremacy in manufacture and its related search for gold - the fluid

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medium that, as we saw above - had given rise to statisics. The success of this drive, in turn, was founded on a developed set of transport technologies (equally a result of competition) powerful enough to reach the waters that bordered on what was later to become Newfoundland. There the imperial travellers found no gold (at least at first), but they did find codfish and, later, fur, and they served the purpose indirectly. The cod was used to feed the fishers and fuel the shipping industry that served the central factories; it was then sold to the Spanish, who completed the transformation by buying it with the desired metal. A phantasmagoric display of modern alchemy, this cod-to-gold economy had two profound and lasting effects. First, it induced Britain to draw a protective or political boundary around the coastal regions needed to support the fishing and to dry and cure the catch for transport. Effectively, this arrangement carved a new politicaleconomic space out of the wilderness and drew that space into a wellestablished system of international trade.59 It placed the area on the developing imperial map and so marked its emergence as a concrete social object, newly represented by a drawn set of coordinates. Fish, dried and incorporated into a vortex of gold and other trade goods, became Newfoundland, the land found and identified to serve the ships that served the empire.60 Second, this same process induced the British to draw a cognitive boundary around the cod itself, and this process had consequences of its own. Once earmarked as an imperial staple, the new product began to shape the colony's internal character. It required the development of local transport systems and organizational structures - an assemblage of work crews, processing equipment, and suitable vessels. Of necessity, the work of extraction followed the staples' geographic distribution and was designed around its distinguishing qualities. And it was these factors, rather than some primordial commodity consciousness, Innis argued, that drew the colony's first institutional boundaries. Moreover, this process was cumulative. Early institutions served as the starting point for, and so structured, all subsequent ones. In Canada, this layering process was most obvious in the fur trade, its first land-based economy. Canada's boundaries, Innis wrote, were determined largely by the framework incidental to the fur trade, and its later industrial development was the story of its adjustment to that framework.61 As Innis showed, these internal structures always fed back into the imperial impulse out of which they had grown. The codfishery provides a good example. In principle, catching codfish does not necessitate a large capital outlay or an extensive infrastructure, and in its

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early days a proliferation of small boats kept the enterprise decentralized. But as it became more fully absorbed into the trade vortex, competition spurred the building of ever-larger vessels, causing the familiar upward spiral of expense. In turn, this inflation caused a broadening and tightening of the grip of monopoly, since now only the wealthy could afford to equip themselves.62 The fur trade provides an alternative example. It had always required a large organization and was thus drawn more quickly into the centrist drive for supremacy. Either way, it was this drive that remained dominant. Using the language of meteorology to describe this process, Innis wrote that marginal cultures were always the "storm centres to the modern international economy."63 Once brought within reach, they were sucked into its trade orbit and onto the political map. As a consequence, cultural-geographic spaces (or social objects) always developed temporally through the agency of global cyclonic winds.64 It is clear from these descriptions that Innis placed a great deal of emphasis on structure, but his view was not mechanistic. Exploitation was never a mere matter of resources and geography for Innis. It was always mediated by cultural values and individual consciousness. Innis noted that European immigrants to Canada had brought with them material and aesthetic tastes acquired in their homeland. They thus wanted as soon as possible to re-create the conditions for enjoying them; this inclination made them especially vulnerable to imperial demands. Consequently, although many had left Europe to escape the grip of social hierarchy, they maintained the staples industry (and the attendant empire) because it gave them something they could trade immediately for the manufactured goods that made the old comforts possible. In addition, Innis argued, a closer look at industries such as the fur trade showed that colonial institutions were mediated as well by methods that immigrants adopted through their encounters with Canada's indigenous peoples. The sum result was a fusion of structure and consciousness, both old and new.65 This fusion was a recognizable totality, but it was at no point a determined one. The mix of geography and culture might have worked out differently. For Innis, this process became the basis for further meditation on history as decentred dialectic, a meditation on cultural and political space as the contingent outcome of dialectics. The staples studies were just as useful for an analysis of how time is created in and through production. They were Innis's first attempt to retrieve from modernity a fluid, personal or cultural sense of time. At this stage in his work, time considerations appeared as aspects of production. Of particular importance to Canada, he noted, were the time-roles played by overhead costs and fixed prices. Innis saw these

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as time-limiting institutions (in his vocabulary, rigidities), which, like all institutions, had marginalizing effects. But the resulting marginalization was different from that produced by Canada's geographical relation to the empire. That relation explained how Canada had emerged as an economic margin. The temporal aspects of production described a second level of marginalization that occurred within the colony itself. It showed how the quality of relations among Canadians came to mirror the spatial attitudes of the central vortex. One of the main institutions responsible for that mirroring was the overhead cost. As Innis showed, an overhead is, in effect, a mass of compressed time. It is the minimum indivisible cost that must be met before any sort of production can be undertaken.66 The elements that make up the overhead include - to borrow from Marx - both the "socially necessary" labour time required to establish and maintain production and the time required to store and transport what is produced. Since most large operations require financing, it also includes the time factor contained in whatever form of credit is used. The heavier the overhead relative to other economic activities, the culturally heavier the product - that is, the more intensely concern with time bears down on the producers. In Innis's analysis, staples producers within the colony responded to heavy overheads by designing strategies to control time. In doing so, they transmitted that heaviness to the colony's social, political, and economic institutions. The fur trade is a prime example. Its overhead included the funds needed to hire a number of sizeable ships, to load them with trade goods, to build and support local trading posts, and to provide ongoing upkeep for a skilled crew. This burdensome cost was exacerbated by a long turnaround period: it could be as long as five or six years between the output for trade goods and the final sale of the furs.67 The fur trade was thus a game of high finance: it was no place for small, independent producers. This elite quality was transmitted to the political arena. High finance called for high levels of defence. A string of forts was required to protect the trade from invaders, and substantial coordination was needed to maintain liaison between producers and protectors. As a result, the early colony was a very centralized place. Transport provides an even stronger example. Building a countrywide transport system was especially difficult in Canada. Cold, rock, and muskeg stretching over enormous, thinly populated areas made for slow construction and heavy financing. Entrepreneurs soon found that such financing was impossible without state support, and would-be financiers who wished to borrow from the empire soon learned that they could not do so without a strong colonial state to

61 Innis's Formative Years

guarantee repayment.68 So for Innis, the Canadian state began as a credit instrument, a way to finance the staples industry. His analysis was designed to show how compressed time helped to shape both the economic and the political constitution of Canada. It showed how overhead costs had turned Canada from a colony to a modern state. Strategies to control time did more than centralize the colony, in Innis's view, for centralization always produces its own margins. When pushed to extremes, time-heaviness can create a powerful impulse towards spatial expansion. High costs entail heavy financing, which brings a repayment schedule independent of all other considerations. This condition creates the second time-limiting institution that concerned Innis - the fixed cost. As he noted, where there are heavy debts, the imperative to meet payments induces entrepreneurs to spread the debt over as large an area as possible. At the same time, the imperative to pay a fixed amount willy-nilly makes it difficult for them to make allowances for economic differences among those who must share the load. The result is a machine-like social system that is insensitive to individual differences and recalls Marx's claim that, in modernity, time is everything and man is nothing. In Canada, the most egregious example was the way in which rigid freight rates were imposed on wheat growers during the Depression, a time when their ability to pay was weakened by factors beyond their control. Their responsive demands for an end to the market, as shown in the development of the CCF, were a clear sign of how unsuitable their economy was to the conditions created by a trade vortex.69 Their general plight showed how the larger empire-margin structure had been taken into the heart of the colony itself. Created initially as a marginal "other" to a centralized economy, the structure came to internalize that economy by creating margins of its own. Thus, western Canada became to Ontario what Ontario had been to Britain, creating the stereotype of the perpetually whining westerner. For Innis, this new internalized form of imperialism was disastrous. Its monopolist thrust was threatening all forms of economic, cultural, and intellectual life that were unsuitable to a market society. This very closure was spelling the end of the unfolding development of thought within Canada. Given the seriousness of these issues, Innis saw an urgent need to develop an adequate mode of analysis. But this need would never be understood within the framework of modernity. As Innis put it, "The static approach to economic theory has been of limited assistance in meeting the problem of time."70 That approach was thus the key target of his developing philosophy. His decentred descriptions, both early and late, were his own innovative readings of the necessary alternative.

62 Unthinking Modernity

Innis later carried the analytical vocabulary that he developed from the 19205 on over to his attempts to trace the history of the West through its communication systems (he was writing on the press by the mid-i93os). We now look at some of the intricacies and tensions in that vocabulary, beginning with the concept of "culture." From the perspective of Innis's later project, his initial choice of culture as a focus was ideal. To understand a nation as a culture is immediately to see it in a non-static and non-dualistic way. Cultures are necessarily historical things. Moreover, unlike the dichotomous space-time world described by Hobbes, they are interactively spatial and temporal, as Innis showed so well. Similarly, in contrast to the scientific view that separates objective from subjective perspectives, they are at once objective, by virtue of their materiality, and subjective, by virtue of the unique forms of consciousness that they produce. Hence, like language, cultures are innately decentred. Innis's choice was partially intuitive at this stage, but the inherent logic was flawless. The concept of culture also had a Utopian purpose in Innis's work. A vibrant culture is highly desirable for any human society. Innis is not usually seen as a Utopian thinker; much of his writing exhibits the air of bemused cynicism reminiscent of Veblen's dry wit. But Innis had an ideal, and, to the extent that he was prepared to make it explicit, it was contained in the way he juxtaposed the terms "culture" and "civilization." Like Adorno and Benjamin, Innis saw his ideal in negative terms. He rejected the idea that rigidity was entirely avoidable. He knew that all cultures had marginalizing effects, and so he did not try to argue that good cultures have no rigidities at all. He argued instead that to be civilized one had simultaneously to accept and reject (or think against) those rigidities. To clarify this stance, let us return briefly to Adorno's concept of negative dialectics as "thought thinking against itself." In Adorno's view, classifying the world was a natural expression of the human need for control.71 Imposing concrete classifications such as mapped boundaries and systems or abstract ones such as concepts was therefore to some degree unavoidable. "All living," Adorno wrote, "entails some biceps flexing."72 And as part of "all living," all thinking imposes boundaries on the elusive and fluid particulars of everyday life, for "to think is to identify."73 This insight struck at the heart of a difficulty inherent in any critique of reason. Critics of reason are always faced with a paradox: they must criticize the use of categories by using categories. There is always a temptation here to try to abandon all categories by sticking to impressionistic descriptions of the world. But this approach, as we saw above, only keeps us focused on the immediate. Descriptions of long-term

63 Innis's Formative Years

trends can never be made on such personal bases. Like Innis, Adorno rejected this short-term option. It was elusive. One could not avoid "the One," he wrote HellenisticaHy, by attempting to take direct hold of the corresponding "Many."74 Instead, one had to study this larger "one" by reflecting on it negatively. This exercise required something like Clark's work on the simultaneous truth of opposites. It required seeing that classification systems both represent the world and do not represent it. In Adorno's cryptic formulation, it required developing a philosophy that understood likeness as that which is unlike itself.75 This approach would create a new vision of truth as an unfolding of the tension between representation and non-representation - a second-order awareness that would undercut at one level the classifications developed at another. In short, it would be thought thinking against itself. Innis was well aware of this paradox. He knew that, like all systems of thought or reasoning, cultures were good things, because they provided avenues for understanding the world, and bad things, because they limited that understanding by imposing their own assumptions. He addressed the paradox by describing cultures in terms of these two faces. About the problematic face, he wrote: "It is perhaps a unique characteristic of civilization that each civilization believes in its uniqueness and its superiority to other civilizations. Indeed this may be the meaning of culture - i.e., something which we have that others have not. It is probably for this reason that writings on culture can be divided into those attempting to weaken other cultures and those attempting to strengthen their own."76 From this formulation we understand that civilizations or cultures are controlling and xenophobic. As demonstrated by their literatures, they fear others, whom they define so as to weaken. But he wrote as well: "The conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology and the mechanization of knowledge and with them, western civilization."77 This statement proposes that civilization is something beyond rigid classifications and, far from being identical with them, must be retrieved from them. Innis reiterated this idea in his claim that the measure of a civilization is its capacity to question its own principles. He expressed it again by arguing that culture is concerned not with the struggle for supremacy but with educating the individual to appraise problems in the broader terms of space and time.78 Thus, for Innis, civilization or culture, like reason itself, causes concern because it is the form through which fanaticism or identitarianism develops. It implies a certain amount of "biceps flexing." But it is also the form through which self-reflexiveness and openness can

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be developed; it has the capacity to see its own basic principles as less than entirely basic. It can define its likeness to universality as less than universal, or, as Innis put it, it may be measured by its general tolerance of unintelligibility.79 It may thus be defined by how tolerant it is of its own (or anyone else's) ineffability. In his later studies on media, Innis deepened these insights. Like "culture," "media" constituted a category that was well suited to his topic. It encompassed both matter and mind and tended towards definition and ambiguity simultaneously. Innis explored this tension through a new concept, the "bias," a term that denoted the tendency of any institution to degenerate into stasis. For Innis, bias was inherent in all communications media and, as a consequence, in all cultures. He demonstrated that the biases of consciousness associated with political, economic, and geographical factors emerged through the media that developed in conjunction with them. This approach provided a powerful account of the necessary relation among production, communication, and consciousness. As such, it provided a concrete way of traversing the theoretical territory covered by Adorno and Benjamin. This interpretation of Innis calls into question some of the ways in which he has been read. His most sympathetic interpreters assumed that he was searching for a new, positive theory. As a result, they often apologized for his lack of logical closure. A. John Watson, for example, concluded that Innis's "real failure" was that he "simply did not succeed in fitting all the determining elements highlighted in the communications works into an integrated whole."80 Robin Neill rightly concluded that Innis, in his communications studies, never meant to present a comprehensive doctrine,81 but he argued that this lacuna weakened Innis's work because we were offered no basis for prediction.82 But indeterminacy, understood dialectically, was Innis's developing analytical focus. Thus Innis requires no such apology. His writings, both in form and in content, should be seen as a historical critique of the thinking that identifies itself with logical closure and predictability. In this sense, they could comfortably bear the general title, "beyond identity."

CHAPTER

FOUR

Innis: Communications and the Negative Dialogue

Through his political economy, Harold Innis had begun to reveal how economic systems affect the philosophical assumptions of those who live them. He showed, for example, that the present-mindedness associated with statistical method grew out of an obsession with gold as a medium of exchange. He demonstrated further that this was significant because present-mindedness fostered imperial attitudes that, like Adorno's identitarianism, were insensitive to cultural differences. This reasoning clearly linked political economy to political culture. Adorno was especially interested in revealing how modern markets, as carriers of the spatial bias, trampled the labouring classes. Innis focused more on the plight of cultures colonized by the market operating at a global level. His task was to explain how economic inequities led to quasi-class relations between cultures. The staples studies also shed light on what Innis had called "meeting the problem of time." Innis understood that spatial methods lack the semantic ability to express differences between time-frames. A person who is convinced that the price system is written into reality will see every product as a commodity, featuring only a price and a quantity. This view glosses over the difference between a staple and a commodity in the same way that the retronym "horseless buggy" glosses over the difference between car transport and horse transport. In both cases, the person will lose the sense that these things belong to entirely different life-styles, featuring different qualities of lived time. Innis met this problem by showing that a staple was not simply a commodity: it had more than quantity and price. It had special qualities that gave rise to a distinctive sets of institutions. In this way, he helped to retrieve Canada's history as a fluid, decentred process, which flowed from unique circumstances, not only from a central principle.1 Adorno's neo-Marxist program had called for questioning

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how classes or societies identify themselves, for "challenging these objects' concepts of themselves."2 Innis took a similar route when he challenged the concepts (such as commodity) that identified Canada as a mere extension of empire. Innis's approach was by far the more concrete. Innis questioned an object's (empire's) concepts of itself. Yet despite its usefulness, Innis's political economy was bound to remain a limited tool. Innis knew how dangerous it was to impose the theories derived from one setting onto another. Thus, he could hardly have chosen to hypostatize his work by applying it to other countries, colonial or otherwise. That he was alert to this limitation is shown by the absence of any such attempt. Thus, as it stood, the staples thesis provided no avenue to a broader understanding of the dialectical processes that Innis had set out to explore. To expand this work, he needed a more universal object of inquiry - something that would allow him to see beyond the dialectic of a specific empire and margin. Happily, Canada was equally rich in such an alternative. It had the imported economics textbook, the medium through which the empire's economic concepts had been imposed on the colony's institutions of learning. For the man who was to develop a new concept of objectivity based on the biases of subjectivity, this new focus was ideal. It was a material thing, objectively measurable because it came out of a specific production process, but it was also a mental and subjective one, since it carried the ideas of the market culture. Thus to explore the biases in its production was equally to explore the thoughts behind these biases. As well, the text, as a product of mechanized print, was the perfect foil for the sound-based paradigm towards which Innis was moving. For him, that paradigm centred on the qualities of dialogue, a medium whose intangible and non-visual character would never have permitted ideas to be imposed so widely and uniformly. This shift in scholarly focus by the late 19405 was Innis's epistemological turning point. It was his way of moving analytically from economic and geographical empires to empires of the mind. In taking this direction, he stepped through the lookingglass into a far more comprehensive field of study. The new field offered a panoramic view of the West - a way to see beyond the smooth surface of rationality that surrounded him. In making this shift, Innis kept his working vocabulary basically unchanged but stretched it to cover a broader range of meaning. He continued to study the way that centralized systems both caused and were caused by time rigidities, but he now used the term "rigidity" more often to describe systems of thought. Similarly, he began to use the term "monopoly" more frequently, to describe what he called

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monopolies of knowledge. Given his penchant for "dirt research," Innis analysed knowledge by looking at monopolies of communications media, since it is through media that knowledge is expressed. At the same time, he increased the historical reach of his work. Like Adorno and Benjamin, he had come to recognize the persistence of communicative monopolies in the West and so cast his critical eye on the entire tradition. He traced the origins of specific monopolies, showed how they persisted, and theorized on why they failed. Thus the term "monopoly" came to refer not only to ways of thinking but to a Western tradition as such. As he had done in his political economy, Innis analysed media monopolies in terms of time and space. This method allowed him to demonstrate materially something that Adorno and Benjamin had shown philosophically: that monopolies of thought are incoherent because they always marginalize someone and, in so doing, create their own antitheses. Whilst he understood that systems of thought had a creative side, he saw that when they hardened into institutions they became destructive. "Most organizations," he wrote, "appear as bodies founded for the painless extinction of [the] ideas of the founders."3 This deeply material approach was Innis's contribution to the larger themes we have been exploring: the critique of modernity, the retrieval of human time, and a new, sound-based paradigm. Innis's epistemological shift was not a move towards a mechanistic and monocausal theory of history. But Innis has been read as a mechanist so often that the point is worth repeating. Innis never offered a determinist version of history based on certain media or on binary sets of oppositional media. Rather, he added an important causal layer to the geographical, political, and economic analyses that he had already developed. This expansion enabled him to extend his study of institutions to the cultural perceptions and values attending them. Moreover, he carried out this study with the help of a greatly widened referential literature, much of which concentrated overtly on the history of Western thought. As a consequence, his later writings became more philosophical. Like Adorno and Benjamin and like McLuhan to follow, he worked substantively by considering the importance of sound as a medium and formally by experimenting with a constellational method of writing. This project required important changes in Innis's research technique. The direct data-gathering process that had been his mainstay had to give way to reading histories. The volume of information required for the new topic precluded gathering it himself, and the breadth of his project required expertise in more subjects than could be mastered by one person. Instead of travelling and observing, then,

68 Unthinking Modernity

Innis read. This charge hardly decreased his workload. Indeed, he surpassed his earlier efforts in the staples studies. His new reading list could have comprised a small library: the bibliography exceeded 90 pages, listing more than 2,000 volumes,4 and included histories of Western thought encompassing the topics of knowledge, politics, language, religion, and mythology. To these were added materialist histories of media from stone to paper, histories of the alphabet by Rhys Carpenter, Milman Parry, and others, and myriad standard political and economic histories. In addition, to bridge the latter two kinds of works, it included cultural histories that covered music, literature, architecture, and art.5 Some of these cultural studies, though nominally specialized, were also written from a broad philosophical viewpoint. This expanded research base was Innis's approach to the broad conceptual categories, such as politics and language, that are the main objects of philosophy. It was his attempt to address these concepts concretely by discovering their material and historical origins. The result was a self-styled materialist course on the history of Western thought. This course had interesting features that made it like critical theory. The European sources on which it drew were largely Germanic. Thus Innis shared a literary background with Adorno and Benjamin. His European sources on the history of Western thought, for example, were Jacob Burkhardt, Ernst Cassirer, Werner Jaeger, and Siegfried Kracauer - the latter, a colleague of Adorno and Benjamin. He also studied the work of Siegfried Giedion, a Swiss cultural historian,6 whose French and German texts also served as sources for Benjamin.7 We have seen that he was an avid student of Thorstein Veblen's work, and Veblen, who had been trained in philosophy, was an important source on German economic thought and on the writings of Kant.8 Indeed, Veblen was one of the main conduits of German historicism to American social theory. Finally, Innis read some original work by Hegel and Nietzsche. It is likely that the Germanic bent of his schooling influenced these choices. In his new course on philosophy, Innis also remained immanently historical, as can be seen from his decision to concentrate on reading histories. But it can also be seen from how he used these histories to undercut the static notion that Western technological progress is the only progress imaginable - a central pillar of modernity. In forming his reading lists, Innis did not confine himself to literature that harmonized with his approach. For example, many of his sources labelled ancient peoples as savage or barbarian according to schemes of classification common in his day. Many portrayed history as a single, Eurocentric narrative describing the ascent of humans as the

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ascent of Western reason: H.M. Chadwick, a source on classics, referred to ancient peoples as not quite children but not entirely mature;9 T.F. Carter, in his history of printing, saw the growth of civilization as a result of the "glory of the European genius";10 and Benjamin Farrington, a historian of science, saw history as the progressive overcoming of obstacles (superstition, popular ignorance, deceit) to the scientific outlook.11 Innis responded to this material in two ways. First, he drew selectively on the historical information and ignored the rest. Second, he drew on alternative sources to show that the obsession with progress was an ideological barrier to seeing Western-style progress as a historical phenomenon. It was a barrier to recognizing values that, though badly in need of reconsideration, were now largely taken for granted. He wrote, "The philosophies of Hegel, Comte and Darwin became enslaved to the superstition of progress. In the corruption of political science confident predictions, irritating and incapable of refutation, replaced discussion of right and wrong."12 Thus, although Innis chose his bibliography, he cannot be defined by any portion of it. He developed his communications studies by reading and interweaving many perspectives, and the resulting tapestry was clearly of his own design. As we can see, Innis's new approach was also emphatically interdisciplinary. His broad range was his own practical rebellion against academic specialization - in his view, a modern disease that threatened to render Westerners incapable of dialogue. Addressing a conference of Commonwealth universities in 1950, Innis stated: "An interest in economics implies neglect of the work of professional historians, philosophers and sociologists ... Knowledge has been divided to the extent that it is apparently hopeless to expect a common point of view ... I propose to ask why ... all of us [specialists] here seem to be what is wrong with Western civilisation."13 The remedy that he suggested was a reconstituted philosophy: something that gathered in the diaspora of divisions in order to make a dialogue possible. But the goal here was not a "common point of view" in any crude sense: it was not to aim at unanimity. For Innis, a single, unanimous approach to a subject would only marginalize some part of it. What he wanted was a philosophy that, like a negative dialogue, was based on limitation.14 He realized that a common viewpoint in this sense required an unusually open method - one that ideally might have emerged from a more open-minded conference of specialists. Since such a gathering was unlikely in the positivist 19505 (especially in North America), its nearest equivalent was a synthetic reading of

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many and varied source materials. For Innis, the result was a oneman program in interdisciplinary studies. The wide-ranging program was also a logical consequence of Innis's attempt to develop a reading of history that was not crudely objective. In a subtle reading, no perspective can be deemed irrelevant a priori. Since one cannot know in advance what constellation of elements was decisive for any given event, one must approach its study openly. And if the aim is to portray the historical totality as having no absolute centre, there is in any case no reason to approach it otherwise. This condition leaves little alternative to read widely, which became an essential part of Innis's route to a negative dialectic. Experimenting with these methods deepened Innis's understanding of empire as world-historical phenomenon. Innis used the concept of empire as a bridge between his political economy and his subject, epistemology. He tracked the history of Western thought by describing the rise and fall of empires from ancient Egypt to their modern successors. As in his earlier work, his approach challenged empires both politically and epistemologically. In this effort, the long-range perspective on empire was a crucial innovation. Given Innis's choice to remain a concrete analyst, he needed that time-frame to show how and why collapse is inherent in the concept of empire. He needed to demonstrate that empires and their monopolies of knowledge collapsed when they could not deal with the groups that they marginalized. This broadened outlook allowed him to generalize an argument inherent in his Canadian studies: that marginal groups are the carriers of critical and innovative perspectives. Unfortunately, this view of empire is not so obvious from a straightforward reading of Innis's writings. He frequently referred not only to the rise and fall of empires but to their success or failure, or to their efficiency or inefficiency. This nomenclature is confusing, because, if understood normatively, it suggests that Innis saw "successful" and "efficient" empires as possible and desirable - hardly congruent with a theory of objectivity that stresses incoherence, or non-identity. Interpretations of Innis's work reflect this confusion: some analysts have remained silent on what he meant by "empire"15 others have suggested that, for him, an empire was not such an undesirable thing;16 a third group has argued that he was a hardheaded realist and treated empires as necessary if undesirable, parts of the world.17 A closer reading shows that his outlook was more complex than this. We can see this most clearly by looking at how he defined empire in Empire and Communications (1950) and how he put that definition to use.

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Innis began by noting that the 20th century had seen increased concern with the study of civilizations. Here he referred particularly to the grand works of Spengler and Toynbee. But, he continued, a proper study of Western economic history showed that it was not enough to be concerned with civilizations. One had to be concerned with empires as well.18 These opening comments draw a distinction between civilizations or cultures, which, we should remember, carried a Utopian meaning for Innis, and empires. Innis enlarged on this distinction by stating: "Civilizations can survive only through a concern with their limitations and in turn through a concern with the limitations of their institutions, including empires."19 So, for him, an empire was an institution within civilization - one that threatened the latter's survival because it had no awareness of its own limitations. Moreover, this threat was exacerbated when, as in the case of modern method, the studies ended by blinding students to cultural distinctiveness. Citing an example, Innis wrote: "With the dominance of arithmetic and the decimal system ... modern students have accepted the linear measure of time. The dangers of applying this procrustean device in the appraisal of civilisations in which it did not exist illustrate one of the numerous problems."20 The linear measure of time is Hobbes's measure, which conceives time spatially as a series of uniform segments. As we saw above, it is insensitive to how time varies with the characteristics of communication and production. To combat this problem, Innis developed a profound and dislocating form of analysis that demonstrated that static presuppositions were imperial presuppositions and that these posed a threat to creative thinking. Innis described his plan of attack as follows: "I have attempted to meet these problems by using the concept of empire as an indication of the efficiency of communication. It will reflect ... the efficiency of particular media of communication and its possibilities in creating conditions favourable to creative thought.21 In other words, he set out to track the opportunities for creative thought by examining the relation between empire and the "efficiency of communication." But what did he mean by "efficiency"? How does efficiency enhance creative thought? The answer is: negatively, a point that comes to light if we look at the ambiguity in Innis's use of the term "efficiency." Innis sometimes used it positively, to denote short-run cost-effectiveness. In his studies of the press, for example, he uses it to refer to competitive mechanical speeds. In a market system, the press is efficient if it is competitively speedy.22 But in this case, Innis linked efficiency to the growth of monopolies and the consequent narrowing of creative thought, not

a

to its flourishing. He showed that as the newspaper industry became more efficient, its product became increasingly homogeneous and so less open to alternative viewpoints. At other times he used the term negatively. For example, in his study of Greece, he argued that a political organization was "efficient" when it could attract talented people and that its ability to do so depended on the absence of any monopoly of written or spoken media. As he noted, where such media could coincide without fusing, each would function as a critical tool relative to the other. The juxtaposition would provide intellectual space for creativity. Along the same lines, in his study of Persia, he argued that an empire would remain "efficient" if it could remain politically decentralized, religiously pluralistic, and democratic in its deployment of communications media.23 These usages are consistent in Innis's work and show that, for him, efficiency was a good thing only in the negative sense. The overlap in usage may be confusing, but the intention is not. For Innis, there was an inverse relation between monopolistic fixity and creativity. An empire thus would be efficient and successful in promoting civilization if it had no monopoly of communication and, by extension, no monopoly of knowledge. It would be successful if it had a plurality of media which, like Innis's bibliographical sources, might function as mutually critical viewpoints. The successful empire would thus be a non-empire. That Innis remained consistent in this outlook can be seen clearly by looking at his accounts of empires. Each shows that it was precisely at the point when civilizations became empires that they collapsed. In this way, Innis showed concretely that as fixed identities, to use the European language, empires were always incoherent and, conversely, that they were coherent only when they were not so fixed. Of special interest in this new anti-imperial work is the way Innis used the categories of space, time, and bias to show how media and media empires affect societies. The categories made possible a multilevelled historical look at the sad fate of dialogue in the West. They also paralleled Adorno's and Benjamin's categories, since they functioned as cognates for idealism and crude materialism, concepts that are common to European critics of modernity. Like Adorno and Benjamin, the later Innis was convinced that the dualism of idea and matter in the West led to crude notions of objectivity; that this crudity led to time-blindeness; and that it prevented people from being able to converse openly. To gain facility with these concepts, Innis consulted the work of other space-time theorists. These included Francis M. Cornford,

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whose essay, "The Invention of Space" (1936), an early classic, traced what the author called the spatial, or Newtonian concept of time to the early Greek atomists,24 and James T. Shotwell, a historian with whom Innis had worked in the 19305. Shotwell argued that people often overlook the special qualities of time because they have no senses with which to grasp it directly. Innis also read the works of Pitrim A. Sorokin and Robert K. Merton, American sociologists who emphasized social time over Newtonian time,25 and Martin P. Nilsson, who linked qualitative conceptions of time to oral traditions.26 Cornford, Merton, and Sorokin were especially aware of working in the age of relativity theory, which called for reconsidering Newton's (and thus Hobbes's) assumptions. According to Merton and Sorokin, human time must always be seen in terms of the beats, pulsations, and rhythms of social activities.27 Space and time are common topics in current studies of modernity, but, as we saw in chapter i, few of these works show an awareness of Innis's research or, indeed, of the other time theorists whom he consulted. Part of the explanation may lie in Innis's odd way of approaching abstract thought. It is not simply that his texts are difficult. If the current interest in European and European-inspired post-modern theory is any indication, there is no lack of enthusiasm today for such texts. But Innis's work poses a different difficulty. The European works require intensive exegetical readings because they are intensely abstract. Innis's writing needs interpretation because it is not abstract enough. This problem reached its apogee in Innis's study of space and time. Although he was developing a meta-philosophy of objectivity, he almost never presented what he was doing in philosophical terms. In fact, he rarely described at all what he was doing. Perhaps for this reason, he has been called "a theorist hiding out in history."28 It is unclear why he hid in this manner. His early empirical training and a natural concrete bent may have been factors. His fear of producing yet another form of "confident predictive science" may have been another. Had he been working on a simple theory, this possibility would have posed no problem. But Innis's space-time studies led him into highly nuanced historical descriptions. In a way that befits a good dialogue, he did not look for historical principles that could predict absoutely how a medium would affect a given society. One might say that he worked with a "both/and" rather than an "either/or" concept of cause and effect. As we see below in considering his description of Greece, the empire studies were detailed meditations on non-predictability at the particular level. Yet he did see some

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general and recurring dynamics in Western history. Let us turn now to Innis's account of these. According to Innis, the West evolved through a series of violent and destructive oscillations between two forms of dualism. He referred to these as "biases." One was a temporal bias - a condition that, as we see below, corresponds to crude idealism. The other was a spatial bias, corresponding to crude materialism a la Hobbes. As he saw it, the West began with a temporal bias and ended with a spatial one. Both biases produced static cultures, and so neither was conducive to open thought. But the stasis was distinctive in each case. Each bias, or each biased culture, developed as part of an empire, and each was dominated by a medium of communication. The direction of the bias resulted from the character of that medium. In each case, communications monopolies served to foster, tighten, and maintain the bonds of a closed totality. Innis put this last point as follows: "We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period of time will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilisation in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain ,.."29 A system that has become inflexible is by definition a system that resists change. For Innis, resistance could take place because of excessive concern either with time or with space. Consider first the time bias. A time-biased culture is dominated by a medium that is, in Innis's terms, heavy. In the most literal sense, this means that it is massive. But, as in the staples studies, this mass is not a simple, quantitative thing. It also has cultural implications which can be grasped only by examining its specific qualities. These are constituted in part by the overhead costs intrinsic to its production, use, and transport. Let us take as our paradigmatic example the medium of hieroglyphics chiselled in stone. This is actually two media - stone and a kind of script; our example allows us to see how they interact. Since the stone is massive, it is difficult to transport; transporting it will require hours of intensive labour over long periods. The technique used to write on stone - in this case, chiselling is also difficult to master. Thus acquiring the technique will in itself be a lengthy process. Finally, the script that conveys the intended meaning is complex and difficult to learn. It, too, will absorb a great deal of time. Each sub-medium, therefore, is culturally heavy. Put together, they form a medium that represents a large investment of time for the culture that employs it.

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For these reasons, stone and hieroglyphics are not likely to become mass media. Since a lengthy apprenticeship is required to learn their use, they will almost certainly be employed, and so governed, by a select group. Someone will have to tend the fields while all this learning is going on. This cultural effect is enhanced by the durability of stone. Unlike newspaper and television producers, chisellers of stone do not work to achieve short-term goals. Again, these media, where they are dominant, are also unlikely to foster social equality. The physical force needed to transport stone requires would-be transporters to have access to masses of unskilled labour. Moreover, this labour would be forced rather than cooperative, since one can hardly imagine so many people yearning to spend their lives dragging stones about. If, as in some cases (Egypt is a key example), the medium is also used for architecture, even greater amounts of such labour will have to be on hand.30 When we add to these factors the primitive technologies available in the ancient West, we can see that this medium comprises a material foundation for a series of overlapping dualisms: the separation of skilled from unskilled labourers, of intellectual from physical labourers, and of an elite political leadership from those who are led. This situation is a time bias, or a timeheavy form of dualism. The elite in this system will be preoccupied with controlling time in a distinctive, inwardly oriented manner that operates at a number of levels. Its intellectual bias will foster disdain for the physical world. Typically, this contempt will find expression in religious beliefs centring on an after-life. Such beliefs are profoundly idealist, since they posit as real only that which is beyond life. In the case of hieroglyphics, the idealist view is strengthened by a generalized belief that the script is magic: that it is able to capture the soul of what it represents. This belief strengthens the social hierarchy by ascribing to the writers the power to control access to the soul. The ascription is further enhanced by the stone's durability. To capture a soul in stone, as the diamond merchant tells us, is to capture it for ever. The select few who use this medium will thus be inclined to imagine that they are reaching beyond time to a realm of timelessness.31 The political structure in this culture will be inwardly oriented as well, for two reasons. The society as a whole will be geographically limited, since the communications media available to it are entirely unsuited to the administration of large areas. Ordinances written on stone may be durable, but they are difficult to disseminate. In addition, the amount of energy this elite is likely to expend on methods of time control such as veneration of ancestral gods will not leave

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sufficient energy for spatially oriented military pursuits.32 As a consequence, the polity will remain small and sacred. Moreover, the society will be representationally limited, since the elite that controls the key communications technology will also hold all formal positions of power. The result will be a fixed social totality that is politically conservative, tradition-bound, sacred, inwardly focused, and philosophically idealist.33 Such a totality will identify the objective with the non-material. By contrast, a space-biased culture is dominated by a medium of communication that is light. Taken literally, the medium is relatively non-massive. As in the time bias, the cultural implications of this quality are determined by the costs entailed by its production, use, and transport. Here we take as our paradigmatic example the interacting media of paper and the alphabet. Since paper is light, it is relatively easy to transport. The technique used for writing - let us say, pencil or pen - takes little time to master and so it is time-light. The same can be said of the script itself, for it is easy enough to be learned by a child in a matter of hours. Put together, they form a medium whose use requires little investment of time. Hence they are light and, in Innis's terms, spatially oriented. As a consequence, paper and an alphabet are ideally suited as mass media. The short span of time needed to master them suggests that one is unlikely to find them limited to a small group. Simplicity and portability also favour a more geographically expansive society, since they make possible administration over wide areas.34 As well, this kind of administrative expansiveness often goes hand in glove with higher levels of military activity. Military conquests make more sense when one can hope to control the areas won. As a consequence, the leadership will be outwardly oriented. Moreover, greater geographical and administrative scope will be matched by a certain amount of representational expansiveness; the system will favour some social and political equality, but in a limited way only. The concept of representation here will remain highly circumscribed. Light media favour the formalist notion of equality of opportunity based on individual talents. To our modern ears, this might sound like a good thing, but modern thinking too often forgets that media carry values. Since monopolies of knowledge are also monopolies of values, they determine what constitutes a talent. Spatial societies recognize only spatial talents. Other talents, as the saying goes, need not apply. Innis provides a good example of this in his account of the sprawling bureaucratic structure that characterized one period in Egypt's history: "In a decentralised bureaucracy the demands of administration increased, the art of writing was encouraged, a system of uniform

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orthography was established, and the civil service was opened to the middle class."35 In this society, the talent to which careers were open was the ability to write - specifically, the ability to work with a brush and papyrus, skills acquired at schools established to produce and teach systems of uniform orthography. It also entailed the ability to develop an interest in such systems. Innis provided another example in his description of the military establishment in Babylonian history: "... war increased the power of kings ... As a leader in war the king commanded a nucleus of specialists. The army opened a career to ability ... "36 In this case, the recognized talent was the aptitude for military technique and the inclination to identify with the pursuits of the king. The general outlook of the space bias will be present-minded, or pragmatic, tending to the secular. Scribes will become a civil service, and states will dissolve into (and perhaps grow out of) military technique. Though spatially expansive, the resulting polity will lack the impetus to change qualitatively; it will value uniformity and administered sameness as represented in its military and its systems of orthography. For this reason, its time will be that not of enduring tradition but rather of technique. Thus it will be culturally static, but in a distinctive sense. In the long run, it will tend not so much to belief in a static eternity, as in a time-biased culture, as to identify reality with the moment. This stance will lock it into an eternal present. This society's crude spatial and technical outlook will also give it a spatial philosophy. It will be crudely materialistic, identifying the objective with the purely material. Since communicative biases favour certain kinds of abilities and screen out others, they invariably invite attacks from those who feel that they have been excluded. These attacks are often violent, resulting in enormous destabilization that reaps human misery and destroys much that is historically valuable. As Innis saw it, the history of the West was just that kind of story. It was a series of marginal attacks and counter-attacks in which each reversal simply set the stage for the next. This was some sort of dialectic, but it was a pernicious variety. For Innis, its failure to incorporate the cooperative qualities of dialogue was the tragedy of the West. Whilst pursuing these ideas, Innis developed a number of insights on the spatial condition of modernity. He saw that it had gone largely unrecognized, at least in Britain and North America. This tendency was obvious to him from the fact that, with few exceptions, his colleagues and his audiences did not take this phase of his work seriously. He had to conclude that their ignorance was a key part of

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the problem. At the same time, he came to believe that modern technologies had brought this destructive dynamic to a critical point. The ignorance thus could not be allowed to continue. He responded with a unique attempt to retell Western history in terms of these destabilizations. In keeping with his interdisciplinary program, he retold it in a number of ways. Speaking philosophically, for example, he wrote: "Descartes with his emphasis on mathematics and his unhistorical temper succeeded in liberating philosophy from history. The ideal of mathematical sciences dominated the i/th century. It was not until the Enlightenment and the historical world was conquered and until Herder and romanticism that the primacy of history over philosophy and science was established. Historicism was almost entirely a product of the i9th century."37 But, as he showed, neither objective a-historicism nor subjective historicism would provide the key to this odd reversal. Speaking concretely, he wrote, "The tendency of a monopoly over time in religion to an accumulation of wealth invites attacks from the state with demands for redistribution evident in the embarrassment of the church in the Middle Ages ,.."38 But, again, neither the timeless irrationality of religion nor the rationality of the state could provide insight into the violence between them. Just as Adorno had engaged in critiques of Western philosophers to highight their dualism, so Innis multiplied such examples to show that the actors neither escaped nor understood the biases in which they were trapped. Innis was especially keen to point out that the modern state was wholly inadequate to address these issues. It was far too caught up in them. Speaking to an audience at the University of New Brunswick in 1950, he expressed these themes as follows: "... this paper ... is concerned with the change in attitude toward time preceding the modern obsession with present-mindedness, which suggests that the balance between time and space has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western Civilization. Lack of interest in problems of duration in Western Civilization suggests that the bias of paper and printing has persisted in a concern with space. The state has been interested in the enlargement of territories and the imposition of cultural uniformity on its peoples, and, losing touch with the problems of time, has been willing to engage in wars to carry out immediate objectives."39 For Innis, the modern so-called free state was a dangerously present-minded force that differed from overtly oppressive states in intensity only. Like Adorno and Benjamin, Innis saw a frightening continuity between the modern spatial bias and the spread of oppressive regimes in the 2oth century. The disappearance of time monopolies had invited state monopolies fostering new

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kinds of religion evident not only in fascism and totalitarianism but also, as he put it, in "our way of life."40 Modernity was the product of a giant pendulum swing from time to space whose political manifestations were more alike than was commonly believed. Innis recognized that this problem could not be resolved by attempts to identify and stop these swings. His reasoning here was central to his outlook on dialectics. For Innis, the oscillations were not simply an aberration in history. They were expressions of a natural historical dynamic. This dynamic was the source of historical change itself. As such, it was potentially the source of objective truth - no dialectic; no change; no truth. The task, then, was not to stop them but to develop a broadened understanding of them. It was in the service of this new understanding that Innis wrote his history of media. He intended to show that the germs of new knowledge emerged at the margins of older systems, always accompanied by new, rival media. To this end, Innis offered a number of examples. The emergence of the Aramean alphabet is a good case in point. Innis noted that simple alphabets had emerged at the margins of empires with complex writing systems.41 Arameans had found themselves in just such a marginal position. They had been excluded from the opportunity to learn the complex writing systems of the grand political powers of the day. In response, they had done two interesting things. First, they had developed a simple alphabet - a healthy counterpoint to the inherent elitism of the old form of script. Second, they had done so for a purpose that was distinctive to their time: since they were barred from holding political office and, through their weakness, from capturing much territory of their own, both of which activities involve spatial powers, they applied their alphabet to a project designed to enhance their control over time. The project was to write what turned out to be the first human histories. "It was no accident," Innis wrote, "that the supremely religious people of all time were likewise our first great historians ... History emerged with the Hebrews as a result of a [responsive] concern with time."42 This story of the dialectic of time and space demonstrated the self-contradictory nature of all rigid systems. It showed how new developments emerge at their margins, bringing new and alternative perspectives that mock the arrogance of the old. The new perspectives are also expressions of new and critical truths. In the above example, the empire had been pretentious in its claims to social and intellectual pre-eminence. But its eyes had been fixed on the spatial control of territory. Its dialectical product - the alphabet - challenged that fixity with a much-needed historical perspective, which was also an important truth.

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In contemplating this process, Innis would have wholeheartedly agreed with Adorno that "matter ... is contradictory and resists all attempts at unanimous interpretation."43 In his own analysis, new communication systems were always the contradictory result of a centre's attempt at unanimous interpretation. He would have agreed with Adorno's critical remark on Hegel's dialectic: "the empirical substance of dialectics is not the principle but the resistance which otherness offers to identity."44 As his story of the Arameans demonstrates, the essence of the dialectic in question was the resistance that their own "otherness" offered to the empire. Innis knew very well that the persistence of dualism in Western thinking worked against awarenenss of this process. But he did not view this condition a-historically. He saw it as a contingent dilemma, not a necessary one. For Innis, its resolution hinged on encouraging a negative reading of history and epistemology. In turn, this project hinged on a new arrangement of available media - specifically, on a balance that would allow biases to offset one another. Innis believed that the key to this balance would be a return to the spirit of the oral traditon.45 Only that type of tradition, with its flexible, interpersonal base, could transcend the hard partisan lines that turned potential dialogue into destructive dualism. Only such a tradition would have the power to communicate without being overwhelming. The reason lay partly in how the oral and aural medium of sound worked to promote a sense of time. In Innis's view, spoken language had a number of qualities that were essential to maintaining a healthy and vibrant culture. One was its ability to foster balanced use of the senses. Though to a far lesser extent than McLuhan, as becomes evident below, Innis explored the idea that a balanced sensory life was necessary for the development of moral integrity. To have such a balance, one needed a diversity of media: media always employ or stress a particular sense and, in so doing, train their users to attend to it. A media monopoly thus would lead to a monopolized sensory life as well. For Innis, the dominance of writing had created such an imbalance in the West. Writing emphasized seeing and implied a corresponding depreciation of other sensory information. Moreover, the dominance of seeing went hand in hand with the hegemony of modern science. This collusion resulted in a visual bias that was the sensory counterpart to the spatial bias of modernity.46 For Innis, the turning point in this development was the invention of the mechanized press. The newspaper and the values it represented made both possible and permissible a dichotomous division

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of public (or objective) from private (or subjective) interests. This public-private split expressed Hobbes's divided universe in two ways. First, the newspaper touted itself as the quintessence of objectivity, and it did so primarily by visual means. It promoted the simplistic idea that seeing is believing, even when seeing was only a matter of reading what someone had printed. Second, and by the same token, it did nothing to promote awareness of the interpretive thought processes behind the printed word. This oversight drove the invisible world of philosophical speculation, the only world capable of revealing biases, into chronic obscurity. Unhappily, this dichotomy worked not only against philosophy but also against the invisible realm of moral feeling. For Innis, the results were evident in the new sensibilities of press owners, journalists, and editors. In keeping with the progressive liberal ideologies of the day, they presented their product as a vehicle for public education. Yet it was clear from the shallow and sensationalist quality of the press that this concern for society went little beyond the immediate goal of manipulating readers.47 This reality demonstrated that, so far as promoting the social good was concerned, outward facade took clear precedence over less visible substance. This stress on window-dressing was part of a visual bias that undermined the basis for social and moral objectivity. Its disintegrative effects on individuals were paralleled by disintegration of the society as a whole. Although this modern condition had come to prominence in the era of the press, its course had hardly ended there. In Innis's view, it had advanced to deeper levels with the invention of a new and more intensely visual medium, the movie camera. The reasons were not hard to divine. The camera had come to birth in a world that already worshipped the visible word in print. In this world, it was easy to convince viewers that the new visuals were objective representations of reality. This change resulted in a peculiarly modern frame of mind known as photo-realism, the naive belief that a camera cannot lie.48 The seriousness of this naivete was directly proportional to the film medium's increased range of nuance and ability to manipulate. Its perverseness was first made evident in its use as a tool for propaganda during the Second World War. Basing his view on Siegfried Kracauer's analysis, Innis noted that, in Germany, films taken on site at the front and shown in theatres soon afterwards had worked to convince citizens of the superiority of German arms.49 He observed, too, that this was not a localized phenomenon. It was a symptom of a crudely materialist drift in Western thinking: "In some sense the problem of the German people is the problem of Western civilisation.

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As modern developments in communication have made for greater realism they have made for greater possibilities of delusion. 'It is curious to see scientific teaching used everywhere as a means to stifle all freedom of investigation of moral questions under the dead weight of facts/ Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses."50 Crude materialism thus was the doctrine of the visual and spatial world. It was a symptom of the general sensory disintegration underlying dualisms, of either "the one" or "the many." Oral traditions, by contrast, promoted high degrees of integration.51 This last observation was suggestive. It raised the issue of the contrast between Western cultures and those of prehistoric or contemporary non-Western oral societies. But Innis did not take this analysis very far; McLuhan was later to extend it in speculations on the nature of contemporary primary orality. Innis was concerned mainly with describing the structural characteristics that made oral dialogue an essential complement to visual communication. In Innis's view, an oral tradition served three main functions - it enhanced cultural memory and, thus, a historical sense of time; it promoted an empathic sensibility; and it promoted tolerance for ambiguity in meaning. Let us look at these characteristics more closely, beginning with the phenomenon of memory. First, Innis developed his new sound-based theory of knowledge on the model provided by ancient Western oral traditions; of particular interest to him about those traditions was their effect on memory. In an oral tradition, he noted, cultural wisdom in the form of law, morality, and other practical matters was stored in, and communicated through, epic poetry. The epic was designed to be memorized: its formal elements had evolved so as to allow its burden of theoretical and practical information to be retained and recalled. These elements included stock phrases and characters, homilies, and rhymes. Together, they created a way of communicating that induced ongoing social concern with remembrance.52 An educational system that concentrated on training, cultivating, and strengthening the memory enhanced this effect. It placed value on traditional knowledge and on those who, as accomplished reciters, became its best carriers. In the world of the epic, history was the recited human story, and poetry was the chain that linked its episodes.53 This kind of education worked on the deep structures of thought: it injected a fluid sense of time into reciters and listeners. Because epics contained their material in dramatic story form, reciters had to become actors. They had to convey their information dynamically

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through characterization. As in all dialectical interactions, this practice served to structure their own thinking. Reciters and listeners came to internalize and imagine the world in the dramatic way represented in the epic.54 Temporal communication thus produced a temporal imagination. In Innis's view, two aspects of this tradition deserved special attention. First, it fostered a human sense of time; characters in a storyline do not follow the rhythms of factory clocks unless they are robots. Second, it was broadly inclusive; it invited the listeners' emotional involvement, and it encouraged memorization, so that listeners became reciters in their own right. By contrast, Innis noted, the passive orality encouraged by the radio did little to facilitate such development. As he put it, the radio addressed the world, not the individual.55 It invited no responsive articulation. In radio communication, listeners are almost never announcers or programmers. Consequently, although the radio is an aural medium, it is not an oral one. A proper oral medium is social in nature. For Innis, the oral spirit was essential to open dialogue, open societies, and an open concept of objectivity. Second, the oral tradition is also important because of the level of mimetic identification that it encourages between speakers and listeners. Innis deepened his analysis of mimesis by incorporating a psychoanalytic perspective similar to the one Adorno had adopted in his analysis of modernity. We remember that Adorno had described human nature as a dynamic tension between a desire to control the world and a desire to identify with it. That description was derived from a reading of Nietzsche and Freud. Innis derived a parallel account from his reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In Nietzsche's analysis, the control side was represented by the god Apollo; the mimetic side, by the god Dionysus.56 The religious issue that distinguished them was the perceived relation between humans and gods. In the Apollonian tradition, the relation was seen as discontinuous; there was an unbridgeable gulf between mortals and their immortal superiors. In the Dionysian tradition, there was no such gulf, and so it was possible to hope for some kind of union.57 Apollonians responded to the purported separation by accepting their fate as humans and, in defence, concentrating on rational control of their natural surroundings. Dionysians were less defensive. They remained open to the idea of being part of nature, since, for them, matter and spirit were essentially one. In Innis's view, the oral tradition enhanced the empathic or mimetic side of this dynamic. As he noted, in that tradition one communicates primarily to absorb and remember rather than to

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distance and criticize. Discussion has some of these qualities too, for, as he commented, discussion calls for consideration of the feelings of others.58 For this reason, a strong tradition of public discussion sets an empathic tone for a society. Once firmly and consciously established, Innis thought, such a tradition might very well be sustainable even in the presence of alternative media. For him, this sort of balance was essential to a proper (non-identitarian, or non-rigid) concept of objectivity. Third, and equally essential, dialogue has a capacity to tolerate ambiguity in meaning. It has a looseness that allows participants to make subtle adjustments in the meaning of their terms. This frees them from drawing hard conceptual lines and, in turn, from classifying in ways that exclude others. For Innis, a key example was the inconsistency that has characterized oral decision-making in Western polities. These polities have had a tradition of discussion based on accumulated historical precedents, rather than on written statues. Terms have been left loose: specific meanings have emerged through local decision-making. This method was useful because it left room for adjustments that suited particular times and places.59 But Western thinkers have too frequently viewed this sort of ambiguity as a sign of weakness. This perception had to be altered so that some ambiguity could be seen as a sign of healthy flexibility. Flexibility would be useful for communication between cultures, as well as within them. Oral traditions permit exchanges of ideas that do not denigrate differences. Dialogue provides a means of adapting, and so absorbing selectively, material from outside one's culture, even in extreme cases of forced imposition. Traditional speakers are used to interpreting what they hear, since oral traditions have no definitive texts. This adaptability makes them better able than modern communicators to accept some things, reinterpret others, and reject the rest. This ability allows them to engage in the processes both of merging in the Dionysian sense and of distancing in the Apollonian. It allows them to identify with one another and still be critical. For Innis, it was a sad sign of the growing visual bias that this looseness was likely to be seen as a failure of logic and, thus, of objectivity. He responded by calling for a new logic and a new objectivity. He argued that the oral tradition was more logical than the written because it allowed speakers to sift out what did not fit their tradition and to build histories informed by their own passions and imaginations. Unlike visual logic, this oral logic would acknowledge those passions as a necessary dimension of communication.60 Innis developed these points more fully in a series of studies on ancient civilizations. He communicated them self-referentially

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through his style of analysis. To do so, he incorporated a number of levels of analysis pulled from his source material and juxtaposed them in a manner comparable to the constellations created by Adorno, Benjamin, and McLuhan. In this way, he invited his audiences to read not only positively, by considering the analyses that he presented, but also negatively, by contemplating the relations between them. This style made for a new, oral kind of writing. To demonstrate Innis's oral approach, I turn now to a reading of his work on ancient Greece. Following the method that I used in chapter i, we can imagine the perspectives that Innis presented as being speakers in an open conversation. The discussion centres on the period between 700 BC and 500 BC, when oral communication combined with writing to permit a unique, albeit brief, flourishing of flexible individualism.61 Perhaps because of this perceived flourishing, Innis referred to Greece as a civilization and a culture but never as an empire. As he showed, when it became empire-like it died. In listening to these voices, one should be aware of the picture of indeterminism they create. Whilst demonstrating Innis's universal claims about the spatio-temporal effects of media, they show his strong accord with Adorno's maxim that matter resists all attempts at unanimous interpretation. We begin, as in Adorno's dialogue, with the psychoanalytic voice. The voice on psychoanalysis. The dynamic tension between mimesis and control in the human psyche has a parallel in the social sphere. It is equivalent to the tension between communitarianism and individualism, respectively. Each of these traditions tends to be static and hierarchical, and each exacts a personal and social price for the comforts it offers. The Greek communitarians were Dionysians who believed in and sought union with their god. But they paid for this belief by submitting their individuality to their society. Their outlook was dominated by a crude notion of equality based on the doctrine of the mystical significance of number. For Dionysians, the number "one" was magical because it represented the one of god, the one of society, and the one of their union. Their sense of equality came from the view that they were alike in forming part of this one. This feeling gave them a sense of belonging, but it created submissiveness. In a community dominated by the mystical "One," there can be no true individuals. In Greece, the practical outcome was general submission to the rule of a priesthood. The individualists, by contrast, were Apollonians, who, as we saw above, renounced the idea of such a union. But they paid for this belief with a profound sense of aloneness. They viewed themselves

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as solitary humans, tragically vulnerable to the winds of change. In keeping with this view, they saw hierarchy as part of the natural order of things. For them, the unbridgeable gulf between gods and humans showed that unbridgeable gulfs were simply part of the world. This assumption led to fatalistic acceptance of a dominating secular elite. In parallel with this vision, they developed a crude notion of inequality based on the idea of geometric proportion. As geometers rather than numerologists, they transposed that idea onto their social lives by maintaining a strictly proportioned class system. In this community there were individuals, but their development was stunted by a class society and a strong sense of fate. The voice on communication. Prior to the /th century BC, Greece had been an exclusively oral society with an epic tradition. Because of the time needed to acquire the tradition and the mental energy needed to maintain it in memory, the epic was a time-heavy medium. At its height, control over maintaining and transmitting it was in the hands of a small, predominantly Apollonian elite. In keeping with its worldview, this elite had individualist tendencies. But the stylistic methods required to keep its medium orally acquirable left little room for innovation. For these reasons, the epic kept this group's individualism in check. During the /th and 6th centuries, two light media were introduced into Greece - papyrus brought in from Egypt62 and an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians.63 This event was crucial in the history of the West. Like the Aramean, the Phoenician alphabet had no vowels. But the Phoenician language from which it had evolved had five consonants that did not occur in Greek. Serendipitously, its inheritors gained five extra letters to play with. Whilst adapting this alphabet to their own language, they turned the extra letters into vowel signs. The adaptation gave us the first complete Western alphabet. The new alphabet was a more flexible medium than the old, and it greatly facilitated translation from one language to another. It did for language what money had done for trade: it created a true medium of exchange - a uniform surface along which exchanges between linguistic groups could slip more easily.64 Like money, this new surface promoted and spread uniformity. But at this stage, its spatializing potential was held in check by two factors. Access to papyrus was limited and irregular, and trade did not dominate the economy. The voice on aesthetics. Once this new visual medium was introduced, it was combined with expressive oral media of the day. The combination inspired a level of individual creativeness unknown before that time. One of its clearest expressions was a series of

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developments in Greek poetry and drama. Following introduction of the alphabet, epics began to appear in written form. But the new ones were different from the old: they were shorter and more individual in style. Moreover, they were written by a wider range of people and appealed to a broader group of interests. This expansion, spatialized them somewhat. The best example of this new type of author was Hesiod. The old Homeric poems had dealt with the doings of heroes and nobles, an elitist concern that overrode the more personal interests of reciters and many listeners. By contrast, Hesiod's works dealt with the trials of everyday life in rural Greece. A poor farmer, Hesiod had made no attempt to conceal his personality.65 Other authors followed suit, and a popular literature emerged. The new literature grew with the spread of writing and an increase in the use of papyrus. Its dissemination weakened the position of professional minstrels and promoted the rise of the lay author.66 The new individualism could also be seen in Greek drama. According to Nietzsche, the drama had its origins in Dionysian rituals centred on the oral and mimetic medium of music. The tradition included song, but in its early stages the music clearly dominated the words.67 In keeping with the mimetic spirit, the ritual's social purpose was to create a community in which there were few sharply felt boundaries between individuals.68 Participants were invited to share in the experience of ecstatic oneness. With the introduction of writing, this oneness began to break down. The oral dramas had had some roles for individual singers. The new written ones featured additional roles for reciters, the speakers of the new written words. This shift spurred an evolutionary process. As speakers' roles became more elaborate, they developed into characters much closer to what we know today as dramatis personae. For Greek drama, the most pivotal of these characters was the tragic hero, an aesthetic fusion of Dionysus and Apollo - of communitarianism and individualism. He encompassed both empathy and fate. In Innis's words, "In the heroes of Sophocles the divine was blended with human character. To know oneself was to know men's powerlessness and to know the indestructible and conquering majesty of suffering humanity. It claimed the interest and participation of the entire people."69 The blending of the divine with the human was a Dionysian characteristic. The awareness of powerlessness and suffering was Apollonian. In their combined form, communal and individual attitudes met for a time in a creative, non-dominating manner. In this form, the drama was capable of speaking to a wide audience. But the balance did not last long. A sure sign of imbalance was the decline of drama. As Nietzsche pointed out, music had provided the

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medium through which actors and audience could experience a joyous form of collectivity. Tragedy had provided the occasion for that experience on a mass level. With the dominance of the written word, this art and the social function that went with it declined. In its wake came the decline of Greek culture as a whole.70 The voice on philosophy. The spread of writing had a profound effect on Greek thought. It lifted the burden of memory from the mind, releasing energy for other kinds of pursuits. At the same time, it induced a new level of detachment from the world. In the early years, however, this objectivity did not become extreme. As the epic tradition began more and more to incorporate writing, a subtle shift in mentality took place. Ancient reciters were accustomed to describing nature by means of imitation. To describe a howling gale, they swayed and moaned like the wind; to descibe a goat, they pranced about and bleated, encouraging their audiences to do likewise. This method encouraged a feeling of continuity with nature, a far cry from the modern mind that invented mazes for rats. So long as rhyming poetry remained dominant, these feelings continued, for poetry encourages identification with its rhythms and muscial sounds. But as shorter, more personal epics were produced, a new medium developed alongside the old. Prose, a relatively non-mimetic form that encouraged objectification rather than identification in the old sense, made it possible to engage in objective studies. Its practical consequence was the emergence of natural philsophy, the new Greek science of nature. The pivotal agents here were a group of Apollonian philosophers from Miletus. Apollonians, as we know, rejected mimesis in favour of an outlook that divorced humans from gods. Prose was ideally suited to that outlook since it allowed the Miletians to push the divorce one step further. Using the goddesses known as the Moirae to represent fate, they articulated a new concept of the object that became foundational to a number of intellectual advances. Of these, the most revolutionary was a transition in the concept of authority. The new philosophers turned from tradition to rational argument. At the same time, they rejected traditional cosmology in favour of a new concern with the internal properties of natural objects, or, in Innis's words, with a proto-Kantian concern with "the thing in itself." This new focus found its ideal in geometry, the science of spatial measurement. In turn, geometry formed the basis for the more general concept of a universal law.71 In these early years, however, objectification was maintained within modest proportions. The voice on political economy. Greece had poor soil and rich silver deposits, a situation that ultimately favoured an economy based on trade. For reasons now lost to us, the Greece of 800 B c was organized

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into family-based systems of land tenure. Soil conditions varied according to region, and in bad crop years, families in sparser regions were driven to seek credit from those more fortunately placed. A series of such years resulted in levels of credit beyond what poor farmers could hope to repay. According to the rules of the day, they had then been forced to sell themselves and their land into virtual bondage. New and sharp class lines divided a landed nobility from labourers in a state of perpetual tenancy. As the divisions intensified, the hierarchically ordered society began to lose its balance. Popular revolts ensued, and the elite called on Solon, a law-maker, to restore the balance. But Solon was an Apollonian and thus committed to maintaining a social hierarchy. As a consequence, he was inclined to leave the original imbalance in the size and quality of land-holdings in place. He also favoured the steady-state economy of agriculture over the spatializing economy of trade. Ironically, this attitude set the stage for the opposite of what he was to try to achieve. Solon remedied the immediate grievances by abolishing accumulated debts, but he maintained the dichotomy between richer and poorer farmers.72 To secure agriculture, he proposed forbidding export of grain so as to subdue external trade. At the same time, he suggested measures to encourage development of a money economy so as to foster internal trade.73 Unhappily, these policies showed poor understanding of trade and an even poorer sense of the suppressed individualism in the Apollonian elite. Wealthy farmers responded to the new money economy by buying out their poorer neighbours and converting agricultural lands from grain production to crops, such as olives, that could be exported for profit. The Greek economy then became more dependent than ever on imported grain, and, in the process, the economic balance tipped irretrievably in favour of external trade.74 As Greece's trading power increased, so did its spatial aggressiveness towards surrounding Hellenic states. This development fostered a will to empire and led predictably to imperial conflict with the Spartan trade group. Just as predictably, it led to collapse. The voice on Plato as requiem. As trade began to dominate Greece's economy, the agricultural life that had grounded its oral tradition began to disintegrate. With its demise came the weakening and decline of the oral tradition itself. Its last requiem was the Platonic dialogues, philosophical texts that wrote down a pedagogy based on oral dialectic. But these texts had an odd and contradictory relation to oral culture. Although they appealed to conversation, they diplayed an open contempt for the poetic tradition - a clear sign that the value of orality had fallen in Greece. Plato deliberately set out to

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break the rhythmic bond of poetry and to replace it with a system of classification based on a static doctrine of ideas. This idealist doctrine rejected all things physical and posed a serious threat to the temporal foundations necessary for true understanding.75 Nevertheless, the real significance of these dialogues was not their role in establishing philosophical idealism as a doctrine in the West. Rather, it was that they had unintentionally escaped their own rigid bonds by remaining inconclusive. As Innis put it, "The dialogues [of Plato] were developed as a most effective instrument for preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page and Plato's success was written in the inconclusiveness and immortality of his work" (my emphasis).76 He continued, "The life and movement of the dialectic [understood as living dialogue] opposed the establishment of a finished system of dogma."77 Indeed, it was as if the oral medium had acted as a bulwark against its full incorporation into a rigid format. Of course, there was a sense in which Plato may have been compelled to choose this path. The changes in production and communication had reached a momentum by his time that no individual could hope to resist. As Innis commented, "Plato and Aristotle wrote in a period after the great tragedy of the oral tradition had been witnessed in the fall of Athens and the execution of Socrates ... [They] had no alternative but to search for the basis of another culture in the written tradition."78 In searching for that basis, they preserved what they could of the old medium. Quoting from Nietzsche in support of this analysis, Innis wrote, "The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all of her childern."79 Following Plato, Aristotle reflected the growing power of writing by promoting prose as the ideal philosophical medium. His work reflected the increasingly dichotomous separation of science (now identified with philosophy) from mythical and literary forms of expression.80 But here again, the real success of prose was its failure to harness the power of the written word completely. Its success, like that of empire and the Platonic dialogues, was its failure to be total. This failure gave it a special significance for all theorists grappling with the phenomenon of modernity. It provided the occasion for rethinking the significance of the spoken word. If read negatively, its history pointed the way to a new and emancipatory theory of knowledge through a study of the distinctive qualities of sound. Innis developed these ideas on orality further by inventing a quasioral method of writing. Without doubt, it was one of the most

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unusual methods in the history of Western social science. Not surprisingly, it has received numerous comments. It has been described variously as "elliptical," "knotted," "cryptic," "compressed," "opaque," and "maddeningly obscure."81 It has been said to demonstrate an "uncompromising attitude to readers."82 Reactions have ranged from explanatory apology83 to wholesale embrace of the style as a conscious experiment in post-linear thought.84 Innis's writing has also invited a certian amount of parody. Innis's colleague, C.R. Fay, once sent him a card that read, "History a la Innis. Cod Fisheries p. 212 Top. The Influence of the imperialism of Rome and the Mediterranean made itself felt in the destruction of Republican institutions and the birth of Christ A.D.I."85 In an unpublished thesis, Thomas Cooper attempted to express the style by animating it. Though not intended as a parody, it was probably meant to be funny. In Cooper's (rather heavily gendered) rendering, "King Paper ... aggressively dethroned the more humble parchment. Divorcing his Oriental queen the Brush in favour of his west Asian mistress the Pen, Paper favoured an enormous empire of political organisation, urban industry and trade ... But Paper's son Printing Press claimed the throne ... Like King Tongue, King Print... cast his shadow across countries and continents."86 The style that inspired these responses was Innis's unique adventure into theoretical non-certainty, a concrete antidote to identitarian forces that, in his view, were destroying the last vestiges of Western culture. It was also an adventure in establishing a new relationship with the reader. The key ingredients were a high degree of selfreflexivity, sharp avoidance of linear causal language, unique use of quotations, and an unusually open method of footnoting. Their product was a set of texts that must be read very actively to be read at all. Self-reflexivity was integral to Innis's understanding of scholarship as an emancipatory practice. Properly transformed, he believed, scholarship could become a counter-modern therapy. It could foster creation of a new historical subject. The new subject was Innis's variant of Adorno's "thought thinking against itself," - the analyst constantly escaping her or his attempts at self-definition. In Innis's texts, escape frequently took the form of reminding readers that there was a parochial tendency hiding in every analytical effort. His essays often opened with such reminders. The following, from "A Plea for Time," written in 1950, is typical: "I must plead the bias of my special interest in the title of this paper. Economic historians and indeed all historians assume a time factor and their assumptions reflect the attitude towards time of the period in which they write ... As a result history tends to repeat itself but in the changing

92 Unthinking Modernity accents of the periods in which it is written."87 He also closed his essays with such reminders. His piece on the price system, for example, ended with the comment, "Depressions produce deterministic systems and arguments such as have been advanced in this paper."88 He carried this reflexive insight over into more specific topics as well. Regarding the current state of scholarship on the press, Innis wrote, "The bibliography of this subject is the subject ... the bibliography reflects the character of the press ... studies reflect the dominant influence of the moment or perhaps it is safer to say, represent the dominant influence of the tradition of the industry."89 And regarding the literature on the so-called post-war problem, he wrote, "The interest in post-war problems is the post-war problem. Samuel Johnson ... wrote: 'I know not what is more to be feared after a war, streets full of soldiers who have learned to rob or garrets full of scribblers who have learned to lie.' In this war we have most to fear from garrets full of scribblers."90 By definition, this warning refers to all scribbers, for theirs is a medium that permits a level of lying not available to oral communicators. Innis combined these efforts to think against himself with a mosaic, or non-linear outlook on his material. He avoided terminology that fixed too strictly the causal relation between the elements in his analysis. He also used terminology that suggested different types of causation. On three randomly selected pages of Empire and Communications, for example, we read that, "The earliest clay tablets include[d] large numbers of legal contracts ... and reflected] a secular and utilitarian interest"; "Pictographs of fine lines made by an almost knife-sharp reed were probably followed by linear writing"; "Economy of effort demanded a reduction in the number of strokes"; and "A change in the direction of the strokes ... hastened the transition from pictographs to signs."91 We read further that clay favoured collection of permanent records, emphasized uniformity, required a number of professional scribes, and furthered abstraction.92 This causal language played creatively with non-certainty, and the variety that it suggested called for a pluralistic approach to causation. Innis's generalizations demonstrated this style at its non-certain best. For example, regarding media, he wrote, "We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilisation where life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain"93 (my emphases). To Innis, it would have been destructive to claim more.

93 Innis: Communications Innis enhanced the pluralistic quality of this framework by piecing his texts together like a patchwork. There are places in his writings where very little heralds a switch from one aspect of a subject to another - a technique that can be quite dislocating. At other places, quotations are patched into the body of the text with little or no introduction or after-comment. Innis paired this organizational disjunctiveness with a cultural and political one. He used some quotations that were friendly to his point of view, and some that were not; many gave the distinct impression of having been pasted into the text like pictorial illustrations in a written document or the voiceover techniques that accompany the visuals in some film presentations. The following is typical: "Technological advance in the production of newspapers accompanied the development of metropolitan centres. In the period of western expansion 'all these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad.' A large number of small centres were gradually dwarfed by the rise of large cities. In turn the opinion of large centres was reflected in their newspapers and in an emphasis on differences. 'No/ said Mr. Dooley, 'They've got to print what's different' (my emphases).94 And elsewhere, "Concentration on learning implies a written tradition and introduces monopolistic elements in culture which are followed by rigidities and involve lack of contact with the oral tradition and the vernacular. 'Perhaps in a very real sense, a great institution is the tomb of the founder.' 'Most organisations appear as bodies founded for the painless extinction of ideas of the founders.' 'To the founder of a school everything is forgiven except his school.' This change is accompanied by a weakening of the relations between organised force and the vernacular and collapse in the face of technological change which has taken place in marginal regions which have escaped the influence of a monopoly of knowledge" (my emphases).95 This style could not have been better designed to escape the dominance of writing; its fluidity belongs clearly to an oral tradition. What is currently known about Innis's method of composition helps to explain this quality. During the communications phase of his scholarship, Innis worked by producing large banks of reference material comprised of critical reading notes, collections of relevant facts, and lists of usable quotations. He wrote the notes by hand, had photostats made of them, cut them up into sentences or paragraphs, and filed them according to subject-matter. By the end of his career, he had amassed quite a collection.96 It seems that part of the technique also involved pasting the pieces directly onto the texts he was producing.97 Innis may have adopted this technique in part because his communications essays were prepared initially as public

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addresses. Patched-in quotations and facts may have been chosen to lend the talks an air of informality. From a more general standpoint, however, it is probably fair to say that he chose this style of working because it was a logical way - perhaps the only logical way - to juxtapose scholarly perspectives. Although Innis invested a great deal of energy in inventing this technique, he rarely had much to say about it. He is known to have commented on his writing style on a couple of occasions only, and then only in response to prompting. Once, the prompting came from Tom Easterbrook, a colleague and fellow political economist, and a friend of Marshall McLuhan's. Easterbrook explained to Innis that, in McLuhan's view, the technique of juxtaposing apparent unlikes was an important way of arriving at new insights. He suggested that this method was not so different from Innis's own form of analysis.98 Innis did not respond by committing himself to any literary approach but agreed that juxtaposition seemed to offer, as he put it, "the only prospect of escape from the obsession with one's own culture."99 Still, however implicitly, Innis must at some level have been aware that he was engaged in a very unusual literary enterprise. And however undertheorized it was, the end result was a form of writing that incorporated the oral word into the written in order to arrive at a nuanced theory of objectivity. Innis enhanced this style still further by adopting an unusual and open-ended style of footnoting. Empire and Communications illustrates this style at its peak. It features three distinct orders of footnotes divided by solid lines, at least two of which ordinarily appear on any given page. The first order is a standard, numbered set referring the reader to one or more texts and page numbers, often with additional comments, sometimes even a short poem.100 The second order is a lettered set that either poses a question to what is written in the main body of the text or offers conflicting information taken from alternate scholarly sources. One section of Innis's dialogue on Egypt, for example, reads: "The Nile with its irregularities3 of overflow, demanded co-ordination and effort." Footnote a reads, "Easily controlled and regular in occurrence(?)" He continues, "Its power was reflected in an absolute monarch to whom everything was subordinated. It has been suggested that such power followed the growth of astronomical knowledge13 by which the floods of the Nile could be predicted ,.."101 Footnote b reads, "Was this to predict the floods or rather to determine the day for religious festivals(?)" That is, did developers of astronomy orient themselves most immediately towards pleasing the river and sky gods or towards organizing agriculture? The questions are merely posed. Indeed, they may be unanswerable. The third order

95 Innis: Communications of footnotes bears no reference marks, gives additional detailed historical information, and is written in note form, punctuated idiosyncratically. For example, "Papyrus for cursive writing-brush pen gave signs bolder forms. How far did spread in belief in immortality facilitate development of army to drive out Hyksos and develop empire. Importance of belief in immortality to military power. Middle kingdom counts for Thebes built feudal monarchy - insubordination of vassal counts - coming of Hyksos ..."102Occasionally the lettered notes contain brief additional information instead of questions, and the third order, only a string of ideas or names, some of which read like found poems. For example, e

At head of pantheon with Kassites not Hammurabi. Code extremely brutal to our standards but that of highly civilised and comercialised state based largely on earlier Sumerian laws. f

Ami, sky. Enlil, storm. Ninhkursag and Enki, the earth. One might say then that Innis complemented his marginal philosophy with a literary style in which the marginal notes formed an unusually integral part of what would commonly be called the "main" work. They questioned some of its claims and, in so doing, pointed to the inconclusive nature of the enterprise at hand. Moreover, Innis sometimes reversed the normal priority of importance so that a marginal note would have to be consulted to make any sense of the main text at all. For example, in "The Problem of Space," Innis wrote, "In contrast with an absolute king in Egypt who cultivated an interest in the next world and immortality, Sumerian and Babylonian priests, by virtue of the importance of religion had little interest in the hereafter but were concerned with the systematising of knowledge and an emphasis on a sense of law and order."103 On the surface, this text makes no sense. Why would priests have little interest in the hereafter because of an interest in religion? And how would this distinguish them from the Egyptians, since the Egyptians' concern with the hereafter was, if nothing else, a concern with religion? The passage is footnoted, and the reference, to W.F. Albright's From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, provides a sensible answer. Babylonia and Sumer were made up of independent and frequently warring city-states. Instability resulted. Nevertheless, they needed a level of stability to succeed in the cooperative task of repairing the dykes and dredging the canals that controlled the flooding of their home rivers. State leaders could not offer this stability,

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since, as a result of their frequent military enterprises, they were often deposed and replaced. It thus devolved upon the priests to organize the flood work, a task that entailed use of religion to uphold a work ethic and to impose sanctions in cases of carelessness.104 Hence "the importance of religion" (as direct discipline) and systematized knowledge (the flood technology), coupled with the focus on the here and now rather than on an after-life. Without the reference, however, the claim remains unintelligible. In reading Innis's later works, one sometimes gets the impression of having come upon not so much a finished study as an archaeological dig in progress. Some of the pieces are ordered; others are scattered about, bearing layers of attached notes, each of which invites the reader to join in the digging. In fact, unless one joins in the digging, much of the work remains opaque. The positive result of this style is that Innis never dominated the analysis. Rather, he invited dialogical experimentation. Following along by poring over the references and layers of notes is a little like participating in a seminar directed by a set of texts. The literary result, as McLuhan put it, was an open-ended "do-it-yourself kit."105 It was an apt comment by an equally unusual theorist.

CHAPTER

FIVE

McLuharis Early Years and Philosophical Framework

Although Marshall McLuhan is well known as a student of Innis's later texts, the distinctiveness of his work on Innis is not often appreciated. As chapter 4 shows, Innis's communications studies make for truly difficult, if interesting, reading. They were even more difficult for the scholars of his day, since in North America they had no precedent. They were far too non-linear and speculative for the positivists, and they employed a vocabulary unlikely to attract philosophers, including the philosophical Marxists, from whose attention they might have benefited. As a consequence, Innis mystified his audiences and most of his readers. An effective reading of his texts by a contemporary was thus a rare accomplishment, and it is not surprising that no one else tried it. It is amazing that McLuhan did. But it is also certain that if McLuhan recognized Innis's texts as an innovative do-it-yourself kit, he came to them already primed, as we see in this chapter. This appropriation was fed by two main intellectual streams. One was the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, with special reference to Aquinas's theory of perception. The second was Gestalt psychology, including a Gestalt-inspired theory of language drawn from the thennew literary criticism of LA. Richards, with whom McLuhan studied at Cambridge. The fusion was important because Gestalt theory provided a historical perspective missing from the earlier Thomist view. Together, they produced an interesting and dynamic framework that formed the basis of The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan's first media text. To clarify McLuhan's work on Innis, we look at how this framework emerged and then observe it in action in that text. This examination provides a basis for comparing the Canadian and European theorists' work on the press and for understanding McLuhan's unique sensory theory of communication, as presented in chapter 6.

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McLuhan's point of departure for understanding Thomist theory was his own religious devotion. His mother was a Baptist with an interest in Christian Science; his father, the son of Methodists, but not especially religious. McLuhan converted to the Roman Catholic church in 1937 at the age of 26, and his introduction to the critique of modernity came through his acquaintance with it in Catholic literature.1 The first of such influences was probably G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World?2 Chesterton's text is a Tory fulmination against the modern obsession with practicality; the second chapter is titled, "Wanted, an Unpractical Man." It offers a critical perspective on the contradictions of capitalism: Chesterton argues that the great capitalists of the world are the enemies of property, since they want not their own land but other people's.3 It displays a sensitivity to the related contradictions of liberal relativism. Chesterton notes that unless we maintain some non-relativistic doctrine of a divine man, "all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them into uses."4 These arguments address two major aspects of the problem of objectivity that concerned Adorno, Benjamin, Innis, and, eventually, McLuhan. Like those men, Chesterton saw that one could not develop a satisfactory theory of knowledge by denying knowledge an objective foundation: this approach would only undercut attempts to deal effectively with abuse. It would only render suffering invisible, to borrow Adorno's phrase. Similarly, he saw that one could not articulate a workable theory of value by adopting practicality or immediacy as a key criterion. Both insights flow from the same concern, since, as Innis saw so clearly, tossing aside a long-term perspective in favour of a practical one is already an expression of relativism. One chooses with impunity to worship the immediate only when one believes that broader, more objective goals are either meaningless or, what comes to the same thing, a simple sum of immediate ones. A properly historical outlook requires a belief in some kind of objectivity. Despite these similarities, allegiance to Catholicism marked Chesterton and McLuhan off in a special way. Their critique bore the stamp of a Catholic form of philosophical organicism, which carried with it a tendency towards a-historical formulations. This tendency posed a problem for McLuhan. It did not negate his effort to develop a historical outlook, but it needs to be seen clearly if we are to appreciate the tensions with which he had to grapple, given his faith. Unfortunately, McLuhan's Catholicism has remained a suppressed aspect of his work. The suppression was conscious on his part: he chose to hide his Christianity from his readers because he

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feared that public awareness of it would raise sectarian passions and divert attention from the broader issues he wanted to raise.5 Given the Protestant-dominated scholarly institutions of his day, this move was understandable, perhaps even unavoidable.6 But it worked against him. Many saw through the suppression, and, ultimately, the attempt to hide drew the very religious attacks he had feared. Theodor Roszak's article, "The Summa Poplogica of Marshall McLuhan," is typical. It drags out the anti-Catholic theme by arguing that, like the eucharistic host, McLuhan's thesis was empty of substance.7 Anthony Quinton's "Cut Rate Salvation" is another. Quinton suggested that McLuhan had derived his Thomist ideas from Walter J. Ong, a former graduate student of his.8 The most publicly damaging was a book-length study by Jonathan Miller, published in 1971. Miller argued that McLuhan's Catholicism added "a hidden bias to all his famous opinions" and that his philosophy reflected "multiple mental squints" deriving from Catholic defensiveness.9 Miller's critique was unhelpful, but in an interesting way. It was premissed on the regressive notion that a 'no-squint' position was possible. McLuhan, however, was concerned with transcending this dichotomy by studying the historical character of mental squints, or, more philosophically, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. McLuhan began this project by looking at Aquinas's critique of St Augustine. This part of the project was based on an interpretation of Aquinas propounded by scholars at St Louis University, in St Louis, Missouri, where McLuhan taught from 1937 to 1944, and at St Michael's College at the University of Toronto, where he spent the rest of his teaching career.10 Augustine had been a neo-Platonist and, like Plato, had argued that body and soul represented separate and irreconcilable realms. Bodies were material and temporal; souls were ethereal and timeless. For Augustine, human bodies and all other material objects were therefore in a constant state of flux. Since this condition held for the senses as well, it followed that sensory information was always changing; sensory information was thus rather precarious and unstable. In the case of the human psyche, Augustine had argued, this precariousness was exacerbated by a tendency of the mind to fluctuate between the acts of sensing and of producing after-images of sensation. It was exacerbated still more by the fact that the mind could not always distinguish between these acts. For Augustine, such fluctuation and blurring were proof that true perception could never come from the senses. One could not perceive truly, as he put it, under conditions in which perceiver and perceived

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were never the same.11 And from this reasoning, it followed that intellect had to be something separate from the body. Aquinas rejected this view. He realized that what could neither know nor be known was doomed to live its life as a marginal, unreconcilable "stranger within reality." On this understanding, the body was some kind of barbarian living outside the bounds of all that was reasonable in the world.12 This could not be the case, he argued, because all creatures in the world depended on God for their existence, and whatever God did he was certainly not in the business of creating barbarians.13 To fail to see this truth was simply to fail to see the world as a created whole. To see it as a whole was to see that matter and intellect were not strangers to one another but rather a single, interactive unit. He thus concluded that mind-body dualism, however logical from some perspective, would not do as a basis for a theory of knowledge. Appealing as this position was in the light of Augustine's rejection of the body, making a credible case for it would not be an easy task for Aquinas. The case still had to be worked out within the confines of a divided universe in which God was spiritual and humans were material. This position still had to be tied to some form of dualism. Now Aquinas had rejected the "barbarian" theory because it posed a problem for the Christian doctrine of salvation. How could a total barbarian be expected to be saved by and thus returned to God? But the larger dualism that was part of the church's dogma was also problematic. Aquinas accepted the view that human beings depended on God for salvation and that salvation was a reconciling of body and spirit. He also believed that before humans could be so reconciled they had to have knowledge of God. And here lay the difficulty. In order to acquire such knowledge, they had to find a way to bridge the gap between their own material existence and God's non-material one. This leap, too, entailed reconciling body and spirit. It seemed, therefore, that one had to reconcile before one could be reconciled. Or, at least, one had to become reconciled epistemologically in order to be saved in some other sense. The question then became, "Through what sort of medium was such reconciliation possible?" Where was the bridge between matter and spirit to be found? Aquinas had an interesting response. He argued that the bridge was provided by two media - language and perception. This hypothesis was useful, since perception is the point at which body and intellect must meet, and language is the medium through which their meeting is expressed and understood. This hypothesis gave the problem of knowledge a decisive perceptual and linguistic turn. Like the Christian imperative to find a solution to the mind-body puzzle, the

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turn was characteristic not only of Aquinas's thought but of medieval philosophy as a whole.14 For McLuhan, who shared this problematique, it led to a theory of communication according to which the transition from medieval times to modernity was essentially a shift in perception and language. McLuhan's theory was rooted in Aquinas's account of how these media are related. Aquinas took the position that perception was not a purely physical and passive thing, as Platonists liked to argue. Rather, it was a form of reasoning. This position rested on a structural argument that ran as follows. Since it is our God-given task to attain knowledge in the broadest sense (the accepted medieval view), it follows that such knowledge is possible. But no knowledge worthy of the name can exclude the plane of reality that comprises the everyday, sensible world. Therefore, knowledge includes that world. To gain such knowledge, one must do two things. One must form concepts that correspond to the world correctly, and one must engage the senses, the only agencies capable of grasping sensible things. Now the sensible world is really a complex series of proportions or ratios. It is a configuration of qualities such as size (large to small), colour (red to blue), and texture (rough to smooth). Hence, to be helpful in forming concepts, the senses must have an in-built capacity to take in and reproduce these configurations. But to do so, they must be preproportioned (in modern language, programmed) to them. There must therefore be a structural continuity between the senses and the world. In that case, human beings can know the world because their senses are able to echo its forms.15 Aquinas argued further that this structural continuity holds as well for the relation between immediate sensations and the mind's after-images of them - one of Augustine's concerns. The sensory picture of the world, already correctly proportioned to it, is passed on to an agency that reproduces it as a set of phantasms or mental analogues. These analogues form the basis of our concepts.16 They are an adequate basis because they match the configurations of the sensory responses that produce them and, in turn, the world that they are picturing. Expressing his accord with this view, McLuhan wrote, "the grandeur of Aquinas is in his explanation of how the modalities of Being are proportional to the modalities of our intellection."17 The senses link knower and known through a process of analogic phantasy. In creating this linkage, they engage in a preconscious form of reasoning. Like other intellectual faculties, therefore, they have real cognitive powers.18 Thus, far from existing on a plane of reality separate from reasoning, they are its very ground.19

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Aquinas's correspondence theory, as it is called, was an important step towards redeeming the sensual body. But it is not clear to what extent it offered this redemption at the cost of promoting a static or, in our European theorists' language, identitarian - concept of the sensible world itself. For if the senses were created in a manner proportionate to the world, how could two persons see it differently or subjectively? And if the world were created according to a certain proportion, how acceptable could it be for them to do so? Further, if one could derive a set of concepts that corresponded to the world "correctly," then perhaps these concepts would be no less rigid or crudely objective than the one Hobbes was to offer 400 years later. However, if one wished to preserve a theory of objectivity, one would seem to need a theory of correct correspondence. This requirement raised serious questions about the proper relation between objective viewpoints and multiple subjective ones, or, as Adorno and Innis put it, between the one and the many. Thomism's capacity to accommodate difference within a larger unity is testable only through an attempt to reconcile it with theories of historical or cultural distinctiveness. I consider below how McLuhan fared in attempting such a reconciliation. For the moment, I concentrate on how he adapted Aquinas's sense theory. McLuhan was especially captivated by Aquinas's theory of the perceptual link between the sensible world and the people identifying it. In Aquinas's view, although we receive sensory input from disparate sources and through five sensory modes, we nevertheless perceive not scattered bits of data (as in Locke's theory of the mind as tabula rasa ) but whole, inter-sensory units, or perceptual Gestalts. From many sensations we derive a unitary "one." Aquinas argued that to make sense of this many-to-one translation, it was necessary to posit an overarching sensory agency. This agency, which Aquinas called the common sense, or sensus communis, would act as a translator for and among the senses. It would be the locus and agent of unified perception. Moreover, he argued, this level of perceptual organization was of special importance to human cognition because it was responsible for self-consciousness. It yielded the second-order awareness that one was perceiving what one was perceiving. In his own work on the history of the West, McLuhan noted that the idea of a faculty of common sense that "conferred consciousness on man" had already occurred to early Greek philosophers.20 He made use of this idea by arguing, like Innis, that balanced use of the senses was likely to result in less rigid perception and, consequently, less rigid forms of reason. In his own words, "The 'common sense' was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of

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translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses and presenting the result to the mind. In fact this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of ratio nality."21 To be rational, then, was to be experiencing a correct sensual ratio. McLuhan linked this ratio in a special way to the sense of touch. His main scholarly source for this aspect of Thomism was a published doctoral work by Edmund Joseph Ryan, written at St Louis University, the first school at which he had taught. According to Ryan, Aristotle had been the first to see the need for a unifying agent such as the common sense, or, in the Greek, aesthesis koine. Aristotle had realized further that, for such a sense to work, the organs of specific sense needed a common medium through which they could be unified. Aristotle had postulated that this medium was the sense of touch; Aquinas, who followed him, adopted this theory. Hence, on the Thomist view, the "common sense" is created through the universal sense of touch.22 Conversely, touch, as unified sensibility, is the root sense.23 McLuhan embraced this idea. As he stated on one occasion, "just as white is the result of the assembly of the primary colours in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio."24 This tactile theory became the core of McLuhan's version of a new, flexible way of knowing. It formed the foundation for his own soundbased paradigm and his own negative theory of dialectic. As in Walter Benjamin's case, this dialectic was modelled partially on the idea of dynamic simultaneity. To represent this fusion of ideas, McLuhan invented a number of neologisms. The key examples are "audile-tactile," which denoted non-visual sensibility; "haptic harmony,"25 which referred to a simultaneity of senses (necessary, in McLuhan's view, to thinking in a constellational, or dialogical way);26 and "tactile," which referred to perceptual or conversational mosaics and to those who created them.27 Given his interest in the sense of touch, it is little wonder that McLuhan was drawn to Innis's detailed and delightfully tactile descriptions of stone, clay, papyrus, and paper. For McLuhan, Innis was a creator of tactile "mosaic configurations" and, as such, a key exemplar of being "in touch."28 For Aquinas, tactile rationality was foundational to every act of identification or objectification. Although the image of matching worlds that this calls up implies a static view, McLuhan argued that sensory balances were not given but were shaped through cultural and historical experience. Consequently, each age or culture represented a dominant sensory mode.29 To develop this historicized reading, he explored an analogy that Aquinas had used to describe the relation between unity and plurality, meaning, in this case, the relation between the "one" as the creative word of God and the "many"

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as the multiplicity of possible percepts. The analogy was based on a point (punctum in Latin) and ran as follows. Just as a point is one when considered by itself, it is more than one when looked at relationally. For example, if located along a line, it can be two, since it is simultaneously the beginning of one segment and the end of another. If regarded as a locus of intersecting lines, it can also be many. This reasoning demonstrates that it is plausible for something to be both one and many. This analogy interested McLuhan because of its relation to the pun, whose etymological root is punctum. Like the point, the pun is a dynamic, interactive simultaneity. The point is a simultaneity of locations; the pun, of meanings. As the point shows that one location can coexist with many, so the pun shows that one meaning can coexist with many. As such, the pun is a natural "audile-tactile" phenomenon that bears an analogical resemblance to the divine Logos, the creative word of God.30 In the light of this analogy, Logos could be seen as a model for tolerating difference within identity. This interpretation was basic to McLuhan's dialectical theory. Like Benjamin's idea of dialectics at a standstill, it stressed the critical insight that could be inspired by the tensions between the elements in a single constellational image. McLuhan attempted to reconcile Aquinas's theory with history by fusing it with Gestalt psychology. This crucial move provided him with a historical-materialist outlook on perception and a powerful argument against the static theories of progress characteristic of modernity. McLuhan was not alone in recognizing an affinity between Gestalt psychology and medieval epistemology. Three of his scholarly sources had suggested it. His colleague Ryan had argued that 'sensus communis' and 'Gestalt' referred to the same phenomenon, since both denoted a coordinated inward experience that grounded all intellectual interpretation.31 Erwin Panofsky, a source on the Middle Ages, had made a similar claim. He had argued that Gestalt psychology stood in conflict with modern theory but was very much in harmony with the doctrines of the 13th century. Modern theorists reserved the capacity for intellectual synthesis for the so-called higher faculties, whereas medieval theorists stressed the formative powers of the senses.32 But the most important source for this attempt was E.H. Gombrich's Gestalt-inspired study, Art and Illusion (1960). The theory McLuhan derived from this fusion formed the basis of a distinctive thesis he was to develop on the historical transition from orality to literacy. Gombrich was an art historican who studied changes in artistic representation through the changes in perception associated with them. He based his work on the premiss that art could have a history

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only because the perceptions that produced it had had one.33 Using Gestalt psychology as a foundation, he argued that perception was not a passive process. Rather, it was a process of forming hypotheses at a subliminal level through a complex set of sensory choices. We never simply see "something out there," Gombrich wrote.34 At some level, we pick or create that something out of the range of possible perceptible phenomena. Moreover, in so doing, we choose to focus our attention on the input that comes from certain senses.35 Perception is a historical phenomenon, Gombrich argued, because these choices are culturally conditioned.36 One might rightly ask, therefore, by what means such conditioning is created and altered. In Gombrich's view, it is created through technological changes in a culture's expressive media. In developing this position, he took a strongly counter-modern stand. He warned that a theory of conditioning based on technological changes did not support the idea that history was a progressive movement towards "scientific" representation. It did not support the crude concept of objectivity most closely associated with modern technology. On the contrary, it served to discredit the modern view. Gombrich arrived at his unique media theory by tracing the historical transition from schematic to representational forms of art. In doing so, he offered a historical account that paralleled Innis and McLuhan on the transition from oral to literate societies. Gombrich noted that primitive and medieval European artists produced schemata of the objects they portrayed rather than representations in the scientific sense. A schema is a stylized symbol that captures the scribe or artist's conception of an object's essence. It offers a relational, rather than an individual or particularist outlook. It is the artistic counterpart of the pictograph or hieroglyph and, as such, is a pictorial, communicative Gestalt. The difference between this and scientific representation can be grasped by considering alternative ways of depicting an object - let us say, an animal. A modern artist would attempt to show the viewer a specific creature as observed at a certain time and place. He or she would strive for a realistic rendering of the size, position, colour, and all other aspects of the original. By contrast, the schematic artist would portray the animal as a generic type, characteristically fierce or tame, depending on the culture's perception of it. He or she would situate the animal in the context of other objects designed to show how it fitted into the culture's natural or cosmological scheme. Here size and all other qualities would be governed by the relative importance of the animal to the culture. Gombrich referred to schematic drawing as "making" rather than "matching." To "make" in this sense was to portray in a way that clearly expressed the artist's cultural sensibility.

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Gombrich stressed that the shift from schematic to scientific representation did not result from an improvement in how humans looked at the natural world. It was not, in other words, the outcome of a form of perceptual progress. Rather, it had resulted from a series of inventions designed to create illusion. Over time, Western artists had discovered and adopted a number of stylistic effects capable of suggesting qualities such as texture, spatial perspective, and the play of light on surfaces.37 These techniques seem first to have surfaced in the Greek art of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the period that had given rise to philosophy and drama. They were initially met with ambivalence. Plato, for example, detested the element of trickery they entailed, for, as he saw clearly, they embodied a disturbing contradiction: they purported to represent reality, but in doing so they falsified it. Like philosophy, these new artistic techniques were expressions of a newly found individualism in Greece. In Innis's account, as we saw above, the written tradition had given rise to forms of expression shaped more by individual taste than by tradition, as previous ones had been. Unhappily, it had also invited increasing levels of concern with the moment and, thus, with space rather than time. In Gombrich's account, the new literature had also given rise to an individualized form of pictorial and sculptural representation.38 In this manner, it had particularly encouraged experimentation with visual effects. Over time, an accumulation of such effects had captured the Western imagination, providing support for the view that art (or representation) was a matter of "matching" rather than "making." In turn, this effect on the imagination had given rise to a dichotomous view that separated objectifying (now seen as an exercise in matching) from creating. The overall result was dualist consciousness. Expressing his accord with this position in a boldface title preceding a commentary on Gombrich, McLuhan wrote, "THE HOMERIC HERO B E C O M E S A S P L I T - M A N AS HE A S S U M E S AN I N D I V I D U A L

EGO."39 For McLuhan, Innis's spatial individual was the split visual man, the human who developed a visual preoccupation by using a medium that, unlike the pictograph, bore no mimetic relation to the objects it represented. Its use separated mimesis from representation and so led to a radical separation of art from science. The split disciplines, thus, were the historical counterpart to the "split-man." Both were concrete expressions of philosophical dualism. McLuhan used the insights he gained from Gombrich's work to develop a more flexible reading of Aquinas's theory of knowledge. Combining their views into a single formulation, he wrote, "Human consciousness is an analogical mirror far more potent than all other

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mirrors that merely provide a univocal or matching image."40 If consciousness could provide more than a matching image, it was because perception itself was a mediated process. For McLuhan, it was mediated by whatever forms of communication were available. A sensus communis thus was a historically specific sensory balance created in and through communication technologies. This historical thesis was also influenced by McLuhan's reading of J.Z. Young, a biologist who developed his own analysis of the concrete relation between human artifacts and culture.41 Young also employed analogical thinking. He argued that people in all ages understand themselves and their world through analogies based on the tools they create. At the same time, they come to perceive their tools through analogies based on their own actions.42 For Young, the collection of analogies and perceptions that this dialectic creates forms the foundation of cultural consciousness. Thus productive techniques, as Gombrich might have put it, are also expressive techniques. They yield analogies that are historically and culturally specific and, in this way, add a significant intellectual dimension to the history of technology. In adopting this theory, Young warned, just as Innis had done, that there is a tendency for a technology, once in place, to become rigid.43 McLuhan borrowed from these analyses in order to develop his own theory of what he called "closed systems."44 As in Innis's case, these systems became the key objects of his ongoing concern. The fusion of Thomism and Gestalt psychology permitted McLuhan to show that one could reconcile Aquinas's concept of mirroring with a theory of cultural difference. It allowed him to show that, within Thomism, this difference was possible. But he also wanted to show that it was acceptable. To do so, he turned from Aquinas's view of perception to the related theory of language. As we saw above, language was an equally important part of Thomist epistemology, since it was the medium through which knowledge of the world (and, therefore, of God) was expressed. For Aquinas, the key unit of meaning was the word. The universe had an essence that was expressible through the word, and God, who was that essence, entered the human mind via the word.45 Although, again, this hypothesis suggested the idea of "matching," McLuhan did not wish to read it this way. To develop a more flexible reading, he turned to another Gestaltinspired theory of meaning derived from the work of LA. Richards and F.R. Leavis, founders of a school of literary studies known as the New Criticism.46 McLuhan had studied with Richards at Cambridge;

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indeed, in the United States, he came to be seen as part of the New Criticism.47 Paralleling much of what has been said about perception thus far, Richards noted that the classical theory of meaning had been under heavy fire from a number of quarters, particularly, from Gestalt psychologists.48 He agreed with the critique and argued that one had to move away from the view that "words just have their meanings as a wall can be represented as a composition of bricks."49 In certain concrete situations, of course, meanings could remain stable because the contexts in which they occurred changed very little.50 For example, words describing how to boil a certain volume of water could remain stable because the context governing the boiling of water is fairly fixed. But in most other cases, contexts shifted, and words and meanings altered with them. Language was therefore inescapably ambiguous. Consequently, Richards argued, a proper theory of objectivity would have to encompass this ambiguity in some way. To develop such a theory, Richards also looked to the communicative practices in ancient Greece. But he did something a little different from either our European or our Canadian theorists. He retrieved a marginalized element in that culture - the ancient art of rhetoric. He argued that rhetoric, as represented by the sophistic tradition, was the precursor to the study of how meaning is related to context.51 At its best, this study had sought to transcend misunderstandings stemming from ambiguity by fostering clear and eloquent exposition. According to its exponents, clarity and eloquence carried with them unique powers of persuasion. This characteristic made them better able than philosophy to bring about transcendence, for philosophy too often tried to force acceptance of particular meanings. Unhappily, the practice had succumbed over time to its own combative tendencies and, in the end, had degenerated into an attempt to eliminate all ambiguity.52 In any case, it had been overshadowed by Socratic dialectic and its adoption of logic as a standard for objectivity.53 Richards's theory called for a new rhetoric that not only respected ambiguity but embraced it as a key object of study. This position echoed the view that Innis had expressed during his academic debates with Urwick in the mid-1950s on objectivity in the social sciences. There, Innis had attempted to describe a theory of objectivity based on the study of institutionalized bias. Richards suggested a similar theory based on attempts not to eliminate shifts of meaning or identity, but to follow them.54 This theory of rhetoric was central to the context in which McLuhan wrote his doctoral dissertation, for which he received his PhD at Cambridge in 1943. The dissertation focused on the work of the 16th-century scholar Thomas Nash and illuminated Nash's work

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by looking at its relation to the long-standing controversy between neo-Platonic logicians (the dialecticians) and the neo-Sophistic rhetoricians. In the process, McLuhan, too, came to call for an end to logic's dominance and for a new balance. He postulated that in principle such a balance would come about if neither logic nor rhetoric dominated the education of an age or a country.55 But he realized that modernity was not to be such an age. In modern times, Newtonian science had robbed rhetoric of its legitimacy and had made the visual-spatial aspects of the world (or what was thought to constitute the world) supreme.56 With the advent of Newtonian thought, McLuhan wrote, "psychology [was] managed in terms of space," and time, tradition, and language were given minimal scope.57 From then on, to borrow from Innis, thinking was dominated by a spatial bias. McLuhan saw a kinship between this new concept of rhetoric and the Thomist doctrine of Divine Logos, which posited words as the key mediators between humans and God.58 The historical linkage was provided by Ciceronian stoicism.59 Cicero's writings on rhetoric were studied and commented on by Augustine and passed on to Aquinas through Augustine's writings. Cicero had argued that clear and eloquent expression mediated thought in individuals and societies alike. Moreover, since it mediated the relations between individuals and their society, it was also the key medium of politics. If practised correctly, it could be the road to a political order that echoed the harmonic order of the cosmos.60 For this reason, in Cicero's view, the study of rhetorical eloquence and the related study of words were most important for developing personal and political wisdom.61 Taking up these ideas, McLuhan wrote that societies and their speech patterns were mirrors of divine Logos.62 To study speech was to study Logos and to study Logos was to mirror it. Expressing this idea elsewhere, he wrote, "I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order (the sensible world) resonates with the divine Logos."63 These last formulations suggest a more rigid version of the analogy theory than the ones described above. They point to the persistence of tensions in McLuhan's thinking that derive from his attempt to combine static and historical viewpoints. At his best, McLuhan juxtaposed these versions, leaving them in tension. In so doing, he invited a negative reading of the spaces between them. At his worst, principally in his later work, the tensions disappeared and his accounts became static. To appreciate McLuhan, therefore it is necessary to pay close attention to the tension-filled analysis he developed in his earlier writings. The first that concerns us - and it forms the

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subject of the rest of this chapter - is McLuhan's critical and constellational text, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951). The Mechanical Bride grew out of a collection of advertisements that McLuhan used as teaching tools for a course he taught on mass culture and mass propagandist techniques. He had begun the collection in the early 19405; he assembled and prepared it for publication during his early years at the University of Toronto.64 It is likely that his choice of focus was inspired by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson's work, Culture and Environment (i934).65 Leavis was a co-founder of the New Criticism, and Thompson, a social scientist with a special interest in the political economy of advertising.66 Like The Mechanical Bride, the Leavis-Thompson text analysed advertising techniques in order to foster critical resistance to mass culture.67 But there is an obvious difference in the way these texts present their ideas. Despite the critical content, Leavis and Thompson wrote in a standard academic manner. McLuhan's writing, by contrast, had already taken a radically non-academic turn. The Mechanical Bride is decidedly non-linear. It is made up of a series of popular cultural exhibits: press advertisements, front covers of popular journals and mysteries, and excerpts from cartoons featuring characters such as Dagwood, Orphan Annie, and Superman. It combines these visuals with the written text in an unusual way. Each pictoral exhibit is accompanied by a number of "glosses" - onesentence commentaries designed to turn the propagandist techniques against themselves by exaggerating, and thus mocking, their crassness. The effect is a penetrating expose of modernity through a satirical mirroring of the grotesque imagery in its mass products. The expose is the contorted speculum of Logos, reflecting back the culture's warped images of humanity. In his work on mass culture, Walter Benjamin referred to the phantasmagoria represented by mass commodities as symbols of a collective dream wish. His project was to expose this dream wish through philosophical analysis of commodities in the 19th-century European setting in which they had first appeared. McLuhan also referred to the advertisements he examined as exhibits in a mass cultural dream. In The Mechanical Bride, he was especially intrigued by the fact that, whilst this dream appeared to emerge from specialized agencies rather than from the masses, it expressed a unity that suggested the presence of a mass psyche. Introducing his text, he put it thus. "Most of the exhibits in this book have been selected because of their typical and familiar quality. They represent a world of forms and speak a language we both know and do not know."68 He continued, "amid the diversity of our inventions and abstract techniques of production

in McLuhan's Early Years and distribution there will be found a great degree of cohesion and unity. This consistency is not conscious in origin or effect and seems to arise from a sort of collective dream ... unfolded [here] by exhibits and commentary as a single landscape. A whirling phantasmagoria can be grasped only when arrested for contemplation."69 It should be borne in mind that McLuhan was not searching for a theory of archetypes. Rather, he was developing an analysis of historically specific imperatives and desires which, whilst operant in the everyday world, are perceived only dimly by its inhabitants. As examples of such imperatives, McLuhan included the "vampire dream,"70 a phenomenon that found expression in the violence portrayed in the popular literature of his day, and "the dream of logic," the scientific outlook that reached its oppressive apogee in the Nazi death camps. An example of subliminal desire was "the passionate dream of unlimited monopolistic power" - the dream that underpinned the market.71 In the light of this theory of culture, McLuhan likened the role of The Mechanical Bride to that of an analyst, "deciphering wishes in the dream symbols of his patients."72 In its approach to modernity The Mechanical Bride addresses a constellation of themes that parallel constellations found in European critical theory: mechanism, the decline of the individual as a consequence of mass production,73 fatherlessness,74 fascism,75 war,76 and distorted images of death and sexuality.77 McLuhan described the relations among these by juxtaposing analyses of the visual components of his exhibits with glosses on the advertising copy and extended prose commentary. He interrelated the themes of mass culture, the decline of the individual, and fascism, for example, through analysis of an advertisement for a romantic novel. The ad featured a sketch of two women in anguished poses, overdramatized to the point of self-parody. The advertising copy read, "They traded loves in a last-minute gamble for happiness." The satirical gloss read back, "Why doesn't somebody write of a last-minute gamble for happiness on a cattle-car headed for Buchenwald?"78 The gloss suggested a link between the emotional falseness in mass advertising and authoritarianism. McLuhan linked mass-produced literature to mass uniformity, and uniformity to the modern practice of reducing individuals to mere units, disposable (as in Buchenwald) when convenient. The cumulative result was a text that probed the workings of the modern unconscious in a way that was probably unequalled in its contemporary North American context. The focus on advertising also gave McLuhan a natural avenue for exploring the relation between communication and production. Although he did not engage in an extended analysis of production,

112 Unthinking Modernity

McLuhan was aware that the market and the sophisticated propaganda of the press were interdependent. In the Thomistic spirit, he portrayed this interdependence as an analogic relation between the deep structures of the market and the inward experience they fostered. Taking Siegfried Giedion's study Mechanization Takes Command (1948) as his point of departure, McLuhan suggested that modern economic values were transmitted to the inner life of individuals through a kind of rhythmic patterning.79 He illustrated this point with an analysis of an advertisement for corsets. The visual part of the ad featured four women in profile, dressed in corsets. Seen as a unit, they appeared as points along the horizontal line of a rectangular figure that framed them.80 Likening the women to a chorus line, McLuhan wrote that there was an interesting relation between "the dynamo of abstract power" that imparted motion to that line and "the dynamo of abstract finance and engineering" that moved the passions of the businessmen seated in front of it.81 For McLuhan, the corset line was a kind of chorus line fuelled by the abstractness of modern production. A similar process governed the effects of the automobile and the printing press. Both featured mechanisms whose throbbing rhythms provided modern culture with its spontaneous impulses.82 Putting this analogical theory in more general terms, McLuhan wrote, "No culture will give popular nourishment and support to images and patterns which are alien to its dominant impulses and aspirations. And among the multifarious forms and images sustained by any society it is reasonable to expect to find some sort of melodic curve ... [its] themes will be the Taws' of that society, laws which will mould its songs and art and social expressions."83 McLuhan suggested that recurring patterns of this sort should always alert us to the possibility of deeper similarities.84 He was not asserting an absolute necessity: rhythmic conformities did not have to signify similar underlying dynamics. However, the suggestion was founded on the Thomist belief that parallel patterning is a primal feature of the cosmos and that, as a consequence, production can be expected to find its analogue in culture. Like the collection of advertisements out of which it grew, The Mechanical Bride was a pedagogical tool as well as an analytical one. Here it took its lead from I.A. Richards's program for a new rhetoric. Extending the analysis he had developed in his dissertation, McLuhan argued that rhetoric had long since migrated to the sphere of private enterprise. Banished from Western academies dominated by logic, its program of expressive eloquence had had no other place to go. Once privatized, however, it had become distorted to fit the narrow goals of commerce and had risen to prominence in this form

113 McLuhan's Early Years

with the triumph of private enterprise over all aspects of society. In so doing, it had not ceased to play the role of public educator. Indeed, McLuhan noted, the real public education now took place in the sphere of commerce, not in the schools. The ad agencies were the modern repositories of rhetoric, or, rather, what was left of it. The ancient concept of rhetoric had linked eloquence to an ethic of public responsibility. The new school was inspired more by cynicism than by ethics and, as McLuhan said, was "virtually demagogic in its headlong exploitation of words and emotions for the flattery of the consumer."85 McLuhan's self-appointed task was to use this new commercial education to enlighten "its intended prey."86 In the process, he hoped to clear a path for a renewed and transcendent rhetoric. As conceived in The Mechanical Bride, however, this project was naive. The idea that textual analysis could bring about radical change from within a social setting was doomed to failure. But it was an interesting failure, and to appreciate it we must look at this text in relation to its Canadian and European counterparts. We can do so best by comparing our form theorists' views on the modern press. Both the Frankfurt and the Toronto theorists believed that the "mass" aspect of mass communication and culture was central to modernity. Mass societies entailed mass institutions, and these worked to transpose the spatial qualities of modern production onto individuals and societies. They were thus instrumental in eroding the quality of inward experience and of public life. In this endeavour, the press had a special role. The theorists developed complementary perspectives on how that role worked. Innis's unique contribution was his lucid account of the economics of the press. For him, the paper and print that comprised the newspaper's material basis made it a light medium, capable of wide circulation. But this lightness was coupled with a heaviness created by the large overhead costs associated with establishing and running a modern press. The combination was insidious. The press's special requirements - its need for large indoor spaces, complex machinery, and skilled labour - created a financial burden that turned the spatial capability of paper and print to a spatializing imperative. Further, it was an imperative that intensified over time. A major secondary factor in that imperative was competition, an element intrinsic to the modern market. As Innis noted, competition between presses led to interesting innovations. But these always involved increasingly complex technologies, which, in turn, increased the press's overhead. From this process there seemed no turning back. Since each new

ii4 Unthinking Modernity technology required a sizeable investment, there could be no question of dumping it for an older and perhaps cheaper one. In any case, keeping up with competitors required producers to obtain the most recent techniques. Put together, these conditions created a ratchet-like logic that compelled press owners to search for ever wider circulation. As a consequence, the modern press was a spatializing medium that could find no point of balance. Given the logic of the market, it was a foregone conclusion that once its historical position as "private enterprise" was secured, the newspaper would develop a deadly dependence on private monies. Someone was going to have to pay for all that technology. Since funding came mainly from advertisers, the industry became dependent on its advertising patrons. This relationship made for a corrosive condition that only worsened over time. The private press had begun, with some support from advertising, as a medium for addressing the public on topics of general interest; it had become a service to sell publics to advertisers - a diabolical inversion that Innis called "the kept press." The kept press reversed the normal relation between the news and the advertisements taken on to support it. Although it operated through the medium of the news, what passed for news was too often composed with an eye to pleasing its private masters.87 As a result, news became a commodity no more or less important than others.88 The pressure for wider distribution also created a structural need for the medium to become qualitatively uniform, or, in the Frankfurt School's terminology, identical to itself. In this process, advertisers were pivotal. Over time, they began to demand progressively larger amounts of printing space for their products. This expansion threatened the balance between advertising copy and news. To meet this threat and thus to maintain a semblance of balance, press owners found themselves in need of ever greater amounts of news and editorial copy. This pressure increased their costs still more, and to economize they began to rely more and more on news and features syndicates.89 It was cheaper to buy news items than to support increasing numbers of local journalists and foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the savings were in inverse proportion to the number of perspectives represented. However "efficient," this move decreased the number of writers and, with them, the number of voices that the public was likely to hear. As a consequence, the readership was less informed and, in this sense, rendered more passive. Papers grew fatter and distribution widened, but the space for individual thought and public dialogue narrowed. The more this condition worsened, the more the newpaper came to resemble a fixed, or rigid totality.90

ii5 McLuhan's Early Years

This new totality turned the new or different into the culturally spatialized "news," the individual into the psychologically spatialized consumer, and the readership into a passive non-public. It was a non-public because creation of a public depends on dialogue. In Innis's view, publics become such only through a process of dialogic self-constitution. As James Carey has observed, "Innis believed that the unstated presupposition of democracy was the existence of a public sphere ... or of a tradition of public discourse." But modern media cannot meet this requirement because they create a system of communication that is essentially private.91 They thereby reduce the truly private - that is, the genuine expression of individual belief to Hobbes's atomistic individual, moving mechanically through a universe that is all space. Adorno developed a parallel analysis of the relation between the spatial bias and advertising. In his view, the age of high capitalism was a new phase of modernity. It had an ironic quality because what was new about it was its capacity to exclude the new. Capitalist projects had reached a peak of development that permitted them to banish as financial risk anything that was untried. Their key medium of exclusion was the high cost of advertising - an element that, as Adorno commented, made it unnecessary "to defeat unwelcome outsiders by laborious competition."92 This prominent position made advertising the elixir of late modern culture.93 Its ability to drive out smaller competitors had imposed a deadly sameness on the entire sphere of production, culture included. Thus the study of modern advertising was central to showing how this quality in production found expression in the quality of society as a whole. Treadmill production leads to a treadmill culture. This situation creates a totality that marginalizes individuals whilst promoting the liberal pseudo-individual (Innis's passive non-public) as its mechanized substitute.94 It results in media-inspired spatiality or, in the language of the Frankfurt School, a one-dimensional world. To these parallel views on the relation between economy and society, Walter Benjamin added the concept of the "empty phrase." For Benjamin, the empty phrase was the unique, aborted product of the press. It was the idea that had never been thought through because its primary role was not to be thought through but to feed the printing machine at the requisite rate each day. It was, impressionistically speaking, the staple diet of the industry, an expression of the same quantitative hunger that characterizes all mass production. Its main ingredient was a set of empty representations of politics, economics, art, and all other dimensions of human life.95 The empty phrase was a melange that threatened to poison the public it no

n6 Unthinking Modernity longer really served. From its central position in the press, it fostered development of an aborted public and an aborted individual - passive, irresponsible, and afraid. In Benjamin's view, this end was precisely its purpose. It generated a false notion of public opinion in order to weaken its readers by insinuating into them an attitude of inexpertise and, ultimately, of irresponsibility.96 The press posed as a responsible, informing authority, but it honed the language of inauthenticity, creating the uninformed public as its reverse image. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan addressed this form of intimidation by analysing an advertisement for radio, whose headline read: "FREEDOM TO LISTEN." He responded by noting that "freedom to listen" in a world that reserved to a tiny minority the opportunity to communicate through the newspaper or radio was nothing more than the freedom to put up or shut up. Under such conditions, he added, ordinary people quickly sense the odds against their being heard publicly and "adapt" to them unconsciously.97 Without fully understanding why, as Benjamin had pointed out, they come to feel uninformed and unauthoritative. In McLuhan's view, this sort of manoeuvring occurred not only through economics and mass media but through the institutions of public education that trained people to respond to them. In his own acerbic words, "Hamburger is more manageable than beef cuts. The logic of a "power economy" is rigorous but crude. It laughs at political shadings ... but it frowns at heavy-boned characters who knock the teeth out of the meat grinder. Our educational process is necessarily geared to eliminate all bone ... Individual resistance to that process is labelled destructive and unco-operative."98 The politics of modernity, in short, was geared to the spatialized human being. Innis and McLuhan were also interested in the deeper psychic implications of this new form of passivity. Like the Frankfurt School theorists, they wanted to understand the related attitudes towards human sexuality and violence. Innis dealt with this issue through an analysis of the press's structural dependence on sensationalism. He saw sensationalism as an indirect consequence of the press's need to compete for advertisers; the main selling point was size of circulation. To increase circulation, owners, editors, and journalists were in constant search of promotional devices. Their task was particularly difficult, since their product had to sell itself anew each day. For this purpose, two things were found to work well. One was an emphasis on deaths, wars, political and sexual scandals, and other human crises.99 The other was an obsession with sparkling political personalities. These devices were interrelated, since both enhanced the

H7 McLuhan's Early Years

authoritarian aspects of the economy. As Innis saw it, the passions they inspired in readers helped to promote a catastrophic view of politics. They promoted the idea that the world was in a continual state of crisis that required cultivation of charismatic leaders. In this way, passions shaped politics. The space accorded to sensationalism supported a cult mentality that favoured dangerous levels of mimetic identification. For Innis, concrete evidence of this phenomenon was the growing tendency towards landslide electoral victories. The politics of sensationalism was thus a key element in promoting authoritarian rule. McLuhan developed an expanded version of this analysis. In his early writings, he was acutely sensitive to the violence and contorted sexuality that lay behind the banal portrait of life promoted by the press. He was similarly sensitive to the relation between this violence and the politics of cult. Although McLuhan was not as conversant as the Frankfurt School theorists were with the concept of repression, he was aware of it. To understand it better, he borrowed from Wilhelm Reich's work on the psychoanalytical dimensions of the control-submission dialectic. Taking Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946) as his starting point, McLuhan developed an account of cult politics based on the psychology of the modern mass experience. Reich, who, like Adorno, had based his analysis on Freud's study of mass psychology, had argued that political cults were created through narcissistic bonds of identification in which sexually repressed individuals merged their identities with charismatic leaders.100 According to Reich, as McLuhan noted, this personal level of identity was the basis for "national narcissism" - a dangerously exaggerated sense of the greatness of one's nation.101 McLuhan enlarged on Reich's work by developing a Thomist formulation of this dynamic. He argued that the cult of personality was a device for reducing everyone to a reflection of the same harmonic pattern. For McLuhan, one could see this process at work in the way advertising reduced women to a set of "love goddesses" who were expected to be essentially alike. Perhaps, McLuhan reasoned, the impulse underlying this reductionism was the modern experience of identifying with large and amorphous crowds. He believed that a special kind of intoxication in numbers brings in its wake a release from all feelings of personal responsibility.102 McLuhan argued that this intoxication also found expression in a cult of death. If Innis saw the bond that tied war and death to the economics of the press, McLuhan saw their link to the modern international economy. "Far from ever looking like accidents," he wrote, "[modern] wars were magnificent displays of what international

ii 8 Unthinking Modernity industry and technology could do."103 Evidence could be found in the way that war and its attendant focus on "the common enemy" had become normal features of popular literature and film.104 This cult of death had its analogue in cultivation of an inward state of deadness. Mass culture treated death and sexuality as much the same thing. Analysing this association through an advertisement for coffins, McLuhan noted that, from the commercial standpoint, sex and death were similar events. Both called for sale of perfumes, flowers, cosmetics, and plush velvets. In a world dominated by commerce, one dressed up death the way one dressed up sexuality. Or, perhaps, one masked sexuality in the same way one masked death. McLuhan saw this grotesque equation as reflecting the way modern culture annihilated individuals and destroyed intimacy, a process for which there is no better expression than the image of a "mechanical bride."105 Elaborating at length in a commentary on Siegfried Giedion, McLuhan wrote, "Giedion [observed] the abbatoir where ... 'the death cries of animals are confused with the rumbling of the great drum, the whirring of gears, and the hissing sound of steam. Death cries and mechanical noises are almost impossible to disentangle.' In this passage one has only to substitute 'life' for 'death' to have a description of any of the great scenes of modern business and industry ... There is a kind of trancelike dream logic in extending methods and attitudes of one sphere of action to another ... The present ad is merely one more example of this dream logic, enabling us to see how death tends to get the same treatment as sex."106 The dominance of logic was thus a dominance of death. A viable culture would need a new epistemological foundation. Whilst developing these views on the damaging effects of the spatial bias, Benjamin and McLuhan were also able to see creative or liberatory moments in the structures that underpinned it. These moments were not liberatory in the Marxian sense of transcendence through a revolt against modern production. Rather, they were incidents of insight or heightenend awareness that emerged from the discontinuity of modern life itself. For both theorists, this vision formed the basis of one variant of the negative dialectic. In McLuhan's view, the press contained a proto-utopian quality that stemmed from two of its characteristics. One was its natural way of juxtaposing material from and about many cultures. The other was its way of juxtaposing subjects not normally associated with one another. Like Benjamin, he saw this textual style as an inadvertent model for seeing in a way that worked against the spatial bias. Thus McLuhan portrayed modern media as paradoxical. They promoted the idea of spatially fixed totalities and yet also pointed the way to

H9 McLuhan's Early Years

a new, non-spatial epistemology. McLuhan believed that it was possible to learn something about this new epistemology by meditating on the medium's form. The meditation would produce an after-image, or Thomistic reflection, that led to a further insight. Meditation on the press, for example, might reveal a set of anonymous tales from around the world narrated to an anonymous audience.107 Regardless of their (admittedly grotesque) content, they could, rightly seen, evoke an image of a new Utopian world society, or, as he was to phrase it later, a "global village."108 Access to this kind of after-image was open to theorists who were willing to look at modern culture through the eyes of the artist. The same claims could be made of the press's discontinuous style. From the Utopian perspective, the exhibits in a newspaper were a series of compressed dream symbols that, despite their content, were iconic prototypes of the collage techniques used by symbolist poets. The collection of exhibits in The Mechanical Bride was an example of this technique. It offered commentary on modernity and inspired insight by presenting cultural symbols or icons in abrupt apposition.109 Like Benjamin, McLuhan came to argue that truth would emerge through meditating on the gaps or negative spaces created by this appositioning. Happily, it was in this same spirit that McLuhan looked at Innis's writings. Its unusual dialectical perspective allowed him to see beyond Innis's factual presentations to the new totality they created. As a consequence, he saw Innis's writings as impressionist paintings, born of the age of simultaneity.110 Like the new age, they offered juxtaposition without explicit connectives111 and symbolic representations that could bring to light the hidden ground created by media both new and old.112 There were, of course, differences between McLuhan's writings and those of his European counterparts. The main one was relative intensiveness. Adorno and Benjamin, following Hegel and the early Marx, stressed the inner life of labourers and members of the capitalist class. As a consequence, they offered the better portrayal of the suffering imposed by the class character of modern life. This dimension is presented by Innis and McLuhan in an attenuated form only. The Mechanical Bride has references to differences in income, and they show that McLuhan was not sympathetic to economic inequality. One of his exhibits, for example, pictured a family picnicking in the country. The copy read, "Freedom ... American Style." Commenting on this supposed freedom, McLuhan wrote, "Study the items in this scene ... What would you say was the income level of this family group? Estimate this from the car, the Scotty, the portable radio and the appearance of the family."113 Again, he responded to an ad for a

12O Unthinking Modernity

diamond bracelet aimed at the nouveau riche: "[They share] the tastes and make-up of the very people above whom they have risen, and yet [are] deprived of the satisfactions of mass solidarity in an egalitarian society."114 Of course, references to income levels and "the rich" do not constitute sociology, and critics have been right in arguing that The Mechanical Bride has little in the way of a sociological perspective.115 Even at this stage, however, McLuhan showed awareness of the distinction between mass culture and popular culture and, consequently, sympathy for certain North American and non-European cultural forms to which Adorno and Benjamin were blind. I deal with this difference more extensively in the concluding chapter, but a brief word is in order here. In the communications phase of McLuhan's work, the concern with popular culture flowered in an elaboration of Innis's work on the distinction between primary orality and the written tradition. This analysis formed the basis for his own attempt to retrieve the negative elements inherent in dialogue. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan touched on these themes by examining the relation between "high-brow" and "low-brow" culture. He was particularly concerned to discredit the notion that elite culture was either radically separate from, or superior to, its folk roots. The relation, he stressed, could not be understood as a simple filtering down of highbrow culture. It was equally a nourishing of the esoteric by the popular. Hence, as he put it, "The few must depend on the many as much as the many stand to gain from the few."116 Indeed, far from wishing to promote a dichotomy of the few and the many, McLuhan moved, through his work, towards suggesting that the vibrant, thematically unfolding society would fuse art and everyday life. This analysis opened the door to more extensive recognition of the distinction between Western culture and the culture of non-Western, non-literate societies. By contrast, Adorno and Benjamin tended to universalize the West. Despite its vibrant, experimental character, The Mechanical Bride failed miserably in the domestic market. It sold only a few hundred copies; McLuhan himself bought the last thousand and pedalled them to friends and students over the next several years.117 It seems that the work found no ready niche in Canada. One can only speculate on why this was the case. Perhaps, since it addressed subject-matter not looked at by other Canadian scholars, it failed to capture their attention, positive or negative. In addition, its focus on mass culture may have drawn some contempt. It was perhaps too complex a work to appeal to the larger public of the collective dream. But whatever the

121 McLuhan's Early Years reason, it fell into a vacuum and became a virtual margin in its own right. This failure led McLuhan to two conclusions: he would have to stop moralizing, and he needed to develop a deeper analysis of the effects of media. In a 1969 journal interview, he told his public that after The Mechanical Bride, he had decided to rid his writings of overt moral content and particular points of view. Neither of these stances was in keeping with the challenge of modernity, which was to search for causes.118 This new policy turned him sharply towards a search for a negative version of objectivity that he was to call "no-point-ofview." In addition, McLuhan came to realize that media affect people structurally in a way less available to conscious consideration than the project of The Mechanical Bride had assumed. The Gutenberg Galaxy, his next book, showed marked absorption of Innis's institutional approach to communication in an attempt to discover how this structural effect worked.

CHAPTER

SIX

From Visual Society to No Point of View

Whilst casting about for a way to move from the immediate study of mass culture to the study of its origins, McLuhan began to read Harold Innis's work. It was a turning point: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) bears the unmistakable mark of Innis's influence. In absorbing that influence, McLuhan brought with him the tension-filled framework that had informed The Mechanical Bride (1951). Language could be conceived statically as analogical mirror, or more dynamically, as historically conditioned. McLuhan never resolved this tension. His earlier communications studies tended towards the historical pole or towards a creative balance between the two. His later work, dealt with in the last part of this chapter, slid towards a frantic kind of stasis and remained there - a case study in how an essentially historical project can be derailed by association with an unsympathetic intellectual environment.1 The Gutenberg Galaxy was a probing and ambitious book. As The Mechanical Bride had elucidated the dream symbols of Western culture, so this second text elucidated the media of communication that made this culture possible. Like Innis's Empire and Communications, it was a study of the deep structures of the West. In keeping with his Thomistic beliefs, McLuhan's special project here was to demonstrate that, over the longue duree, the dominant forms of perceptual closure and sensibility in the West have gone through profound changes. His analysis remains significant at a number of levels. It enlarges our understanding of the relations among production, communication, and reason. Through its unique literary style, it contributes to the project of experimenting with non-linear, sound-based epistemologies. And it effectively analyses the visual character of modernity whilst highlighting the aural medium of dialogue.

123 From Visual Society

In pedagogical terms, The Gutenberg Galaxy deepens and extends the raising of consciousness begun in The Mechanical Bride. Expressing his desire to realize this potential, McLuhan wrote that he hoped that his study would bring to light the factors promoting social change, thus helping, in turn, to increase human autonomy.2 For McLuhan, the essence of education was civil defence against media fall-out. It seemed odd to him that no Western culture had embarked on a systematic campaign to develop such a defence. His subsequent trek through the history of the West was his route to discovering why.3 The new long-range approach borrowed from Innis's work in two ways. It was deeply materialist in its study of media and society and, unlike The Mechanical Bride, highly academic in its use of scholarly sources. This shift in style was paralleled by a change of intended audience. The Mechanical Bride had urged its readers to pay attention to the messages around them. It had addressed itself to the collective dreamers of mass society. In the spirit of Innis, The Gutenberg Galaxy urged its readers to probe the material basis of those messages and thus addressed itself to historians. Because of this affinity, McLuhan introduced The Gutenberg Galaxy as a gloss on Innis's study of the effects of mechanized print on Western culture.4 Elsewhere, he wrote, "I am pleased to think of my own book, The Gutenberg Galaxy ... as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing and then of printing."5 Of course, it would be a mistake to read these assertions too literally, since The Gutenberg Galaxy was also a self-proclaimed extension of the work of several other authors. These include J.Z. Young,6 whose historical-biological work was considered above; Alfred Lord and Milman Parry/ whose classical studies informed the work of Innis and Eric Havelock; and Alexis de Tocqueville, who, according to McLuhan, was like Innis in that he "had the habit not of presenting a picture of events but of meditating on their inner causes."8 However, these authors are linked by a common commitment to psychic and social-historical analysis, - a feature that, at least in McLuhan's view, gives them an affinity with Innis. Consequently, it would not be unfair to see The Gutenberg Galaxy as McLuhan's Empire and Communications: a concrete reading of Western thought through its dominant ways of identifying or objectifying reality. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan traced the development of "visual" society in the West. "Visual" was McLuhan's perceptual term for the spatial bias described by Innis, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Extending his work from The Mechanical Bride, he offered accounts of atomistic individualism, rationalism, liberalism,

124 Unthinking Modernity and the nation-state, as these have intertwined with and emerged from particular media. Despite its Thomistic bent, his approach was eclectic. He articulated his account through a series of literary and scholarly quotations, each accompanied by his own critical commentary. The series was historically ordered, with one exception. It began with descriptions of contemporary non-literate societies and then passed through the medieval and early-modern eras to the modern age of print. It thus replaced what, in Innis's study, were accounts of ancient non-literate cultures with descriptions of contemporary tribal groups. This was an important innovation, of which more is said in the final chapter. The result was a text that provides a cumulative and environmental, rather than a linear, analysis. It is well known, however, that McLuhan's work came under an unusual amount of attack, much of it severe. Thus a summary of his communications work must not only illuminate his project but address the criticisms. The latter are of two main sorts. The first is that McLuhan's analysis was based on a mechanistic ontology. This is often expressed in the charge of "technological determinism."9 Most of these critiques make little or no reference to The Gutenberg Galaxy; they focus mainly on the later works.10 Careful analysis of this text, offered below, shows that McLuhan's early work on communication was broad enough to include the mediating effects of social and productive relations. In advance, a simple response can serve to weaken these charges. For McLuhan, the impact of a medium is itself mediated by the culture that employs it. The Gutenberg Galaxy offers an excellent example. When contemporary oral societies were shown Western films, they were unable to comprehend the standard conventions for differentiating foreground from background and for indicating the passage of time. To reach them, film-makers had to alter the conventions and, in the process, to make the medium more interactive.11 Had this kind of adjustment developed further, McLuhan argued, we might have had a new composite medium. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), offers another example. McLuhan claimed that the radio's impact on society depended on the culture receiving it. He believed that it was potentially more disruptive in tribal societies, since they perceived and employed it as they would a tribal drum.12 The second common criticism is that McLuhan's aural-to-visual thesis is either meaningless or inadequately supported by evidence and thus pseudo-scientific.13 The charge of meaninglessness can be countered only by explicating McLuhan's work. Since McLuhan developed his most nuanced account of the shift from aural to visual culture in his description of the transition from medieval manuscript

125 From Visual Society

culture to the modern world of print, I focus on that analysis. The charge of pseudo-science eventually got the better of McLuhan, as we see later in this chapter. For the present, we turn to McLuhan's story of how visual culture came to the West through the mechanization of the word. We learn from The Gutenberg Galaxy that the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, although it had incorporated writing into the heart of its commercial and educational institutions, was far removed from the visual bias of modernity. The written word did not function in that society as a purely visual medium, mainly because reading was not a silent activity as it is today: it was an oral one. To grasp this difference, we must look at the material, social, and religious conditions that attended medieval reading and writing. Mechanized print is so much a part of Western culture that it is difficult for us to imagine the effects that a mechanized tradition can have on a language and on the culture that speaks it. Modernity is linguistically uniform in a way that we have come to take for granted. In an oral society, it is common to find a wide variety of regional dialects. Much of what we currently refer to as the "Third World" still reflects that tendency. In principle, introduction of an alphabet need not change this situation, since alphabets can be adjusted to these variations. Indeed, for a time it may enhance regional or individual expression, as it did in ancient Greece. But introduction of a printing press is another matter. The heavy costs of establishing and maintaining a large press virtually compel printers to find ways to sell their products as widely as possible. In turn, this compulsion standardizes language, an important factor in the modern literary experience. Manuscript culture knew nothing of this experience. It developed under constraints as well, but these did not foster languages that were as stable as the ones with which Westerners are most familiar. Travel was slow by our standards: written material could not be transported as easily or widely as it can be today. In addition, education was regionalized. Consequently, writers worked in localized enclaves, and, like all locally developed projects, their work remained fluid and improvisational. There were no centralized authorities on spelling, word definition, or expressive style. Dictionaries with their fixed entries and meanings had not been conceived. As a result, all of these elements varied from place to place.14 The variations were especially characteristic of the vernacular literatures that had gained popularity in the 12th and 13th centuries. Unlike scholarly works, which were written in Latin, these reflected not

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only regional orthographies but also the myriad shifting dialects spoken in medieval Europe. Reading a medieval manuscript was thus a profoundly different experience from reading a modern text. Books were few and far between, and, more often than not, medieval readers facing a new manuscript would be looking at a work that came from a town or area other than their own. The manuscript would reflect that difference. It would be written in an unfamiliar dialect or in a familiar language spelled in an unfamiliar way. To grasp the words and meanings in front of them, readers would have to interpolate. In that aural age, the natural method was to sound out the words and listen to them in order to grasp their phonetic similarity to the reader's own dialect. H.J. Chaytor, one of McLuhan's sources on this subject, illustrates this experience by quoting the following example of a verse fragment written in a 13th-century southern French dialect: Horns pot, segon mon sen, Per art o per uzatje Entendre tot langatje ...15

Translated, the fragment says, "A man can, in my opinion, by skill or use, understand any language." This self-referential sentence indicates the sort of reading experience that faced the man or woman in the late medieval era. Supposing him or her to have a working knowledge of English, French, and Latin (or another similar combination), but not this particular dialect, and presupposing a commonality in the prosodic elements (rhythm, cadence, phrasing, and pronunciation) of the current languages, the sentence would be decipherable if he or she read it aloud and listened for linguistic cognates. "Horns pot, segon mon sen" can be heard as "[Un] Homme peut, selon mon sens," taking the word "sens" to denote the related concept, opinion. Similarly, "uzatje," which looks odd on paper, is aurally recognizable as a variant of "use." This kind of reading placed an emphasis on hearing that heightened this culture's general alertness to sound. It fostered a fluid linguistic dynamism in which to grasp meaning was always to listen for familiarity with one's own tongue. Medieval languages reflected this fact: in the dialects of the day, "reading" and "recitation" were represented by one and the same term.16 Although he focused only a little on this aspect of communications history, Innis was also aware of the aural nature of pre-modern societies. In his own account of the medieval era, he was particularly interested in the effects of print on Latin. Although it was the universal

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language of scholarship, Innis noted, early Latin, like other languages, varied regionally. As a result, Latin speakers throughout the West were accustomed to listening to and comprehending each other's dialects. They were used to concentrating on aural cues. As print worked its stabilizing effect on Latin, however, texts became linguistically uniform and, as a consequence, easier to read. This change reduced the range of differences in Latin to regional differences in pronunciation. Under these conditions, scholars grew to depend more on reading each other's texts than on listening to each other's spoken Latin. Once the variations in spelling were reduced, it simply proved easier to deal visually with the differences that remained than aurally with dialects.17 Scholars thus came to rely increasingly on the visual dimension of literacy. In the process, they ceased to share a world of sounds and came to share mainly texts. Extending this analysis, McLuhan noted that the need to read orally in this age was intensified by reliance on parchment. Parchment was an expensive and scarce medium, compared with paper, and for the sake of economy words were often bunched together. Readers had thus to sound out and hear their manuscripts in order even to separate one word from another. To illustrate the effects that such a text would have on reading, McLuhan quoted from James Joyce, who, sensitive to the visual character of his own society, attempted (in McLuhan's view) to re-create the aural world by using non-standard spellings and run-on words. He thus induced oral reading of his characteristically aural texts.18 Contemporary Canadian west coast poets, I might add, and no doubt many others do this as well.19 This oral/aural quality also had social dimensions. Under conditions of handicraft production, texts and readers were few compared to today and public oral recitation was a standard method of disseminating literary, scientific, and philosophical thought. The importance of public readings was enhanced by the fact that this era was distinctively Christian (at least for the educated elite) and "spreading the word" was a spiritual imperative. Oral disputation on points of theology was thus a crucial form of social education. But non-religious readings were just as prevalent. In this lighter vein, the oral reading of vernacular literatures continued the uniquely fused practices of entertainment, news reporting, and cultural transmission that had flourished in the age of the epic. Sacred reading was presided over by the priest; secular, by the wandering minstrel. Either way, social gatherings were an integral part of reading in the Middle Ages. This sociability, in turn, had economic and political effects, most notably in the medieval concepts of authorship and ownership. Since

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texts were rare in the schools of the day, teaching took the form of dictation. Educators lectured at a pace that allowed students to make verbatim copies of the curricula they had to master. These copies became the students' own texts. This practice was so fully integrated into the medieval concept of education that students were required to present these texts in order to graduate. In a pinch, such texts might even be sold commercially.20 As McLuhan put it, this practice made the medieval student the consumer, producer, palaeographer, and publisher of the works that he read.21 In turn, it gave copying a text a significance that is entirely different from the one it has today. Medieval texts were not viewed as private and original things. It was too clear that they were copies to which commentaries had been added over time. In this circumstance, to copy and circulate another person's writings would be considered an act of virtue.22 The notion of literature as property, especially individual, private property did not and could not exist. By extension, the idea that a single piece of literature had a strictly definable identity was unheard of. Property, identity, and individuality are in this sense visual concepts. On a more Thomistic note, McLuhan argued that manuscript culture both created and reflected a particular way of perceiving. In explanation, he contrasted the structure of medieval written communication with that of mechanized print. He noted that the press, unlike the pen, was able to produce a visually uniform text. The relative cheapness of paper also made it feasible to leave spaces between words. These changes resulted in texts that were legible enough to allow swift and silent reading. They made it possible to read more quickly than one could recite. This development separated reading from reciting and seeing from hearing. Silent readers lost the kinaesthetic sensations that had accompanied cultivation of a clear and sonorous reading voice.23 Thereafter, reading became a mainly visual experience, and more inward. The silent reader learned to hear words internally. In the words of McLuhan's colleague Walter Ong, this practice brought about a new kind of "inner speech" and a new measure of solitude.24 The new solitude was the offspring of the cheapness and availability of texts. Its psychological counterpart was nascent modern individualism.25 The new form of reading also supported development of a crude concept of the object. It did so by bringing about a new literary style. Reaching live audiences on philosophical topics had required a grand, rhetorical, or semi-poetic style. The medieval speaker had to develop patterns of rhythmic emphasis that paralleled the structure of his or her arguments in order to increase their intelligibility and appeal. Oral eloquence was integral to a literature that was meant to

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be read aloud. Under the influence of print, this quality receded into the specialized field of poetry. Just as it had done in Greece, the abstract-logical medium of prose gained ascendance. As oral reading declined, readers lost not only the sensations associated with it but its musical and mimetic dimension as well. The theme of rhythm and mimesis is treated in detail in Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato (1963). Although McLuhan had not read Havelock at the time of writing The Gutenberg Galaxy, his later reading of it and the high regard in which he continued to hold it make it permissible to use Havelock's work to clarify McLuhan's argument.26 Havelock, who was also at the University of Toronto for a time, developed a unique media-oriented analysis of the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in ancient Greece. Like Innis, he noted that in the oral phase of that society, the need for extensive memorization had given rise to a series of expressive devices that functioned as mnemonics. To be workable, he argued, these devices had to be appealing. They had to produce pleasure. To this end, melody and rhythm were found most effective. They encouraged a level of bodily identification with reciters that made listening and remembering joyful. Havelock argued that writing, with its focus on vision, had broken the hold of this mimetic tradition in Greece. It was just this kind of pleasure, he added, that Plato had sought to eliminate when, in The Republic, he proposed that poets be expelled from the good city. Poetry was too threatening to logic, the idol of the new visual elite. Extending this argument, McLuhan observed that logic, though incorporated into the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages, had not yet reached the point of domination. Teaching had become disputational, but, as we saw above, many rhythmic-mimetic elements remained. Dictation is a far more mimetic practice than is the extemporaneous kind of lecturing common in universities today. The same could be said for non-academic reading. Vernacular litarature was written mainly in rhyme, and so public readings were, in effect, poetry readings. Both experiences involved the body in a way that the prose style to follow would never do. The attendant material transition from parchment to paper played its own role in suppressing the body's involvement in communication. Working with parchment was a far more tactile experience than was the paper-writing and print-making that followed it. Parchment surfaces are rough, and medieval writers had to press hard and steadily on their pens in order to produce a text; writing involved physical as well as mental labour. Further, the traditions of handillumination and calligraphy fused writing with the more sensuous

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activities of drawing and painting. By comparison, print is a passively visual medium. It is an etherealized medium that invites separation of thought from the sensual body. In McLuhan's Thomistic terms, it is a medium that minimizes sense and, hence, "common sense." Thus, like Innis, McLuhan showed that there is always a reciprocal relation between media and the consciousness of individuals and societies. His broad understanding of communications systems enabled him to show how they, in turn, are mediated by the social and educational institutions that employ them. He provided as well a complex account of how suppression of hearing and touch in Western culture helped to create the visual world of modernity. The most familiar manifestation today of that world is the boundary that our institutions draw between the so-called public sphere of visual knowledge and the private sphere of touch. Visual knowledge is knowledge of applied technique. It is the epistemology that, at its oppressive best, we experience as refusal to accept as truth anything that cannot be measured and graphed by instruments offering visible read-outs. In our European theorists' language, it is an imperative to identity-thinking; for McLuhan, it is the sensual counterpart to what they describe as identitarian culture. This account of McLuhan's work provides a context for assessing the critiques that have called his visual thesis "meaningless." Jonathan Miller's book is a prime example. Miller argued that for such a thesis to make sense, one would have to specify the physical procedures by which visual intensities could be measured. Otherwise, there was no ground from which to assert that any medium had stepped up the intensity of vision. Since McLuhan's thesis was not amenable to this sort of measurement, it was "not wrong exactly," Miller continued, "but meaningless."27 A visual critique of an exploratory concept of the visual is not very helpful. Unfortunately, this sort of charge was too much a part of the intellectual atmosphere in which McLuhan had to work, and, eventually, he increased his own difficulties by chasing after proofs of the kind that Miller demanded. This fact makes it important to retrieve and explain McLuhan's way of exploring the social creation of meaning. Its critique of visual science allows us to see that lack of meaning in Miller's sense does not amount to lack of all meaning. Our understanding of McLuhan's thesis will be strengthened by a closer look at the various meanings he assigned to the term "visual." We saw above that McLuhan used the term to refer to the dehistoricized world-view that is the hallmark of modernity. He did so

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explicitly by linking it to what he called the Newtonian concept of the universe. Here he added to Innis's materialist critique of modernity by reading the history of Western philosophy through a history of the media that had underpinned its development.28 His special contribution here was his portrayal of the spatial bias as a sensual state wrought by "the interiorisation" of print technology.29 In keeping with the emancipatory spirit of his critique, McLuhan stretched the term "visual" to cover the idea of domination. Employing a vocabulary similar to that of the Frankfurt School, he argued that the main thrust of visual technology was to reduce persons to things. From the standpoint of that technology, he wrote, human beings are simply machines ruled by passions that can be discovered by scientific (that is, visual) methods of observation. But the methods are reductionist, and, as a consequence, the so-called observations are really exercises in control.30 Extending this argument to language, he suggested that rendering persons as things was part and parcel of the reified concept of meaning that saw words as things.31 Reified language (the language that LA. Richards had struggled against) helped to create reified persons. Hence, the fixity of visual science and communication were historically linked to domination.32 Thus for McLuhan the term "visual" was the main foil for the open, non-dominating concept of knowledge he was attempting to develop. Like the terms "space," "time," and "reification," it was an antiNewtonian nexus linking all dimensions of the culture of modernity: production, communication, history, political geography, and psychology. McLuhan offered many formulations that expressed this nexus. For example, he related visual culture to production thus: "The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line and the first mass production."33 He related mechanistic production to the spatialization of time by arguing that print, in its capacity of freezing time, had anticipated the work of the camera: "The mechanisation of the scribal art was the first translator of movement into a series of single shots or frames."34 Extending this analysis to the relationship between producers and consumers of texts, he wrote that silent, solitary reading had anticipated the passivity of film-viewing. Both activities allowed receivers to absorb producers' messages at almost the normal speed of thought. This process left little time for reflection, placing receivers more and more in the hands of authors and filmmakers. McLuhan saw this new time-frame as a dangerous phase in the producer-consumer relationship. Visual culture bred passive consumers, all too well suited to consumerism as a way of life.35

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McLuhan also explored a link between visual culture and political geography. He postulated that print was a major factor in supporting development of the modern state. Perhaps, he wrote, seeing a language in print leaves a cultural after-image in the minds of its speakers. When a language appears in "high visual definition," it may afford a glimpse of a unity that coincides with the language community's geographical boundaries.36 Following Innis's lead, he hastened to add that the spatializing thrust of print had enhanced the ability of centres to impose specific vernaculars on marginal speakers of dialects. He continued to recognize this process as violent. He noted that in France, for example, the original Jacobins had been quick to recognize the importance of language to the building of a nation and, as a consequence, had resolved to stamp out dialects. They had thereby created at least the illusion of a strong "French" state.37 The new homogeneity had fostered development of a uniform system of law, which had made possible the intensive levels of surveillance and control so distinctive of modernity. The modern state was thus a manifestation of the visual world of applied technique.38 Finally, McLuhan linked visual culture to the homogeneity that plagues modern liberal notions of the individual. Individualism, he wrote, is an ironic concept: it is founded on the technological notion of a homogeneous citizenry. Although it is supported by an ideology of personal initiative and self-expression, it is a variant of the atomism that one finds in a battalion of drilled soldiers.39 More ironic still, it forms the foundation of value relativism, the ideology that reduces value to the level of a commodity. In McLuhan's words, "The literal liberal is convinced that all real values are private, personal and individual. Such is the message of mere literacy."40 Such is the visualizing message of the visual medium - "the [visual] medium is the [visual] message." McLuhan's critical analysis and the method by which he developed it contained an implicit theory of history and epistemology. The new theory was an effort to move beyond critique and towards something transcendent. In this effort, McLuhan followed Innis. But he approached this task in a unique way. Innis had been trained as an economic historian and had begun by developing a dialectical thesis built around the concepts of centres and margins. His later work on Western epistemology was an extension of this thesis. Centres became monopolies of knowledge, and margins became cultures whose ways of life were negated by the monopolies. In both cases, the margins, or negative spaces, were the main sources of innovation. This formula

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was Innis's version of negative dialectics. As a meta-theory, however, it needed to be teased out of his concrete historical accounts. In McLuhan's case, the reverse is true. McLuhan was trained in literature, a field more obviously tied to the subject of consciousness than is economic history. He arrived at a concept of history through his experiments in epistemology - in particular, through meditating on the causal relations between the dimensions of modernity that he brought together. McLuhan referred to these experiments as "probes." As he frequently made explicit in a way that Innis could not, they were investigative exercises rather than finished theories: "my books constitute [a] process rather than the completed product of discovery; the purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks."41 McLuhan mapped this new terrain by employing a wide-ranging array of analytical methods. If Innis was the universal scholar conducting experiments in interdisciplinary study, McLuhan was the universal teacher engaged in a continual practice of inspiring new modes of thought. To counter the visual approach, McLuhan experimented with a concept that he called acoustic space. Because it was so experimental, he could not pin its meaning down in a way that afforded a view as clear as the one offered in his history of visual society. "Acoustic space" was a diffuse, umbrella term for a set of epistemological boundary experiments. McLuhan described it through analogies and neologisms that drew together a wide range of themes, many of which we encountered above. His way of doing so reflected the tension in his work between the Thomist/static and the Gestalt/ historical outlooks. The overarching theme at the static pole was dynamic co-presence, or simultaneity. The theme at the historical pole was negative history, formulated in ways that derived from Innis. Both poles represented a challenge to the linear version of reality offered by Hobbes and Newton. Acoustic space was the epistemological space in which these poles could coexist. He thus referred to it as (among other things) "multi-levelled"42 and, more empirically, " multi-cultural. "43 McLuhan described this new terrain through four key neologisms - the mosaic concepts "hot" and "cool" and the negative concepts "anti-environment" and what I call "no-point-of-view." The neologisms were iconic symbols - units of compressed meaning intended to inspire a sudden transcendent insight, or epiphany.44 They worked almost too well. The terminology so completely captivated his readers

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that even his harshest critics engaged in wordplays that stem from it. Their titles reflect this paradox. They read, for example, "Mc2Luhan's Message or Which Way Did the Second Coming Went?," "A Hot Apostle in a Cool Culture," and "The Modicum is the Messuage."45 The titles stand as interesting counters to some of the more unfortunate substantive comments accompanying them; McLuhan's epiphanies, it seems, had powerful subliminal effects.46 If we are not to discount the power of his experimental method, we must keep this perspective in mind. "Mosaic" was the term that McLuhan most often used to describe his own texts. They were the literary and methodological expression of his concept of the "acoustic," as opposed to the "visual." McLuhan described it thus: "The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history ... the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation - particularly in our time."47 The idea of a "constellation," of which "mosaic" and "galaxy" are cognates, is by now familiar. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin used this metaphor, and Innis, the technique. Adorno's and Benjamin's work differed from McLuhan's, since they used Marxist categories such as capital, labour, and commodity fetishism to analyse the parts of their constellations. But the theoretical links are unmistakable. The metaphor seems almost to have been "in the (philosophical) air" during the first half of this century. It appeared in Karl Mannheim's program for a new social science. Mannheim, like Adorno and Benjamin, was nurtured on the writings of Lukacs and claimed that social factors comprised a constellation (almost, he added, in the astronomical sense) that rendered a specific cultural formation possible. By studying these constellations, one could come to understand the possibilities opened up by shifting configurations. Mannheim's description, like McLuhan's, was carefully phrased to avoid the notion of mechanical necessity.48 It also appeared in Siegfried Giedion's work, which influenced Benjamin, Innis, and McLuhan. In the introduction to his own text on modernity, Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion wrote, "The writing of history has less to do with facts as such than with their relations. These relations will vary with the shifting points of view, for, like constellations of stars, they are ceaselessly in change."49 In a mosaic, a diffuse or fluid notion of relatedness replaces mechanistic atomism.

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Two characteristics link all these versions of the constellation: all use juxtaposition as an alternative to linear causation (but include that form of causation), and all lack explicitness. In putting together a constellation, one resists reducing social and historical processes to a string of billiard ball-like causal relations. One sees them as a set of elements that encompass all levels of physical and social reality. The diffuseness of definition invites the active participation of the observer/social scientist/historian. For McLuhan, it also expressed the Gestalt-inspired idea that the observer's perceptions are always saturated with analytical categories. Since inviting participation was one of McLuhan's main goals, he designed his constellations to resemble or mimic an open dialogue. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Gutenberg Galaxy is almost entirely a collection of voices. These take the form of quotations from literary and scholarly sources juxtaposed with McLuhan's own "voice-over"-style glosses and commentary. It is interesting and instructive to look at this book from the standpoint of its acoustic method. Like The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy grew out of a living educational project. Soon after publication of the earlier book, McLuhan concluded that understanding the effects of communication systems required a collective rather than an individual effort.50 He set out to organize an ongoing project that brought together, initially in live format and later in print form, the work of anthropologists Edmund Carpenter and Dorothy Lee, art historican Siegfried Giedion, urbanologist Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and many others. The intention was to develop an interdisciplinary analysis through a dialogue among minds trained to see the world from different points of view. This project yielded a brilliantly experimental journal entitled Explorations, published between 1953 and 1959-51 The Gutenberg Galaxy was McLuhan's own extension of this project. The explorations group was McLuhan's attempt to challenge and explore the epistemological boundaries of the West as they had found expression in its educational institutions. This interest in education linked McLuhan to Innis in the most clear and immediate sense. Their periods at the University of Toronto overlapped from 1946, when McLuhan joined St Michael's College, to 1952, the year in which Innis died. They were introduced to each other by Tom Easterbrook, a political economist and mutual friend, but did not get on wonderfully.52 Their first meeting, alas, found them discussing the Inquisition. Innis expressed his distaste for religious monopolies; McLuhan defended the church.53 Nevertheless, for a brief period - three months

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in 1947 - they participated in an informal interdisciplinary group at the University of Toronto, the Values Group.54 The group's activities revolved around rethinking the role of values in the humanities and social sciences and was a reaction to the encroachment upon all subject areas of so-called value-free methods. Both men had a powerful vision of the communitarian possibilities lodged within the university. The vision was integral to their hope of transcending monopolies of knowledge. It was also tied to their perspective on dialogue. Both thinkers saw the university as an institution rooted in the transitional culture of the manuscript, and both were attempting to retrieve its oral/acoustic character. For Innis and McLuhan, the university was at least potentially an "acoustic" institution. It is undoubtedly this common spirit of effort that helped McLuhan to see what Innis was trying to do. In describing Innis's work, he wrote with some humour, "Innis takes much time to read if he is read on his own terms. That he deserves to be read on his own terms becomes obvious as soon as that experiment is tried even once. So read he takes time but he also saves time. Each sentence is a compressed monograph. He includes a small library in each page, and often incorporates a small library of references on the same page in addition. If the business of the teacher is to save the student's time then Innis is one of the greatest teachers on record."55 McLuhan treated Innis's texts as they needed to be treated. He saw them as invitations to engage in a dialogical reading. McLuhan's contribution to this literary method was his distinctive way of composing his texts out of massive numbers of quotations. The quotations decentred his analysis, thus providing the opportunity and the incentive for readers to participate actively in it. Students of Innis's and McLuhan's work seem not to have recognized their unique and innovative method - their improvised form of non-centrist philosophy. Seen from another perspective, McLuhan's constellations were natural extensions of two aspects of Thomism. The first was the theory of the "common sense"; for the Thomist, whilst each sense plays a distinctive role in appropriating the world, perception proper comes together in a single Gestalt through the medium of touch. Adequate perception requires balanced use of the senses. In McLuhan's version, a balance of this sort was foundational to a nonvisual, non-dominating form of reason. Where no sense was unduly suppressed, percepts would be relatively balanced, and objects could be identified in an open-ended manner. McLuhan's community of scholars was a living version of this theory. Each person

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represented a particular sensibility, and their coming together was their way of realizing a common sense. The second aspect was the question-and-response format common to medieval texts. This dialogical form was a natural historical extension of the medieval semi-oral mode of education. In the Middle Ages, educational institutions were responsible for holding regular public disputations. The disputations revolved around points of philosophy that were relevant to the day. Questions could be posed by listeners, and such general interaction was thought to advance and disseminate knowledge throughout the Western world. It was a conscious continuation of a dialogue that had begun with the dawn of philosophy in the West. McLuhan's constellations represented a new kind of orality - a literary anticipation of the community of speakers in a world beyond modernity. Like Innis's texts, they presented the oral tradition in written form. To capture the qualities and levels of participation that media invited, McLuhan coined two of the terms for which his work is most often remembered - "hot" and "cool." "Hot" described media that encouraged passivity. The paradigmatic example was the printed dictionary, the Western text that best expresses the idea of words as fixed objects. Consequently, McLuhan described hot media as "high in definition." High-definition media appeal to or invite the participation of a single sense to the detriment of the "common sense." In so doing, they foster personal and social passivity. In contrast to this, "cool" media invite integrated use of the senses and, hence, participation; correspondingly, they are low in definition.56 Here the paradigmatic case is the dialogue as realized in the ideal university seminar or in the 19605 phenomenon of the "teach-in." McLuhan expressed it thus: "A hot medium is one that extends a single sense in 'high definition/ High definition is the state of being well filled with data ... speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand hot media do not leave so much to be filled in ... by the audience. Hot media are therefore low in participation, and cool media are high in participation."57 Associating coolness with participation was yet another adaptation of Thomist theory. Aquinas had frequently used "participation" as a term to describe a process of cooling. He explained this usage by pointing to the relationship between the sun and its earthly medium, the air. In his words, the air "participates the light of the sun" because it diffuses it. It does not communicate sunlight in the same clarity as it exists in the sun. To McLuhan, this description meant that diffuseness, or coolness, was a natural earthly condition - a fact that

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Platonists such as Augustine were never able to understand.58 By extension, participation was the natural condition of community. "Cool" thus was a participatory concept and, as such, a key characteristic of acoustic space. Its antonym, "hot," denoted the visual culture of modernity. In what was easily his most paradoxical formulation, McLuhan also referred to acoustic space as having, or representing, no point of view. "No-point-of-view" was McLuhan's exploratory move towards a negative concept of dialectics. It was his attempt to theorize through a positive form of negation. A brief review of the versions of negative dialectics as developed by Adorno, Benjamin, and Innis can help us to situate McLuhan's efforts. For Adorno and Benjamin, a negatively dialectical approach to history or epistemology called for an understanding of margins as the points at which institutions or concepts fail to do justice to their objects. Their approach challenged the notion of exhaustive definition, suggesting that new insights arise instead from recognizing where definitions have failed. Innis was more concrete. He posited that new historical developments and insights emerged through the agency of marginalized groups that were created by imposed institutions such as monopolies of communication. Since all established systems tended towards monopoly, maintaining openness was always, as in Mannheim's formulation, to listen at (or to) the margins. Innis's corresponding vision of a successful community called for a multiplicity of media that could function as moments of truth relative to one another. For all three theorists, this new method was modelled on the concept of a negative or open dialogue. A negative dialectic was important to McLuhan as well: it was integral to his concept of acoustic space. Unfortunately, McLuhan used the terms "centre" and "margin" in ways that were truly confusing. This difficulty stemmed in part from his not explaining his usage well. It was exacerbated by his attempts to combine the terms with the concepts of figure and ground and a related set of neologisms: "anti-environment" and its synonym, "counter-environment." Before looking at McLuhan's use of this language, let us consider what logical relation there may be among these terms. As McLuhan noted in a text he designed for schools, "figure" and "ground" were coined initially to assist in a structural study of visible phenomena.59 They provided a vocabulary for exploring how the structure of any situation becomes the ground for experiencing all that presents itself, so to speak, as figure.60 They thus offered a way to explore how we participate in perceiving. The figure-ground distinction serves as a constant reminder that all acts of identification

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occur in the context of a ground that is, in part, culturally determined. For McLuhan, a culture was a subliminal configuration of figureground relations. It was a predominant mode of perception, or, in the philosophical language that I am using, a predominant way of objectifying reality. Innis had developed a power-centred analysis that showed how dominant or central ways of objectifying reality were able to marginalize other existing or possible ways. In this, endeavour, he was concerned primarily with relations between cultures, but his call for a multiplicity of media is applicable to such relations within cultures as well. McLuhan's early analysis was not as clearly power-centred, but much of it was consonant with Innis's view. For McLuhan, communication-based centres were always hidden environments.61 Understanding social and cultural change was impossible without studying how media worked to create those environments.62 By extension, understanding modernity meant being able to illuminate the environments created by modern media, a task made especially difficult by the subliminal nature of media effects. To overcome this difficulty, McLuhan proposed creation of "counter-" or "anti-environments." One paradigm for the antienvironment was the successful work of art. Good art, McLuhan argued, functions as a perceptual abrasive, jarring its culture's awareness and, in the process, highlighting figures not noticed in the course of everday life.63 Another paradigm was the new medium. By functioning as new grounds, new media could highlight features of older media previously unnoticed. The same could be said of the margins created by the meeting of two or more cultures. The marginal or negative points of contact could induce new levels of self-awareness and awareness of others. In all these examples, the juncture, or margin, remained the locus of new learning. Stating this thesis in a way that was consonant with Innis's claims, McLuhan wrote that cultural clashes are especially effective in heightening the participants' powers of generalization.64 The kinds of translation that such clashes entail seem to open up great reserves of creative energy.65 Framing this thesis in terms of media, McLuhan wrote, "The moment of the meeting of two media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses."66 And further, "The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born."67 Applying this idea to institutions, he added that new ideas never seem to emerge from within large corporations. Rather, they assail them from outside through the agency of smaller, competing organizations.68

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Like Innis, McLuhan realized that dominant communications systems tend to ossify. He reasoned that they did so partly because there is a natural human drive to reach an equilibrium state in perceptual closure.69 The result of any equilibrium state is a set of institutions that come to represent a "single point of view." In the modern world, this tendency is exaggerated by the increasing capacity of the new media to centralize. For this reason, McLuhan wrote, "The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple modes for exploration."70 Modernity thus calls for continual decentring. Unlike Innis and Adorno, and much like Walter Benjamin, McLuhan also developed formulations that suggested a mystical interpretation of acoustic space based on the idea of dynamic simultaneity. These formulations also challenged the single point of view. The mystical models dealt with a central paradox revolving around the one-many relation. In McLuhan's words, they represented "no point of view" and, simultaneously, "all points of view." This duality lodged within a single image was McLuhan's version of dialectics at a standstill. The gap between its components was intended to inspire flashes of understanding. McLuhan described this phenomenon through a number of analogies. Typically, one was sound: "The ear favours no particular 'point of view.' We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say 'Music shall fill the air.' We never say, 'Music shall fill a particular segment of the air/"71 Another analogy was the medieval painting, an art form in which figures were arranged in a way that expressed all possible interrelations.72 Still another was a "no-point-of-view" interpretation of a text that explored all possible meanings and, hence, "all points of view."73 Acoustic space was thus a "no point of view/all points of view" kind of space, a concept in which co-presence took the place of centres and margins. The focus here was still on negative spaces - that is, on the junctures of the multiple figures (as in the paintings) or interpretations (as in the texts). But, unlike the historical formulations, it suggested no conflict, or, rather, only that form of conflict that is inherent in all human life. Like the seamless web represented by sound, it pointed to a transcendence of all natural conflict in a moment of total reconciliation. This thesis placed an important limitation on the mystical outlook. It was not very useful for exploring those forms of domination that are historically contingent or unnecessary. These mystical formulations were not attempts to relinquish a point of view in any ordinary sense, as some commentators have suggested;74 McLuhan did not deny that he had preferences.75 Neither were they expressions of a classical liberal position on pluralism,

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as Arthur Kroker has argued.76 Rather, they were articulations of a belief in a transcendent way of understanding derived from an unmediated encounter with the divine, or, Thomistically, from an immediate resonance between the sensory order and divine Logos.77 In Understanding Media, McLuhan expressed this idea as "faith in the ultimate harmony of all being."78 McLuhan's idiosyncratic use of the terms "centre" and "margin" illustrates how he juxtaposed the historically dialectical and statically transcendent concepts of dialectics. At his best, he maintained creative tension between them. This method was not contradictory.79 Since neither concept was dominant, especially in the early writings, it is fair to assume that McLuhan saw them as complementary. A good balance was achieved in The Gutenberg Galaxy, where, as part of a historical account, he described the new acoustic era as a cosmic return to the tribe at a new level of consciousness80 but also offered open-ended constructions such as the following. "Two cultures can, like astronomical galaxies, pass through one another without collision but not without change of configuration ... Such interficiality is the very key to the Renaissance as to our twentieth century."81 In this second formulation, there is no suggestion that the process has any set end point. In his later works, McLuhan continued to express both views, sometimes within a single formulation. For example, his opening words in Understanding Media read, "Every culture and every age has its favourite model of perception and knowledge that it's inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns ... There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude - a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith in which this book has been written."82 Here he juxtaposed the claim that the revolt against patterns was a contemporary phenomenon with a universal claim identifying the same revolt as an expression of a faith in universal harmony. We find a similar combination in his 1967 work, (with Quentin Fiore), The Medium Is the Massage, in which readers are told, on the one hand, that we are now living in a global village, a simultaneous happening,83 and, on the other hand, that "[w]e now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative ... The dropout represents a rejection of 19th century technology as manifested in our educational establishments. The teach-in represents a creative effort, switching the educational process from package to discovery."84 This second passage points only to an open-ended process of discovery. Unfortunately, many of

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McLuhan's critics picked up on the messianic claims in his texts and ignored the more open-ended ones with which these were paired.85 Yet there were some real problems in McLuhan's work. As is well known, in his later career, McLuhan was the object of much hostility. Some of it was deserved. Three elements crept into his later writing that eroded his capacity to comment competently on the issues of his day. First, he began with increasing frequency to make pronouncements that reduced his theoretical claims to specific practices. For example, he linked historical and cultural changes too closely with the advent of specific media. This tendency made him sound like a mechanist. Second, he began to confuse the decentralization made possible by certain electronic media with democratization. This error stemmed partly from his not being well versed in political economy and, hence, in power relations. Third, he began less and less to ground his accounts in the kind of historical documentation that he had offered in The Gutenberg Galaxy. As a result, his presentations became scattered - at their worst, pastiches of catchy phrases that seemed to go nowhere and everywhere at once. This method resulted in a pernicious rendering of acoustic space, and it made his later works unconvincing and dogmatic. The charge of mechanism, though hardly supported by the corpus as a whole, does have some foundation. As early as The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan was inclined occasionally to make claims that suggested a grotesquely positivist reading of his sensory thesis. At one point, for example, he suggested that computers could be programmed to simulate, and thus indicate, the sense ratios that a given medium would foster.86 This theory reduced his historical analysis to a set of measurable and programmable variables, untouched by the mediating influences of institutions such as universities and printing economies. But in The Gutenberg Galaxy, this claim stood alone in the midst of a generally sensitive historical analysis, and thus one could dismiss it as a stray piece of ironic speculation. Similar claims appearing with increasing frequency in his later work showed that his perspective had taken a clear turn for the worse. In Understanding Media, for example, he wrote, "We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say ... 'We can program 20 more hours of TV in South Africa to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.'"87 This horrifying thought represents a sad development in McLuhan's career. Mechanistic statements of this kind are rare in McLuhan's early texts. But for many people, they stand out starkly when seen in the

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context of claims about the beneficial effects of electricity that appeared more and more as his work progressed. In the spirit of Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford, McLuhan seemed in his later years to adopt the naive position that electronic media would inevitably bring about the true human community.88 In The Medium is the Massage, for example, he posited that electricity involves people with one another in a manner that forces them to move away from rigid ideas about classification and towards the more open practice of pattern recognition.89 Elsewhere, he suggested that, thanks to electricity, we are now blessed with a return to the world of the palaeolithic tribe.90 In this phase of McLuhan's career, nothing became the object of more contempt than his pronouncements on the supposedly happy effects of that pervasive electronic medium, the television. The following is typical: "Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialised acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilisation ... Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being."91 What can one say? Something had clearly gone awry in the land of constellations. Although McLuhan never appeared publicly to alter his view on these matters, by the mid-1970s he began to have serious private misgivings. In a 1974 piece of correspondence, for example, he argued that electronic media reduced personal identity to vestigial levels that, in turn, diminished moral feeling to practically nothing.92 To James Carey, author of a critique of Geddes, McLuhan, Mumford, and others, he responded by saying that, although he associated electronic media with decentralization, he was painfully aware that this kind of decentralization was eroding a private dimension of life that was necessary for human well-being.93 He insisted further that he had no Utopian views on electricity or any other technology. By 1977, he had also decided that television was not so tactile a medium as he had imagined. He noted that television seemed to have an immobilizing effect on children, stemming from the way the programs inundated them without inviting an active response.94 Eventually, he became convinced that television was a factor in dyslexia and other reading difficulties. But he expressed these views privately, and one can hardly expect students of his texts to have been aware of them. When McLuhan reduced media theory to a discussion of electronic technique, he effectively reduced democratic theory to a discussion of the decentralization made possible by certain electronic media. He argued that electricity permitted all places to be centres, since it

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eliminated the power distinction between the farm-house and the executive suite.95 As a result, it was bound soon to end all domination. In his words, "The electric gives powerful voices to the weak and suffering ... and sweeps aside the bureaucratic specialisms and job descriptions of the mind tied to a manual of instruction ... Under these conditions 'conspicuous waste' or 'conspicuous consumption' become lost causes, and even the hardiest of the rich dwindle into modest ways of timid service to mankind."96 And worse still, "Computer speed and inclusiveness is LSD for Business - that is, the end of goals and objectives."97 He offers an entirely naive, if disapproving, view of class society. Although the disapproving attitude excuses neither McLuhan's naivete nor his reductionist tendencies, it is worth focusing briefly on his class allegiances, since so many of his critics have accused him of "buying into" the values of the corporate elite. It is not difficult to guess why they have done so. McLuhan's penchant for associating electronic media with a new form of humanism was music to the ears of corporate owners and sponsors. For a time, as Neil Compton has pointed out, it made him "the darling of marketing organizations."98 The Utopian vision provided them with a sense of historical destiny.99 During the height of his popularity, he enhanced this image of himself by giving workshops to the executives of Bell Telephone, the Container Corp., General Electric, General Motors, IBM, and other corporations.100 He seemed, like the medieval supporters of classical rhetoric, to have left the academic world for the glitz of the corporate one. This move was a partial expression of McLuhan's everambivalent relation to the University of Toronto. The high-profile workshops drew distrust and contempt from his liberal and conservative colleagues and the charge from the left that he now spoke with the voice of domination. That McLuhan was naive on the subject of capital is hard to doubt. That he was in sympathy with it, however, is not plausible. Look at what he had to say in these workshops. To General Motors, for example, he offered the message that the automobile was obsolete, since ours was the age of the new corporate social body, not the individual. To the telephone company, he took the news that the phone's true significance lay in its effect on the sensorium. And to the Container Corp., he brought the insight that, since this was the end of the Newtonian era, the concept of the container was obsolete, and prefabricated packages would soon be a thing of the past.101 This approach may have been hopelessly ineffective, but it was hardly sympathetic to business. Indeed, it showed a fair degree of hostility.

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The best evidence of an anti-corporate stand can be gleaned from McLuhan's last major work, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972). In this text, written with Barrington Nevitt, he took on the dubious task of informing corporations that they were out of touch with how the new media were doing away with specialization and fostering a communitarian sensibility. He presented prospective corporate readers with a whirlwind of aphorisms which, if confusing, were hardly calculated to be endearing. He told them, for example, that laundromats were the residual quest for community.102 He treated them to characterizations of market society that read "Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Market at Any Price"103 and told them, in a section entitled "Work as Torture," that the contemporary work process was rooted in 19th-century specialization and had created a savage work environment that people tolerated because it had anaesthetized them.104 There was more than a touch of megalomania in these efforts. McLuhan almost believed that he could single-handedly draw out the communitarianism latent in the corporation. But if at this stage McLuhan showed contempt for economic domination, he displayed an even profounder incapacity for coherence. Take Today contains McLuhan's neologisms and theoretical formulations in a scattered and elliptical format. "The art and science of this century," it begins, "reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. All boundaries are areas of maximal abrasion and change."105 To the seasoned reader of McLuhan, this statement points to his theory of universality coupled with a variant of negative dialectics. To the new reader (possibly the corporate executive), it would probably signify very little. The text continues with flashy phrases about figure and ground, matching and making, percepts and concepts, sensus communis, acoustic space, hidden environments, tribal communities, and Gutenberg "speed-up." It races through cryptic (if clever) versions of the theories of Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes ("Where Ignorance Is Blitz: Harmony by Collision Unltd."),106 Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx (where readers, alas, are told that the concern with property is "visual" and hence, obsolescent),107 Charles Dickens, William Blake, G.W.F. Hegel, Charles Darwin, Robert Owen, Karl Polanyi, S0ren Kierkegaard, James Joyce, John Stuart Mill, and dozens of others in an order whose significance I have yet to decipher. It ends with the suggestion that in the world of electronic speedup, everyone will become an executive. The result is not only an unreadable text but one that reflects a formerly a lucid critic of modernity who had become a sign of it: a-historical, directionless, and tending to triviality.

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This decline proceeded apace, as demonstrated by Laws of Media: The New Science (1988), a posthumously published work, written with his son Eric. Laws of Media takes as given the idea that electronic media will create the "acoustic" society. Its goal is to make readers aware of this quasi-second coming. In keeping with this simplified view - simplified when contrasted with McLuhan's earlier texts - it adopts a monocausal theory of history, according to which the abstraction in "visual" society "occurs by the agency of the phonetic alphabet alone; it does not occur in any culture lacking the phonetic alphabet."108 The conclusion is a non sequitur. From the nonoccurrence of the alphabet in non-"visual" societies one cannot infer that the alphabet is a sufficient condition for "visual" culture. But monocausality fits well with this text, which, having left history behind, attempts an odd fusion of crude empiricism and mysticism. Although the attempt hardly succeeds, it illustrates McLuhan's confused response to his critics on the pseudo-scientific nature of his work. McLuhan was not educated in scientific theory, and, judging from his responses, the so-called scientific criticisms simply confused him. The confusion took two forms: he attempted to "prove" what he had to say and tried to arrive at a definitive set of "scientific" laws for media. From as early as 1954, but at an accelerated rate throughout the 19605 and 19703, McLuhan searched for proof of his theory about the relation between media and sensory balance. In 1954, his colleague Edmund Carpenter had helped him to conduct an empirical test to determine the effects of media on comprehension and information retention. The results seemed to tell in favour of television.109 A similar test conducted in 1963 reversed these findings.110 McLuhan had also sought funding to develop a sensory typology. A test, eventually conducted with funding from IBM, yielded no significant results.111 Seizing on yet another possibility in the late 19605, McLuhan became obsessed with the split-brain hypothesis: the idea that each side of the brain controls a separate and distinct set of functions. According to this theory, the left side is linear, or "visual"; the right side, holistic, or "acoustic." In this endeavour, McLuhan was supported by Robert Logan, a physics professor and colleague at the University of Toronto.112 Laws of Media takes the split-brain hypothesis as a given. McLuhan obviously had some genuine interest in such testing. But it seems clear that he also had a need for the legitimacy that his society accorded to the scientist. That need was continually frustrated both at his university and in the world outside. Within the university, the Centre for Culture and Technology, over which he presided from 1963 until 1980, struggled for permission to teach its one and only

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graduate course. McLuhan was considered a crackpot by more than a few academics.113 Within the wider community, he had to contend with scientistic readings of his texts. He faced both the silly charge that his use of the print medium negated his critique of it and its complement, that at the very least he should have followed literary conventions in employing it.114 Although the corporate sponsors that he sought out were indeed interested in the effects of media and, as he realized, not as tied to print as were academics, they were basically interested in predictability and control - hardly the stuff of non-linear experimentation. All in all, it was a difficult and unhelpful environment. It is thus not surprising that, according to Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media was designed as a response to "a chorus" of complaints that McLuhan's work was not scientific. The book opens with a claim to be scientific and promises to enhance our ability to predict the effects of all media.115 But the claim has an air of desperation that illustrates McLuhan's alienation both in the academy and outside. Consider his son's introductory words: "It took my father nearly two full years of constant inquiry to find out 'what constitutes a scientific statement.' He asked everyone he encountered - colleagues, students, friends, associates, visitors. Finally, one evening, he found the answer in Sir Karl Popper's Objective Knowledge - that it was something stated in such a manner that it could be disproved."116 If this description is correct, Marshall McLuhan was a profoundly isolated man. It is almost inconceivable that in a university one would have to search for two years to collide with Popper's rule of falsiflability. It is standard fare for all students of social science. In any case, McLuhan did not understand Popper's rule. Laws of Media is subtitled The New Science. It purports to develop a science of humanity that transcends older, linear systems. But the rule of falisfiability is, par excellence, the rule of the old science. To falsify a claim in Popper's manner one needs first to frame a research design in which the object of study is defined unambiguously. The test for falsification then requires "visual" evidence and measurement. There is little room in such an approach for the multi-levelled historical study of meaning that forms the core of McLuhan's early writings. Laws of Media, however, is certainly not scientific in Popper's sense. The text ignores the rule of falsification almost as soon as it states the rule. Its authors begin by inadequately distinguishing between verification and falsification. They suggest that the scientific character of their laws can be determined by asking, "Can anyone anywhere, anytime, verify them by direct observation?"117 They then propose four "laws" that can be neither verified nor falsified. The first two

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are tautologies; the second two require too strict a definition of the media in question. The first pair reads: 1. Every technology extends or amplifies some organ or faculty of the user. 2. Because there is equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is heightened or intensified another is diminished or numbed.118

If the terms "extension" and "intensification" are understood metaphorically, then laws i and 2 need neither verification nor falsification, since they are tautologies. Clearly, any human-made thing extends some faculty and, in so doing, diminishes the use of another. If the terms are to be read empirically, they could be verified (if this is the correct term) only by the kind of historical analysis offered in The Gutenberg Galaxy. They are clearly not open to "direct observation." The second pair reads: 3. Every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics. 4. The content of any medium is an older medium.

A corollary of law 4 is that every artifact retrieves something previously suppressed. The four laws form what the McLuhans call a "tetrad." The tetrad is meant to be a heuristic device. By considering any human-made artifact (or medium) in terms of what it extends (law i), makes obsolete (law 2), reverses into (law 3), and retrieves (law 4), one is to arrive at a perception of its hidden ground that allows prediction of the cultural effects it would have. The laws of reversal and retrieval express the real tension in this text between the will to the old scientism and the desire for a new science. To be usable, the law of reversal requires a contextual, or cultural identification of the medium in question that neither the individual laws nor their conjunction will make obvious. Consider an example offered by the McLuhans: the high-rise apartment building. By their reading of the laws, it enhances solitude and, when pushed to its extreme, reverses into a slum.119 This kind of "reversal" has obviously occurred. But how, outside a socioeconomic analysis of the context in which a dwelling is developed (now considered part of the "visual" approach), could one identify what it necessarily enhances? If a building were built and owned cooperatively, would it enhance solitude? Would it reverse into a slum? Would it be a high-rise? To identify it as enhancing solitude is to identify it with capitalism as the hidden "ground," or environment. To fail to see this ground is to defeat the purpose of the exercise.

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The law of retrieval is no less problematic. It claims that all media or artifacts retrieve something. But again, to apply the law requires an identification whose context or ground remains hidden. Consider the example of the Western public school. What does it retrieve? That depends on how we identify it. From Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's viewpoint, probably slavery;120 from Allan Bloom's viewpoint, probably pre-civilized mediocrity;121 from some liberal viewpoints, natural human equality. The laws of media will neither reveal the hidden ground nor predict the effects (reversals) of human artifacts. To be fair, one must add that these laws are an intended extension of the quasi-mystical theory of Giambattista Vico. This very brief account of Vico is taken from the work of A. Robert Caponigri, one of McLuhan's sources on the subject. An early 18th-century theorist, Vico believed that one could retrieve the true meaning or purpose of a culture's key institutions through careful historical study of its language.122 In keeping with this theory, he tried to develop a "new science" of humanity based on an etymological study of linguistic forms. This effort was premissed on two articles of faith. The first was that history is a providential and collective movement towards the good.123 The second was that there is an essential and retrievable meaning for each of our everyday utterances, through which we can come to understand that movement better. The resulting understanding would be analogical in the Thomist sense. It would mirror the world as intended by its creator. In McLuhan's version of this theory, all human artifacts are "outerings," or extensions of our faculties, and thus they are equivalent to utterances or words.124 Moreover, all utterances are analogues and, as such, have a four-part (A:B as C:D) analogical structure. The "four pattern" of the laws thus has a "special resonance and relation to language."125 Other "four patterns" that somehow relate to these are the four levels of textual exegesis and Aristotle's four types of causation.126 Because of this resonance, studying media with the aid of the tetrads is the key to understanding their effects. Vico's view, at least as described by Caponigri, is relatively clear, but McLuhan's "four pattern" extension of it is intelligible only as a desperate move to render Aquinas's doctrine of mirroring "scientific." More to the point, it neither enlightens us about how the tetrads can be used to predict the effects of media (the scientific requirement) nor solves the problem, raised above, of definition. Indeed, the entire exercise seems to turn its back on the historical and cultural analyses that were so central to the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Innis, and the early McLuhan.

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The confusion in Laws of Media runs deeper still. Vico had turned away from natural science on the grounds that, since God made nature, only God could know it. He reasoned that the proper thing to study was the world of nations, since, as humans had created it, they could know it.127 Based on this view, Laws of Media claims that it has nothing to tell us about the non-human world.128 In so doing, it re-creates the dichotomy between nature and culture that is part of the fact-value dualism of modernity. The text's overall position is further confused by the authors' assertion that, whereas "visual space is a man-made artefact, acoustic space is a natural, environmental form"129 - a view that suggests either that acoustic space is unknowable or that the "new science" should turn away from Vico and find a way to interrelate the study of the non-human and the human worlds. The text is rendered no clearer by the McLuhans' assertion that it rests on no theory because it is a purely "empirical" work, aimed at training perception.130 Of course it does rest on a theory, albeit an incoherent one. The assertion only suggests another dichotomy between theory and empiricism. We have travelled a great distance from the historical project of The Gutenberg Galaxy. The possibility of a slide into a-historicity was always possible, given the tensions in McLuhan's theoretical framework. Still, it is reasonable to assume that he would have fared much better had his own cultural ground consisted of a less awestruck and scientistic, more genuinely appreciative and comprehending audience.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Theorists in Dialogue: Parallel Tracks?

Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan were Canadian theorists of modernity who challenged the boundaries of Western epistemology through a self-styled, uniquely materialist analysis of communications media. Their work is best seen as part of a larger Western project of rethinking the cultural dimensions of space-time relations by employing models built around the temporal qualities of sound. Like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School theorists with whom I am comparing them, they carried out this task by developing a method that retrieved a fluid, personal sense of time by redefining the oral/aural medium of dialogue. In the process, they arrived at a Canadian version of negative dialectics modelled on the concept of open dialogue. Negative dialectics poses a direct challenge to the two axioms that of identity and that of difference - that govern our most common assumptions about reasoning. Before considering the comparisons offered in this chapter, we should examine those axioms more closely. They form the basis of much of our everyday reasoning, yet to most of us they are subliminal. As becomes clear, the axioms are most notable for their inability to make sense of human time. Consider the axiom of identity. It reads, "A thing is always itself and not anything else"- not a bad axiom when one is considering a rock or an apple. We could hardly get anywhere if, on a daily basis, we were unable to recognize such things as themselves. But, like Hobbes's paradigm and the imaginary world of the universal market, this axiom, when applied to societies, makes sense only in a visual framework that divides reality into discrete, a-temporal segments. Only in that kind of framework could a living social object remain sufficiently "itself" to be identifiable in the sense required. But where do we find such time segments? Certainly not in an aural, sensual

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world, and not in a temporal world that sees change taking place in persons and societies everyday. The axiom of difference only compounds the difficulty. It reads: "A thing cannot both be itself and not-itself at the same time and in the same way." But where is this time in which it remains itself? No person, society, or living process is momentary in this way. To use this logic as a standard for studying cultures is to deny their historical reality. The denial can follow Augustine's method of denouncing life as epistemologically unreliable or Hobbes's route of defining life as a collection of mechanized units. But it cannot comprehend the ambiguity that is integral to all living matter. Nor can it make sense of the natural ambiguity in language and its entension in dialogue. Identitythinking, as Adorno called it, is inimical to dialogue. It is blind to dialectical movements, for open dialogue is always dialectical in its structure. Applied to social studies, it justifies as rational the imposition of dichotomous categories onto persons, groups, and cultures. Applied to political life, it justifies as progressive the colonization of entire worlds, a practice that obliterates the special qualities of collective and individual lives. Applied to human psychology, it suppresses all mimesis in favour of the will to control. Our Canadian and European theorists addressed these axioms in different ways. But all four showed that the axioms' so-called rationality contains and is partially driven by non-rational elements. They showed too that Western reason inherently structures thinking in rigidly dichotomous ways. Innis and McLuhan approached these axioms empirically by studying the communications media that fostered their emergence as expressed in the development of spatial or visual thinking. Innis traced the eclipse of oral communication and the ascendancy of the will to control associated with writing. He showed that every dominant medium represents a rigidity, or monopoly, and that every monopoly demonstrates the ambiguity central to all social phenomena. Monopolies are clearly themselves. But since they invariably create margins, they are also not themselves. Or at least they are not what they believe themselves to be. Consequently, no standard logical analysis can do them justice. McLuhan traced the eclipse of orality and tactility associated with mimesis in the wake of mechanized print. He showed that print rigidified language by reducing it to a fixed lexicon. This point was equally useful in demonstrating ambiguity, especially in language. Words are clearly themselves. But since they both marginalize meanings and contain many meanings, they are also not themselves. Innis and McLuhan were uniquely materialist in their efforts to show that knowledge

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grows not only through objectifying life but also through an interplay of objectifications and their margins. They thereby transcended the concept of objectivity associated with static definitions and escaped the subjectivity that comes from denying all definition. Their work was an ongoing dialogue that consciously incorporated both poles. Innis's political economy showed how the boundaries of societies are defined by their political and productive contexts. It revealed as well that an adequate perception of this dynamic requires input from marginal groups. His study of media extended this insight to the history of knowledge. McLuhan's perceptual account of media showed that the boundaries of percepts are defined by their social and productive contexts. In his rendition, awareness of this process was available only through the perspective of a margin such as a counter-medium, counter-culture, or alternative environment. Adorno's and Benjamin's point of departure for a similar critique was the failure of philosophers from Kant onwards to develop a method that escaped the bonds of space-time or one-many dualism. Adorno responded by engaging in critical dialogues with Western dialecticians in order to show that their attempts to reconcile subject and object ended inevitably in reformulated versions of dualism. He revealed that in each case failure stemmed from efforts to arrive at final classifications. Benjamin, who occupied a middle ground between Adorno and the Toronto theorists, developed critical dialogues of this sort as well as a history of Western technology. Like Adorno, he challenged the fixity of Western philosophy. Like Innis and McLuhan, he did so in part by studying the history of perception. The two schools' approaches were distinct; their projects were similar. Adorno and Benjamin challenged other Western dialecticians in order to display the dualism underlying their logic. Innis and McLuhan developed an account of media monopolies in order to display the dialectic underlying their history. All four studied cultures because cultures cannot be understood dualistically. All four searched for a new logic that could address the institution, system, or culture rather than the mythically atomized individual. Despite these thematic ties, there were important differences between the two schools. Each was grounded in a personal and philosophical context, and, predictably, each developed a bias. The Canadian school grew out of post-colonial experience and exhibited a correspondingly global or intercultural bias. It also had an empirical outlook that reflected its British heritage and the practical needs of a new country. The outlook was useful because it resulted in a fine

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elaboration of the material links among the various levels of analysis that Innis and McLuhan drew together. But it was less conducive to abstraction, and, as a consequence, it was sometimes poorly theorized. The European school grew out of a more culturally centrist experience and developed a local or intracultural bias. Its theoretical work reflected the strength of the European philosophical tradition. But that tradition placed little emphasis on concreteness, and so the theorists etherealized and sometimes mystified the material relations that they were supposed to be revealing. Since both schools were concerned with the effects of production on consciousness, it is appropriate to begin this comparison by examining their respective approaches to political economy. As we saw above, Adorno's and Benjamin's work was grounded in Marxism, a theory developed at the centre of the industrial revolution. Since that revolution was founded on a new order of labour control made possible by mechanization and the factory setting, the political economy that derived from it centred naturally on the act of production. According to Lukacs's version of that theory, which so influenced the Frankfurt School, mechanized labour had a static quality that fostered a correspondingly static consiousness. It also had structural ties to a commodity market which spread that consciousness throughout the industrialized world and beyond. Like Marx, Lukacs had hoped that this new way of labouring would nevertheless inspire a level of critical consciousness ready and able to transform the market society. When, in the 19305, the supposed bearers of that consciousness turned instead to fascism, critical Marxists began to search for a better theory of consciousness. They were especially interested in finding a theory of internalization, for it seemed to them that the spatial character of the modern market had been internalized by the labourers who produced for it. It also seemed that this internalization had transformed potential revolt into regressive reaction, creating a depressing continuity between bourgeois and proletarian culture. This concern resulted in an analysis that contained two elements virtually absent from the Canadian writings. One was a description of the pain and degradation experienced in the everday life of market societies. The other was a vindication of the right to the sensual pleasure that those societies deny their members. Adorno's critique of Thorstein Veblen serves as a good starting point for expanding on this difference. We remember that Veblen was one of Innis's theoretical forbears and was renowned for his critique of modern society's consumptive excesses. He was equally noted for his attack on the theory of hedonism associated with modern price theory. For Veblen, consumers' purchases and cultural activities beyond those

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leading to the bare necessities of life were motivated by the desire either to demonstrate so-called class superiority or to emulate that superiority. Objects and activities designed purely for pleasure were thus, for Veblen, forms of class barbarism. In his view, the diabolical continuum between the two stood as a concrete rebuke to those who believed such objects to be civilized, creative, and unique. Whilst sympathetic to the theory of commodity fethishism contained in this critique, Adorno noted that it had an ascetic quality that made it more like traditional American theory than might appear. The desire for commodities, he argued, was more than an expression of class. It was also an expression of the genuine need for sensual happiness, albeit an inadequate one. It demonstrated the need for a life beyond pure utility. Mass products were certainly unique in a false sense, but the gesture towards uniqueness was, in part, an attempt to avoid the loss of inward experience created by the modern work process.1 Workers and capitalists developed an object-oriented facade of uniqueness in the face of the loss of internal uniqueness. And they were fooled by this facade because they required, but could no longer recognize, the real thing. As well, consumers who bought in order to emulate inadvertently proved the real social character of happiness. They demonstrate the real need for being recognized and approved of by others. An adequate analysis of consumption would thus have to take account of these Utopian moments. It would have to capture that aspect of modernity that was not identical with the market.2 Innis and McLuhan were not unsympathetic to the idea of a life beyond the practical. Innis was highly critical of Western asceticism. On one occasion he wrote, "The hand of Puritanism is evident in our art and in our cultural life. This implies neglect of the interrelation between reason and emotion. Religion is a good servant but a bad master ... Puritanical smugness has had a sterilizing influence on the cleansing effect of art and other expressions of cultural life."3 McLuhan was also aware of this dimension. He expressed it in his idea that a new harmony could be seen through the veil of the fragmented character of modernity. But both Canadians' work lacked a subtle appreciation for the poverty of experience in modern culture. It did not have the kind of sensibility expressed in Adorno's description of the psychological impact of market-driven uniformity: "[Uniformity] ... is the triumph of invested capital whose truth as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line ... Kant's formalism still expected a contribution from the individual who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental

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concepts; but industry robs the individual of this function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him."4 Adorno could see how the uniformity expressed in Hobbes's writings had penetrated to a level of experience in which individuals barely participated in producing their own percepts. He saw similarly how this condition fostered a dualist consciousness at every level of existence. For Adorno, "The bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone ... is already a Nazi ... or a modern city-dweller who can now only imagine friendship as a 'social contact': that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact."5 From this neo-Marxist perspective, modernity appears as loneliness covered by a thin veneer of sociability. Equally sensitive, Benjamin was concerned with the effects that modern life had on the human sense of time. Like Lukacs, Benjamin argued that modernity was different from earlier eras mainly because of the radical discontinuity of time experienced by workers who laboured at machines or on the assembly line.6 In his version, the discontinuity stemmed from the fact that, in mechanized labour, each productive moment was isolated from the next, and each thing produced apparently independent of all the others. Actions and products were repetitive, he noted, but they were not linked to one another like the parts of a story or a symphony. In these latter endeavours, parts are always tied meaningfully to what comes before or after. In factory work, they are linked only to a generalized will to profit. When he turned his attention to everday life, Benjamin saw that the modern city provided two important analogues to the factory: the urban crowd and the gambling hall. Like machine processes, he wrote, crowds are discontinuous. In a crowd, one is jostled unpredictably. Each instance is separate from the next. Strange faces appear and disappear with a rapidity unknown in earlier times. None seems connected to any other. Together, they form a disjointed set of experiences that do not seem to fit into any meaningful pattern. The crowd becomes the social counterpart to the assembly line. Benjamin posited that gambling had a similar quality: each game appears entirely independent of the last. The gambler can gain a fortune at one moment and lose it at the next. Like the jolts and faces in the crowd, these moments do not seem to be meaningfully interconnected. In the modern world, Benjamin continued, the desire for this level of discontinuity was on the increase. Modernity and gambling were thus becoming well-matched phenomena.

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Thus, for Benjamin, all three venues - factory, street, and gambling hall - were existentially locked into a segmented series of moments. The experience that linked them was a continuous stream of shocks. As modern urban dwellers adjusted to these shocks, Benjamin argued, they began to experience a distinctive kind of drudgery.7 The experience was subliminal, but it was none the less painful. A great deal of energy was required to parry these jolts and to bear the boredom that resulted from their relentlessness. The constant level of defensive readiness that was required turned civilian life into a muted form of war. Benjamin saw this defensiveness as the tragic contradiction of modernity. It compelled people to live each moment in the moment. But this momentary existence was destructive to the capacity for remembrance. Ultimately, it could work only to devalue memory itself. In turn, this devaluation could only erode the ability to develop a historical perspective, for such perspectives are necessarily linked to a valuing of remembered times. There is nothing in the work of Innis and McLuhan that compares to these observations. They referred to this loss of inner time only indirectly, by documenting the decline of the mimetic moment in oral communication. Innis's writings on the labour-capital relation are emotionally cool in contrast to those of Adorno and Benjamin. Innis concerned himself with global or inter-cultural dynamics. His analysis of the Depression described its relation to the rise of nationalism and the marginalization of rural classes. The following is typical: "The trend of modern industrialism has been toward the more recently industrialized regions with new sources of power and less exhausted resources but this trend has been strengthened by cumulative forces in economic nationalism. The results have been evident in the increasing disparity between standards of living of rural and urban populations ... The struggle between miner and peasant which has characterised the industrial revolution becomes progressively more intense."8 Innis saw the economic disparity but said nothing of the inner feelings associated with it. His characterization of modern labour focused on the interrelation among unions, the political geography of Canada, and Canadian dependence on American capital.9 One searches in vain in his work for an account of the emptiness experienced by labourers, capitalists, and the dispossessed in the employment line. McLuhan's work was similarly lacking. He concentrated on the effects of mechanization on perception, and so his account of unhappiness in bourgeois culture was relatively cool. His rendition ran, for example, "the eighteenth century business man whose political arithmetic was based on visual quantity, or the eighteenth century business

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man whose speculations were built on the mechanism of 'the hedonistic calculus' alike relate to the uniform repeatability of print technology."10 The phrase "relate to" shows awareness of the link but not of its emotional dimension. Of course, The Mechanical Bride was clearly an attempt to address the mechanization of intimacy. But it did not describe the accompanying loss of friendship and remembrance. The Frankfurt School theorists had a clear view of modern identitarian psychology. They saw identitarian society as a living contradiction. Its institutions were built around a philosophy of freedom and equality, but they blocked the conditions for realizing either state. They set supposedly universal standards for success and then antagonized those who could not meet them. Yet in the same breath, they betrayed an unspoken longing for an end to that antagonism. For Adorno, this betrayal was their moment of truth.11 It was the marginalized wish to overcome the antagonism between the formal freedom accorded citizens of the state and the genuine freedom possible under conditions not yet realized. In the absence of these conditions, the will to control continued as a displaced and unconscious sense of loss, and the will to endless acquisition, as a displaced attempt to retrieve the experience lost in the modern state. In the same way, the will to rigid classification, at heart an attack on inwardness, lingered as a perverse form of self-punishment. Innis was certainly aware of the emotional content of the commodity culture. In his own studies, he addressed it by looking at the sensationalism in the press. He explored this quality through the economics and epistemology associated with it. From the economic perspective, he saw it as a device for selling newpapers; from the epistemological, as an expression of the Western divorce of reason from emotion. In the press, this divorce took the form of a voyeuristic obsession with violence done to others.12 Although he had no specific account of it, Innis knew that this penchant for violence was associated with the social atomization of modern society. He could see that the press expressed and supported this atomization. The entire West, he wrote, had been pulverized by the application of machine industry to communication. The pulverization was eroding the ground from which to develop a critique of its own (or anyone else's) condition. In Innis's inimitable rendering, "J. G. Bennett is said to have replied to someone charging him with inconsistency. T bring the paper out every day/ 'Advertising lives in a one-day world.'"13 The juxtaposition of modern production (the industry), communication (the newspaper), and social atomization (the lack of social concern) shows how they combine to erode any objective stance from

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which to criticize inconsistency. The one-day world has no objectivity and, thus, no basis for critique. Innis developed a sophisticated analysis of monopolies through a negative reading of their margins. But his background in political economy and his colonial experience had trained him to seek those margins at the juncture of two cultures or modes of communication. This perspective had a definite weakness: it did not lend itself to a sophisticated reading of emotion. Innis did not develop a good sense of the margins of sensationalism in the press or in other commodities. He read only their grotesque, positive face. His own critique of Veblen, unlike Adorno's, was blind to the asceticism that Veblen shared with American Calvinists. It focused mainly on how Veblen's cultural critique had served to label him as a satirist. The label annoyed Innis. For him, Veblen was a serious theorist whose attack on the theory of hedonism was a major contribution to Western thought. He was unable to see the Utopian moment in the hedonist's attempt to derive pleasure from commodities. McLuhan was more inclined than Innis to read the emotional subtext of the press advertisements that he studied. Like Benjamin, he saw that subtext as a modern collective dream. But, as evidenced by The Mechanical Bride, his interpretation emphasized the destructive side of this dream. For McLuhan, the mechanization of sensual life was the dream of the vampire and the logician. Like Innis, he understood that dream mainly in technological, or outward terms. He developed a negative analysis of the newpaper's mosaic form. He read it as an interesting analogue of his own constellations and of the new global community. He speculated on the kind of sensory balance that made such a vision possible. But his theoretical eye was fixed on the juncture of communicative modes or of the parts of the newspaper collage, not on that between the emotionally expressed and the emotionally suppressed. It is perhaps for this reason that Innis and McLuhan have sometimes been called classical liberals, whose complaints about modernity did not run to a critique of its very roots. Adorno and Benjamin provided a better basis for understanding the emotional (non-)content of modernity. But this inward orientation carried its own weakness. Adorno and Benjamin hit a truly universal note when they saw the resonance between the sensational and the Utopian. But they undermined that vision by universalizing Western experience. The theorists of the Frankfurt School concentrated on psychoanalysis because they wanted to make sense of how labourers internalized the economic system that used them. This concern with labour was integral to the

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Marxist critique of capital on which their work was based. Since that critique is implicitly aimed at the West, one might expect it to have been accompanied by a discussion of non-Western cultures. Yet in Adorno and Benjamin we find no such discussions, for several reasons. Both men developed their ideas in a setting that was immersed in the politics of labour movements. This setting encouraged class consciousness but may have discouraged an interest in (or awareness of) cultures without such movements. In addition, Euro-centrism was written into Marxism, since Marx himself identified all history with the history of capitalism. Adorno and Benjamin appear to have taken on some of this bias. Finally, despite their sympathy for labour, they were not labourers but members of an intelligentsia in the heartland of the Western philosophical tradition. Without doubt, this position gave them a centrist perspective from which existing marginal cultures did not figure prominently. A very different sort of political economy informed the work of our Canadian theorists. It also centred on capital and its effect on consciousness. But it focused on the staples production characteristic of a new country emerging from an established system of global capital. Working from this 20th-century perspective, Innis's attention turned naturally to the moment not of production but of transport. There were two reasons for this concern. The labour involved in activities such as fur trading was not mechanized and, at least on the Canadian side, was part of a barter economy, not a market. Consequently, the labour involved did not bear the marks of alienation characteristic of factory work. It was not spatialized. Moreover, imperial market rigidities were imposed onto the colony not as a result of the immediate labour process, but by the overhead costs of the transport and communications technology required for overseas trade. These differences had theoretical consequences. Where Marx had emphasized the labour class within capitalist society, Innis saw a different sort of class in the form of a colony within a rapidly globalizing system. This international emphasis opened a window onto cultural differences at a global level. It is no accident that geographical space was an important part of the way in which Innis conceptualized the spatial bias. It is a natural correlate of transport, still central to a post-colonial society that remains to date an economic and cultural margin. Innis used that category to shed light on how such sociopolitical spaces developed in relation to the power centres of the globe. Like much of Innis's theory, this inter-cultural perspective remained implicit. Innis was a philosophical introvert. He preferred to demonstrate that Canada did not fit the categories of Western economic theory - that it could not be understood simply as a market.

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By doing so, he challenged the universality of the market as a category. The challenge was implicit in his analysis of the fur trade; his detailed portrayal of the economic relations between Native and European traders revealed the striking differences between Native and European concepts of value.14 This finding posed a direct challenge to the notion of history as the history of capital. McLuhan brought this challenge and the implicit inter-cultural message into full view. His constellations included various accounts of non-Western societies. These were gleaned, as we saw, from the work of anthropologists, art historians, urbanologists, literary critics, and others. Through this important work, McLuhan highlighted alternative human possibilities rarely considered seriously in Western social and political thought. The explorations of alternative linguistic forms, artistic styles, and forms of social organization offered concrete examples of living, non-individualistic, non-spatialized ways of life. Even more, they portrayed the globe itself as an expression of the contrast between visual and tactile sensibilities. Analysts on the left who rightly criticize Innis and McLuhan for their blindness to social class seem to overlook the liberatory potential of this global-class dimension of their work. Rooted in the particular Canadian cultural experience, it constituted at one and the same time a profoundly universal theme - the global perspective on the critique of modernity. These differences between the Schools become even clearer when we observe them in action on a more specific topic common to both. An ideal topic is oral culture, or primary orality, a subject central to the sound paradigm within which all four theorists strived to work. We can begin fruitfully by looking at Walter Benjamin's account of oral storytelling in the earlier days of the West. Like McLuhan, Benjamin believed that successful oral communication - successful dialogue - was the essential counterpoint to modern communication. He based his belief on an understanding of modernity as an experience of discontinuity and shock - a condition, as we saw above, that destroys the historical sense of continuity. Benjamin illustrated this point with an interesting and unusual analysis of oral storytelling. He began by reminding readers that, in an earlier world, wisdom and practical experience were most often collected and passed on in story form. The stories were fluid, since they were improvised by the individuals who told them, and cumulative, since listeners absorbed them and then incorporated them into experiential stories of their own. In this way, stories were much like epics: they provided information and good counsel for those who could spare the time to listen.

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To his own contrast between this earlier world and the world of writing, Benjamin brought a psychological dimension that is absent from, but complements, Innis and McLuhan's accounts. He noted that the story's power lay in its capacity to interweave three elements - drama, technological information, and moral content. This interweaving went hand in glove with a logical structure that encouraged listeners to absorb the elements with an intensiveness that is little understood today. The key to that structure was its ability to leave the task of causal, political, and psychoanalytic analysis to listeners. The old stories recounted events, but they did not impose interpretations. They were thus porous and open-ended in a way that had significant consequences for the art of listening. They invited listeners to colour the events with interpretations of their own and, because interpretation is always an ongoing process, to mull them over again and again, learning something new each time. All these features made the stories exceptionally memorable. Listeners wanted to remember them because they provided the raw material for their own developing philosophies. This quality was enhanced by the overall setting in which stories were told. In Western oral societies, storytelling occurred in relaxed surroundings. It often accompanied productive activities, such as weaving or spinning, or leisure hours in a society unencumbered by the panic of modern schedules.15 These settings created the right mood for in-depth absorption. The mood was mimetic. For Benjamin, its most natural habitat was the world of handicraft production. When that world declined, he argued, so did the art of storytelling. On the assembly line, in the factory, or in the executive office, storytelling becomes, at best, a waste of time. This change had serious psychological and social consequences. Since local storytelling was the vehicle through which personal experience was passed on from one person to another, its decline eroded the capacity to exchange experiences.16 Unused, the skill and the mentality that accompanied it atrophied. And with that decline came a fall in the value of experience itself.17 The fall was tragic, for it meant a devaluing of life. In a world that does not value experience, we lose the fine texture of our everday thoughts, emotions, and sensations - the very substance of our lives - because we are taught systematically to dismiss them in favour of the glitz of modern media presentations. In Benjamin's account, this fall dovetailed neatly with the rise of print. The print medium also carried stories, but these no longer came out of a living tradition; they were the products of isolated minds and were absorbed not in the company of others but in isolation.

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Further, they were absorbed not to be remembered and passed on but to be analysed, judged, and ultimately ranked. Benjamin saw this isolation as part and parcel of a mechanistic life whose apogee was 20th-century warfare. Never, he wrote, had personal experience been degraded so much as by the strategic and tactical approaches to violence characteristic of the modern world. And never had moral experience been negated more than by those who controlled the means to such violence. The new degradation had bred a new form of silence and, with that, a new form of non-dialogue.18 Benjamin paralleled this analysis with an optimistic account of the reproductive techniques that made possible the mass reproducibility of art. He argued that just as the printed book had destroyed the unique qualities of storytelling, so the mass-produced work of art had shattered the uniqueness of original works. He referred to that uniqueness as an "aura." In this account, Benjamin claimed that there was hope to be found in this change. Whilst it was destructive, it was also liberating, because in elite culture art had always developed as part of a religious hierarchy or cult.19 It had always been elitist in that way that Innis called time-biased. Its aura had supported this elitism. It gave art an air of exclusiveness that intimidated viewers. In Benjamin's view, modern media were no different. Novels and other isolated forms were also elitist, since they were historically tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie. Both media thus were class instruments. The demise of the aura, Benjamin suggested, might bring with it the collapse of the classes in question, perhaps of class itself. The will to destroy the aura might be a sign of a newly historicized form of perception that favours a philosophy of equality.20 If seized appropriately, it might serve as a force for democratization. These insights add much to our understanding of the transition from orality to literacy. But they also carry a bias. If we put Benjamin's accounts of the decline of storytelling and auratic art together, we find that his storytellers inhabit a world governed by social hierarchies and cult practices. This vision provides no opening for considering forms of oral culture that are non-hierarchical and suggests that Benjamin took over Marx's Western historical bias. A direct comparison of the two theorists illustrates this point. In Marx's Communist Manifesto, we find the following: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman ... in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to to each other."21 This description suggests that all history is the history of the West - and, moreover, a single, virtually foreordained trajectory. In Benjamin's writings on the philosophy of history we

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find a parallel claim: "The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spirital things could exist ... As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history."22 Unsurprisingly, Benjamin concluded his analysis with the statement that "there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."23 Adorno had a similar line: "No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb."24 This outlook, for all its sophistication, is part of an idealist bias that etherealizes and rigidifies history. To escape this notion of destiny requires a concrete analysis that permits one to see the advent of modernity as contingent on circumstance. A good contrast is provided by Innis's account of the history of print. For Innis, the rise of a bourgeois class did not adequately explain the rise of a mass communications technology. The development of the first real mass medium, the alphabet, was a thoroughly contingent event. It was caused by two historical phenomena: the technical requirements of a people who had developed as nomadic traders, and that group's exclusion from the media that dominated the power centres of the day. This fact suggested two alternative possibilities. There might never have been an alphabet; the nomads might have invented a simplified pictographic script instead. Or they might have managed to master the imperial script, despite the empire. In either of these cases, papyrus and paper, which are light media, would have carried a heavy script, as it does, for example, in China. What would have happened then is a matter of speculation. But it is certain that these forms do not have the spatial flexibility of the alphabet. They do not serve easily to translate one language to another. They cannot rigidify a language like an alphabet can. They are not so suitable to mechanization and mass learning, and they are not very suitable for international trade. They might not have given rise to an individualist form such as the novel. In that case, the conjunction of trade and script would have fostered a different sort of economy and culture and, by definition, a different social structure. This bit of speculation tells us something not only about the West but about fine materialist analysis. Only that sort of approach can show us that capital was not inevitable. Innis argued that inter-cultural analysis was a prerequisite for moving beyond cultural bias. But, he noted, this sort of analysis ran counter to the condition of modernity. Modern countries are dominated by media that mechanize the spoken vernacular. They mechanize

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our everyday language. This process goes hand in hand with the consolidation of linguistic groups within national borders. Mechanization is thus a force that favours rigid nationalisms and the blindness that often accompanies them. For Innis, the West was a prime example. One of nationalism's most serious consequences was lack of interest among Western social scientists in civilizations other than their own.25 Adorno and Benjamin reflected this difficulty. The Canadian theorists are equally to be praised for their technical descriptions of primary orality. The descriptions laid the ground for understanding the distinction between an oral society and a literate one. In the process, the theorists paved the way for comparing contemporary industrialized societies and non-industrialized, nonliterate ones. We remember that, in making this distinction, Innis and McLuhan had focused on the structure of epic poetry. As they noted, the formal elements of that medium were dictated by the need for its contents to be stored in memory and had evolved as a set of formulae that could be combined in a variety of ways. They observed in addition that the epic was often accompanied by music composed along similar lines. The interaction of language and music created a framework that, though formulaic, permitted intensive, subtle differentiations. To the unschooled ear, these oral compositions might seem overwhelmingly uniform. But to the ear for whom primary orality was cultural ground, the differences in individual performances would stand out clearly. These epics were in many ways like the stories that interested Benjamin. Their style was non-analytical, and they left a great deal of interpretive latitude to the listener. They were designed as the carriers of the culture's collective wisdom. They also had some of the ritualistic, or cult elements that Benjamin identified in his theory of the aura. Each performance bore the marks of a living personality, and hence none could be reproduced exactly. But Benjamin was not interested in this similarity. His storyteller was situated in medieval Europe; his cult objects in pre-history. Since both periods featured storytelling, they tended, in Benjamin's accounts, to shade off into one other. The shading created a historical trajectory that began with cults and ended with the class society of the newspaper. But this emphasis suggested that hierarchies are somehow built into oral cultures. Innis and McLuhan's approach was better able to demonstrate that oral cultures can be open-ended and non-hierarchical. The following exposition of Adorno's work on music illustrates this advantage. If Benjamin negated the distinctiveness of oral cultures by conflating history with the history of modernity, Adorno did much the same

166 Unthinking Modernity

by conflating mass culture and oral culture. His lack of interest in primary orality had consequences for his awareness of cultures other than his own. There are contemporary cultural forms that retain some of the traditions of the epic, including fairy tales, folk ballads, and traditional musical forms such as fiddle tunes that, to this day, are most frequently learned and passed on orally. They also include the collection of oral traditions that comprise the various styles of jazz. Adorno was a musician and composer, and jazz interested him because it was such a prominent part of the American culture that surrounded him during his years in exile. He came to despise it, like other elements in that culture. But his judgment of it betrayed his lack of experience with oral traditions. Adorno developed a critique of jazz that turned on a superficial similarity between the uniformity in commodity production and the uniformity in oral traditions. As we saw, they share some features: both are formulaic. Newpapers, for example, are built around formulae that derive from the logic of the markets in which they must compete. They are designed to sell. This characteristic makes them repetitive, sensationalist, shallow, and overly friendly to advertising. Under these conditions, as Adorno noted, they are all the more objectionable because they simulate originality whilst suppressing innovation. Moreover, like primary oral forms, they create variety by sequencing these formulae in different ways. In both cases, the variety remains framed within a structural sameness that underlies them. Newspapers and jazz represent variations on a theme. Apparently knowing little about orality, Adorno concluded that all formulaic media were degenerate forms. And, making this assumption, he engaged in a veritable fulmination on American jazz. It was, he declared, nothing more than a "feeble rehashing of basic formulas/'26 a "paltry stock of procedures" and well-defined tricks and cliches.27 It was an assembly-line product which, like all mass commodities, rooted out all deviations and held a monopoly that rested on "the exclusiveness of supply and the economic power behind it."28 The judgment was so devastating that it recalls a claim Adorno once made about psychoanalysis revealing truth mainly in the form of exaggeration. If any hyperbole speaks truth, then this assessment of an oral medium tells us a great deal about Adorno's cultural orientation. When abstracted from the contemptuous commentary, the characteristics he described all belong to traditional culture. His judgment on jazz is less important than the framework that it fails to provide for distinguishing between oral and mass culture. Adorno's analysis renders them identical and, in the process, erases the distinctiveness of all non-Western societies.

167 Theorists in Dialogue

I am not suggesting that Adorno wished to extend his findings in this way. His key point of contrast, however, was modern a-tonal music, a form that, in his view, did represent real innovation and thematic development. Undoubtedly, a-tonal music has this openended quality. But its approach is profoundly literate. No one who has heard it can doubt that the compositions are not designed to be held in memory. Indeed, their reproduction depends on sophisticated forms of notation that few "literate" musicians learn to master. As Innis and McLuhan would have been quick to point out, this analysis suggests an unquestioned literary bias, a cultural sensibilty that seems to have made Adorno and Benjamin blind to the oral elements in Western society and to the oral non-West. Of course, these elements, when fused with the culture industry, do produce degenerate forms. But then an adequate reading of modern culture would require an understanding of how folk culture is incorporated into and interacts with mass culture. It is clear from these comparisons that, despite their dedication to open-ended, or negative dialogues, neither school escaped its ethnocentricity. The Canadian theorists remained globally biased; the Europeans, inwardly biased. Similarly, despite their dedication to transcending the dichotomy of matter and idea, the first pair remained materially biased, and the second, ideally biased. Nevertheless, the negative method that they shared provides an important route to addressing this difficulty. In keeping with the spirit of negative dialectics, an adequate study of either school would seem to call for a parallel and concurrent study of the other, or of some alternative approach with a different bias. This text has attempted to lay the ground for such a study. The rewards of such comparisons are potentially high. Recent years have seen the rise of a plethora of epistemological subjectivisms, mainly in the forms of New Age pluralism and deconstruction. These approaches are disturbing, since they seem to leave no ground for a critique of values. But to the extent that they are part of an ongoing epistemological dialogue in the West, negative dialectics provides a unique and important response.

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Notes

PREFACE

1 I am grateful to Ben Livant for this suggestion. 2 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam Books 1988). 3 McLuhan, "Introduction," in Innis, The Bias of Communication, xv. 4 Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950 (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1981). 5 Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets. 6 Curtis, "Marshall McLuhan and French Structuralism." 7 Heyer, Communications and History. 8 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 51-2. 9 Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989), 5-11 and passim. 10 Maribini, Marcuse et McLuhan. 11 Curtis, Culture as Polyphony. 12 Wernick, "The Post-Innisian Significance of Innis." 13 Don Theall, "Communication Theory and the Marginal Culture: The Socio-Aestheic Dimensions of Communication," in Robinson and Theall, eds., Studies in Canadian Communications, 19. 14 Fekete, "Massage in the Mass Age." 15 Carey, "Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and the Emergence of Visual Society." 16 McCallum, "Walter Benjamin" and "Marshall McLuhan." 17 Willam Westfall, "The Ambivalent Verdict: Harold Innis and Canadian History," in Melody, Salter, and Heyer, eds., Culture, Communication and Dependency, 38.

170 Notes to pages xiv-4 18 See, for example, McPhail and McPhail, Communication; McQuail, Mass Communication Theory; and Taras, The Newsmakers. CHAPTER ONE

1 Exceptions are Canadian analyses developed by Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, which takes a global view and suggests thematic link with Foucault and others; Theall, The Medium Is the Rearview Mirror; Robinson and Theall, eds., Studies in Canadian Communications; Melody, Salter, and Heyer, eds., Culture, Communication and Dependency; Armour and Trott, The Faces of Reason; Graeme Patterson, History and Communications; and two unpublished studies: Watson, "Marginal Man"; and Cooper, "Pioneers in Communication." 2 This charge took a number of forms. Many readers, locked into a crude empirical paradigm, expected analyses that could be operationalized. They accused Innis and McLuhan of being insufficiently scientific. Examples for Innis are Childe, Review, which suggested that Innis's work had "unluckily ... not led to such reliable results as one might have anticipated"; Brady, Review, which, whilst admiring the broad sweep of Innis's effort, suggested that the analysis and concepts were unclear and the quotations too numerous; Deutsch, Review, which argued that Innis had an oversimplified causal scheme and cited numerous counter-examples to Innis's hypotheses; and a review in Canadian Forum 31 (1952), 388-90, which, though respectful, claimed acerbically that it was too bad that a man so concerned with space and time had not expended more of it on making himself clear. Examples for McLuhan are so numerous that they are best dealt with in the two chapters (5 and 6) that focus on his work. This kind of critique also took the form of implicit dismissal. Here two key examples are McPhail and McPhail, Communication, and McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 97-9. Both books were written as primers. The McPhails' text offers a chapter on Canadian theory featuring Innis and McLuhan. Early on, it schematized their theory in clearly dualistic and mechanistic terms. It then analysed media in contemporary Canada using a straightforwardly structural-functionalist analysis on the American model, never once suggesting that Innis and McLuhan might have any insights to offer. McQuail simply listed Innis and McLuhan under the heading "Technological Determinism." Finally, some writers simply gutted Innis's and McLuhan's analysis, leaving the impression that their contribution has been very slight. For McLuhan, a good example is Meyerowitz, No Sense of Place, who argued that while McLuhan was right to focus on media his sensory analysis was not useful. Meyerowitz therefore combined this focus with a theory by Irving Goffman to create a thesis of his own.

171 Notes to pages 4-8

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

The commentators on Innis, listed above, have offered similar views. They praised him for drawing our attention to media whilst dismissing his substantive work. Ultimately this sort of judgment is damning, for without substantive arguments one can hardly know why studying media is important. Somewhat along the same lines, some writers have apoligized for Innis, suggesting that his work on communication would have been coherent had he not been ill when he was writing it. Examples were Watson (cited above), Creighton, Harold Adams Innis, i35ff, and, more recently, Heyer, Communications and History, 114. Creighton suggested that Innis's busy schedule and his last illness (cancer) resulted in premature, overly brief analysis. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Kern, Culture; and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1990). Each very briefly mentioned only McLuhan and only the concept of the global village. Overtly dismissive comments were reserved mainly for McLuhan. See Jameson, Marxism and Form, 74, and The Political Unconscious, 25; Jameson misspells McLuhan as "MacLuhan" and dismisses him as a mechanist. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 159, suggested that McLuhan's famous aphorism should read, "The medium is the master": Fekete, The Critical Twighlight, xxi, 138, saw McLuhan as a theorist "fully integrated into capital ... vaccinating us by means of partial truths against any real consideration of historical truth." McCallum, "Walter Benjamin." Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 169, called McLuhan a "modernolator" who believes that all the dissonances of modern life could be solved by technological means. Ross, No Respect, 114, claimed that McLuhan was not a theorist at all and has thus "retained no lasting theoretical respect, but here McLuhan is in good company since others similarly classified are Norman O. Brown and R.D. Laing." From Capital, vol. i, quoted in Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 89-90. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, xix-xx. See, for example, Gabel, False Consciousness; Gabel argues a similar case for racism. Kern, Culture, 232; Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity, 205. Kearney, Modern Movements, i. Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avante Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press 1977), 3. Calinescu describe critical aesthetic responses to modernity as a reaction to the spatial character of capitalism, which turns time itself into a commodity. Kern, Culture, 34. Ibid., 24-5. Ibid., 28.

172 Notes to pages 8-30 14 Ibid., 16. Benjamin translated some of Proust's works into German. 15 An interesting, sustained discussion of this model can be found in Curtis, Culture as Polyphony. The focus on oral communication can be seen in the increasing interest in language shown in social and political theory. 16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1968), 81, 85-6, 118-19. 17 This point was made by Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and William James. See Kern, Culture, 44. 18 Adorno was actively engaged in debates with Popper, and, as can be seen in chapter 5, McLuhan was interestingly caught in his orbit. For Adorno's interaction with Popper on these issues, see Adorno, "Introduction," especially 29. 19 This is not at all to claim that materialists working in the Value-free' vein have consciously sought to impose suffering. On the contrary, social scientists have historically maintained a concern for human betterment. Rather, it is to argue that the certainty that invariable creeps into presumed neutrality is in itself an oppressive force which, like the fabled power, in its absolute form corrupts absolutely. 20 Jay, "The Concept of Totality." 21 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. CHAPTER TWO

1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 19. Ibid., 12. Adorno, "Subject and Object," 505. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 38-39. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 189, 222-3. Adorno, albeit reluctantly, learned these techniques in the course of an analysis of mass culture carried out under the direction of Paul Lazarsfield at Columbia University, New York, in 1938. They were also central to studies on authoritarianism carried out by the institute during the 19405 in collaboration with Lazarsfield. Adorno became identified with this kind of analysis in the United States. For an account of the influence of Lukacs on Adorno and the Frankfurt School, see Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 20 and passim. Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities," in McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 435-9. For further commentary, see Rose, The Melancholy Science, 31. Marx, Das Kapital, 51. Adorno, "On the Fetish Character," 287.

173 Notes to pages 31-7 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 285-6. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 271. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 99-100. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6. Adorno, "Subject and Object," 499. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8. Ibid., xv. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 29. This account is based on the section of Negative Dialectics entitled "Constellation," 162-3. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 47, 77. Ibid., 183. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 69-70. Ibid., 56. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17-18. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 369. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 152. Theodor Adorno, "Individuum und Staat," in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 20-1, 288-91. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5, 11, 22-4, 158, 378. Ibid., 19. Ibid. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 146, 176. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 179. The best guides to the Adorno-Benjamin relationship are in BuckMorss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics and The Dialectics of Seeing, 24, 33-4. The method was inspired by Benjamin's attempt to bring into philosophical analysis the techniques employed in surrealist art. It

174 Notes to pages 38-45

49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57

was transmitted to Adorno through a series of talks that the two had in 1929. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 167. Ibid., 33-4. Walter Benjamin, "N," 5. "Theoretics of knowledge" was Benjamin's epistemological prolegomena to a constellational analysis of the mass culture of igth-century Paris. The work was never completed. The prolegomena consists of a numbered series of aphorisms, each bearing the letter "N." Ibid., i. Ibid. (N3a, 3), 9. Ibid. (N2a, 5), 8. Ibid. (Nioa, 3), 24. Walter Benjamin, 'The Story Teller," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 81-4. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 220-1, 232ff. CHAPTER THREE

1 Innis, The Bias of Communication (first published 1951), 190. 2 Ibid., 190. The address, "Critical Review," was given at the Conference of Commonwealth Universities at Oxford, 23 July 1948. 3 Quoted in Watson, "Marginal Man," 8, from an interview for the CBC program Ideas in fall 1978. 4 There is a Canadian literature that explores the similarities between Innis and Marx. See, for example, Schmidt, "A Critique," and Parker, "Commodity Fetishism." 5 Innis, Unpublished Autobiography, 37-8. Also see Creighton, Innis, 13-15, 21-30. 6 Creighton, Innis. 7 Innis, Autobiography, 50. 8 Moody, "Breadth of Vision," 5-6. 9 Innis, "The Problem of Space," in Innis, Bias, 131. 10 Watson, "Marginal Man, 117. 11 Innis, "Technology and Public Opinion in the United States," in Innis, Bias; also see synopsis of Innis's seminar on communication, Values Discussion Group (archival material), 8th meeting, 15 April 1949. 12 The reference here is to Patrick Geddes's theory that "Neo-technic" electronic technology - would bring about an informed, enlightened, and humane post-industrial society. See Innis, "The "Penetrative Powers of the Price System" (1938), in Innis, Essays in Canadian

175 Notes to pages 45-54

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Economic History (1956), 259. Innis used Geddes's terminology here but did not assign to it any benign qualities. For a description of Geddes's theory, see Geddes, "Paleo-technic." Innis, Bias, 139. Innis, "Political Economy in the Modern State," in Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (1946), 144. Owram, Government Generation, 257. Innis, "Political Economy," 124. Ibid., 124. Innis, Essays, 252. Ibid. Innis, "The Role of Intelligence," 281. Urwick, "The Role of Intelligence." Urwick was chairman of Innis's department in the University of Toronto at the time. Innis, "The Role of Intelligence," 280-7. Ibid., 283. For an extended discussion, see Armour and Trott, Faces of Reason, 43off. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 35-6. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 12. Christian, "Preface" to Innis on Russia, 57. Innis, "A Plea for the University Tradition," in Innis, Modern State, 65. Innis, "Mental Notes" (archival material). Armour and Trott, Faces of Reason, 354. Ibid., 355. Quoted in Neill, A New Theory, 100. Armour and Trott, Faces of Reason, 359. Ibid., 13-14. Herbst, The German Historical School, 37. Knight, Freedom and Reform, 141. These quotations are taken from essays originally published in 1929 and 1934. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Clark, "Socialising," 22. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 40. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class.

176 Notes to pages 54-60 48 Veblen had taught at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Thus he had doubtless influenced many of the theorists with whom Innis came to study. 49 For Innis's account, see his bibliographical essay "The Work of Thorstein Veblen" (1929), in Innis, Essays, 17-26. 50 For a more extended discussion see Neill, A New Theory, 23. 51 Quoted in Innis, "Thorstein Veblen," 20. 52 Horace Gray has noted that as a consequence of its affinity with Marxian analysis, institutional analysis was suppressed in American thought during the Cold War, a fact that explains partially the relative lack of interest by American theorists in Innis's work. See Gray, "Reflections." 53 Ibid., 26. 54 Ibid., 25. 55 Innis expressed this view in a conversation with Tom Easterbrook, a colleague at the University of Toronto. The conversation, one of many that took place during the last months of Innis's life, was recorded in writing by Easterbrook. See the archival material on Easterbrook, T.W., File 001. 56 For various discussions of this thesis, see Watkins and Easterbrook, eds., Approaches. 57 Along similar lines, Abraham Rotstein argued that Innis's work on the institutions of the fur trade is suggestive of a kind of analysis designed to show that, at the Canadian end, no market economy i.e., no market - was in effect; there was a barter system. Abraham Rotstein, "Innis," Innis encouraged such an interpretation by referring to the trade as a "feudal enterprise." 58 Innis, "The Teaching of Economic History in Canada" (1929), in Innis, Essays, 3. 59 Innis, "Penetrative Powers," 252-3. See also "The Economic History of the Maritimes" (1931), in Innis, Essays, 30-3. 60 Innis, "Transportation in the Canadian Economy" (1938), in Innis, Essays, 220-1. 61 Ibid., 393, 402. 62 For more on Innis's theory of cyclonics, see Neill, A New Theory, 50-9. 63 Innis, "The Political Implications of Unused Capacity" (1946), in Innis, Essays, 382. 64 Innis, Cod Fisheries, 152, 385. 65 Innis, Fur Trade, 383. 66 For a clear and concise discussion of "rigidity" in Innis's work, see Spry, "Overhead Costs, Rigidities of Productive Capacity and the Price System," in Melody, Salter, and Heyer, eds., Culture, 155-65.

177 Notes to pages 60-9 67 Innis, "A Plea For Time," in Innis, Bias, 74. 68 Innis, Fur Trade - see especially section "Capitalism and the Staples" (1930), 396-402. 69 See Rotstein, "Alchemy." 70 Innis, "A Plea for Time," 75. 71 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11. 72 Ibid., 378. 73 Ibid., 5. 74 Ibid., 158. 75 Ibid., 150. 76 Innis, Bias, 132. 77 Ibid., 190. 78 Innis, "A Plea for Time," 85. 79 Innis, Empire, 163. 80 Watson, "Marginal Man," 346. 81 Neill, A New Theory, 96. 82 Ibid., 105. CHAPTER

FOUR

1 I phrase Innis's approach in this way to emphasize that he did not go to the opposite extreme of positing Canada's development as so unique that no cross-cultural comparisons could be made at all. 2 Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 382. 3 Innis, "Minerva's Owl" (1947), in Innis, Bias, 40. This is actually a quotation from a source, Albert Guerard, Literature and Society (Boston 1935), 286. 4 Watson, "Marginal Man," 404. Watson noted that the section on classics alone lists 179 volumes. 5 For specific references, see Innis's many footnotes. 6 Giedion was a student of Heinrich Wolfflin, an art historian who had studied with Burkhardt. 7 Walter Benjamin, "N," 3. 8 See, for example, Innis's comments in his essay, "Thorstein Veblen," 19-21. 9 H.M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1926), 442. 10 T.F. Carter, The Invention of Printing and Its Spread Westward, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press 1925). 11 Farrington, Science and Politics, 13. 12 Innis, "A Plea For Time," in Innis, Bias, 80. 13 Innis, "A Critical Review" (1948), in Innis, Bias, 190-1. 14 Innis, Political Economy, viii-ix.

178 Notes to pages 70-9 15 Arthur Kroker seems to have gone this route. He spoke of Innis as a theorist of technology and civilization but made no attempt to define what Innis might have meant by "empire." See Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind. Robin Neill does the same; see A New Theory of Value. 16 Watson, "Marginal Man," 388, 392. Watson argued that "Innis was not an anti-imperialist in the sense of having a prejudice against largescale empires." According to Watson, he was opposed to only the military expansion of contemporary empires, but he saw them as paradoxical formations, since to be successful they had to combine two antithetical elements - power and intelligence. 17 Innis, Empire and Communications (1950), 1986 edition, Godfrey, ed., viii. Godfrey has argued that Innis personally disliked empires but, as a historical realist, simply studied them. Marshall McLuhan, "Foreword" to Innis, Empire and Communications (1972), viii-ix. McLuhan pushed this point much further and insisted that Innis had no point of view on empires. He simply saw them as processes to be examined. Unless otherwise indicated, citations below to Empire and Communications (Empire) refer to the 1972 edition. 18 Innis, Empire, i. 19 Ibid., 4, 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 See, for example, Innis, The Press (1949), 9-10. 23 Innis, "The Problem of Space," in Bias, 104; also Innis, Empire, 166. 24 Cornford, "The Invention of Space." 25 Sorokin and Merton, "Social Time." 26 Nilsson, Primitive Time Reckoning, 619. 27 Sorokin and Merton, "Social Time," 619. 28 Wernick, "The Post-Innisian Significance of Innis," 130. 29 Innis, Bias, 34. 30 Innis, "The Problem of Space," 94. 31 Innis, Empire, 13. 32 Ibid., 28-9. 33 Innis, "The Bias of Communication" (1949), in Innis, Bias, 33. 34 Ibid., 33. 35 Innis, "The Problem of Space," 94. 36 Innis, Empire, 28-9. 37 Innis, "A Plea for Time," 63. 38 Ibid., 76. 39 Ibid., 76. 40 Ibid., 88. 41 Ibid., 67.

179 Notes to pages 79-90 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77

Ibid., 68. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 144. Ibid., 160-1. Innis, "A Plea for Time," 64. Innis, "The Bias of Communication," 41; Innis, "The Problem of Space," 105, 130; Innis, "Industrialism and Cultural Values" (1950), in Innis, Bias, 138; Innis, "Technology and Public Opinion in the United States," in Innis, Bias, 188. Innis, "Industrialism and Cultural Values," 138. Innis, "A Plea for Time," 81-2. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Innis, "The Problem of Space," 105. Ibid., 105. Ibid. Ibid., 106. Innis, "A Critical Review," 191. Innis, "A Plea for Time," 71-2. Ibid., 72. Innis, "A Critical Review," 191. Innis, "Great Britain, the United States and Canada" (1948), in Innis, Changing Concepts of Time (1952), 120. Innis, "The Problem of Space," 102. Innis, Empire, 56. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 58-9. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 62. Ibid. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 78. This is a paraphrasing of Nietzsche. Ibid., 79. Innis, "The Bias of Communication," 43. Innis, Empire, 65. Innis, "The Problem of Space," 107. Innis, Empire, 69-70. This account was given very cryptically in Innis's work. To make full sense of it, one must go to his sources. The key one here is George M. Calhoun, The Business Life of Ancient Athens (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider 1965). Innis, Empire, 70. Ibid., 56: free-form note. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57.

i8o Notes to pages 90-9 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 93. Carey, "Culture, Geography and Communications," 73. Creighton, "Innis," 23. Watson, "Marginal Man," 389-90. Marshall McLuhan, "Foreword" to Innis, Empire, v-xii. Quoted in Cooper, "Pioneers in Communication," 240. Ibid., 244. Innis, "A Plea for Time," 61. Innis, "Penetrative Powers," 272. Innis, "The Newspaper in Economic Development," in Innis, Political Economy, i. Innis, "The Problems of Rehabilitation," in Innis, Political Economy, 56. Innis, Empire, 26-7. Ibid., 28. Innis, "The Bias of Communication," 34. Innis, "A Plea for Time," 78. Innis, "Minerva's Owl," 4. The best available collection is a book: Innis, Idea File. Watson, "Marginal Man," 398-9. Letter to Harold Innis. 30 May 1952, Easterbrook Files, University of Toronto Archives. Letter to Tom Easterbrook. 7 June 1952, ibid. For an example of a poem, see Innis, Empire, 17. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 20. Innis, "The Problem of Space," 100. Albright, Prom the Stone Age to Christianity, 146-9. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 217. CHAPTER FIVE

1 Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 44-5. 2 Ibid., 23. 3 G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (London: Cassell and Co. 1912), 48. 4 Ibid., 22. 5 Letter to Edward T. Hall written in 1969, in Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 284. 6 Marchand (McLuhan, 43-5) notes that McLuhan's Parents and brother did their best to convince him that his chances of an academic career would be ruined if he became a Catholic. If their prediction turned

181 Notes to pages 99-106

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

out not to be literally true, his understandable paranoia probably did affect his work relations. Theodor Roszak, "The Summa Poplogica of Marshall McLuhan," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, 258-63. Anthony Quinton, "Cut Rate Salvation," in ibid., 189. Miller, McLuhan, 20-1. Marchand, McLuhan, 47, 70. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 106. Pegis, ed., Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, 392. "Summa Theologica," question 84, article 6. Anton C. Pegis, "Introduction," in Pegis, ed., Introduction, xix. Pegis was a colleague of McLuhan's at St Michael's College. See Marchand, McLuhan, 81-2. Pegis, "Introduction," xvii. For a full discussion of this topic, see Colish, The Mirror of Language, viii-5Ryan, The Role of the "Sensus Communis", 105. Pegis, Introduction, "Summa Theologica," Book i, question 84, article 7, pp. 396-7. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 184. Ibid., 107. This is a statement from Aquinas's writings quoted from Erwin Panofsky's work, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Ibid., xvi. As a consequence of this position, Aquinas has sometimes been referred to as a proto-existentialist thinker. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 105. Ibid., 67, 105. Ryan, "Sensus Communis", 16. Ibid., 84. McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 15. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 17; Understanding Media, 105, 107. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 22 and passim. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 217. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 368. Ibid., 368. Ryan, "Sensus Communis", 176. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, 37-8. McLuhan refers to Panofsky in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 106-7. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 4. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 53. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 22-3.

182 Notes to pages 106-11 38 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 132. 39 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 51. 40 Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 448. This was a letter to William Kuhns, author of The Post-Industrial Prophets (1971), which featured chapters on Innis and McLuhan. 41 Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 6. 42 Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science, 14. 43 Ibid., 19-20. 44 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 6. 45 Ibid., 111. 46 Marchand, McLuhan, 32-7. McLuhan studied with I.A. Richards at Cambridge from 1934 to 1936. 47 Jeffrey, "The Heat and the Light," 17-18. Jeffrey derived this information from a 1989 interview with Don Theall. 48 Ibid., 14-15. 49 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 9. 50 Ibid., 11. 51 Ibid., 23. 52 Ibid., 40. 53 McLuhan uses the term "dialectic" to refer to its Socratic variant, hence to denote the dominance of logic, or the will to identitariansim. His term for dialectic as understood here is "interplay." 54 Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 73. 55 McLuhan, "An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America," in McNamara, ed., Interior Landscape, 237. 56 McLuhan, "James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial," in McNamara, ed. Interior Landscape, 24. 57 Ibid., 25. 58 McLuhan, "An Ancient Quarrel," 227. 59 Colish, Mirror of Language, 22. 60 Sabine and Thorson, A History of Political Theory, 148. 61 McLuhan, "An Ancient Quarrel," 227. 62 Ibid., 227. 63 Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 368. 64 Marchand, McLuhan, 107. 65 Ibid., 59. 66 Innis, Empire, 164. A related work by Denys Thompson, Voice of Civilisation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), a critical refutation of liberal arguments on the supposedly beneficial, educative function of advertising, had also been a source for Innis. 67 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 5. 68 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v. 69 Ibid.

183 Notes to pages 111-19 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 33-4, 55, 104, 141-3. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 15, 22-3, 141-3. Ibid., 7, 15, 70, 137, 147. Ibid., v, 55, 56, 60, 98, 107, 141, and passim. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 94-6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 42. Ibid., v. Innis, The Press, 19. Ibid., 10-11. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 36-7. James Carey, "Culture, Geography and Communications: The Work of Harold Innis in an American Context," in Melody, Salter, and Heyer, eds., Culture, 86. 92 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 162. 93 Ibid., 161-2. 94 Ibid., 134. 95 Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, 241. 96 Ibid., 239. 97 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 21. 98 Ibid., 128. 99 Innis, The Press, 12. 100 Quoted in McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 142-4. 101 Quoted in ibid., 143. 102 Ibid., 96. 103 Ibid., 7. 104 Ibid., 147. 105 Ibid., 33-4, 55, 141-3. 106 Ibid., 15. 107 Ibid., 3. 108 Ibid., 5. 109 Ibid., 65-7. no McLuhan, "Introduction," in Innis, Bias, vii.

184 Notes to pages 119-24 111 Ibid., viii. 112 McLuhan, "Foreword," in Innis, Empire, xi. 113 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 116-18. 114 Ibid., 56. 115 Theall, The Medium Is the Rearview Mirror, 57. 116 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 59. 117 Marchand, McLuhan, no. 118 Norden, "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," 74. CHAPTER SIX

1 Two recent theorists have also divided his career into "early" and "late." See James Winter and Irving Goldman, "Comparing the Early and Late McLuhan to Innis' Political Discourse," in Canadian Journal of Communication special issue (December 1989), 92-100. 2 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 3. 3 Ibid., 246. 4 Ibid., 216. 5 McLuhan, "Introduction," in Innis, The Bias of Communication, ix. 6 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 4. 7 Ibid., i. 8 Ibid., 220. 9 John Fekete's has been the most vehement attack of this sort; in McLuhan's theory "systems are fully determined according to the independent laws of the dominant technological environment and its relation with antecedent technologies," and his theory is "completely positive in that it is completely uncritical and has no place for contradictions or alternatives"; Fekete, The Critical Twilight, 135. Pamela McCallum argued that McLuhan's descriptions of technological changes are entirely unmediated by human relationships; McCallum, "Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan." Donald Theall called McLuhan's analysis "Technology in vacuo"; Donald F. Theall, "Communication Theory and the Marginal Culture: The Socio-Aesthetic Dimensions of Communication Study," in Robinson and Theall, eds., Studies in Canadian Communications, 17. William Kuhns has suggested that, for McLuhan, people are passive in relation to media; he extends this judgment to Innis as well; Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets, 179. Arthur Kroker concluded that McLuhan's account reduces society to technique; Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, 80. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 148. 10 Fekete, The Critical Twilight, 160. Fekete, who did discuss this text, classified it, apparently on the basis of a handful of scattered

185 Notes to pages 124-33

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

references, as an example of McLuhan's "fully mature," one-dimensional, reified analysis. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 36-9. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 262. Theall, The Medium Is the Rearview Mirror, 87. In Kuhns's view, McLuhan's method ultimately failed to give validity to his theories; PostIndustrial Prophets, 177. Jonathan Miller argued that McLuhan's concept of visual stress, or the visual society, is untestable and thus meaningless; McLuhan, 94-5. Czitrom called McLuhan's theory a mere trick of vision; Media and the American Mind, 165, 180. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 229-30. Chaytor, From Script to Print, 29. Ibid., 16. Innis, Empire, 131. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 83. See, for example, Gilbert, Moby Jane, 7-11, and bissett, Animal Uproar. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 95-6. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 43, 88. Walter J. Ong, "World as View and World as Event," American Anthropologist 718 (1969) 634-47. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 158. Havelock, A Preface to Plato. McLuhan also made use of the studies of Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, Havelock's scholarly sources. Miller, McLuhan, 94-5. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 266, 271; Understanding Media, 38. McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 60. Ibid., 174. Ibid. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 174. The term "reification" actually appeared in this text in the context of a quotation from Walter Ong. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 124. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 124-5. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 157. Norden, "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," 54.

i86 Notes to pages 133-40 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 63. Ibid., 31. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 159. The titles are contained in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con. For more on this see Heyer, Communications and History, 135. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, n.p. This quotation appears just prior to the "Prologue," on Page i. Mannheim, Structures of Thinking, 17. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, i. Norden, "Playboy Interview," 74. This interview has recently been reproduced in Canadian Journal of Communication special issue (December 1989), 101-37. McLuhan and Carpenter, eds., Explorations in Communication, ix. Cooper, "Pioneers in Communication," 173. Ibid., 177. Values Discussion Group, University of Toronto Archives. McLuhan, "Introduction," to Innis, Bias, ix. Ibid., 67. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 36. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 460. Marshall McLuhan, Hutcheon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom, 9. Marshall McLuhan noted here that the terms were developed in 1915 by Edgar Rubin, a Danish psychologist. Ibid., 14. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 68. Ibid., 26. See also McLuhan, Counterblast, 22-4, 31-2, and McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 7-10. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 68. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 142. Ibid., 72. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 63. Ibid. Ibid., 221-2. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 4, and Understanding Media, 221-2. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 69. Ibid., 111. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 127. Ibid., 110-11. See, for example, Neil Compton, "The Paradox of Marshall McLuhan," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, 112, and Raymond Rosenthal, "Introduction," in ibid., 7. Norden, "Playboy Interview," 158.

187 Notes to pages 141-6 76 Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, 54, 78-9. Kroker granted McLuhan's Thomism but appeared to insist that he maintained a classical liberal conception of reason. 77 Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 368. 78 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 21. 79 Heyer, "Probing a Legacy," 35. This was Heyer's assessment of McLuhan's juxtaposition. 80 Ibid., 75-269. 81 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 149. 82 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 21. 83 McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 63. 84 Ibid., 101. 85 See, for example, Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets, 193. Michael J. Arlen, "Marshall McLuhan and the Technological Embrace," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, 84. Anthony Quinton, "Cut Rate Salvation," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, 198. 86 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 183. 87 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41. 88 For a good discussion on theoretical responses to the advent of electricity, see Carey and Quirk, "The Myth of the Electronic Revolution." 89 McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 63. 90 McLuhan, Counterblast, 43. 91 McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 125. 92 Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and Toye, eds., Letters, 494. 93 Ibid., 491. 94 Ibid., 535. 95 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 47. 96 Ibid., 223. 97 Ibid., 36. 98 Compton, "The Paradox of Marshall McLuhan," 106. 99 Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, 83. 100 Marchand, McLuhan, 151-65. 101 Norden, "Playboy Interview," 53. 102 McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today, 36. 103 Ibid., 59. 104 Ibid., 165. 105 Ibid., 3. 106 Ibid., 56. 107 Ibid., 68. 108 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 22. 109 Marchand, McLuhan, 125. no Ibid., 157.

i88 Notes to pages 146-57 111 Ibid., 161-4. According to Marchand, McLuhan later tried to interest OISE in the results but was rebuffed on the grounds that the testing method was "shaky" - that is, unscientific. 112 Ibid., 244-7. Logan was later to produce The Alphabetic Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization (New York: St Martin's Press 1986). Logan credited McLuhan with having inspired his interest in communication. 113 Marchand, McLuhan, 158-60. 114 See, for example, the reviews of The Gutenberg Galaxy by R.M. Wiles in Dalhousie Review, 42 (1963) 122-7 and by John K. Jessop in Yale Review 42 no. 3 (1963), 454-6. 115 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, viii. 116 Ibid., viii. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 138. 120 I am referring here to Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1976). 121 Allan David Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 122 This brief account is based on Caponigri, Time and Idea. McLuhan cited this text approvingly in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 250. 123 Caponigri, Time and Idea, 142. 124 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, ix. 125 Ibid., x. 126 Ibid., 218. 127 Quoted in ibid., 221. 128 Ibid., x. 129 Ibid., 22. 130 Ibid., 98. CHAPTER

SEVEN

1 Theodor Adorno, "Veblen's Attack on Culture," in Adorno, Prisms, 86. 2 Ibid., 82. 3 Innis, "The Church in Canada," in Innis, Essays, 385. 4 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124. 5 Ibid., 155. 6 Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 175. 7 Ibid., 76.

189 Notes to pages 157-66 8 Innis, "The Canadian Economy and the Depression," in Innis, Essays, 128. 9 Innis, "Labour in Canadian History," in Innis, Essays, 199. 10 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 211. 11 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149. 12 Innis, The Press, 12. 13 Innis, "A Plea for Time," in Innis, Bias, 79. 14 For a full discussion on this point, see Rotstein, "Innis." 15 Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 91. 16 Ibid., 83. 17 Ibid., 87. 18 Ibid., 84. 19 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 223-5. 20 Ibid., 233. 21 McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 222. 22 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 254. 23 Ibid., 256. 24 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. 25 Ibid., 46. 26 Adorno, "Jazz - Perennial Fashion," in Adorno, Prisms, 123. 27 Ibid., 122. 28 Ibid., 129.

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197 Bibliography McLuhan, Marshall, and Nevitt, Barrington. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovitch 1972. McLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper and Row 1968. McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, Bruce. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 2ist Century. New York: Oxford University Press 1989. McNamara, Eugene, ed. The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan: 1943-1962. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. 1969. McPhail, Thomas L., and McPhail, Brenda. Communication: The Canadian Experience. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1990. McQuail, Dennis. Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction, and ed. London: Sage Publications 1987. Mannheim, Karl. Structures of Thinking. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber Nicholson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982. Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Toronto: Random House 1989. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon 1974. - "A Note on Dialectic." In Andrew Arato and Eike Gehrhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 444-96. New York: Urzen Books 1978. Maribini, Jean. Marcuse et McLuhan et la nouvelle revolution mondiale. Paris: Maison Mame 1973. Marvin, Carolyn. "Innis, McLuhan and Marx." Visible Language 20 no. 3 (1986) 355-9Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der Politische Okonomie. Stuttgart: Verlag 1957. Melody, William H., Salter, Liora, and Heyer, Paul, eds. Culture, Communication and Dependency: The Tradition of H.A. Innis. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. 1981. Meyerowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985. Miller, Jonathan. McLuhan. London: Fontana Press 1971. Molinaro, Matie, McLuhan, Corinne, and Toye, William, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1987. Moody, Barry M. "Breadth of Vision, Breadth of Mind: The Baptists and Acadia College." In G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Canadian Baptists and Christian Higher Education, 1-29. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1988. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1966. Neill, Robin. A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H.A. Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Trans. Francis Golffing, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1956.

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Nilsson, Martin P. Primitive Time Reckoning: A Study in the Origins and First Development of Counting Time among Primitive and Early Culture Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1920. Norden, Eric. "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Playboy 16 no. 3 (1969) 53-158. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen 1987. Owram, Doug. The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1986. Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. New York: World Publishing Co. 1957. Parker, Ian. "Commodity Fetishism and Vulgar Marxism." Studies in Political Economy 10 (1983) 143-72. Patterson, Graeme. History and Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, the Interpretation of History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990. Pegis, Anton, ed. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica. The Summa contra Gentiles. New York: Modern Library 1945. Persky, Joel. "The Relationship between the Writings of Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan." Doctoral dissertation in education, New York University, 1975. Reiss, Timothy J. The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1982. Richards, LA. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press 1936. Robinson, Gertrude Joch, and Theall, Donald R, eds. Studies in Canadian Communications. McGill University, Program in Communications, 1975. Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought ofTheodor W. Adorno. London: Macmillan Press 1978. Rosenthal, Raymond, ed. McLuhan: Pro and Con. New York: Funk and Wagnails 1968. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge 1989. Rotstein, Abraham. "Innis: The Alchemy of Fur and Wheat." Journal of Canadian Studies 12 no. 5 (1977) 6-31. Ryan, Edmund Joseph. The Role of the "Sensus Communis" in the Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Cartagena, Ohio: Messenger Press, 1951. Sabine, George H., and Thorson, Thomas L. A History of Political Theory. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston 1973. Schmidt, Ray. "A Critique of Canadian Political Economy." Studies in Political Economy 6 (1981) 65-92. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press 1987.

199 Bibliography Sorokin, Pitrim, and Merton, Robert K. "Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis." American Journal of Sociology 42 no. 5 (1937) 615-29. Stamps, Judith. "The Bias of Theory: A Critique of Pamela McCallum's 'Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan: Theories of History.'"Signature \ no. 3 (1990) 44-62. Stearn, Gerald E., ed. McLuhan Hot and Cool. New York: Dial Press 1967. Taras, David. The Newsmakers: The Media's Influence on Canadian Politics. Toronto: Nelson Canada 1990. Theall, Donald F. "McLuhan, Telematics and the Toronto School of Communication." Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10 nos. 1-2 (1986) 79-88. - The Medium Is the Rearview Mirror: Understanding McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1971. Urwick, E.J. "The Role of Intelligence in the Social Process." Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science i (1935) 64-76. Vattimo. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press 1988. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: New American Library 1953. Watkins, M.H., and Easterbrook, W.T., eds. Approaches to Canadian Economic History. Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1988. Watson, Alexander John. "Marginal Man: Harold Innis' Communication Works in Context." Doctoral dissertation in political science, University of Toronto, 1981. Wernick, Andrew. "The Post-Innisian Significance of Innis." Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10 nos. 1-2 (1986) 128-50. Wiles, R.M. Review of Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. Dalhousie Review 43 no. i (1963) 121-7. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977. Young, J.Z. Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press 1960.

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Index

acoustic space. See sound paradigm Adorno, Theodor: on advertising, 115; on causation, 29; compared: with Benjamin, 8, with Benjamin, Innis, and McLuhan, 152-67; with McLuhan, 134, 138-40; on constellations, 32-3; on consumerism, 154-5; on dialectics, 32, 51; on dualism, 36-7; on fascism, 33-4, 156; on Hobbes, 36; on identitarianism, 152, 158; on jazz, 166-7; on market society, 156; on negative dialectics, 62-3, 138; on objectivity, 33-4; on regression of hearing, 30-2; on theory and practice, 50-1; on Veblen, 154-5; on the visual bias, 30-2; weakness

in theory of, 120, 165-7, 159-60 advertising: Adorno on, 115; Innis on, 114, 158; McLuhan on, 111-13 anti-environment. See media: as hidden environments Aquinas, St Thomas, 99-104, 107, 109, 136-8 Arameans, 79 Aristotle, 90, 103 Augustine, 99-100, 109

37-40, 138; on orality, 39-40, 161-3; on the press, 115-16; on print, 162-3; on shock, 156-7; on the spatial bias, 38-40; on time, 156-7; weakness in theory of, 120, 159-60, 1635 Bentham, Jeremy, 17, 54-5 Bergson, Henri, 8 bias, 74-7; and negative dialectics, 49-50

Bateson, Gregory, xii Benjamin, Walter: on the aura, 163; on causation, 29; compared: with Adorno, 38, with Adorno, Innis, and McLuhan, 152-67; with McLuhan, no, 118, 134, 138-40; on memory, 157; on mimesis, 162; on negative dialectics,

Carey, James, 115 Carpenter, Edmund, 146 causation: Adorno and Benjamin on, 29; dialectical, 28-9; holistic, 28-9; Innis on, 92; McLuhan on, 135 certainty. See objectivity Chesterton, G.K., 98 Cicero, 109

2O2 Index Clark, John Maurice,

54 commodity fetishism. See consumerism; spatial bias: Marx on common sense, 102-3, 130, 136-7 constellations, 21, 32-3, 35, 134; and Adorno, 32-3; and Benjamin, 37-40; and Giedion, 134; and Innis, 85-90; and McLuhan, 103, 111, 134-7; and Mannheim, 134 consumerism: Adorno on, 154-5; McLuhan on, 131; and the spatial bias, 6-7; Veblen on, 154-5 Cornford, Francis M., 72-3 counter-environment. See media: as hidden environment critical theory: definition of, 4; linked to broader literature, 5-8; roots of, 25-9 dialectics: Adorno on, 31-2, 51; as causation, 28; definition of, 11-12; Hegel on, 26-7; Innis on, 46; McLuhan on, 182 n 53; Marx on, 18, 268; and technology, 107 - as dialogue: general discussion of, 11-12,

19-21, 138; Innis on, 84, 90; McLuhan on, 135 - negative: Adorno on, 62-3, 138; Benjamin on, 37-40, 118, 138; as history, 20; Innis on, 49-50, 56, 63-4, 70, 79-80, 91-6, 132-3, 152-3; and logic, 151-2; McLuhan on, 103-4, 109, 118-19, 133~4/ 138-42; as methodology in general, 4, 20-1 dialogue: Adorno on, 31-2; and cultural remembrance, 11; as dialectic, 11-13, 32' 138; and environmental concerns, 1315; and Hobbes, 19; as negative dialectics, 19-21; and participation, 11; and the university, 136 dualism: Adorno on, 36-7; in Aquinas, 100-1; in Augustine, 99-100; as class domination, 36; Innis on, 72, 74-7, 80-2 Easterbrook, Tom, 94, 135, 176 n 55 empire. See Innis: on empire fascism: Adorno on, 33-4, 156; and the

Frankfurt School, 24-5; Innis on, 79; McLuhan on, 111, 117-18 Fay, C.R., 91 figure and ground, 138-9 Frankfurt School: history of, 23-5; main focus of, 159-60; on Marx, 25-9; membership of, 25; weakness in theory of, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 35 galaxy. See constellations gestalt psychology, 104-6 Giedion, Siegfried, 134, 177 n 6 Gombrich, E.H., 104-7 Greece: Gombrich on, 106; Innis on, 85-90; philosophy of, 8890; Richards on, 108 Griinberg, Carl, 23 Gutenberg Galaxy, 12232, 135, 142 Havelock, Eric, 129 hearing. See sound Hegel, G.W.F.: on dialectic, 26-7; influence in Canada of, 52-3; on time, 8; Ten Broeke on, 52; weakness in theory of, 29 Hesiod, 87 Hobbes, Thomas: and class, 36; general

203 Index philosophy of, 9-11; and market society, 15; and the spatial bias, 71 Homer, 87 Horkheimer, Max, 25 idealism, 16 identitarianism: Adorno on, 24, 36, 37, 152, 158; and empire, 46; McLuhan on, 130 individualism: Gombrich on, 106; McLuhan on, 128, 132 Innis, Harold: on advertising, 114; on the alphabet, 86, 164; on Aristotle, 90; biographical details, 41-5; on causation, 92; on civilization, 71-2, 85; compared: with Adorno, 63-4, with Adorno, Benjamin, and McLuhan, 152-67, with McLuhan, 96, 123, 132-3, 137, 139-40; on culture, 63, 162; on dialectic, 41, 46, 79-80; on dialogue, 82-4; on dualism, 72, 74-7, 80-2; on empire, 70-2; on fascism, 79, 81-2; on Greece, 85-90; influences on, 51-6, 68; and McLuhan, relation to, 94, 97, 132, 135-6; McLuhan's comments on,

xii; on marginality, 152-3; on materialism, 82; methodology of, 90-6; on mimesis, 83-4, 117; on monopolies of thought, 67, 152-3; negative dialectics in, 70, 132-3, 152-3; on objectivity, 84, 158-9; on Plato, 8990; on the press, 802, 113-15, 116-17, 158-9; on reason, 45, 158; and the sound paradigm, 825; on the spatial bias, 65-6, 76-7; on specialization, 45-6, 69; on the staples thesis, 56-61; on the state, 46-8, 61, 78-9; on theory and practice, 47; on the time bias, 74-6, 83; on Veblen, 55-6; weakness in theory of, 73, 119, 155-7, 159; on writing, 86-90 Innis and McLuhan: commentaries on, xiii-xiv, 4 James, William, 8 Jay, Martin, 21 Knight, Frank, 53-4 Laws of Media: The New Science, 146-50 Leavis, F.R., no Lukacs, Georg, 27-8, 154

McLuhan, Marshall: on acoustic space, 133-4; on advertising, 11-13; and Catholicism, 98-9, 180-1 n 6; on causation, 135; on common sense, 102-3, 130, 136-7; compared: with Adorno, 138-40, with Adorno and Benjamin, 134, with Adorno, Benjamin, and Innis, 152-67, with Benjamin, 104, 11011, 118-19, 138~4o, with Innis, 132-3, 137, 139-40; and constellations, in; on dialectic, 182 n 53; on dialogue, 135; on fascism, 11718; on film, 124, 131; on "hot" and "cool," 137-8; and identitarianism, 130; on individualism, 106, 128, 132; early influences on, 97109; and Innis, relationship to, 97, 119, 122-3, 130, 132, 1356; on Innis, 94, 96, 136; on manuscript culture, 125-30; on marginality, 138-40; on market society, 111-12, 116, 119-20, 131, 144-5; method, 124; negative dialectics in, 103-4, 1:L819, 133, 140-2; on

204 Index no point of view, 140-2; on objectivity, 128; on paper, 128; on perception, 138-9, 146-7; on print, 126-7; on radio, 124; on reason, 129, 136, 14750; on sound, 12630; and the sound paradigm, 137; on the state, 132; on television, 143-4; on the visual bias, 123, 127-32; weakness in theory of, 119, 122, 142-50, 155-9 Mannheim, Karl, 134 marginality: and the Frankfurt School, 25; and history, ix; and Innis, 43-4, 95, 152-3; and McLuhan, 138-40; and negative dialectics, 21 Marx, Karl: dialectics in, 18; on the spatial bias, 6-7; weakness in theory of, 18, 29, 163-4 Marxism, in Adorno and Benjamin, 154 materialism: bourgeois, 17; definition of, 16; history of, 1619; Innis on, 82; in Innis and McLuhan, 152-3 Mechanical Bride, The, 110-13, 120-1

media: the alphabet, 76-7, 79-80, 86, 164; clay, 92; "cool," 1378; and culture, 124; film, 124, 131; as hidden environments, 138-9; and hieroglyphics, 74-6; "hot," 137-8; and objectivity, 128-9; the oral tradition, 80-90; paper, 76-9, 128; parchment, 12530; poetry, 86, 165; and politics, 75-7; the press, 78-82, 113-17, 125, 158-9; print, 126-7, 162-3; and property, 127-8; radio, 124; sensory balance in, 80-90; stone, 74-6; television, 143-4; writing, 76-7, 80-90 Medium Is the Massage, The, 141, 143 Merton, Robert K., 73 Miller, Jonathan, 99,130 mimesis: Adorno on, 35-6; Benjamin on, 162; Havelock on, 129; Innis on, 83-8; and logic, 152; McLuhan on, 129; and the press, 117 monopolies of thought. See Innis: on monopolies of thought negative dialectics. See dialectics: negative

Neill, Robin, 64 New Criticism, the, 107-8, no Nietzsche, Friedrich, 83, 87-8, 90 objectivity: Adorno on, 30-4, 50-1, 1657; Benjamin on, 1613; as control, 8, 10; and dialectics, 5; as domination, 12-13; French post-structural approaches to, xiii; Gombrich on, 105: Innis and McLuhan on, 152-3; Innis on, 47-50, 84; McLuhan on, 128: and the press, 1589; Richards on, 108; rigid forms of, 5; as scientific representation, 105-6; and suffering, 18-19, 33-4 orality: Benjamin on, 39-40; Innis on, 8090; in writing, 90-6 perception: Aquinas on, 100-2; Augustine on, 99-100; McLuhan on, 102-4, 136-9 Phoenicians, 86 Plato, 89-90, 106 Popper, Karl, 147 Proust, Marcel, 8 reason: Aquinas on, 101, 103; critiques of, 29-30, 62-3; and

205 Index economics, 4-5; history of, 88; Innis on, 45, 66, 158; as logic: Adorno, 33-4, and fascism, 33-4, in, McLuhan on, 108-9, in, 118, 129, 14750, Richards on, 108, and time, 1512; McLuhan on, 1024, 108-9, 136' and violence, xi, 118 Reich, Wilhelm, 117 reification. See spatial bias Richards, LA., 107-8 Ryan, Edmund Joseph, 103 Shotwell, James T., 73 Smith, Adam, 17 Sorokin, Pitrim A., 73 sound, 126-30 sound paradigm: description of, 10n; in Innis, 82-5; in McLuhan, 133-4, 137, 140-2; origins of, 8. See also constellations spatial bias: Adorno on, 115; Benjamin on, 38-40; definition of, 7; in Hobbes, 71; Innis on, 47-8, 61, 65, 76-9, 113-15; Knight on, 53; libera-

tory possibilities in, 118-19; Lukacs on, 27-8; McLuhan on, 109; Marx on, 6-7, 27-8; and mass society, 113; as meaninglessness, 6-7; and objectivity, 6; as present-mindedness, 6 - as reification: Adorno on, 34-7; Gabel on, 7; Lukacs on, 6-7; McLuhan on, 131 - as visual bias: Adorno and Benjamin on, 30; Adorno on, 30-2; definition of, 130; Innis on, 80-2, 126-7; McLuhan on, 123, 127-32; Marx, 30. See also media: "hot" staples thesis, 56-61 tactility, 129-30 Take Today: Executive as Dropout, 145 technological determinism, xiv, 124 Ten Broeke, James, 52-3 theory and practice: Adorno on, 50-1; Innis on, 47 Thompson, Denys, no

time: Benjamin on, 156-7; Bergson on, 8; Cornford on, 723; and dialogue, 12; and difference, 152; in Hobbes, 9-10, 71; and identity, 151-2; Innis on, 60-1, 74-6, 83; James on, 8; Lukacs on, 6-7; Marx on, 6-7; and memory, n, 157; Merton on, 73; Shotwell on, 73; Sorokin on, 73; and values, M totality: Adorno on, 115; "de-centred," 20-1; Innis on, 11415; and language, 52; Ten Broeke on, 52 Understanding Media, 141-2 Urwick, E.J., 48-9 Values Group, 136 Veblen, Thorstein, 546, 68, 154-5, 176 n 48 Vico, Giambattista, 149-50 Watson, A. John, 64 West, critical literature on, 5; Innis on, 45 Young, J. Z., 107