One of the best sites to observe the nature of McLuhan’s writing of the period more closely is in “Acoustic Space.” The essay, published in
Explorations, starts from “ignorance,” and “puts on” its primary audience by way of an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland:
We often have difficulty understanding a purely verbal notion …. We feel happier when it is visible; then it’s orientated in a way we understand. For, in our workaday world, space is conceived in terms of that which separates visible objects. “Empty space” suggests a field in which there is nothing to see. We refer to a gasoline drum filled with pungent fumes or to a tundra swept by
205 C.f. McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, 30 January 1951 in regards to the possibility that some of the analogies he offers may be “smoke,” purposeful “mistakes” intended to generate dialogue.
howling gales as “empty” because nothing is visible in either case.207
The procedure of “putting on” the audience (which will be taken up at some length in chapter four), is outlined in brief in a letter to Joe Keogh:
Apropos dialogue, it is done with mirrors, of course, only you hold the mirror up to the public. Was it not Perseus who thus beheaded Gorgon by looking at it in a mirror of art, as it were? By holding the mirror up to the public you literally confront the Gorgon of tangled impressions and biases. You “put them on” this way, as well, and you can sort through their problems at will …. This kind of effect you cannot get by simply adopting a point of view on anything.208
The “gorgon of tangled impressions” here stems from Western man being “drunk,” to use Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, with print, a technology that extends the eye in isolation (leading to calling space “empty”
because nothing is visible).
Having “put on” their public, McLuhan and Carpenter present a dramatic dialogue, using whole cultures in place of literary forms. The “acoustic space” of preliterate, oral cultures is put forward as a
“counterpoint” to the biases (and grievances: the “difficulty
understanding a purely verbal notion”) of literate or “visual Western man”:209
Not all cultures think this way. In many preliterate cultures the binding power of oral tradition is so strong that the eye is subservient to the ear. In the beginning was the Word: a spoken word, not the visual one of literate man…210
207 “McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter, “Acoustic Space,” 39. C.f. F. M. Cornford, “The Invention of Space,” In Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936.
208 McLuhan to Joe Keogh, 11 April 1973.
209 See McLuhan, McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool Interview,” in Media Research, 53–54. 210 “McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter, “Acoustic Space,” 39.
In the dialogue that follows, each sensibility is examined on its own terms, and each is then seen through the lens of the other (the acoustic world is seen through the lens of visual space, and visa-versa). In many respects, the dialogue exhibits inherently Lewisean traits insofar as these mutually supplementary antagonistic “modalities” are set “against each other’s throats” in accord with Lewis’s practise of combative dialectics:
1. Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.
2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structures of adolescent clearness between two extremes.
3. We discharge ourself on both sides.
4. We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours…211
Neither sensibility is permitted to prevail. Rather, both sensibilities are held in near perfect balance, in much the same manner as Joyce’s treatment of the trivium and quadrivium in Ulysses:212
These two labyrinths are counterpointed throughout Ulysses. The one is “Eastern,” Hermetic, earthly and cloacal, proceeding by peristaltic convulsions to metamorphosis (e.g. the Marxian materialistic dialectic of history). The other is “Western,” a cognitive labyrinth cognizant and constitutive of the world of analogy. As a true analogist Joyce attempts no reduction of these realities, but orders their ineluctable modalities to the
reconciliation of vision rather than of fusion. But roughly, the two
modes correspond to quadrivium and trivium.213
As a more developed portrait of both literacy and orality and visual and acoustic space emerges, the reader, at least potentially, comes to see the inhabitants of both these spaces as “half-witted.” Neither is
211 Wyndham Lewis, “Manifesto,” in BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex 1, ed. Wyndham Lewis (London and New York: John Lane, 1915): 30–31.
212 In this respect, “Acoustic Space” is something of an oddity in McLuhan’s oeuvre. See McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, 3 September 1976 cited in chapter five.
shown to be in possession of a unified sensibility.214 “Civilized” or
western or literate or visual man is “half-witted” because sight encourages him to subdue all other senses. “Tribal” or “pre-literate” man, on the other hand, at least as he appears in the dialogue, is “half- witted” since he lives not by the eye but by the ear and by touch. Further, the reader also comes to see that both preferences and/or biases are in fact learned — both at the level of individual sensation (psychology), and at the level of the colossal system of preferences and biases we tend to call culture (anthropology):
It is therefore worth recalling that the child must learn to see the world as we know it. At or shortly after birth, his eyes are as perfectly developed a camera mechanism as they will ever be. In a sense they are too perfect and too mechanical, since they present him with a world in which everything is inverted, double,
laterally reversed, and devoid of depth. In the course of time, by a tremendous tour de force of learning, he turns the world right side up, achieves binocular fusion, and reverses the lateral field so that he now sees his father as one person, erect, whole, and bilaterally oriented.215
The immediate effect is that the reader’s assumption that visual space is the “common sense norm” (that informs the “problem” with which the essay begins) is collapsed:216
Powers: Now that the reader has read the material on the
hemispheres and the media, visual and acoustic space, what is the chief thought you’d want him to retain?
McLuhan: That he’s not living in a natural environment. If he’s civilized, he’s living in Euclidean space – closed, controlled, linear,
214 McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter, “Acoustic Space,” 42. 215 Ibid., 40.
216 “The Western world is hung-up on the problem of visual versus acoustic space, seeming unable to let go of the “common sense” visual, even as it flounders in the acoustic ground,” (Laws of Media, 111).
static – abstracted from the world around him. Like language, it is an attempt to manipulate as well as interpret the world.217
Potentially, then, the reader is afforded a chance to view the world as a stranger. The reader’s own individual assumptions, private reflexes and collective biases, are brought to the level of consciousness for
examination, and s/he is invited to begin a dialogue with his or her own “self,” culture, and other cultures. In many respects, McLuhan’s later letter to Barbara Ward is illustrative of the “spirit” of the enterprise:
The above is not intended as an attack on the visual man or a defence of acoustic man. The qualities of life attainable by each are quite different, and it is no longer necessary to be locked up in any one of these pockets exclusively …. When the entire Western world is going inward via electric information, and the entire Orient is going outward via Western hardware and technology, how is it possible to make value judgements? We already know the qualities and satisfactions to be attained by both these modes of the visual and the acoustic. Shall we simply say “A plague on both your houses — I mean both your city house and your country house!” We can't take either of these houses very seriously. 218
Coming at the matter from another angle we could say that the newborn stranger assumes a new posture in relation to “self” and world that is pragmatic, tentative, and also not dissimilar to McLuhan’s own posture in relation to Aristotle and Plato. While I may have given the impression in my discussion of figure and ground that McLuhan is in favour of hylomorphic figure and ground interplay (which McLuhan saw as Aristotelian, and thus “seems more earthy and rooted”),219 this is not the
case at all. He is neither Platonic,220 nor Aristotelian.221 As McLuhan states
217 The Global Village, 130.
218 McLuhan to Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson), 9 February 1973. Emphasis mine. 219 McLuhan to Jane Bret, 3 January 1973.
220 “Movie is f/g [figure/ground] pictorial form, while TV is iconic, merges figure and ground. The Platonist, with his specialised and merely visual archetypes (figures without
in “The Difficulties of Yvor Winters or Rhymer Redivus,” that he is adamant that he never set out to prove the superiority of hylomorphism over dualistic philosophy.222
“Acoustic Space” also has a second movement where we can observe McLuhan and Carpenter’s use of the obsolete dichotomy to get at the present. It is here that we also see how the essay works on four levels: (1) Literal, (2) Analogical – as A:B/C:D, (3) Moral (arising from 1 and 2), and (4) “Prophetic.”223 Perhaps, the best way into the matter is to
start by noting that the essay also works in “reverse.” At the conclusion of the piece we find new “ignorance,” a new “problem.”
Today we are experiencing the emotional and intellectual jag resulting from the rapid translation of varied visual and auditory media into one another’s modalities.224
To address this issue, in the second half of the article the obsolete, orality- literacy dichotomy, is shown to be: (a) an effect of the new ground, and (b) to have some bearing on the present state of rapid translation of varied visual and auditory media into one another’s modalities:
Poets have long used the word as incantation, evoking the visual image by magical acoustic stress. Preliterate man was conscious of this power of the auditory to make present the absent thing. Writing annulled this magic because it was a rival magical means of making present the absent sound. Radio restored it. In fact, in evoking the visual image, radio is sometimes more effective than sight itself. The squeaking door in Inner Sanctum was far more terrifying over radio than that same door seen and heard on
ground, rather than merging with ground) gets a sense of divinity from his abstraction of figure from ground,” (McLuhan to Jane Bret, 3 January 1973).
221 “I find nothing of use in Aristotle’s approach to cause. It seems merely conceptual. A way of classifying,” (McLuhan to Fredrick Wilhelmsen, 18 January 1971).
222 McLuhan, “The Difficulties of Yvor Winters or Rhymer Redivus,” MS., 11. 223 McLuhan, “The Possum and the Midwife,” 4–5.
television, because the visual image that sound evokes comes from the imagination.225
By introducing features of the new electric surround McLuhan and Carpenter create a four part analogy that might be cast either as: (a) The new electric surround is to mechanized print as literacy is to orality, or (b) The new electric surround is to orality what mechanized print is to literacy. What this means for the reader is that by tracking backwards from effects, causes or the ground or formal cause of the condition of “rapid translation” are revealed (information movement at the speed of light?). The present is thus approached in a manner not dissimilar to how McLuhan approaches the situation in “The Effect of the Printed Book on Written and Oral Language in the Sixteenth Century.” Here McLuhan presents the “ignorance” of the effects of the printed page in the 18th
century as analogous to present day “ignorance” of newer electric forms:226
Printed grammars since the 18th century created a fog based on the
concept of correctness. Once this concept, unconsciously derived from the form of print itself, was pervasive, any hope of study of the actual dynamics of our language situation was obliterated. Our new media with their complex influence on language are similarly blanketed today.227
225 Ibid., 43.
226 Approached spatially, and taking McLuhan writings of the period as a simultaneous whole, we might say that his outputs anticipate his later tetrads: “various aspects of the tetrad have, unknowingly, formed parts of our earlier studies, collaborative as well as private,” (Laws of Media, 8). For example, if we consider three of the excerpts already cited: (a) “The Effect of the Printed Book on Written and Oral Language in the Sixteenth Century,” (b) “Acoustic Space,” (c) “Radio and Television in Finnegans Wake,” we have, effectively, a “tetrad” for radio. Radio (broadcasting), obsolesces print, retrieves the word as incantation (advertising etc.), and reverses into talking pictures. Tetrads will be taken up further in the following chapter.
227 McLuhan, “The Effect of the Printed Book on Written and Oral Language in the Sixteenth Century,” Explorations 7 (March 1957): 108.
As a four part analogy, the article also serves as a “bridge.” And like any bridge, it can be crossed in both directions. On one hand, the historic scene can be taken as having some bearing on our present day situation. On the other hand, our present day situation can be seen as helping us understand, possibly for the first time, our own history. Just as in Eliot’s idea of Tradition, where the whole of “literature” has a simultaneous existence, here we see that the same holds true of entire cultures over and above “literature.” As McLuhan notes in “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters”:
He who would discuss humanism and literature today must know something about the history of media of human
communication, because so rapidly have the media changed of late that print and letters have been dethroned by radio, TV, movies, and mechanized pictorial communication in general. I wrote a book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, on the role of the literary humanist confronted by the hostile forces of non-literary communication. But when I wrote that book I had not become aware, for example, that printing (the mechanization of writing 400 years ago) had liquidated 2,000 years of manuscript culture. Printing was as savage a blow to a long-established culture as radio, movies, and TV have been to the culture based on the printed book. Today, therefore, when writing, speech, and gesture have all been mechanized, the literary humanist can get his bearings only by going back to pre-literate societies.228
It is from the interplay of the literal (that simply describes, compares and contrasts the differences between two cultures) and the analogical (where the dialogue between orality and literacy is shown to have some bearing on the present situation) that we see the additional levels of “Acoustic Space” come to the fore — the moral and allegorical levels broached by the essay. On the moral level “Acoustic Space” is a call to action — to
exploration and contemplation. McLuhan’s comments in “The Medium is the Message,” have some bearing here:
My own work has tended more and more to center on the
misunderstandings and clashes that occur between these two basic types of order in experience and organization: the visual and the auditory. The basic patterns for ear and eye found in most of the media are in their messages typically non-verbal. And it is even more confusing at first for some to learn that the mosaic of a page of telegraph press is “auditory” in basic structure. That, however, is only to say that any pattern in which the components co-exist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations, is auditory, even though some of its aspects can be seen. The items of news and advertising that exist under a dateline are interrelated only by that dateline. They have no interconnection of logic or statement. Yet they form a mosaic whose parts are interpenetrating. Such is also the kind of order that tends to exist in a city or a culture. It is a kind of orchestral, resonating unity, not a logical unity of discourse. It is not necessary to be satisfied with such a state of affairs once it is understood.229
“Acoustic Space” also makes a similar declaration — there is no need to remain hung-up in frozen postures like Dante’s figures in hell, nor is there reason to exist in a mode as patterned, “circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid” (as outlined by Lewis).230 Rather, as
McLuhan makes explicit elsewhere: “knowing, as we do, the constituents
229 McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 17, 9. Emphasis mine.
230 McLuhan writes to Sheila Watson in the early 1970s, noting that
Ovid, taught Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis “how to contemplate effects minus causes e.g. all of Dante’s people are hung up or frozen in postures that record a mass of preceding causes which are totally concealed.” The “metamorphic trick” McLuhan notes, is to eliminate all evidence of the causes that led to that state; e.g. in the Human Age “Lewis gives all the effects of electric technology as angelism without including the ground,” he suppresses the grounds that caused these effects. The technique, McLuhan adds: “is to arrest an action and suppress the cause for the arrest. By involving himself in the moment of arrest, the reader is expected to retrace or dream back. This is the mythic method of Ovid and the symbolists alike,” (McLuhan to Sheila Watson, 20 January 1971).
of both civilized and tribal cultures, of both private, rational and individual and corporate, mystical tribal man, it becomes our privilege and responsibility alike to mix and harmonize these factors even as the Greeks chose to alter the Dionysian fury with Apollonian detachment.”231
After all, the fruit of reconciliation, as McLuhan notes elsewhere, are periods of “great cultural flowerings,” and “may well be the key to the greatest manifestation of human culture.” 232
231 McLuhan, “My Last Three Books,” Untitled Article, MS., 8. He adds: Today we can maintain visual value only if we chose to moderate the intensity of the acoustic resonance – like turning down the intensity of the rock concert to engage in dialogue.”