Media Environments and Our Sensorium

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Extrapolating on McLuhan: How MediaEnvironments of the Given, the Represented,and the Induced Shape and Reshape Our Sensorium

Andrey Miroshnichenko Andrey.Mir70@gmail.com Independent Scholar, Kingston, ON K7M 2W8, Canada; Academic Editors: Robert K. Logan and Marcin J. Schroeder

Philosophies 2016, 1, 170–189 186

Abstract: The article develops Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the interplay between media, the sensorium, and reality. McLuhan’s concepts of “acoustic space” and “visual space” are unfolded with regard to the consequences that digital media will have on the human ability to perceive reality. Reality–sensorium interaction is systematized in the article. This systematization includes the environments of the given, the represented, and the induced. These environments are shaped by sequential stages of media evolution, which relate to preliterate media, alphabet-based media,and digital media. Existing and upcoming media technologies are presumed to alter human biology and transcend it. Within the set of media technologies that alter human biology, artiﬁcial ﬂavours, electrically induced senses, immersive media, augmented reality, and virtual reality are treated. Within the set of media impacts that will change the human sensorium, the dismissal of gravity (related to the McLuhanian “angelism” of electronic discarnate man), the switch in navigation from biological networking to social networking, the sense of others, and the thirst for response are treated. Plato, Lenin, Wittgenstein, Benveniste, Logan, Carr, Shirky, and other thinkers are employed in the article to support these McLuhanian speculations, and sketch out prospective trends in the evolutionof media and the sensorium.

Keywords: Marshall McLuhan; human sensorium; digital media; synesthesia; augmented reality;virtual reality; transhumanism

1 – Introduction

McLuhan’s most famous one-liner, “The medium is the message”, was once playfully changed for the title of McLuhan and Fiore’s book: The Medium is the Massage [1]. Such wording leaves a lot of space for interpretations. One interpretation suggests the phrase means that each medium is capableof or even aimed at “massaging” the human sensorium. Marshall McLuhan made a huge contribution to the exploration of media impacts on society and culture. Methodologically, he explored social and cultural media impacts via the impacts media have on the sensorium. Media impact human life regardless of their content (that is why “the medium is the message”), because they involve one or another part of the human sensorium simply in order to be perceived. In turn, media emphasize a certain part of the sensorium to create speciﬁc “spaces” of human thinking and acting. This methodology allowed McLuhan and his followers to study media themselves, not their content, and establish the entire ﬁeld of media ecology. McLuhan separated two spaces that are created by media impacts on the sensorium. Preliterate media create “acoustic space”, where humans act naturally, in their tribal state, seeing the world syncretically. Literate, alphabet-based media (that is, scribal and print media) use the faculty of vision to be perceived, hence creating “visual space”, which alienates humans from tribal collectivism, creates individualism, rational analytical thinking, nation-states, etc. When radio and television marched victoriously across the planet, McLuhan noticed that electricity turned us away from “visual space” back to “acoustic space” with its three-dimensional perception of reality. Indeed, turning away from “visual space” and back to “acoustic space” meant that our perception of reality has been returned to the “natural” way of sensation, when the entire sensorium is involved, as it used to be before the alphabet. But here is a paradox: even though the acoustic, three-dimensional space of electric media simulates the natural perception of reality, the reality of electric media is not natural. It is created, or, better to say, induced. So we apply the natural way of perception to the artiﬁcial environment. It is away of living, not just a form of information consumption. Sensation, not cognition, is the target of oncoming media, be they technologies of augmented reality, virtual reality, immersive media, kinetic interfaces, etc. We can go even further, and say that the artiﬁcial environment of electric media tends to become the natural habitat for us. To achieve this condition, electric and now digital media steadily adjust the environment induced by them for better sensory perception. Such futuristic media technologies are being developed of which even McLuhan had no idea. But absolutely in the spirit of McLuhan’sthoughts, human kind develops the more advanced media technologies in order to capture the entire sensorium, and thereafter these technologies reshape our sensorium. To live in the new environment, humans will surely obtain a new sensorium. How far will humans go in changing their sensorium? Will they still be humans after?Extrapolating McLuhan’s approach to the new things that we obtain in the course of media evolution,it is possible to sketch out both future media innovations aimed at capturing the sensorium and changes in the sensorium itself, under the pressure of media innovations.

2. Sensations as Spatial Frame Underlying McLuhan’s Contraposition of Visual and Acoustic Harold Innis established that certain media have certain time-space biases, by means of which they inﬂuence the development of certain types of empires.

The concepts of time and space reﬂect the signiﬁcance of media to civilization. Media which emphasize time are those which are durable in character such as parchment, clay, and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media which emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. The conquest of Egypt by Rome gave access to supplies of papyrus which became the basis of a large administrative empire. Materials which emphasize time favor decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those which emphasize space favor centralizationand systems of government less hierarchical in character [2].

Here, Innis points out the capability of media to shape the social environment. Marshall McLuhan developed these ideas by connecting the media capability of shaping environments to certain sensory channels of media perception. According to McLuhan, media shape “spaces”, which are characterized either by visual or by acoustic ways of perception and acting.

Acoustic space is the environment of the spoken word, the preliterate environment, where all things coexist and can be perceived simultaneously. Written language, starting with hieroglyphs, boosted by alphabet and then the printing press, has shaped visual space, where all things are linear, organized by means of text, and can be perceived sequentially. Acoustic space had been prevalent in the oral, preliterate age, being the habitat of tribalman. “Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless,in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror”, wrote McLuhan [3]. Visual space had dominated in the West from the 15th century to the early part of the 20th century, thanks to printed text coming into place as a main medium. However, things have started changing with the rise of electric media, which is returning us to a preliterate, tribal, acoustic space, accordingto McLuhan. At ﬁrst glance, the opposition of spaces, which is based on the adjectives “acoustic” and “visual”, looks inconsistent, especially as applied to electric media. The most prominent electric medium known at McLuhan’s time was television. How could television put humans into acoustic space if it even hasthe word “vision” in its name? Here is how McLuhan himself explained these concepts in his famous Playboy interview:

… Another basic characteristic distinguishing tribal man from his literate successors isthat he lived in a world of acoustic space, which gave him a radically different concept of time-space relationships.

PLAYBOY: What do you mean by “acoustic space”?

MCLUHAN: I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensiﬁcation of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entireconcept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all oursenses at once; the auditory ﬁeld is simultaneous, the visual successive [4].

McLuhan’s concepts of visual space and acoustic space obviously refer to the sphere of sensations. But also important is that McLuhan used the word “space”, not “sense”. It is not about senses of vision or hearing directly. Many prominent media ecologists have paid attention to this distinction between“space” and “sense”. In his McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, Robert Logan suggests a good explanation of McLuhan’s use of the terms “visual” and “acoustic” as applied to the idea of space, not sense:

McLuhan considered two different and opposing states of the sensorium, which he characterized as visual space and acoustic space, where the latter was sometimes referred to as audile-tactile space. He believed that the sensorium of preliterate or oral cultures was dominated by the audile-tactile sense in which information is processed simultaneously in real time. Literate societies in which information is acquired by use of the visual faculty to read develop a visual bias in which information is processed in a linear sequential manner, one item at a time, the same pattern as that of the written word. As a result, literate manoperates in visual space[5].

Further, Logan [5] (Kindle Locations 975–976) lists characteristics immanent to acoustic space andvisual space:

McLuhan characterized the difference between visual and acoustic space with the terms in the following table, which I compiled and shared with Gordon Gow, who quoted them in his paper, “Making Sense of McLuhan Space” (2004).

It is important to note that most of these characteristics are, in essence, spatial. Paul Levinson writes in his Digital McLuhan about the detachment of vision from other senses in the process of developing a phonetic alphabet as a medium. Levinson underlines that, for McLuhan, visibility is more a trait of space created by a medium than a part of the sensorium, even though (or because) this space was created, technically, via visual perception:

The paper makes a startling point: what we consider normal or natural visual space is actually a technological artifact—a result of perceptual habits created by reading and writing with a phonetic alphabet. Or as McLuhan put it, much later, in two books posthumously published, “when the consonant was invented as a meaningless abstraction,vision detached itself from the other senses and visual space began to form” (M. McLuhan& E. McLuhan, 1988, p. 13) … Thus, McLuhan … is consistent in his view that what we take for granted in the shapes and organization of our external visual world is actually aconsequence of the technological lenses through which many of us for the past 2500 years of Western history have been inclined to regard the world—speciﬁcally, the prism of thelinear, connected alphabet [6]

The same goes for the audibility of acoustic space: it is more a spatial property than a sensory one, even though it refers somehow to the sense of hearing. The word “tactile” in McLuhan’s deﬁnition of “audile-tactile”, for space created by electric media, is particularly important. It is tactility that allowspeople to interact with the physical environment, using data of all other senses. That is why McLuhan speciﬁed that “tactility is the interplay of the senses” [7]. With that, he referred to the ability of electric media to recreate the natural, biological way of human perception of the surrounding reality. Through the interaction between media and the human sensorium, McLuhan meant something deeper than just the stimulation of receptors. Here is the clue: for McLuhan, sensations were just a way to distinguish spatial characteristics of the media environments (alphabet-based and electricity-based). The visual (in the context of print media), for McLuhan, was a space of linear perception, while the acoustic was a space of simultaneous perception. Although these time-biased speciﬁcations of different types of media are represented via sensational characteristics, they in fact reﬂect an environmental approach on McLuhan’s part. The linear, one-dimensional (unfolding in time) environment of cognition is opposed to the simultaneous, three-dimensional (unfolding in space) environment of sensations. Substantial for McLuhan’s theory of “detachment of vision from the other senses”, mentioned by Levinson, is, in fact, the evidence of shaping some inner vision, which is a phenomenon that is not sensory but rather intelligible. This inner vision appeared thanks to the written/printed representationof reality, which shape a uniformed picture of reality, and put it in the human mind. Not without reason, McLuhan describes visual space as “‘rational’ or pictorial space” in the given Playboy interview quote above.

Thus, opposing the audile-tactile space inherent to the oral, preliterate age, and the visual space shaped in the literate age, we enter the territory of the longest philosophical discussion about the cognition of the ideal and the material, a tradition that can be traced down through the millennia to Plato’s famous Cave metaphor.

2.1. McLuhan, Plato, and Lenin

Plato’s allegory of the Cave laid the foundation for a system of philosophy later known as Plato’s objective idealism. Plato wanted to emphasize the illusiveness of sensations against the true reality of the “ideal” essences of things.

But what is more important, Plato’s Cave started a long discussion about the dualistic nature of reality in the human perception. For Plato, sensed things of this world were just the shadows: the vague representations of the real, pure ideas of things that, to him, were the only things truly real.

The lower portion of the lower or visible sphere will consist of shadows and reﬂections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world of nature or of art [8].

Such an approach allowed only philosophers to be capable of seeing the real world in the light of supreme knowledge, beyond the reach of mere mortals (prisoners of reality) who experienced the world in sensations, i.e., vulgarly and biologically.

We can easily paraphrase Plato’s allegory in McLuhan’s terms. Cave prisoners are the “tribalmen” of the oral age, who live in the “lower sphere” of the physical reality, which is audile-tactile space. In these conditions, only philosophers are capable of looking up at the source of the light, to see the essences of things, which are ideal—the ideas. With the advent of scribed and then printed media,many people have become capable of “philosophizing”, abstract thinking, and picturing the world intheir minds.

For Plato, only the ideal world was real and true. With the development of the natural sciences and materialistic views, positioning turned upside-down. The sensible world of physical nature was found to be the primary, the real one, while the world of ideas became the realm of intellectual representations and speculations. But the very dichotomy introduced by Plato has remained in play throughout the entire course of history. Thanks to Plato, though in contrast to his personal preferences, human thinking has gotten a notion of a distinction between the world given to us insensation, directly, immediately, and the world that is represented to us in ideas, mentally.

Interestingly, “given in sensation” is a direct quote from Vladimir Lenin. Developing the materialistic, Marxist approach, Lenin wrote in his basic philosophical paper, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: “matter is that which, acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensation; matter isthe objective reality given to us in sensation [9].” (Bolded by author.)

McLuhan was unlikely familiar with Lenin’s philosophical legacy, but he very likely could deem audile-tactile space as the “reality given to us in sensation”. While audile-tactile space is perceived by people directly, visual space is the “rational, pictorial” representation of reality, which has become accessible to all of society, thanks to scribed/printed text. Thus, via McLuhanian bridge between Plato and Lenin, we have approached the dichotomy of the given and the represented.

2.2. The Given and the Represented: How a Word Doubles the World

The dichotomy of “the given in sensation” and “the represented in ideas” is substantial for philosophical, linguistic, and psychological comprehension of the human interaction with reality. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, turning Plato’s view upside-down but retaining its duality, coined in his famous The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

2.063 The total reality is the world
2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts. < … >
2.12 The picture is a model of reality [10].

For linguists, the dichotomy of the given and the represented reﬂects the representative nature of language and speech. Émile Benveniste, a structural linguist, wrote in his Problems in General Linguistics:

Thought is nothing other than the power to construct representations of things and to operate on these representations. It is in essence symbolic. The symbolic transformation of the elements of reality or experience into concepts is the method by which the rationalizing power of the mind is brought about. Thought is not a simple reﬂection of the world; it categorizes reality … [11]

It even can be said that, dealing with language as a categorizing and depicting intermediary between the human mind and the external environment, most linguists after Ferdinand de Saussure were spontaneous media ecologists. For instance, Gustave Guillaume in his Foundations for a Science of Language wrote:

We see the external universe only through the medium of the universe-view we carry in our minds. This medium is part and parcel of the human outlook. A properly human viewof the universe is the outcome of our ability to deal with the universe within us. [12]

It is interesting that Guillaume supported a quite radical view on “the given and the represented” duality.

I never see anything but mental inwardness realized mentally. If instead of this view of what is realized mentally—a view excluding any other—I had a direct view of the real, I would not be a human being. To do a way with a human being’s view of reality through the compulsory medium of the image of reality that he carries within him would be to do away with the human being, to descend from the human to the animal. To replace an animal’s direct view of reality by a view which is the result of treating an image of reality carried within, would be to promote the animal to the condition of man, in other words, to deprive it of its immediate view of the universe and substitute a mediate view through the channel of a prior mental representation. Possessing one state entails losing the other …[12] (p. 142)

Therefore, amplifying in his way the Platonic view, Guillaume states that reality exists for humans only mentally, and it is an essential human property, distinguishing them from animals, who are unable to mediate nature and have to interact with it immediately. (Subjective idealism would be an interesting prism for media ecology’s exploration of the digital world). Yet many other thinkers have contributed to the deﬁnition of this “the given and the represented” dichotomy. Perhaps, a quote by Alexander Luria, a Soviet neuropsychologist and a leader of the Vygotsky Circle, can summarize well these efforts of collective thought:

The huge beneﬁt of humans’ possession of developed language relates to the doubling of their world. Without word, humans would be able to deal only with those things that they can see directly, and which they could personally manipulate … Word doubles the world, and allows a human to operate with things mentally, even in the absence of the things. [13]

Thus, the symbolizing capacity of thought/word creates a second world, in addition to the natural, sensible one. The materialists and the idealists argue over which one is real or primary above the other. For media ecology, as well as for the developing of McLuhan’s prompts, it is more substantial to differentiate these two worlds, the given and the represented, as two environments for human habitat, or, in the words of McLuhan, two “spaces”. It is worth noting that the idea of doubling the world by means of the word (alphabet) was expressed also by McLuhan himself. And he did that precisely in the area of psychology, and even psychiatry. In Gutenberg Galaxy, in a chapter titled “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy”, McLuhan stated that the introduction of the alphabet provided an ancient literate man with the ability to create the other world, and afterwards such a man became “divided” and “schizophrenic”. Marshall McLuhan wrote:

From that magical resonating world of simultaneous relations that is the oral and acoustic space there is only one route to the freedom and independence of detribalized man. That route is via the phonetic alphabet, which lands men at once in varying degrees of dualistic schizophrenia.[14]

In his Playboy interview, McLuhan returns to this idea with a small addition:

When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data. < … > Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of phonetic literacy [4].

The development of the inner vision, on the base of the alphabet, has pulled humans out of theaudile-tactile space of oral culture and placed them in visual space. The represented has not killed the given but overshadowed it. Although different views on the concurrency of the given and the represented exist, the most common approach sees the given, the physical reality of nature, as the basic, primary habitat of humans, while the represented, the ideal “visual space” of culture, is seen as the secondary space of the higher level; as such it has been the historical sequence of things.

Not without reason being called a futurist, McLuhan discerned new tectonic shifts related to the advent of electric media. He described this movement as the returning of humans from visual into audile-tactile space, to the tribal state. Signs of this returning are obvious and well known; however, itis also clear that the new space, shaped by electric and now digital media, will not be the good old physical reality. This movement is spiral, and goes rather forward to some new state than backward towhat has already once passed.

From the reality of the represented, humans are moving to a reality that is very similar to the given, except it is not natural. It is artiﬁcial, developed out of the represented. It is the induced; the next stage of the evolution of the interplay of reality, media, and the sensorium.

2.3. Synesthesia and the Induced Reality

In his article “Hypermedia and Synesthesia”, James Morrison wrote:

“ … it is clear that McLuhan (1964) saw the connection between digital representations of reality and a heightened ability to involve all the senses, but in a way that returns modern consciousness to a preliterate mode of awareness” [15].

Electric media, as McLuhan put it, returns us from the visual space to the audile-tactile space,that is to say, from mainly cognitive perception to mainly sensory perception. However, the realityof digital media is absolutely virtual and by itself has nothing in common with the primary physical reality. The internet is still perceived mostly visually, though it obviously shapes the audile-tactile-like space of panoramic simultaneity.

The capability of electric media to induce audile-tactile space relates to the phenomenon of synesthesia, which plays a signiﬁcant part in McLuhan’s theory. As James Morrison also wrote:

Synesthesia is a central conception in Marshall McLuhan’s exploration of the relationship between media, culture, and the human sensorium … McLuhan’s notion of synesthesia as the simultaneous interplay of the senses in a ratio fostered by the particular medium or media involved is missing in the theoretics of hypermedia, which relegates all sensory phenomena to visual terms and overlooks the interplay between orality and literacy. Research into synesthesia in art, culture, language, and cognition supports McLuhan’s conception of it as the normal process by which the brain reaches a new equilibrium whenone of its functions is outered in a technology [15].

Robert Logan also underlines that synesthesia (a concept introduced by McLuhan under the inﬂuence of symbolists’ poetry) allows electric media to engage the entire sensorium:

According to McLuhan all of the effects of the Gutenberg press reverse with electric media as we return to an emphasis on the audile-tactile part of our sensorium that he suggests involves the interplay of all our senses. McLuhan is suggesting that with electric media one has an experience of synesthesia [5] (Kindle Locations 522–525)

Infact, the capacity of the senses to induce each other is augmented by the capacity of the cognitive pathways of perceptions to induce senses, when “the mind coordinates the interplay of the senses”,as Morrison put it [15].

The ability of symbolic representation to evoke senses gave the ground for Dr. Danko Nikolic of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt to develop the concept of ideasthesia:

We have conducted a number of studies conjointly indicating that synesthesia is not asensory-sensory phenomenon, as it has been largely held. Instead, this is a semantic-sensory phenomenon in which the meaning of the stimulus induces perception-like experiences. Hence, I proposed that a more accurate name for the phenomenon is ideasthesia, whichis Greek for “sensing concepts”. The theory of ideasthesia is based on arguments for introducing semantic component and on a proposal how the semantic system contributesto the phenomenon [16].

The symbolic representations substitute and at the same time enforce (McLuhan would say“extend”) the sensory perceptions of the world. Thanks to print media, humans have obtained anenvironment that is expanded far beyond their physical surroundings. (As Clay Shirky wrote inhis Cognitive Surplus, “Media is how you know about anything more than ten yards away” [17].)This environment, which is a media environment, has overlaid the physical surroundings in terms of its signiﬁcance for everyday life. The media environment is ﬁlled with symbolic representations no less than with sensory stimulations. It is the phenomenon of ideasthesia that “helps” humans to experience the media environment almost physically. In his The Shallows … , Nicholas Carr, quotingElizabeth Eisenstein, writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that the writing and reading of books enhanced and reﬁned people’s experience of life and of nature. “The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was passed on in turn to the reader,” writes Eisenstein. Like painters and composers, writers were able “to alter perception” in a way “that enriched rather than stunted sensuous response to external stimuli, expanded rather than contracted sympathetic response to the varieties of human experience.” The words in books didn’t just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly; they enriched people’s experience …[18]

The phenomenon of ideasthesia/synesthesia is obviously related to the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Introducing the concept of neuroplasticity in media research, Nicholas Carrdemonstrates that the impacts of digital media are not limited by merely a changing of habits. It isabout the physiological rebuilding of brains:

Neuroplasticity provides the missing link to our understanding of how informational media and other intellectual technologies have exerted their inﬂuence over the development of civilization and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness [18] (p. 44)

Thanks to the physiological compensatory mechanism of neuroplasticity, the human brain is capable of accepting any reality, “as given to us in sensation”. Ideasthesia and synesthesia unfold neuroplasticity at the level of emotions and sensations; they represent the plasticity of sensorium. Ideasthesia enables all-senses engagement in the media environment, based on symbolic representation (McLuhan’s “visual space”). Synesthesia enables all-senses engagement in the electric and now digital media environment (McLuhan’s “audile-tactile space”).

The ideasthesia/synesthesia digression is called on to illustrate how the media environment can compensate for its lack of physiological stimuli. Thanks to synesthesia, electric media are capable of inducing a natural-like reality, which is fully artiﬁcial and has nothing to do (so far) with the physiological stimulation of body sensors.

3. Altering Human Biology

By shaping the media environment, media are able to tune the human sensorium according to their “bias”. Equipped with ideasthesia/synesthesia, the sensorium follows the environment. In its turn, thanks to neuroplasticity (and ideasthesia/synesthesia), the sensorium is able to adapt humans to any media environment. Media always probe the sensorium; the sensorium always adjusts in orderto unfold all capacity of media, and reach their limits and their demand for new experience. This interplay between the sensorium and media lies in the foundation of media evolution. In the process of adaptation, for the sake of better experience, the sensorium sooner or later employs all capacity of any new media.

The ideas of evolving of media environment were expressed by McLuhan, for example, in John Culkin’s famous paraphrase, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” The very formulation of McLuhan’s Laws of Media, that he and his son Eric McLuhan call the Tetrads,as well as the terms “new medium” and “old medium”, also represent the idea of the media environment’s dynamics.

The evolutionary approach to media ecology gives us an opportunity to speculate about contemporary trends in the interplay between the sensorium and media, and to chart these trends ahead in the future.

If the represented reality (visual space) compensates for the lack of physiological sensory stimulation by engaging ideasthesia, the induced reality has to develop new senses, since this reality does not represent the reality given to us in sensation, but creates a new reality in a new, virtual space.

In the beginning, the induced reality follows the norms of the physical reality, “after the image and likeness”, since the creator just does not have any other reality to have experienced. But afterward,the induced reality may and has to transcend the rules and establishments of the physical reality. Indeed, why should the digitally induced reality have to be a double of the physical world, if digital media creates its own space, which has no physical limits?

The represented reality of literate media has already freed human beings from physical reality, yet just symbolically, in human imagination. The induced reality can capture humans without any use of their imagination, literally, as a surrounding environment.

On its way from the given to the represented and then to the induced, media evolution has to modify the sensorium, ﬁrst on the foundation of “likeness”, then, in some other way, under its ownlaws. In this context, we can search for some indications of enhancing “natural” senses and then of transcending them (as this metaphor was used by Ray Kurzweil in the title of his book The SingularityIs Near: When Humans Transcend Biology).

Here is a possible list of such improvements of the sensorium by technologies. The list is not complete, but is indicative.

3.1. Artiﬁcial Tastes, Artiﬁcial Smells, Artiﬁcial Sounds

Technologies in culinary work, perfumery, and music have aimed to evoke enhanced sensations.Any attempts to improve natural sensation, in fact, have been leading to the creation of artiﬁcial substitutes. Certain logic can be found in such a tendency. Natural tastes, smells, or sounds are too regular, too indistinguishable for distinctive sensory experience (that most often can be described as pleasure) to be had. Strange as it may seem, puriﬁcation of sensations has always had to do with artiﬁcial stimuli.

The history of nutrition gives us a good example. People are capable of processing food before digesting. The ability to cook is one of the traits that differentiates humans from animals. Throughout the entire course of history, by purifying the taste sensation, humankind has been trying to obtain ﬂavours that do not exist in nature. Flavour additives and enhancers also make food cheaper and more storable. But initially, they aimed to make food tastier. Historically, salt and sugar, along with a huge variety of spices and condiments, played precisely the same role as contemporary artiﬁcial ﬂavours: to improve and enrich the taste qualities of food, simultaneously having made it, in fact, unnatural.

Media ecologists should pay particular attention to the phenomenon of artiﬁcial ﬂavours. “Old”and “new” ﬂavours invisibly reshape the environment pretty much in the same way that media do.For example, a marketing trick with “tomato-ﬂavoured potato chips” aims to recall the natural taste of tomatoes as something valued. It makes sense for those familiar with the original tomatoes’ taste, but makes no sense for the many children who have simply not been made familiar with the taste of real tomatoes. Moreover, if they happened to try a real tomato, they would recognize its taste only because they are familiar with an artiﬁcial tomato ﬂavour. The taste enhancer absolutely detaches the reality given to us in induced sensation from “the reality given to us in sensation”. Only one question remains: why do we still need tomatoes? The enhanced taste still relates to the natural environment, but with decreasing necessity.

Same analysis can be applied to the millennial efforts of people to purify, enrich, and enhance smells. Fragrances of all sorts and fresheners of all sorts aim to improve the perception of surroundings.They act absolutely similarly to artiﬁcial ﬂavours: being in essence unnatural, they fake some natural properties and eventually withdraw the human sensorium from the natural environment into the“better”, induced environment.

The development of the “use” of other senses can be analyzed in the same media-ecological way. For example, all smartphones are designed to produce a clicking sound when taking a photo. This sound obviously imitates the noise of the mechanical shutter in the old types of camera. The clicking smartphone is a “mechanically ﬂavoured” digital device. However, today’s majority of smartphone users have never used a camera with an actual mechanical shutter. For them, this sound means nothing except the sound of a smartphone taking a picture. This is another example of the continuing detachment of our sensorium from a “natural” environment.

In a certain meaning, similar to artiﬁcial ﬂavours, music and poetry have been developed to purify speciﬁc human sensations. In this case, it is the sensation of the others, experienced via sounds. Primitive rhythms were used to coordinate people’s locations in space and people’scollective efforts in time in the era of hunting-gathering. Rhythm lies in the foundation of group cohesion. It is not for nothing that McLuhan, when speaking about the capacity of radio to reverse humans from individualism to collectivism, compared radio to the “tribal drum” [7] (Chapter Radio:“The Tribal Drum”).

Nowadays, precisely like artiﬁcial ﬂavours, most sounds produced by people and sensations induced by these sounds have little to do with the natural environment. People now live in a constantly collapsing audile space, whose implosion shapes a sound cocoon around everyone. The state of alienation experienced by an individual with ears corked by earphones makes this audile cocoon almost visible. Earphones drastically increase the amount of time spent by one in the induced sound environment, which aims both to alienate and to please. Another signiﬁcant trait: while detaching people from the physical surroundings, the audile cocoons attach their inhabitants to one another in the induced reality of music, radio, and phone conversations. The reality of an individual cocooned by earphones is a space that is physically individual but virtually shared.

It is quite safe to say that humankind has always been seeking ways to induce better sensations.The contemporary trends of consumption of organic or natural goods reﬂect some fears and some resentment, but in general, the induced has always been perceived as something more valuable (enhanced) than the given. Such speculation may be concluded with the thesis that our entire civilization is the movement from the natural to the artiﬁcial, which means from the given to theinduced. This movement was drastically boosted by the introduction of electricity, which promised to become the main supplier of sensation.

3.2. Augmented Sensorium: Artiﬁcial Senses

During World War II, the Soviet neurolinguist Alexander Luria was the head of a neuro surgery evacuation hospital. He treated hundreds of brain-injured soldiers. In particular, he was workingto invent a method of rehabilitating patients with dynamic aphasia, who were unable to deliver utterances sequentially. Luria forced them to pick up cards sequentially, which through exercise gradually restored their speech ability [19]. This method shows how a verbal function that is lost because of injury to one brain region can be compensated for and then restored by the training of another brain region, which is thought to be initially responsible for physical, not verbal, activity.

Luria’s invention shows that disrupted brain abilities can be compensated for by the activity in other brain regions. The same is applied to “disrupted” senses. This is the gift of neuroplasticity represented, at the level of the sensorium, by synesthesia. As Nicholas Carr put it:

Thanks to the ready adaptability of neurons, the senses of hearing and touch can grow sharper to mitigate the effects of the loss of sight. Similar alterations happen in the brains of people who go deaf: their other senses strengthen to help make up for the loss of hearing. The area in the brain that processes peripheral vision, for example, grows larger, enabling them to see what they once would have heard [18] (p. 25).

Today, gadget developers try to exploit the phenomenon of synesthesia in order to help people with disabilities. For example, for visually impaired people, a device has been developed that can transmit the spectrum of colors and lighting around a person, along with spatial orientation, into the mouth cavity, by means of a lollipop-shaped device, and using slight electric stimulation [20].

Slight electric stimulation can be used not only for compensation of impaired senses but also for inducing senses that we are not certain are or were inherent to human beings. German scientists have developed a new device, the feel-space belt, which allows the wearer to feel the Earth’s magnetic ﬁeld and be oriented in the four winds, just like birds and bats are [21].

In another case, a Spanish avant-garde artist, Moon Ribas, has gotten a subdermal cybernetic implant that allows her “to feel” every earthquake on Earth in real time. In fact, the implanted device just receives “data from a custom iPhone app that aggregates seismic activity from geological monitors around the world. She describes the physical sensation as akin to having a phone vibrate in yourpocket. The stronger the quake, the stronger the vibration”, the report says. Ribas’ new ability is called“the seismic sense” [22].

So far, such manipulations with the sensorium do not amount to a truly new sense. The feel-space belt just transforms the magnetic currents into vibrations that the body can easily perceive; the seismic implant does the same. In reality, the devices produce just a cognitive effect induced by the physical impact on receptors of the “old” sense, which is tactility. It is safe to say that this transition of meaning of one “sense” via the other sense is symbolical. It requires time and effort to recognize and learn the“content” of the signals, while the real, natural senses are immediate for perception, as they require no symbolic interpretation.

More interestingly, these experiments allegedly restore to humans the senses of the magnetic ﬁeld and seismic activity that are presumably inherent to biological beings. These sensorium augmentations just improve human physiology (the report calls Ribas’ new seismic-feeling ability “a superpower”).

However, electricity allows a pushing of the boundaries of the human sensorium, or even an exceeding of them. An electronic bracelet called the Pavlok punishes the wearer with a slight electric shock (they call it a “zap”) in case the wearer passes a deadline, or smokes when having pledged to quit, or breaks some other rules established by themselves (so far just by themselves). The device isdesigned to facilitate the ﬁght against bad habits [23].

In fact, these slight irritants induce a fear of punishment that fosters a sense of guilt. Maybe this can be described as a new type of synesthesia, something opposite to ideasthesia, because in this case the sensory stimuli evoke cognitive experience. For now, the punishing bracelet has been being programmed by the owner for certain displays of bad behaviour to get a negative reaction. Becoming more sophisticated, such a device could take upon itself more responsibility in making decisions on what is bad and good for a human, ﬁnally ending up in violation of Asimov’s First Law; the subjugation of humans for the sake of their well-being is one of the alleged scenarios of the rebellion of the machines.

The electrical extension of the sensorium cannot but will go further. Moscow engineer VladZaitcev has inserted a payment chip under his skin to pay subway fare. He also was reported to beplanning to insert a bank card chip into his other hand [24]. Zaitcev has become one of the hundreds of today’s real cyborgs [25]. Sooner or later, the development of payment implants has to bring to bionic people the sensory perception of a bank balance. Heating or vibration could indicate the state of account, similarly to what the feel-space belt does. Then, thanks to synesthesia or because of the development of cognitive interfaces, people may learn direct, not just symbolical ways of experiencing their ﬁnancial state (or whatever will exist in place of ﬁnances).

The acquisition of this ﬁnancial sense would well correspond to the logic of media evolution. It is the same for other, for now unknown senses, which still have to appear in order to further extend the sensorium in the digital environment.

3.3. Immersive Media

In August 2015, the beer company Stella Artois constructed “a big white dome” named “Sensorium” in downtown Toronto. Here is a description of the project:

A multi-course dining experience with beer and food pairings where each dish will be inspired by one of the ﬁve senses—sight, sound, taste, touch & aroma. Within our sensorial dome, guests will be immersed in a 360 degree experience, surrounded by video and interactive elements that will engage and amplify all of the senses throughout the night [26].

Brands and entertainers seek to immerse consumers in the experience of artiﬁcial reality entirely. Today, 4D and 5D movie theatres (even 7D movie theatres exist) offer an almost full package of sensorium stimulation. “Spectators” are being shaken, touched, blown with hot or ﬂavoured air, poured on or sprayed with water, and moved down and up according to what is going on onscreen. Artfully combined and synchronized, these impacts together create the effect of being present in animaginary world created by the movie. The effect of presence or co-sensation—this is what arts, or literature, or movies, or media have always been seeking to achieve.

However, 3D, 7D—or speaking precisely, 5-Senses (5S) simulation — is just an exercise in shifting human perception from the real world to an artiﬁcial one. This exercise is in an interim stage, which nevertheless shows the direction of media evolution. The 5S simulation still uses the physical stimulation of nerve endings. It is still as biological as in the real world, even though the reality of 5S immersive media is artiﬁcially induced. Observing other oncoming digital media technologies, we can say that the time is coming for the stimulation of nerve “beginnings”, not just endings.

3.4. Augmented Reality

Improvement of the “natural” sensations, followed by an augmenting of the sensorium with new electrically induced senses, logically leads to the development of the phenomenon of augmented reality. From enhancing and augmenting senses, media evolution has to move toward enhancing and augmenting surroundings. The trend is obvious—creation of a new capacity of the body is not enough, since the creation of the entire world in the digital space has become affordable. Instead of representation of reality in the human mind, media evolution leads to the representation of the human mind in the induced reality. Video games and social media have paved the way. They insert “a representative” of the user into the reality of the game or social interaction. The augmented reality technologies facilitate this process at the level of the sensorium. As Wikipedia puts it:

Augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data [27].

For a McLuhanist, augmented reality can be seen as the further extension of the central nervous system, but with a new, signiﬁcant trait. For the ﬁrst time in the entire evolution of sensations’ mediation, the improvement has neither been done on the side of human, nor been attached to acertain sense. With augmented reality technologies, the improvement entirely occurs “on the side” of the reality (or at least somewhere between the sensorium and reality). McLuhan’s extension of the human body starts transcending the bounds of body and transiting into the surroundings. Everything described before has related to the augmented sensorium; now it comes to augmentation of reality itself.

According to McLuhan, Innis, and other media determinists (even if they rejected this title), any media (better to say mediums) are able to shape environment, but they do this just metaphorically or via some physiological, social, or cultural impacts. With augmented reality, media starts shaping environment literally, directly, and immediately. At today’s stage, this is just the addition of some induced objects or data into the picture of the surroundings. The next stage of media evolution, the technologies of virtual reality, combine the immersive media idea of full sensational immersion with the augmented reality idea of digitally shaped reality.

3.5. Virtual Reality

Media evolution leads us to gradual resettling from the physical world to the “best” one, whichis the virtual one; from the given, through the represented, to the induced. Along the way, mediaevolution sentences us to be entirely immersed into this new environment with all our ﬁve (or more)senses, just as we have existed in the real world, until now.

In the present day, the most advanced technologies that can implement these ideas are technologies of virtual reality. They are already capable of resettling us into the induced world without any real world “earthing”. As Wikipedia puts it,Virtual reality, also known as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated reality, is acomputer technology that replicates an environment, real or imagined, and simulates a user’s physical presence and environment in a way that allows the user to interact with it. Virtual realities artiﬁcially create sensory experience, which can include sight, touch,hearing, and smell [28].

Interestingly, classical dictionaries fail to deﬁne fast-emerging phenomena of this kind, relinquishing this function to Wikipedia. People who develop the technologies also hardly worry about solid deﬁnitions. But even Wikipedia, that tremendous enterprise of collective thought, is notable to cope with the nuances of newly arising technologies. Thus, Wikipedia tries to present the concepts of virtual reality and immersive multimedia as synonymic, which is obviously not the case. Immersive media (or multimedia), such as the Stella Artois sensorium dome or 5D movie theatres,clearly differ from such technologies as virtual reality headsets. To distinguish immersive media fromvirtual reality, it may be said that the immersive media technologies create the induced reality for thehuman body, while the virtual reality technologies create the induced reality for the human mind. Indeed, immersive media together with all previous technologies of enhancing sensations induce new sensations of reality by stimulating nerve endings, while virtual reality induces an altered reality bystimulating nerve “beginnings” (almost; the full effect will come into play after a cognitive interface is developed as part of the achievement of a direct mind-machine wiring).

Virtual reality is most often used for play or training. Both of these sorts of activities are aimed at simulating a new reality for which humans should be prepared. In a more abstract and philosophical sense, the virtual reality technologies offer humans training for resettlement into an induced world.

4. Transcending Human Biology

People still act in virtual reality in a mostly natural way, as “physical beings”, which is obviously predeﬁned by their (our) previous experience. Moreover, the content of the virtual reality is still physical reality.

This reﬂects McLuhanian ideas of interplay between the new and older media. “The content of anymediumisanoldermedium”, as Eric McLuhan put it in the preface to his and Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media: The New Science [29]. Marshall McLuhan himself declared that, “The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel” [7](p. 267). Similarly, in the chapter devoted to the development of the phonograph, in Understanding Media, McLuhan described the expectations related to the phonograph in the late 19th century:

It was conceived as a form of auditory writing (gramma—letters). It was also called “graphophone,” with the needle in the role of pen. The idea of it as a “talking machine” was especially popular. Edison was delayed in his approach to the solution of its problems by considering it at ﬁrst as a “telephone repeater”; that is, a store house of data from the telephone … [7] (p. 305)

But afterwards, the phonograph ceased to be providing just an enhanced version of something performed by the older media. Developing this line of McLuhan’s thought, we can assume that it was the phonograph and its descendants (the tape recorder, etc.) that created the sound-recording industry, making their contribution to the emergence of show business and the entire pop culture with its cult of celebrity, which in turn changed culture, social life, and politics, as is masterfully exposed by Neil Postman in his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). (In the same chapter about the phonograph, McLuhanwrote : “… entertainment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics” [7] (p. 306), as Donald Trump has demonstrated.)

Starting with satisfaction of old needs, a new medium creates a new environment that unfolds media capacity, which is authentic speciﬁcally to this new medium. The environment always pays back. As for digital reality, inhabitants create a habitat and thereafter the habitat recreates its inhabitants, to make them compatible. It is not an opportunity, but a necessity.

Applying such McLuhanian speculations to the self-evolving interplay between media and the sensorium, we will come with necessity to the question: which new properties of the new environment will reshape which properties of human beings, how, and with what outcome? Thus, the McLuhanian approach allows us not just to explore but also explain and predict possible (in fact, inevitable) changes in the human sensorium. What ultimate conditions of the environment are thinkable, if this environment is “enhanced” so far that it can entirely and controllably be recreated inthe digital “space”?

Answering these questions, we will get a notion of the future human being. After all, it is not that difﬁcult, since we already can trace existing and oncoming properties of the digital world. In terms of their impacts on humans, they lead to:

– escape from the given reality and, as a consequence, the abandonment of the body;
– transition from biological networking to social networking and development of the social sensorium instead of the biological one;
– escape from the “physical” time-space continuum, followed by the full liberation of time-space navigation.

Which possible, or, better to say, required properties of the sensorium can and have to support these conditions and requirements of the digital reality, if a person gets immersed in there entirely?What changes in senses may and have to happen? These questions also relate to the media and therefore belong to the set of questions that need to be answered “ … in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man”, as McLuhan said in the Playboy interview about media impacts ingeneral [4].

4.1. Angelism and Dismissal of Gravity

While media have had to do with the given reality, they have been expected to enhance the body’sperception of physical surroundings, as the feel-space belt does. But “electronic man has no physical body”, as McLuhan put it [30]. In an interview to Father Patrick Peyton in 1971, McLuhan said:

<Electric media> give you a sort of dimension of an angel, an almost supernatural being, a disembodied spirit. In the electric age, man becomes a kind of disembodied spirit [31].

This angelic condition of the digital human being, in fact, has to undermine this world’s physical basics, such as gravity, for example.

The absence of gravity is not unfamiliar to people, thanks to space exploration. However, the absence of gravity also can be created in the digitally induced reality of video games. After playing a 3D-ﬂying shooter game for a long enough time, gamers may experience a sense of ﬂight, as though it were real. In digital reality, the “movement” up and down has to be as easy as any horizontal movement.

The transfer of the gravity concept to the digital world still reﬂects the habits of physical beings and will be overcome completely, sooner or later. As physical weight is irrelevant in digital reality, gravity will not just be overcome—it will be completely dismissed.

In parallel, it is interesting to watch what happens to the metaphor of gravity in social relations. The “social gravity” of the pre-digital society created the structure of relations describable through the concept of a pyramid: the massive bottom, the authoritative top, somehow equalizing each other. The vertical, ofﬂine organization of authority clashes with the horizontal online organization of authority on the Internet, which again still reﬂects the “gravitational bias” of physical being. In fact,the Net shapes not the horizontal but the cloud-like structures of authority, with its heavy centers and dispersed peripheries. In the digital world, social coherence will be run by peer-to-peer authoritative gravitation, not by top-down authoritarian gravity.

4.2. Navigation in the Digital Space: From Physical to the Social Dimension

The digital space is ﬁlled not with physical objects but rather with humans themselves (and also with algorithms, many of which seek to act like humans). That is why digital reality will gradually have ceased attempts to simulate physical reality, and will develop its own characteristics; not time-space ones, but rather timing-spatial ones. It goes well for the concepts of gravity, of distance, of direction, of duration and timespans.

In digital reality, distance, directions, duration, and timespan turn from physical characteristics to social characteristics; they represent the distance between people (or their utterances), directions toward others or crowds, time passed after someone’s actions, etc.

It is interesting to note that the sense of the Net tends to be rather more temporal than spatial. The nearer one is to the source of signiﬁcant information, the more efﬁciently one will get responses (in the form of shares, comments, etc.) Time is becoming a category of distance. Earlier means closer. Everyone has to share signiﬁcant items as early as possible in order to be a part of society. Acting in this way, people socialize themselves and at the same time serve each other. Digital tools very much facilitate this human need, which is placed on the very top of Maslow’s pyramid.

Human perception of the digital space is mediated by other humans and algorithms. Being put into the digital space completely, the augmented reality turns into the augmented humanity, which is a nice term coined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt [32].

Not without reason, speaking of the “angelism” of humans in the electric environment, Marshall McLuhan related this angelism to humans’ shared omnipresence: “I don’t think our institutions have any way of coping with this new dimension of man … the angelic discarnate man of the electric age who is always in the presence of all the other men in the world” [31].

Paraphrasing other utterance of McLuhan’s, we can say that the best, ultimate extension of man is another man (until algorithms, on behalf of man, intervene and capture this function). In digital reality, humans are the best media for each other: homo homini media est. That is why the sensation of physical objects has to be replaced with the sensation of others of our kind in the environment that tends to be purely social, not physical. This is what has to reshape the human sensorium completely.

4.3. Social Dimension: The Sense of the Others

In the blogosphere and social media, we almost already experience a sense of social gravitation. This observation brings us to the conclusion that with the transfer from the given reality (through the represented reality) to the induced reality, we inevitably have to switch from the biologically-based sensorium to the socially-based sensorium.

In the digital reality, the need for social cohesion will provide people with a sense of social gravitation, by means of which they will learn how to sense the direction toward each other (or outof each other) in the socially networked space. Connecting to the social network, we will have to experience “sensually” the distance to those speaking or the currency of what is said. We will have to sensually perceive the massiveness, or virality, of a topic. We almost already can feel it now, looking at the number of likes and reposts, but in the future, it will have to be a particular sense, similar to how we feel the crowd at a stadium or in a subway; or how we feel the emptiness of an empty room. Such indicators as numbers of likes, shares, and reposts may turn to the sensors of the new, social-based sensorium.

The sense of social coherence will enhance the social–spatial orientation, but also will nurture the sense of social resonance, which will be subordinated to the timing of wave-shaped social activities. By the way, this wave-looking pattern of activity will form a “digital calendar” to replace the solar–lunar calendar (which has already been very much spoiled by electricity).

The transformation of the biological sensorium into the social sensorium is worth additional exploration. In the context of this paper, it is important to chart this tendency as a continuing and inevitable way for the sensorium to be adapted into the realm of digitally induced reality

4.4. Social Dimension: The Thirst for Response

Marshall McLuhan used the myth of Narcissus to explain humans’ addiction to media. Accordingto him, “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves” [7] (p. 45).

As has already been said above, the best, ultimate material for man’s “extension” is another man. Many researchers note, for example, the narcissistic nature of the selﬁe, which looks very similar to the original myth. But in fact, the most important aspect of taking selﬁes is the subsequent sharing of it in the hope of getting responses from others. The phenomenon of the selﬁe does not exist without its publication. Reﬂection in others, not just on the screen of a smartphone—this is what the selﬁe is, in essence. Any human interaction may have its certain purpose, but interaction itself is not achievable without the exchange of reactions. Reacting to each other’s signals is essential for human enrolment, as well as being the basis for both individual and group survival. For the sake of socialization, people seek response and spend their talents, time, and effort in pursuit of better responses. This thirst for response helps human beings to be social being [33]. The thirst for response is the same driving force that Hegel called the “struggle for recognition”. In order to get a response, people choose to share the best of what they come across. It may be said that people experience the thirst for response on a sensual level. It is the sixth sense—the social sense. Sufﬁcient or insufﬁcient satiation of this thirst can prompt action and bring people stress or pleasure. The Internet provides new, quick, and inexpensive opportunities to satisfy this thirst. However, it is athirst that is never fully satiated, because socialization is not a product, but a process. If the sense of others allows the “feeling” of digital distance and direction toward signiﬁcant people and events, i.e., allows orientation in the digital–social space, the thirst for response is a sort of inducement for people to act in induced reality.

5. Conclusions

By advancing the concepts of visual space and audile-tactile space, Marshal McLuhan created an intellectual space for explorations, probes, and speculations about the interaction between humans and media. Being sharp, sometimes controversial, sometimes provocative, and always thought-provoking, his ideas resonate with a huge number of theories in many others areas of human thinking. As mass media, to use a metaphor from Clay Shirky, is “the connectivet issue of society” [17] (p. 54), media in general have been the connective tissue for civilizations throughout time, space, and cultures. The history of humankind can be seen as a big journey along the waves of media technologies. TheMcLuhanian approach allows for a fuller study of this journey, and even a description of its future. Many arriving media technologies justify what McLuhan witnessed, despite his having barely caught the ﬁrst personal computers. Now media are not seen just as information carriers. Contemporary media literally create reality. They demonstrate this “assignment” unabashedly, even in name, as immersive media, or augmentedreality, or virtual reality. McLuhan described this phenomenon when it was not so obvious. Tracing the trends noticed by McLuhan into the future, we can separate several important areas of future research. The list of these, of course, is indicative, but not complete.

5.1. The Resettlement into the Digital World

As McLuhan stated, electric media return humans into the preliterate state of being within a natural-like environment. The trick is, it is not the natural environment; so, in fact, human kind moves to some next stage of media evolution. The reality of electronic media is not given. It is the induced reality, the digital world, in which humans are about to resettle completely. Thus, any media exploration, being done fairly enough and far enough, with necessity leads to the ideas of mind uploading, Transhumanism, and the Singularity [34].The great resettlement, or the new exodus, hovers behind any media study, be it devoted to the decline of newspapers, or media impacts, or media literacy. The acceptance of this seemingly provocative thesis helps to explore and develop any media phenomena in the right light. The resettlement will be followed by drastic changes to human and social natures; among them the change of the sensorium represents only a tiny part of what is coming up. (An important note: any upcoming iteration of the future has to be linked to its time horizon. Things have to happen in the right order, timely, and should be perceived so, for the sake of psycho-hygiene. Realizing proper sequences for the future can help prevent future shock, which is about the inevitable, due to increasingly accelerating historical time.)

5.2. Time-Managing Sensorium

Time is one-dimensional for a biological being, for whom it exists only in the form of “now”. The sensorium has had to do with space mostly. Humans have had a notion of time projections of the past and the future, but these projections have all the same been represented only in the “now”—bymeans of the arts, imagination, memory, and grammar. As any time is “now” for the biological being, any space is “here” for the digital being. Moreover, time has to be manageable for the digital being in the same way as space is manageable for the biological being. Humankind has already developed some capacity to make time more elastic: art, medicine, education, cosmetic surgery, ﬁnances (loans and derivatives), the entire subculture around aging, etc. But the real notion of manageable time has come with digital media, particularly video games. They do not just already dismiss gravity; they also are able to speed up, slow down, reverse, stop, skip, and repeat time. Of course, these properties of video games obviously link to the ideas of angelism and discarnate man, expressed by McLuhan in the 60 s. Electrical man has already achieved the God-likeability of omnipresence. The sensorium must perform this ﬂip-ﬂop soon, with the implosion of the spatial “everywhere” into “here” and the explosion of the temporal “now” into several time dimensions, with the different characteristics of velocity, ﬂow, continuity, direction, etc. We are somewhere at the very beginning of this incredible shift. It is still hard to imagine what kind of adaptation will happen to the sensorium to ﬁt the new time dimensions. But this is not about the far futuristic future; some things are already occurring. Time (attention span) already is the measure of value in the digital realm. The currency of future digital economics will be clearly related to time-spending. Time compression, or extension, or repeating, or stopping, or reversing, or skipping will be the main goods in such an economy. Preliterate media are space-biased and time-ignorant. Alphabet-based media are time-space biased. Digital media are time-biased and space-ignorant. These traits of theirs, by the way, are already causing not just changes in the sensorium, but also social unrest and intercultural clashes around theworld [35].

Conﬂicts of Interest: The author declares no conﬂict of interest.

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© 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution(CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

A SCHOOLMAN’S GUIDE TO MARSHALL McLUHAN

Veja em Português

By JOHN M. CULKIN, S.J. (1967, March). A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan. The Saturday Review, 51-53, 70-72 Director of the Center for Communications, Fordham University

EDUCATION, a seven-year-old assures me, is “how kids learn stuff.” Few definitions are as satisfying. It includes all that is essential – a who, a what, and a process. It excludes all the people, places, and things which are only sometimes involved in learning. The economy and accuracy of the definition, however, are more useful in locating the problem than in solving it. We know little enough about kids, less about learning, and considerably more than we would like to know about stuff. In addition, the whole process of formal schooling is now wrapped inside an environment of speeded-up technological change which is constantly influencing kids and learning and stuff. The jet-speed of this technological revolution, especially in the area of communications, has left us with more reactions to it than reflections about it. Meanwhile back at the school, the student, whose psyche is being programmed for tempo, information, and relevance by his electronic environment, is still being processed in classrooms operating on the postulates of another day. The cold war existing between these two worlds is upsetting for both the student and the schools. One thing is certain: It is hardly a time for educators to plan with nostalgia, timidity, or old formulas. Enter Marshall McLuhan. He enters from the North, from the University of Toronto where he teaches English and is director of the Center for Culture and Technology. He enters with the reputation as “the oracle of the electric age” and as “the most provocative and controversial writer of this generation.” More importantly for the schools, he enters as a man with fresh eyes, with new ways of looking at old problems. He is a man who gets his ideas first and judges them later. Most of these ideas are summed up in his book, Understanding Media. His critics tried him for not delivering these insights in their most lucid and practical form. It isn’t always cricket, however, to ask the same man to crush the grapes and serve the wine. Not all of McLu is nu or tru, but then again neither is all of anybody else. This article is an attempt to select and order those elements of McLuhanism which are most relevant to the schools and to provide the schoolman with some new ways of thinking about the schools. McLuhan’s promise is modest enough: “All I have to offer is an enterprise of investigation into a world that’s quite unusual and quite unlike any previous world and for which no models of perception will serve.” This unexplored world happens to be the present. McLuhan feels that very few men look at the present with a present eye, that they tend to miss the present by translating it into the past, seeing it through a rearview mirror. The unnoticed fact of our present is the electronic environment created by the new communications media. It is as pervasive as the air we breathe ( and some would add that it is just as polluted), yet its full import eludes the judgments of commonsense or content oriented perception. The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are processes which shape people. Such influence is deterministic only if ignored. There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. Theorists can keep reality at arm’s length for long periods of time. Teachers and administrators can’t. They are closeted with reality all day long. In many instances they are co-prisoners with electronic-age students in the old pencil box cell. And it is the best teachers and the best students who are in the most trouble because they are challenging the system constantly. It is the system which has to come under scrutiny. Teachers and students can say, in the words of the Late Late Show, “Baby, this thing is bigger than both of us.” It won’t be ameliorated by a few dashes of good will or a little more hard work.

“The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people. There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

It is a question of understanding these newkids and these new media and of getting the schools to deal with the new electronic environment. It’s not easy. And the defenders of the old may prove to be the ones least able to defend and preserve the values of the old. For some people, analysis of these newer technologies automatically implies approbation of them. Their world is so full of shoulds that it is hard to squeeze in an is. McLuhan suggests a more positive line of exploration: At the moment, it is important that we understand cause and process. The aim is to develop an awareness about print and the newer technologies of communication so that we can orchestrate them, minimize their mutual frustrations and clashes, and get the best out of each in the educational process. The present conflict leads to elimination of the motive to learn and to diminution of interest in all previous achievement: It leads to loss of the sense of relevance. Without an understanding of media grammars, we cannot hope to achieve a contemporary awareness of the world in which we live. We have been told that it is the property of true genius to disturb all settled ideas. McLuhan is disturbing in both his medium and his message. His ideas challenge the normal way in which people perceive reality. They can create a very deep and personal threat since they touch on everything in a person’s experience. They are just as threatening to the establishment whose way of life is predicated on the postulates he is questioning. The establishment has no history of organizing parades to greet its disturbers. His medium is perhaps more disturbing than his message. From his earliest work he has described his enterprise as”explorations in communication.” The word he uses most frequently today is”probe.” His books demand a high degree of involvement from the reader. They are poetic and intuitive rather than logical and analytic. Structurally, his unit is the sentence. Most of them are topic sentences which are left undeveloped. The style is oral and breathless and frequently obscure. It’s a different kind of medium.”The medium is the message,” announced McLuhan a dozen years ago in a cryptic and uncompromising aphorism whose meaning is still being explored. The title of his latest book, an illustrated popular paperback treatment of his theories, playfully proclaims that The Medium ls the Massage – a title calculated to drive type setters and critics to hashish and beyond. The original dictum can be looked at in four ways, the third of which includes a message of importance.

The first meaning would be better communicated orally – “The medium is the message.” The medium is the thing to study. The medium is the thing you’re missing. Everybody’s hooked on content; pay attention to form, structure, framework, medium. The play’s the thing. The medium’s the thing. McLuhan makes the truth stand on its head to attract attention. Why the medium is worthy of attention derives from its other three meanings.

Meaning number two stresses the relation of the medium to the content. The form of communication not only alters the content, but each form also has preferences for certain kinds of messages. Content always exists in some form and is, therefore, to some degree governed by the dynamics of that form. If you don’t know the medium, you don’t know the message. The insight is neatly summed up by Dr. Edmund Carpenter: “English is a mass medium. All languages are mass media. The new mass media-film, radio, TV – are new languages, their grammars as yet unknown. Each codifies reality differently; each conceals a unique metaphysics. Linguists tell us it’s possible to say anything in any language if you use enough words or images, but there’s rarely time; the natural course is for a culture to exploit its media biases. “It is always content-in-form which is mediated. In this sense, the medium is a co-message”.

The third meaning for the M-M formula emphasizes the relation of the medium to the individual psyche. The medium alters the perceptual habits of its users. Independent of the content, the medium itself gets through. Pre-literate, literate, and post-literate cultures see the world through different colored glasses. In the process of delivering content the medium also works overthe sensorium of the consumer. To get this subtle insight across, McLuhan punned on message and came up with massage. The switch is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral – it does something to people. It takes hold of them, it jostles them, it bumps them around, it massages them. It opens and closes windows in their sensorium. Proof? Look out the window at the TV generation. They are rediscovering texture, movement, color, and sound as they retribalize the race. TV is a real grabber; it really massages those lazy, unused senses.

The fourth meaning underscores the relation of the medium to society. Whitehead said, “The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” The media massage the society as well as the individual. The results pass unnoticed for long periods of time because people tend to view the new as just a little bit more of the old. Whitehead again: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, – synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself: That is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization.” Understanding the medium or process involved is the key to control. The media shape both content and consumer and do so practically undetected. We recall the story of the Russian worker whose wheelbarrow was searched every day as he left the factory grounds. He was, of course, stealing wheel barrows. When your medium is your message and they’re only investigating content, you can get away with a lot of things – like wheelbarrows, for instance. It’s not the picture but the frame. Not the contents but the box. The blank page is not neutral; nor is the classroom. McLuhan’s writings abound with aphorisms, insights, for-instances, and irrelevancies which float loosely around recurring themes. They provide the raw materials of a do-it-yourself kit for tidier types who prefer to do their exploring with clearer charts. What follows is one man’s McLuhan served up in barbarously brief form. Five postulates, spanning nearly 4,000 years, will serve as the fingers in this endeavor to grasp McLuhan:

1) 1967 B.c.–All the senses get into the act. A conveniently symmetrical year for a thesis which is partially cyclic. It gets us back to man before the Phoenician alphabet. We know from our contemporary ancestors in the jungles of New Guinea and the wastes of the Arctic that preliterate man lives in an all at-once sense world. The reality which bombards him from all directions is picked up with the omni-directional antennae of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Films such as The Hunters and Nanook of the North depict primitive men tracking game with an across the-board sensitivity which mystifies Western, literate man. We mystify them too. And it is this cross-mystification which makes inter-cultural abrasions so worthwhile. Most people presume that their way of perceiving the world is the way of perceiving the world. If they hang around with people like themselves, their mode of perception may never be challenged. It is at the poles ( literally and figuratively) that the violent contrasts illumine our own unarticulated perceptual prejudices. Toward the North Pole, for example, live Eskimos. A typical Eskimo family consists of a father, a mother, two children, and an anthropologist. When the anthropologist goes into the igloo to study Eskimos, he learns a lot about himself. Eskimos see pictures and maps equally well from all angles. They can draw equally well on top of a table or underneath it. They have phenomenal memories. They. travel without visual bearings in their white-on-white world and can sketch cartographically accurate maps of shifting shorelines. They have forty or fifty words for what we call “snow.” ·They live in a world without linearity, a world of acoustic space. They are Eskimos. Their natural way of perceiving the world is different from our natural way of perceiving the world. Each culture develops its own balance of the senses in response to the demands of its environment. The most generalized formulation of the theory would maintain that the individual’s modes of cognition and perception are influenced by the culture he is in, the language he speaks, and the media to which he is exposed. Each culture, as it were, provides its constituents with a custom made set of goggles. The differences in perception are a question of degree. Some cultures are close enough to each other in perceptual patterns so that the differences pass unnoticed. Other cultural groups, such as the Eskimo and the American teen-ager, are far enough away from us to provide aesthetic distance.

2) Art imitates life. In The Silent Language Edward T. Hall offers the thesis that all art and technology is an extension of some physical or psychic element of man. Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body: stone axe for hand, wheel for foot, glasses for eyes, radio for voice and ears. Money is a way of storing energy. This externalizing of individual, specialized functions is now, by definition, at its most advanced stage. Through the electronic media of telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, man has now equipped his world with a nervous system similar to the one within his own body. President Kennedy is shot and the world instantaneously reels from the impact of the bullets. Space and time dissolve under electronic conditions. Current concern for the United Nations, the Common Market, ecumenism, reflects this organic thrust toward the new convergence and unity which is “blowing in the wind”. Now in the electric age, our extended faculties and senses constitute a single instantaneous and coexistent field of experience. It’s all-at-once. It’s shared by-all. McLuhan calls the world “a global village.“

3) Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. These extensions of our senses begin to interact with our senses. These media become a massage. The new change in the environment creates a new balance among the senses. No sense operates in isolation.The full sensorium seeks fulfillment in almost every sense experience. And since there is a limited quantum of energy available for any sensory experience, the sense-ratio will differ for different media. The nature of the sensory effect will be determined by the medium used. McLuhan divides the media according to the quality or definition of their physical signal. The content is not relevant in this kind of analysis. The same picture from the same camera can appear as aglossy photograph or as a newspaper wire photo. The photograph is well-defined, of excellent pictorial quality, hi-fi within its own medium. McLuhan calls this kind of medium “hot.” The newspaper photo is grainy, made up of littledots, low definition. McLuhan calls thiskind of medium “cool.” Film is hot; television is cool. Radio is hot; telephone is cool. The cool medium or person invites participation and involvement. It leaves room for the response of the consumer. A lecture is hot; all the work is done. A seminar is cool; it gets everyone into the game. Whether all the connections are causal may be debated, but it’s interesting that the kids of the cool TV generation want to be so involved and so much a part of what’s happening.

4) We shaped the alphabet and itshaped us. In keeping with the McLuhan postulate that “the medium is the message,” a literate culture should be more than mildly eager to know what books do to people. Everyone is familiar enough with all the enrichment to living mediated through fine books to allow usto pass on to the subtler effects which might be attributed to the print medium, independent of the content involved.Whether one uses the medium to say that God is dead or that God is love( – – – – – – – – -) , the structure of the medium itself remains unchanged. Nine little black marks with no intrinsic meaning of their own are strung along a line with spaces left after the third and fifth marks. It is this stripping away of meaning which allows us to X-ray the form itself. As an example, while lecturing to a large audience in a modern hotel in Chicago, a distinguished professor is bitten in the leg by a cobra. The whole experience takes three seconds. He is affected through the touch of the reptile, the gaspof the crowd, the swimming sights beforehis eyes. His memory, imagination, and emotions come into emergency action.A lot of things happen in three seconds.Two weeks later he is fully recoveredand wants to write up the experience in a letter to a colleague. To communicate this experience through print means that it must first be broken down into parts and then mediated, eyedropper fashion, one thing at a time, in an abstract, linear, fragmented, sequential way. That is the essential structure of print. And once a culture uses such a medium for a few centuries, it begins to perceive the world in a one-thing-at-a-time, abstract, linear, fragmented, sequential way. And it shapes its organizations and schools according to the same premises. The form of print has become the form of thought. The medium has become the message. For centuries now, according to McLuhan, the straight line has been the hidden metaphor of literate man. It was unconsciously but inexorably used as the measure of things. It went unnoticed, unquestioned. It was presumed as natural and universal. It is neither. Like everything else it is good for the things it is good for. To say that it is not everything is not to say that it is nothing. The electronic media have broken the monopoly of print; they have altered our sensory profiles by heightening our awareness of aural, tactile, and kinetic values.

5) 1967 A.D.- All the senses went to get into the act. Print repressed most sense-life in favor of the visual. The end of prints monopoly also marks the end of a visual monopoly. As the early warning system of art and popular culture indicates, all the senses want to get into the act. Some of the excesses in the current excursions into aural, oral, tactile, and kinetic experience may in fact be directly responsive to the sensory deprivation of the print culture. Nature abhors a vacuum. No one glories in the sight of kids totally out of control in reaction to the Beatles. Some say, “‘What are the Beatles doing to these kids?” Others say, “What have we done to these kids?” All the data isn’t on what it means to be a balanced human being. Kids are what the game is all about. Given an honest game with enough equipment to go around, it is the mental, emotional, and volitional capacity of the student which most determines the outcome. The whole complicated system of formal education is in business to get through to kids, to motivate kids, to help kids learn stuff. Schools are not in business to label kids, to grade them for the job market or to babysit. They are there to communicate with them. Communication is a funny business.

There isn’t as much of it going on as most people think. Many feel that it consists in saying things in the presence of others. Not so. It consists not in saying things but in having things heard. Beautiful English speeches delivered to monolingual Arabs are not beautiful speeches. You have to speak the language of the audience-of the whom in the “who says-what-to-whom” . All good communicators use Whomese. The best writers, film-makers, advertising men, lovers, preachers, and teachers all have the knack for thinking about the hopes, fears, and capacity of the other person and of being able to translate their communication into terms which are relevant for that person. Whitehead called “inert ideas” the bane of education. Relevance, however, is one of those subjective words. It doesn’t pertain to the object in itself but to the object as perceived by someone. The school may decide that history is important for the student, but the role of the teacher is to make history relevant to the student.

In September, Dr. Marshall McLuhan will go to Fordham University in New York to assume the Albert Schweitzer chair in the humanities. He will be working with the team of media researchers, including the author of this article, who has been studying and interpreting McLuhan for more than ten years. McLuhan theories will be analyzed in depth by media specialists at Fordham’s two summer film study conferences in New York, July 5-8, and in Los Angeles, August 16-19.

If what has to be tailored to the whom, the teacher has to be constantly engaged in audience research. It’s not a question of keeping up with the latest slang or of selling out to the current mores of the kids. Neither of these tactics helps either learning or kids. But it is a question of knowing what values are strong in their world, of understanding the obstacles to communication, of sensing their style of life. Communication doesn’t have to end there, but it can start nowhere else. If they are tuned in to FM and you are broadcasting on AM, there’s no communication. Communication forces you to pay a lot of attention to other people. McLuhan has been paying a great deal of attention to modern kids. Of necessity they live in the present since they have no theories to diffract or reflect what is happening. They are also the first generation to be born into a world in which there was always television. McLuhan finds them a great deal different from their counterparts at the turn of the century when the electric age was just getting up steam. A lot of things have happened since 1900 and most of them plug into walls. Today’s six-year-old has already learned a lot of stuff by the time he shows up for the first day of school. Soon after his umbilical cord was cut he was planted in front of a TV set “to keep him quiet.” He liked it enough there to stay for some 3,000 to 4,000 hours before he started the first grade. By the time he graduates from high school he has clocked 15,000 hours of TV time and 10,800 hours of school time. He lives in a world which bombards him from all sides with information from radios, films, telephones, magazines, recordings, and people. He learns more things from the windows of cars, trains, and even planes. Through travel and communications he has experienced the war in Vietnam, the wide world of sports, the civil rights movement, the death of a President, thousands of commercials, a walk in space, a thousand innocuous shows, and, one may hope, plenty of Captain Kangaroo. This is all merely descriptive, an effort to lay out what is, not what should be. Today’s student can hardly be described by any of the old educational analogies comparing him to an empty bucket or a blank page. He comes to the information machine called school and he is already brimming over with information. As he grows his standards for relevance are determined more by what he receives outside the school than what he receives inside. A recent Canadian film tells the story of a bright, articulate middle class teen-ager who leaves school because there’s “no reason to stay.” He daydreams about Vietnam while his teacher drones on about the four reasons for the spread of Christianity and the five points such information is worth on the exam. Only the need for a diploma was holding him in school; learning wasn’t, and he left. He decided the union ticket wasn’t worth the gaff. He left. Some call him a dropout. Some call him a push out. The kids have one foot on the dock and one foot on the ferryboat. Living in two centuries makes for that kind of tension. The gap between the classroom and the outside world and the gap between the generations is wider than it has ever been. Those tedious people who quote Socrates on the conduct of the young are trying vainly to reassure themselves that this is just the perennial problem of communication between generations. “I ain’t so. “Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.” Says McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage. “Growing up that is our new work, and it is total: Mere instruction will not suffice.” Learning is something that people do for themselves. People, places, and things can facilitate or impede learning; they can’t make it happen without some cooperation from the learner. The learner these days comes to school with a vast reservoir of vicarious experiences and loosely related facts; he wants to use all his senses in his learning as an active agent in the process of discovery; he knows that all the answers aren’t in. The new learner is the result of the new media, says: McLuhan. And a new learner calls for a new kind of learning. Leo Irrera said, “If God had anticipated the eventual structure of the 72 school system, surely he would have shaped man differently.” Kids are being tailored to fit the Procrustean ( framework or system enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality) forms of schedules, classrooms, memorizing, testing, etc. , which are frequently relics from an obsolete approach to learning. It is the total environment which contains the philosophy of education, not the title page in the school catalogue. And it is the total environment which is invincible because it is invisible to most people. They tend to move things around within the old boxes or to build new and cleaner boxes. They should be asking whether or not there should be a box in the first place. THE new learner, who is the product of the all-at-once electronic environment, often feels out of it in a linear, one-thing-at-a-time school environment. The total environment is now the great teacher; the student has competence models against which to measure the effectiveness of his teachers. Nuclear students in linear schools make for some tense times in education. Students with well developed interests in science, the arts and humanities, or current events need assistance to suit their pace, not that of the state syllabus. The straight line theory of development and the uniformity of performance which it so frequently encourages just don’t fit many needs of the new learner. Interestingly, the one thing which most of the current educational innovations share is their break with linear or print-oriented patterns: team teaching, non graded schools, audio-lingual language training, multimedia learning situations, seminars, student research at all levels of education, individualized learning, and the whole shift of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student. Needless to say, these are not as widespread as they should be, nor were they brought about through any conscious attention to the premises put forward by McLuhan. Like the print-oriented and linear mentality they now modify, these premises were plagiarized from the atmosphere. McLuhan’s value is in the power he gives us to predict and control these changes. There is too much stuff to learn today. McLuhan calls it an age of “information overload.” And the information levels outside the classroom are now higher than those in the classroom. Schools used to have a virtual monopoly on information; now they are part-time competitors in the electronic informational surround. And all human knowledge is expanding at computer speed.

Every choice involves a rejection. If we can’t do everything, what priorities will govern our educational policies? “The medium is the message” may not be bad for openers. We can no longer teach kids all about a subject; we can teach them what a subject is all about. We have to introduce them to the form, structure, gestalt, grammar, and process of the knowledge involved. What does a math man do when a math man does do math? This approach to the formal element of a discipline can provide a channel of communication between specialists. Its focus is not on content or detail but on the postulates, ground rules, frames of reference, and premises of each discipline. It stresses the modes of cognition and perception proper to each field. Most failures in communication are based on disagreement about items which are only corollaries of a larger thesis. It happens between disciplines, individuals, media, and cultures. The arts play a new role in education because they are explorations in perception. Formerly conceived as a curricular luxury item, they now become a dynamic way of tuning up the sensorium and of providing fresh ways of looking at familiar things. When exploration and discovery become the themes, the old lines between art and science begin to fade. We have to guide students to becoming their own data processors to operate through pattern recognition. The media themselves serve as both aids to learning and as proper objects of study in this search for an all-media literacy. Current interest in film criticism will expand to include all art and communication forms. And since the knowledge explosion has blown out the walls between subjects, there will be a continued move toward interdisciplinary swapping and understanding. Many of the categorical walls between things are artifacts left over from the packaging days of print. The specialist’s life will be even lonelier as we move further from the Gutenberg era. The trends are all toward wholeness and convergence. These things aren’t true just because Marshall McLuhan says they are. They work. They explain problems in education that nobody else is laying a glove on. When presented clearly and with all the necessary examples and footnotes added, they have proven to be a liberating force for hundreds of teachers who were living through the tension of this cultural fission without realizing that the causes for the tension lay outside themselves. McLuhan’s relevance for education demands the work of teams of simultaneous translators and researchers who can both shape and substantiate the insights which are scattered through his work. McLuhan didn’t invent electricity or put kids in front of TV sets; he is merely trying to describe what’s happening out there so that it can be dealt with intelligently. When someone warns you of an oncoming truck, it’s frightfully impolite to accuse him of driving the thing. McLuhan can help kids to learn stuff better

The Medium is the Message

O meio e a luz: reflexões sobre a religião

Read it in English

Introdução por Eric McLuhan

A estatura de nenhum homem é aumentada pelo acúmulo de mitos, e nada é prejudicado da genuína grandeza histórica pela consideração do lado puramente humano de um homem.

Heinrich Fichtenau on Charlemagne (The Carolingian Empire – Toronto: University Press, em associação com a Medieval Academy of America, 1978,82,86, página 25)

Talvez a pessoa mais surpresa com a conversão de McLuhan ao catolicismo foi ele mesmo.
Meu pai me contou a história de sua conversão várias vezes ao longo dos anos em que trabalhamos juntos. Tinha em mente duas fases. A primeira consistia em como a Igreja e suas reivindicações repetidamente se intrometiam em sua atenção enquanto ele tentava se concentrar em outros assuntos acadêmicos – com tanta frequência e poder que ele acabou se sentindo forçado a lidar com isso. A segunda consistiu nos eventos que precipitaram sua conversão real e aceitação na Igreja.
A primeira fase levou muitos anos e inclui o período entre meados e final dos anos 30 que ele gastou em pesquisas para seu doutorado na Universidade de Cambridge. Esse documento constituiu a base não apenas de sua abordagem intelectual da Igreja, mas também de muito mais em estudos posteriores em comunicação. Vou entrar em alguns detalhes.
Marshall McLuhan foi criado em uma espécie de protestantismo frouxo. Ou seja, a família que vivia em Edmonton, Alberta, era liberal quanto à denominação – Metodista Batista, etc. – que eles seguiam. Eles, como muitos protestantes de pensamento independente, não “pertenciam” realmente a uma ou outra denominação, mas compareciam no fim de semana a qualquer Igreja ou local de reunião que pudesse fornecer a melhor ou mais interessante pregação, a melhor “motivação”. Não posso deixar de mencionar aqui o que me parece uma curiosa coincidência: retórica e falar em público percorrem a vida de meu pai como uma espécie de tema básico ou linha basica sobre a qual o resto é desempenhado. Sua mãe, Elsie, estava no palco como um show de leituras e interpretações. Seu pai era um vendedor de seguros – e conhecido como um bom falador e contador de histórias. O irmão de meu pai, Maurice, também se tornou um orador: um ministro e pregador e, mais tarde, um professor. E a mulher com quem meu pai se casou, minha mãe, formou-se atriz, estudou e ensinou teatro e oratória, além de dirigir peças. Ele próprio se tornou conhecido por sua habilidade como orador. Ele escreveu sua tese de doutorado sobre a história do trivium (retórica, dialética e gramática) e fez da retórica seu estudo particular: A crítica prática, que se baseia na retórica, formou o alicerce secreto de toda a sua abordagem da mídia e da literatura. Meu pai decidira escrever sua dissertação sobre um panfletário elisabetano obscuro, mas vigoroso, Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). Pesquisar aquele espirituoso satírico claramente significava cavar fundo nas brigas que ele travava. Uma coisa levou à outra; em pouco tempo meu pai decidiu que teria de escrever mais do que a breve nota que planejara para explicar as diferenças entre Hashe e seu principal antagonista, Gabriel Harvey. Os dois homens, ao que se constatou, eram apenas os últimos combatentes em uma luta que já ocorria há mais de 1.500 anos e que por mais centenas de anos não dava sinais de diminuir. (De muitas maneiras, pode ser visto ainda furiosa por trás dos principais argumentos nos círculos intelectuais, políticos e religiosos ocidentais hoje, mas isso é outra história). Quando terminou, a breve nota de fundo havia se transformado nos primeiros três quartos de uma das teses mais eruditas que Cambridge já vira. Ele vasculhou nossas tradições intelectuais, começando com seus fundamentos nos sistemas e técnicas educacionais legadas a nós pela Grécia e então por Roma, e os perseguiu durante a Idade Média, o período da Escolástica, a Reforma, o Iluminismo, e terminando com alguns comentários sobre James Joyce no século XX. O tempo percorrido começou com Cícero na Roma de Augusto augustana e foi até Nashe na Inglaterra Elizabetana; o assunto dizia respeito aos debates e rivalidades – surpreendentemente consistentes – que distinguiam vários campos intelectuais e até mesmo grandes universidades como Paris, Oxford e Cambridge. Tudo isso foi necessário para colocar Nashe e suas atividades “no contexto”: sem isso, grande parte da atividade de Nashe parecia, mesmo para especialistas Elisabetanos, bastante inexplicável; com isso, perfeitamente racional. Desnecessário dizer que Nashe logo ficou em segundo plano com o panorama que se desenrolou, que meu pai foi evidentemente o primeiro em séculos a descobrir e discutir. Por muitas centenas de anos cobertos em suas investigações, os antagonistas eram clérigos. E seus debates diziam respeito não apenas a esta ou aquela ideia ou doutrina, mas sim às próprias ferramentas do esforço intelectual, à natureza e seriedade da filosofia e da literatura, e às técnicas de interpretação e suas esferas de aplicação. Foi nesses termos que McLuhan encontrou o catolicismo, termos que diziam respeito à natureza da compreensão humana e a toda a prática de aprendizado e tradição de interpretação em todas as artes e ciências. Hoje, esses debates são considerados “acadêmicos” recônditos, argumentos de pouco significado prático. Mas por mais de mil anos eles foram a base da escola e da sociedade, a pedra angular de todas políticas e da política. E se eram vitais para a compreensão de Nashe, também sustentavam as diferenças entre a Igreja e os reformadores protestantes. Nashe representava as antigas reivindicações da gramática (aliada à retórica) pelo domínio no trivium – o que significava domínio tanto do mundo intelectual quanto do político; Harvey, representava as reivindicações rivais dos reformadores dialéticos em questões literárias e teológicas. Nessa época, havia pouca ou nenhuma distinção entre literatura, teologia e política. Para ter uma noção do debate, lembre-se da rivalidade entre conservadores e reformadores, ou capitalistas e socialistas, e amplie as diferenças em quatro ou cinco vezes. Para alcançar esse pano de fundo, ele teve que embarcar em um programa de estudos de dimensões enciclopédicas (Ele havia chegado a Cambridge com bacharelado e mestrado pela University of Manitoba, ele passou a adquirir em Cambridge outro bacharelado e mestrado antes de prosseguir para o doutorado.) Ele decidiu que precisava dominar e então desenhar os contornos de o trivium, que durante muitos séculos foi o sistema ocidental tradicional para organizar a atividade intelectual. O trivium comprimia todo o conhecimento em três correntes: retórica (comunicação), dialética (filosofia e lógica) e gramática (literatura, tanto sagrada quanto profana, incluindo modos de interpretação). A gramática incluía testes escritos de todos os tipos, assim como o mundo e o universo conhecido, que eram considerados como um livro a ser lido e interpretado, o famoso “Livro da Natureza”. Por incrível que pareça, o trabalho nunca havia sido feito antes. Certamente, houve – e há – muitas histórias de filosofia, por exemplo, e histórias de literatura, bem como relatos de retórica. Mas quando cada um deles é visto não individualmente, mas como um de um conjunto de trigêmeos siameses, a perspectiva muda enormemente, assim como todo o significado de cada desenvolvimento nas histórias. Sua leitura, então, cobriu a área mais ampla que se possa imaginar e, porque o clero católico estava intimamente envolvido na maior parte dela, ele se familiarizou não apenas com o que eles haviam dito sobre uma ampla gama de assuntos, mas também com o motivo pelo qual haviam tomado esta ou aquela posição. A leitura incluiu os clássicos padrões: os principais filósofos, como os pré-socráticos, Platão e Aristóteles e representantes das principais escolas filosóficas; os retóricos; os principais textos literários e poéticos; e o diretor; escolas de exegese textual de tudo, de Homero à Bíblia. Os intérpretes da Bíblia incluem Orígenes e Filo de Alexandria, que estabeleceram o padrão por séculos de praticantes posteriores. Ele leu os Padres Apostólicos, é claro, bem como seus intérpretes e comentaristas, e todos os Padres Ante-Nicenos. (Recentemente encontrei seu próprio conjunto surrado de 24 volumes, um conjunto de segundos dos Pais Ante-Nicenos, cada volume obviamente lido e muitos anotados e com referências cruzadas, alguns deles pesadamente. É o mesmo com o conjunto de cinco volumes dos sermões de Lancelot Andrewes, também usado na tese.) Ele era perfeitamente capaz de ler latim e grego, bem como as línguas padrão dos estudos, francês e alemão. Em suma, ele tinha, desde o início de seus estudos literários, também pesquisado todo o espectro da doutrina e filosofia católicas – uma visão geral como poucos teólogos católicos possuíam.

(Da introdução de sua tese, não publicada – seria posteriormente) Consequentemente, quando ele passou a considerar a verdade essencial ou não do catolicismo ou a discutir seus méritos, ele o fez com um conhecimento profundo e enciclopédico que ultrapassava em muito o do convertido médio, para não dizer nada daquele do “católico de origem” ou mesmo do padre ou teólogo médio. Ironicamente, sua abordagem erudita da Fé foi simplesmente um efeito colateral de seus estudos: ele não se propôs a investigar o catolicismo. Em vez disso, ao mapear o pano de fundo intelectual das disputas Nashe-Harvey, ele adquiriu uma base extensa na teologia católica e os fundamentos ocultos da Reforma. Quando chegou a hora, portanto, de investigar a Igreja e suas reivindicações, ele já sabia onde procurar evidências ou provas, como procurar (isto é, como permitir o partidarismo e o preconceito) e o que procurar. Eu insisto desde já que meu pai não era teólogo. Nem empreendeu estudos teológicos formais em preparação para qualquer uma das peças incluídas nesta coleção, embora ele naturalmente tivesse se aprofundado um pouco neste ou naquele tópico antes de escrever. Em sua maior parte, sua educação católica foi a ordinária do convertido – ampliada por seu próprio estudo. Por curiosidade, ele leu a Summa Theologica, de St. Thomas de Aquino, por exemplo (em latim, bem como em inglês) e a Summa Contra Gentiles, entre outras coisas. E ele havia se formado em filosofia como parte de seu estudo em Cambridge para o doutorado em inglês. Ele se dera ao trabalho de familiarizar-se com muito do material básico como parte de seu estudo do trivium

Meu pai frequentemente atribuía sua conversão à influência de dois escritores, São Tomás de Aquino e GK Chesterton, particularmente a obra deste ultimo: O que há de errado com o mundo e a ortodoxia – da mesma forma que CS Lewis creditou sua própria conversão à leitura de The Everlasting Man, tambem de GKC . Não surpreendentemente, então, o primeiro artigo acadêmico publicado de McLuhan foi sobre Chesterton, e nós o reproduzimos aqui como nosso primeiro capítulo. Embora não se preocupe com disputas teológicas, nós a incluímos por causa de sua predileção pela maneira de pensar de Chesterton e por causa do lugar que Chesterton (também um convertido ao catolicismo) ocupa na história de sua conversão. Sua introdução à escrita e pensamento de Chesterton ocorreu muito antes, durante seus dias como estudante na Universidade de Manitoba. Ele tinha ficado fascinado com a sagacidade, estilo e acuidade de percepção de Chesterton e até tentou imitar seu estilo na ocasião. (A imitação era a maneira tradicional de aprender a escrever, que ele sempre defendia.) Como J.G.Keogh escreveu no boletim informativo de Ottawa Chesterton de dezembro de 1996:

De Cambridge, McLuhan despachou cuidadosamente para sua família e amigos todas as suas cópias da publicação G.K.’s Weekly. Mesmo antes de vir para a Inglaterra, ele já era fascinado por Chesterton. A esposa de René Cera uma vez me mostrou um recorte de um jornal estudantil durante os dias de McLuhan na Universidade de Manitoba no início dos anos 30, dizendo “Shhhhh! Não deixe Marshall saber que eu lhe mostrei isso ”, sendo o assunto G.K.Chesterton.
O modo familiar de Chesterton com o paradoxo mostrou a meu pai como operar na fronteira entre ideia e metáfora, entre conceito e percepção. Durante a grande depressão, ele e um colega estudante de Manitoba, Tom Easterbrook, foram para a Inglaterra em um barco de transporte de gado para estudar juntos em Cambridge. (Tom, um amigo de longa data, estudou economia em Cambridge e passou a chefiar o Departamento de Economia da Universidade de Toronto.) Um dia, em Cambridge, Tom entregou a meu pai um exemplar de What’s Wrong With the World, de Chesterton, dizendo: “Aqui , Mac; Eu acho que você vai gostar disso. Eu odiava. ”A cada passo, enquanto ele investigava o pano de fundo para seu estudo de Thomas Nashe, ele encontrava a Igreja – o que Chesterton chamou (outro título de livro) A coisa. Estava em toda parte. Em um ponto, ele me disse mais tarde (e ele nunca foi muito específico quando esse ponto ocorreu), ele decidiu que a coisa tinha que ser resolvida ou ele não poderia descansar. Ou era verdade ou não era. Ou toda a questão era verdade, tudo isso, exatamente como a Igreja afirmava, ou foi a maior fraude já perpetrada contra uma humanidade crédula. Com essa escolha claramente delineada, ele começou a descobrir qual era o caso. O que veio a seguir não foi mais estudo, mas testes. O assunto teve que ser testado “em seus próprios termos”; isto é, pela oração. Ele me disse que a principal oração que ele usou não foi uma fórmula longa ou complexa, mas simplesmente: “Senhor, por favor, envie-me um sinal.” Ele relatou que, quase imediatamente, não um, mas um dilúvio de sinais chegaram. E eles continuaram a chegar sem diminuir por um longo tempo. Quanto ao que consistiam os sinais e o que aconteceu a seguir, bem, algumas coisas devem permanecer privadas. O leitor pode deduzir o resto do fato de sua conversão. Mas por muitos anos o assunto não ultrapassou o estágio de assentimento intelectual. A crítica prática exige que o leitor execute textos e, assim, encontre a voz que os enuncia. Por sua vez, encontrar o tom e o sentimento do orador leva diretamente à análise do público e ao efeito produzido. Uma grande ênfase é colocada, assim, para o crítico, no treinamento da sensibilidade e da consciência crítica multissensorial. A experiência de encenar um poema ou passagem fornece a base do entendimento e da análise e nunca está subordinada às idéias que sit contém. Conseqüentemente, a ênfase está mais nas percepções do que nos conceitos. Ele sempre lembrava que os católicos não podem selecionar e escolher doutrinas como os protestantes. Os católicos têm autoridade para ajudar tanto no ensino quanto na interpretação, a translatio studii. Você aceita o catolicismo como uma peça ou nada. De maneira bastante apropriada, a fé, a Igreja sempre ensinou, é uma forma de saber. A fé, como aponta a Epístola aos Hebreus (Novo Testamento), é “a substância das coisas que se esperam, a evidência das coisas que não se vêem”. Esta distinção entre conceito e percepção, ideias e consciência absoluta, tornou-se crucial para revelar muito na mídia estudo e na mediação sobre a Igreja e assuntos relacionados. McLuhan escreveu a Jim Taylor, então editor do The United Church Observe, que ele “não pensava em Deus como um conceito, mas como um fato imediato e sempre presente – uma ocasião para um diálogo contínuo”. (Cartas de Marshall McLuhan, página 362). Ele afirmou que era:

… um tomista para quem a ordem sensorial (ou seja, o mundo) ressoa com o Logos Divino. Não acho que os conceitos tenham qualquer relevância na religião. Analogia não é um conceito. Isso ressoa. É inclusivo. É o próprio processo cognitivo. Essa é a analogia do Logos Divino. Penso em Jasper, Bergson e Buber como tipos conceituais muito inferiores, totalmente fora de sintonia com a consciência analógica imediata que começa nos sentidos e é descarrilada por conceitos ou ideias (idem, páginas 368.369)

Para um católico, a fé não é simplesmente um ato da mente, isto é, uma questão de ideologia ou pensamento (conceitos) ou crença ou confiança, embora geralmente seja confundida com essas coisas. A fé é um modo de percepção, um sentido como a visão, a audição ou o tato e tão real e real quanto esses, mas um sentido espiritual em vez de corporal. (Os protestantes, ele descobriu em sua pesquisa, haviam decidido considerar a fé em termos de idéias e conceitos. A decisão deles significou que, em termos do trivium, amarraram sua sorte à dialética e abandonaram a velha aliança de retórica e gramática ao qual a Igreja ainda aderiu resolutamente.) Fé, nós católicos somos ensinados, é um dom do Espírito Santo, disponível para pedir – em oração. Como forma de conhecimento, a fé opera no reino das percepções, não nos conceitos. É um modo de consciência e conhecimento espiritual, tão agudo e tão real quanto a visão, o tato, o olfato, a audição.
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Nenhum sentido saudável precisa de questionamento e reexame constantes: se você pode ver ou ouvir, está bem; você não precisa ficar se perguntando: “Posso ver? Posso ouvir? Você sabe, sem sombra de dúvida, se pode ouvir ou não, e isso não tem nada a ver com teoria ou conceitos. Essa atitude quem esta de fora lê como arrogância ou ilusão, ou ambos. Daí o paradoxo do assentimento (que para quem está de fora parece uma subserviência cega), por um lado, e o intenso intelectualismo da Igreja, por outro. Daí, também, aquele outro paradoxo de que a Igreja é infinitamente maior por dentro do que parece por fora. Tornar-se católico foi durante séculos equiparado a cometer suicídio intelectual – uma reputação amplamente engendrada pelo pensamento livre – antipatia protestante aos catecismos e autoridade. Mas o catecismo, como McLuhan descobrira, dava respostas abreviadas a perguntas incrivelmente complexas. Em sua pesquisa, ele havia visto o processo prolongado de desenvolvimento da doutrina e o processo secular de testar e definir doutrinas. Ele havia estudado para si mesmo e escrito extensivamente nas teses sobre o Translatio studii – a tradição de comentários eruditos sobre textos sagrados e profanos, o que a Igreja chama de “Tradição” (e o estudo literário chama de ‘a tradição’ ”. Usar a Tradição significa envolver-se em uma conversa complexa: as distinções do passado e do presente são suspensas e todos são seus contemporâneos. Menos de um século antes, o cardeal John Henry Newman havia escrito seu próprio Ensaio sobre o desenvolvimento da Doutrina Cristã, que discutia a maneira exata como a nova doutrina foi testado pela Tradição. E T. S. Eliot, uma espécie de herói nos círculos literários de Cambridge, tinha recentemente escrito, em óbvia imitação do Ensaio de Newman, sua própria declaração, Tradição e o talento individual. ”(nota no apêndice) – Se o a primeira fase ocupou vários anos de intensa erudição e escrutínio, a segunda fase demorou muito menos. É seu relato, muitos anos (1970) após o fato:

“Eu não tinha nenhuma crença religiosa na época em que comecei a estudar o catolicismo. Fui criado nas igrejas Batista, Metodista e Anglicana. Fomos a todos eles. Mas eu não acreditei em nada. Decidi descobrir, e literalmente pesquisar o assunto, e descobri muito em breve que uma coisa precisa ser testada em seus termos. Você não pode testar nada na ciência ou em qualquer parte do mundo, exceto em seus próprios termos, ou obterá as respostas erradas. A igreja tem um requisito ou conjunto de termos muito básicos, a saber, que você se ajoelhe e pergunte pela verdade. Um dos meus amigos me disse: ‘Você não acredita em (Nosso Senhor), portanto, você só pode orar a Deus Pai; você não pode rezar para a Trindade.’ Orei a Deus Pai por dois ou três anos, simplesmente dizendo ‘Mostre-me’. Eu não queria prova de nada. Eu não sabia o que seria mostrado porque não acreditava em nada. Eu fui mostrado de repente. Não aconteceu da maneira esperada. Veio instantaneamente como evidência imediata, e sem qualquer dúvida de ser uma intervenção divina. Não houve trauma ou necessidade pessoal. Nunca tive qualquer necessidade de religião, nenhuma crise pessoal ou emocional. Eu simplesmente queria saber o que era verdade e me disseram … Wham! Tornei-me católico no dia seguinte.”

Como foi aquele dia?
É fácil de descrever. Eu estava com um grupo de pessoas que disseram enquanto eu falava: “Por que você não é católico?” Eu não conseguia pensar em um motivo, eu estava derrotado. Tornei-me católico imediatamente, porque sabia que essa era a obra divina. Eu tinha me convertido trabalhando na questão toda. Eu não tinha nenhum ponto de vista, nenhum problema; Não tive dificuldades. A propósito, nunca tive nenhuma dificuldade, a fé não é uma questão de conceitos: é percepções, uma questão de realidade imediata. ”
Foi batizado e confirmado no mesmo dia: 25 de março de 1937, Quinta-feira Santa. Em seus diários, pelo resto de sua vida, ele nunca deixou de marcar o aniversário, mas sempre na Quinta-feira Santa antes da Páscoa, qualquer que seja a data do calendário. – Ao apresentar esta coleção de suas observações sobre religião, acho apropriado observar que Marshall McLuhan não era reticente, exatamente, sobre seu catolicismo, mas também não era dado a discuti-lo
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levemente. Ele não era o que poderia ser chamado de “católico público” ou “católico profissional”. Ele nunca considerou escrever um livro sobre sua fé. Em um ponto, porém, enquanto estávamos trabalhando com um grupo de temas para o que mais tarde se tornou Laws of Media (University of Toronto, 1988), algumas controvérsias ou dificuldades da igreja, provavelmente em artigos de jornais, cruzaram nossos escritos. O resultado foi o esboço do capítulo de um livro sobre o Cristianismo na Era Eletrônica (Capítulo 18, abaixo). Ele manteve cuidadosamente suas vidas pública e privada separadas. Por exemplo, ele raramente arriscava sua opinião particular sobre qualquer assunto, como a mídia, que era chamado a discutir pública e profissionalmente. Crítico e observador treinado – e imensamente erudito, ele foi perfeitamente capaz de separar a observação profissional do sentimento pessoal. Para ilustrar: uma vez que um aluno de uma de suas aulas de literatura lhe perguntou, ele experimentava algum sentimento ao ler um poema? Eles tinham acabado de passar uma hora ou mais na análise exaustiva e no exame crítico de alguns versículos. Ele ficou evidentemente muito surpreso com a pergunta e respondeu que é claro que tinha sentimentos. Ele parecia sentir que a resposta era óbvia. O aluno (ele mesmo um poeta) perguntou então, por que então ele nunca mencionou, muito menos discutiu, esses sentimentos em aula? Não ocorreu a ele que talvez outros alunos precisassem de algum incentivo ou incentivo no assunto. Alguma orientação sobre como responder mais plenamente à poesia? Meu pai respondeu. Com efeito, tais assuntos eram naturalmente privados e não um assunto apropriado para o discurso público ou crítico. (Ele foi bastante franco, duro, uma vez em 1969, para um grupo de estudantes de pós-graduação: “Nunca deixei de me emocionar com as palavras na missa: ‘mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilis reformasi” – homem, que tinha sido feito de forma surpreendente e maravilhosa antes da queda, foi ainda mais maravilhosamente refeito na Encarnação. A teologia sobre este assunto é quase inexistente: não existe. ”) Tal atitude é difícil de imaginar hoje, quando sentimentos de todos os matizes são virtualmente exigidos de todos, e de figuras públicas em particular. Pessoas que podem compartimentar seus seres tão estritamente nos parecem frias, desumanas, insensíveis. No entanto, ainda há muitas pessoas entre nós que pertencem à idade e ao conjunto de hábitos anteriores e que consideram a questão da privacidade não apenas absolutamente normal, mas também absolutamente necessária para a sanidade e a civilização. Na verdade, esse controle das faculdades emotivas é uma consequência normal da alfabetização alfabética e faz parte do individualismo privado que ela engendra; nossa surpresa ou desânimo contemporâneo com isso dá alguma indicação do grau de nosso distanciamento em relação à alfabetização e à privacidade. Possuidor de um firme senso de identidade privada, ele conduzia suas aulas com a cortesia de um cavalheiro de uma época anterior, uma maneira que ele pode ter aprendido em Cambridge. Embora falasse abertamente sobre o presente, ele sempre foi formal e cavalheiresco em suas aulas, em contraste com a prática de sala de aula de hoje, ele nunca usou a amizade de primeiro nome com seus alunos. Ele uma vez escreveu para o antropólogo Edward T. Hall, cujo trabalho ele admirava e costumava usar , que, além da privacidade, havia uma razão técnica para não trazer questões religiosas para suas discussões sobre a mídia e seus efeitos: ”Eu deliberadamente mantenho o Cristianismo fora de todas essas discussões para que a percepção não seja desviada dos processos estruturais por paixões sectárias doutrinárias. Minha própria atitude para com o próprio cristianismo, consciência do processo ”. Ocasionalmente, nos anos desde sua morte, ouvi os métodos e percepções de meu pai rejeitados como“ catolicismo aplicado, a alegação de que ele era simplesmente uma ferramenta da Igreja Católica. Seu trabalho na mídia é apenas doutrina católica secular em roupas novas e que ele está apenas falando alguma coisa do partido católico. (As pessoas que fazem tais afirmações claramente não devem ser católicas: os próprios católicos estavam tão irritados com seus insights quanto qualquer outra pessoa e nunca detectaram a menor relação com a doutrina em suas observações). Em uma recente (1997) conferência na Universidade de York em Toronto no qual Neil Postman e Arthur Kroker foram palestrantes, a nova linha convencional foi revelada: ela diz: “O trabalho de McLuhan é basicamente um antiquíssimo Humanismo Cristão em trajes modernos”. (Pode-se muito bem acusar Northrop Frye era simplesmente uma ferramenta dos maçons, ou que suas teorias literárias eram apenas filosofia maçônica antiquíssima vestida e regurgitada como crítica literária.) Há evidências em abundância nos capítulos que se seguem para desencorajar ou refutar qualquer imputação desse tipo. Mas é verdade que ele costumava levar os conservadores ossificados e os de raciocínio lento à distração. Ele não era um liberal delirante nem um conservador de boca fechada, mas era um homem erudito em busca constante de compreensão. Em uma entrevista com Gerald Stearn, ele refutou a sugestão de que seu trabalho na mídia deriva do catolicismo ou da doutrina católica:
Tem havido muito mais religiosos do que eu que não deram nem os passos mais vacilantes nessa direção. Uma vez que comecei a
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mover nessa direção, comecei a ver que tinha um profundo significado religioso. Não acho que seja meu trabalho apontar isso. Por exemplo, o conceito cristão de corpo místico – todos os homens como membros do corpo de Cristo – torna-se tecnologicamente um fato em condições eletrônicas. entretanto, eu não tentaria teologizar com base em meu entendimento de tecnologia. Não tenho formação em pensamento escolastico, nunca tendo sido criado em nenhuma instituição católica. Na verdade, fui amargamente censurado por meus confrades católicos por minha falta de terminologia e conceitos escolásticos. (McLuhan: Hot and Cool: A Primer for the Understanding of & a Critical Symposium with a Rebuttal por McLuhan, ed Gerald Emanuel Stearn – NY: Dial, 1967, página 267) Ocasionalmente, meu pai comentava com um colega católico que sua própria abordagem para a mídia era semelhante aos métodos de compreensão de São Tomás, por exemplo – como um meio de envolver o colega. Isso não quer dizer que seu trabalho derivou do de S.Thomas de Aquino, mas que eles estavam em paralelo. Ele encontrou insights nos lugares mais díspares e nunca hesitou em cooptá-los sempre que pudesse ser útil. Santo Tomás de Aquino foi particularmente útil porque tratou de muitos dos mesmos problemas. Tomás de Aquino observou que todo ser era por analogia com a fonte do ser, Deus. A ideia de meu pai de mídia como extensões era que eles eram análogos aos nossos membros e órgãos. Thomas fez muito uso em seu trabalho de causalidade formal: A ideia de meu pai de um meio como um ambiente de serviços como desserviços é exatamente a da causalidade formal – que pode ser a razão pela qual tantas pessoas têm problemas com isso. Como ele escreveu ao Pe. John Culkin (ver carta, página 76, abaixo:

(Fritz Wilhelmsen) está interessado em trabalhar na teoria da comunicação de São Tomás, e eu indiquei a ele que Aquino designa seu público, as pessoas que ele deseja influenciar e alterar, nas objeções de cada artigo. Então percebi que o público é, em todas as questões de arte e expressão, a causa formal, por exemplo, o homem caído é a causa formal da Encarnação, e o público de Platão é a causa formal de sua filosofia. A causa formal se preocupa com os efeitos e a forma estrutural, e não com julgamentos de valor. Minha abordagem à mídia tem sido inteiramente de causas formais. Como as causas formais são ocultas e ambientais, elas exercem sua pressão estrutural por intervalo e interface com o que quer que esteja em seu território ambiental. As causas formais estão sempre ocultas, enquanto
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as coisas sobre as quais agem são visíveis. A geração da TV foi moldada não por programas de TV, mas pelo caráter difuso e penetrante da própria imagem ou serviço da TV.
Ao mesmo tempo, ele viu uma relação direta de outro tipo entre o estudo da mídia e o estudo da igreja e das escrituras. Ele escreveu a um correspondente: “A Igreja é tão inteiramente uma questão de comunicação que, como os peixes que nada sabem sobre a água, os cristãos não têm consciência adequada da comunicação. Talvez o mundo nos tenha sido dado como um anti-meio ambiente para nos tornar cientes da palavra. ” (Carta para Kristin L. Popik, 28 de maio de 1971, na coleção National Archives of Canada) Com bastante frequência, ao longo dos anos, antes do café da manhã, ele costumava ler alguns versos do Novo Testamento todas as manhãs em inglês e depois em duas ou três outras línguas. Isso proporcionou um duplo benefício: refrescar – ou aprender, ocasionalmente – um idioma. (Como muitos estudiosos, ele conhecia duas ou três outras línguas razoavelmente bem – latim, francês e alemão, por exemplo – e podia ler mais ou menos em várias outras.) Sua leitura matinal do NT usava, entre outros, grego, latim, alemão , Italiano, português, espanhol, francês. Freqüentemente, a “mediação” produziu percepções em ambas as áreas, mídia e o significado de uma passagem. Por exemplo, ele escreveu Bill Kuhns:
É o mesmo que a diferença indicada em Lucas 8:18: “Atende como ouves”. Todo o texto depende de sua compreensão. Aqueles que recebem a palavra de Deus como uma ideia ou conceito maravilhoso logo o perdem. Aqueles que o entendem como uma percepção, uma coisa direta que faz interface e ressoa, são aqueles que representam o “bom terreno”. A imagem da semeadora e da semente é uma antecipação direta da relação figura-fundo da gestalt. Todos aqueles que hoje têm dificuldades com sua fé católica tendem a ser vítimas de uma teologia e catecismo conceitualizados pós-renascentistas. (Carta, 5 de janeiro de 1970, na coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá. Em uma carta a Allen Maruyama, ele amplia, “… ‘O usuário é o conteúdo’ – sempre – de modo que o ouvinte que tem ouvidos para ouvir seja capaz de responder à palavra revelada por causa do conteúdo de seu próprio ser. Há muito desse tipo de observação nos Atos, capítulos 16-17. A mensagem é o efeito na sociedade em geral, enquanto o significado é o efeito no indivíduo, mas não diga que eu acho que “o meio não tem conteúdo”! Todas as mídias são míticas no sentido estrito de serem ficções artificiais e formas concebidas para aumentar ou acelerar as transações humanas. Carta para Allen Maruyama, 11 de janeiro de 1972, coleção National Archives of Canada)
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Essa relação figura-causa fundo foi central para sua abordagem ao estudo da mídia. A abordagem, baseada na causalidade formal, isto é, em observar a forma da mídia e discuti-la como forma e como tendo poder formal sobre seus usuários, derivou de diversos modos dos antigos, da Tradição, das observações de Eliot sobre conformidade, do novo Estruturalismo, da Crítica Prática, do estudo de público, etc. Ele escreveu: “O estudo dos efeitos me levou recentemente ao estudo da causalidade, onde fui forçado a observar que a maioria dos efeitos de qualquer inovação ocorre antes da inovação propriamente dita. Em uma palavra, um vórtice de efeitos tende, com o tempo, a se tornar a inovação. É porque os assuntos humanos foram empurrados para um processo puro pela tecnologia eletrônica que os efeitos podem preceder as causas. ”(Carta para Muriel Bradbrook, 5 de novembro de 1971, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá) Uma observação diretamente devido ao trabalho com a dinâmica de figura / causa e sua relação com a causalidade formal surgiu quando lemos certa manhã nos jornais outro artigo discutindo a controvérsia sobre a intenção da Igreja Anglicana de ordenar mulheres. Após alguma discussão, ele rapidamente escreveu esta pequena nota para referência futura:
Esta é apenas uma nota sobre a ordenação de mulheres, que diz respeito à “causalidade formal”, ou seja, a forma estrutural que é inseparável de “se vestir” em público. O escritor ou o público dos performers é a causa formal de sua arte, entretenimento ou filosofia. A relação figura / causa entre o artista e seu fazer é uma interação, uma espécie de intercurso. Essa interação está em seu auge em todas as apresentações perante o público e é característica ou role-playing em geral. Existe, por assim dizer, uma relação sexual entre o intérprete e o público, que se relaciona especificamente com o padre ou ministro. A congregação é necessariamente feminina para o papel masculino do sacerdote ou ministro. A congregação é necessariamente feminina para o papel masculino do sacerdote. (Isso é característico também na medicina, do cirurgião que é apenas excepcionalmente uma mulher.) É, portanto, esse aspecto sexual inerente ao sacerdócio que torna a ordenação de mulheres impraticável e inaceitável para uma congregação em seu papel feminino. Talvez lá não foi dada atenção suficiente à natureza do role-playing em sua causalidade metafísica ou formal. Esta é uma proposta que as manchetes locais sobre o sínodo anglicano OK – na ordenação de mulheres. (Papel de carta do Centro para cultura e tecnologia, datado de 20 de junho de 1975, nunca foi usado.
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A noção de causa formal e sua relação com a causa base aparecem em vários dos capítulos. abaixo. Ele freqüentemente voltava sua atenção para examinar a relação entre a igreja e a mídia:
Não é cérebro ou inteligência que é necessário para lidar com os problemas que Platão e Aristóteles e todos os seus sucessores até o presente não conseguiram enfrentar. O que é necessário é uma prontidão para subestimar o mundo completamente. Isso só é possível para um cristão … Todas as tecnologias e todas as culturas, antigas e modernas, fazem parte de nossa extensão imediata (uma grande extensão de qualquer coisa). Há esperança nesta diversidade, pois ela cria novas e vastas possibilidades de desapego e diversão para o humano credulidade e autoengano. Não há mal nenhum em nos lembrarmos de vez em quando que o “Príncipe deste Mundo” é um grande Relações Publica, um grande vendedor de um novo hardware e software, um grande engenheiro elétrico e um grande mestre da mídia. É seu golpe de mestre ser não apenas ambiental, mas também invisível, pois o ambiente é invencivelmente persuasivo quando ignorado. (Cartas de Marshall McLuhan, páginas 386-387) Ele ficava continuamente surpreso com a relutância, muitas vezes a recusa total, das pessoas em prestar atenção aos efeitos da mídia e com sua hostilidade para com ele pelo que revelava. Eles incluíam aqueles, clérigos e leigos, que abraçam com entusiasmo as tecnologias mais recentes, sem levar em conta seus efeitos. Essas pessoas estão cegamente ansiosas para fazer da missa ou dos sacramentos, ou da congregação, o conteúdo de cada novo dispositivo ou tecnologia que surge – no interesse de “trazer a Igreja atualizada” e “tornar a Igreja relevante”. Eles são totalmente inocentes do poder dessas formas de transformar seus usuários – inocentes, mas não isentos de culpa. eles compartilham a atitude protestante, “se Deus os deu para nós, eles devem ser bons.” McLuhan estudou incessantemente e ocasionalmente escreveu sobre essas novas formas e seu impacto na Igreja. Um artigo (Capítulo 13, abaixo) mostrava, em particular, que o uso de microfones no altar destruiria a psicologia do rito latino: sinalizaria a substituição da oração sacral pela conversação pedagógica. os acontecimentos provaram que ele estava certo. Ele viu um paralelo entre cristãos e não-cristãos em sua relutância comum em olhar para a mídia em si. Como escreveu a Alan Maruyama.

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Você parece ter esquecido sua própria contribuição aqui! Depois de discutirmos o homem foneticamente letrado como o único indivíduo privado na história da humanidade, você mencionou que a relutância [desse tipo] do homem ocidental em considerar os efeitos de suas próprias tecnologias sobre sua psique e sociedade era uma simples resistência a qualquer invasão de privacidade . Vamos lembrar como as pessoas resistiram violentamente e se ressentiram de Jung e Freud quando eles invadiram nossa privacidade. Não vejo razão, no entanto, para supor que o cristão esteja mais inclinado a estudar esses assuntos do que o não-cristão. ” (Carta para Allen Maruyama, 11 de janeiro de 1972, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá)
Novamente, Continuo perplexo com o pânico e a raiva que as pessoas sentem quando os efeitos de qualquer tecnologia ou atividade lhes são revelados. É quase como a raiva de um chefe de família cujo jantar é interrompido por um vizinho que lhe diz que sua casa está pegando fogo. Essa irritação de lidar com os efeitos de qualquer coisa, seja o que for, parece ser uma especialidade do homem ocidental. (Carta para Peter Buckner, 19 de junho de 1974, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá).
Uma conversa adicional ajudou a encontrar pelo menos uma fonte para a resistência:
Bob Logan [um colega da Universidade de Toronto] mencionou que muitas pessoas se ressentem de mim porque fiz tantas descobertas e, do ponto de vista da vida subliminar, isso pode ser uma pista. As pessoas ficam com raiva quando algo que elas “conheceram” vem à tona. Aconteceu com Freud. O que quero dizer é que nós mesmos criamos nosso subconsciente e nos ressentimos de qualquer um que brinca com ele. Quando estudo os efeitos da mídia, estou realmente estudando a vida subliminar de toda uma população, pois eles se esforçam para esconder esses efeitos de si mesmos. (Carta para Barbara Rowes, 15 de abril de 1976, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá).
Constantemente frustrado por encontros com a intransigência burocrática, ele passou a estudar a dificuldade enfrentada por burocracias impressas imersas em eletricidade.
Você pode ver como essa [dificuldade] aflige o vasto predomínio das mentalidades do século XIX que constituem as burocracias
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da igreja católica. Na era elétrica ou ressonante da tatilidade, eles estão desligados; eles não entendem “desistência” como o modo necessário de diálogo e interface, mas apenas a destruição de todo o seu mundo e de qualquer mundo concebível … Tomás de Aquino foi traduzido em termos visuais desde o início e nunca mais do que por Gilson. Naturalmente, fico angustiado com a total inconsciência da lógica da eletrotécnica entre a hierarquia católica. Não havia ninguém no Concílio de Trento que compreendesse os efeitos psíquicos e sociais de Gutenberg. A Igreja não está melhor agora, humanamente falando. (Carta ao Rev. Walter Ong, S.J., 18 de dezembro de 1968, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá).
Muita importância foi atribuída à nomeação de meu pai para o Comitê de Comunicações Sociais do Vaticano. Lamento dizer que o significado foi grosseiramente inflado. A nomeação foi feita, é verdade. Mas significava pouco mais do que receber pelo correio de vez em quando um aviso de uma reunião (sempre a ser realizada em Roma) ou algo assim. Meu pai tentou várias vezes iniciar uma correspondência com alguém, qualquer pessoa, do comitê. Ele estava ansioso para prestar algum serviço e ajudá-los no estudo e compreensão da mídia. Seus esforços não atraíram, infelizmente, nenhuma resposta, o que foi fonte de grande decepção. Igualmente, uma grande quantidade de significado foi atribuída ao seu hábito de assistir à missa diária. Outro exagero, temo. Em primeiro lugar, lembre-se de que a igreja de São Basílio era e está no centro do campus do St. Michael’s College da Universidade de Toronto. Para aqueles que têm seus escritórios e classes lá, é quase impossível ir do escritório para a sala de aula sem ter que dar uma volta – ou pelo menos muito perto – da igreja. O escritório de meu pai na “casa 96” fica a menos de cem metros da igreja, e seu posterior Centro de Cultura e Tecnologia não tem o dobro dessa distância. Para ir para a pequena sala de jantar no Brennan Hall, administrada pelo Colégio, também é necessário caminhar pela igreja. O que é mais natural do que aparecer para uma missa ao meio-dia de passagem, por assim dizer? A missa era sempre bem frequentada naquela época, tanto por professores quanto por alunos. Nada de excepcional nisso, realmente, mas a missa diária é uma maneira maravilhosa de pontuar o dia acadêmico para manter contato com as prioridades e mediar as leituras da manhã ou colocar algum problema atual em perspectiva. Ele tinha uma série de idéias teológicas incomuns, entre eles a
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observação de que, dada a estrutura da Igreja, se só restassem dois católicos no mundo, um deles teria de ser Papa. Incomum, talvez, mas teologicamente correto: ele lança uma luz peculiar sobre o papado e sua relação com o resto dos fiéis. Ele também advertiu (em “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters. ‘Capítulo 17, abaixo) que talvez o perigo católico persistente seja viver com a verdade até que não se preocupe em olhar para ela. Nós sabemos tão bem que “não dá para me importar menos”.
Ele ponderou o slogan popular “Deus está morto” quando era atual e observou em seu diário: “De repente, realmente entendi a mensagem de ‘Deus está morto’. Eles significam que a Encarnação foi sua morte porque Ele se tornou visível. Agora no tempo não visual, o visual os aliena ”(25 de julho de 1967) E ele escreveu isso para seu amigo Marshall Fiscwick. “A propósito da Teologia Pop, o deus que está morto, é claro, é o Deus Newtoniano, a imagem visual de um cosmos organizado visualmente. Com o destronamento do sentido visual pela mídia audível-tátil do rádio e da TV, a religião, ou a relação com o divino, não pode mais ter um viés primariamente visual. A atual irrelevância de nossos estabelecimentos políticos e educacionais deriva da mesma situação. Deus, é claro, não está envolvido em nada disso. ” (Carta de 5 de janeiro de 1973, coleção National Archives of Canada) Ele também destacou que “Se as escolas católicas do futuro decidirem se programar eletronicamente, criarão uma simetria entre o ambiente secular da informação e o ambiente da graça”. (“Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes”, 1969) Meu pai não tinha aversão a discutir ideias incomuns ou exageradas. Ele e eu uma vez discutimos a noção de haver vida em outros planetas. De alguma forma, a conversa girou em torno do que a Igreja poderia ter a dizer sobre essa ideia. Ele apontou (isso não é discutido nos capítulos abaixo) que, embora seja aceito que Adão no Jardim claramente possuía todo o conhecimento, muito possivelmente ele transmitiu uma grande parte dele a seus filhos. É inteiramente possível, portanto, que eles, um ou mais deles, se mudaram para alguma outra parte do universo por um tempo, para ver como poderíamos nos dar bem e resolver os problemas. E um colega, Joe Keogh, escreveu em Ottawa, Ontario GK Chesterton News de uma curiosa troca entre meu pai e o

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(Então) Arcebispo Pocock de Toronto. O bom bispo, é dito, uma vez perguntou que dado o famoso prólogo de João ao quarto evangelho, isso não indicava que o próprio Cristo é o exemplo arquetípico do médium como uma mensagem? Ele prontamente concordou. Aqui, de uma carta, está outro exemplo de como o estudo da mídia pode iluminar uma questão teológica de uma maneira incomum:
Outra característica da humanidade do homem é sua liberdade em comunidade, que a comunidade cristã oferece, a liberdade cristã é encontrada na liberdade corporativa no corpo místico de Cristo, a Igreja. A era da eletricidade envolveu tanto o homem com todo o seu mundo que ele ainda tem liberdade individual. Ele só tem liberdade corporativa no contexto tribal. A esperança do homem é que ele possa ser mudado sacramentalmente para que finalmente chegue a uma consciência de si mesmo em sua comunidade e descubra a liberdade individual na comunidade. (Carta para Allen Maruyama, 31 de dezembro de 1971, coleção dos Arquivos Nacionais do Canadá).
Em vez de deixar o assunto ali, ele foi mais fundo, escrevendo para muitos amigos e colegas
[Eric] Havelock foi a pessoa que explorou o fato de que o indivíduo particular era na verdade um artefato, ou desenvolvimento, da tecnologia do alfabeto fonético. Acho que este é um assunto teológico muito grande e urgente nos dias de hoje. Se o indivíduo privado, como o conhecemos no mundo ocidental, é de fato um artefato e não um aspecto inevitável da condição humana, então temos que considerar a tradição greco-romana e a alfabetização ocidental sob uma luz muito especial … Eu Estou completamente perplexo com a relação da tradição greco-romana com a Igreja na Encarnação e na Paixão ocorrida no contexto greco-romano. Visto que Deus não faz nada em vão e nada ociosamente, ou insignificantemente, a providência em colocar a Igreja centralmente no contexto greco-romano tem um significado enorme que foi meramente assumido até agora. Atualmente, quando todo o sistema ocidental está se dissolvendo muito rapidamente sob o impacto da tecnologia elétrica e quando o homem tribal está reassumindo seu domínio sobre o mundo, a questão da relevância da coisa greco-romana
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torna-se uma preocupação central … Se a pessoa privada é um artefato, torna-se criminoso perpetuá-la tecnologicamente na era eletrônica. (Carta a Alexis de Beauregard, coleção de 11 de maio de 1972 do Arquivo Nacional do Canadá).
Agora parece claro, a partir das observações neste livro sobre a mídia e sobre os Concílios do Vaticano, I e II, que haverá um Concílio Vaticano III em um futuro muito próximo. O propósito deste terceiro Concílio será, como o do Concílio Vaticano II, também pastoral e será o de responder ao atual ataque do computador à nossa sociedade. Terá de lidar com o derramamento do aparato burocrático e administrativo que a Igreja acumulou em resposta ao alfabeto e à impressão. Algo mais parecido com a Igreja oriental pode estar por vir: ainda haverá um magistério e uma autoridade doutrinária e um Papa, mas não mais uma Roma, isto é, não mais uma burocracia centralizada. Questionado sobre este aspecto da Igreja, McLuhan respondeu ao entrevistador em 1970.
Em seu lado meramente burocrático, administrativo e institucional, eu acho, ele vai sofrer o mesmo padrão de mudança que o resto de nossas instituições. Em termos de, digamos, tecnologia de computador, estamos caminhando para economias caseiras, onde as atividades industriais mais importantes podem ser realizadas em qualquer casinha individual em qualquer lugar do globo. Ou seja, os projetos e atividades mais importantes podem ser programados por indivíduos nas áreas mais remotas. Nesse sentido, o cristianismo – de forma centralizada, administrativa e burocrática – é certamente irrelevante. (Veja abaixo, página 85)
Meu pai tinha marcado uma data para fazer uma palestra, no início do semestre de outono, 79, sobre o tema “O Homem Descarnado e a Igreja Encarnada”. para uma aula no St.Michael’s College, ou em algum lugar semelhante nas proximidades de Toronto. Pouco antes de fazer o discurso, ele teve o derrame que lhe tirou a capacidade de falar. Esse tópico, no entanto, desempenha um grande papel nos ensaios que se seguem. O leitor pode estar interessado em juntar, formular observações nos capítulos abaixo, o provável texto dessa palestra – A palestra que ele nunca deu.

O católico Marshall McLuhan

See it in English

Marshall McLuhan era muito reticente sobre seu catolicismo.
Se você verificar sua Bibliografia Oficial, o único livro que toca no assunto foi escrito por seu filho Eric, cerca de vinte anos após sua morte.
O meio e a luz: reflexões sobre religião e mídia
Editado por Eric McLuhan e Jacek Szklarek com uma introdução de Eric McLuhan. Wipf and Stock Publishers (1999)

Se você olhar pela introdução que Eric nos dá neste livro, que transcrevi, ele não garante que foi a convicção católica de McLuhan que está por trás de sua, como posso dizer, criação, coleção de opus, oeuvre, talvez: Sua obra. Eric, também, embora não de forma totalmente aceitável, declara que a base real de tudo o que seu pai fez, foi baseada em sua Tese de Doutorado, sobre o Trivium. Andrew, neto de Marshall McLuhan e filho de Eric, recentemente, em um seminário apresentado em 29 de maio de 2020 pelo Sr. Madhusudan Mukerjeey na Anant National University (India) confirma a mesma ideia, ou seja, tudo o que Marshall McLuhan fez, se resume ao seu doutorado. Temos que ter em mente que Andrew acabou de sair de uma bolsa de estudos de três anos em que analisa cuidadosamente o trabalho de seu avô, descobrindo exatamente quando e como o meio é a mensagem apareceu.
O próprio McLuhan, em diversas ocasiões, proferiu declarações, sem falar em entrevistas completas, o que deixa muito mais espaço sobre o universo de suas ideias. Como estavam espalhados ao longo do caminho, introduzi os verbetes a seguir, onde tento substanciar de forma mais completa e ressonante com sua obra, o papel que sua fé católica desempenha em sua obra e em suas idéias. Eu localizei os seguintes indicativos:
O meio e a luz – resenha da Vialogue
Paixão e precisão: a fé de Marshall McLuhan – Derrick de Kerckhove
Homem desencarnado – pistas dadas pelo próprio McLuhan
O lado místico de Marshall McLuhan

The Mystical Side of Marshall McLuhan

Veja em Português

By: Peter Feuerherd June 15, 2017

Communication theorists don’t usually merit international celebrity, with one giant exception. During the 1960s, and until his death in 1980, Canadian professor and author Marshall McLuhan improbably became part of cocktail party discourse and a household name.

McLuhan, born on July 21, 1911, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937. After attending Cambridge, he taught at the University of Toronto, where he began exploring the postwar world of modern communications. He was fascinated by the life of his own children, who he discovered had moved beyond the print culture he was reared in. They watched the newly-created television, listened to radio, read, and multi-tasked in ways that captivated their professor father.

McLuhan’s signature concept was that any new medium of communication alters the entire outlook of the people who use it. He saw the newly emergent medium of television transforming the world into what he called a global village, breaking down isolated pockets of racial and ethnic identities, forging new narratives shared by entire populations, who were returning to pre-print ways of hearing and experiencing stories.

McLuhan privately expressed his debt to the Jesuit mystic, scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin

These concepts hit the United States of the mid-1960s with a bang. McLuhan’s theories were said to explain the generation gap. Corporations paid him large sums to lecture executives on their business models (he often told them they had no idea what they were doing). He was featured in scores of magazine and newspaper articles. Intellectuals (and would-be intellectuals) bandied about McLuhan’s proverbs such as “the medium is the message.” He even discussed his theories in a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 romantic comedy Annie Hall.

But there was one portion of McLuhanism that remained hidden to the general public, according to author Tom Wolfe. McLuhan privately expressed his debt to the Jesuit mystic, scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin for inspiring many of his theories. McLuhan saw his theories as harkening an age in which all people would become part of the body of Christ, a unity created by technological advances. Teilhard, who died in 1955, was known for his teachings which looked towards Darwinian evolution not as an enemy of religious faith but as evidence of God’s design for the evolution of humanity.

McLuhan kept this influence out of his public writings and speeches. Wolfe says he probably did so in response to Teilhard’s regular battles with Catholic authorities, who frequently saw his views as contrary to the faith and tried to suppress them. Teaching at a Catholic college, McLuhan might have been reticent for fear for his own position.

McLuhan also saw that citing a mystical Jesuit would be a dead end with secular audiences, who would be suspicious of a religious viewpoint permeating the realm of communications theory.

In any case, McLuhan enjoyed guru-like status, invoked regularly and pondered by the world’s intelligentsia. His theories were applied by the innovators of the emerging internet of the 1990s, who saw in McLuhan a vision of how their own medium was transforming the world. Years after his death, McLuhan’s photo adorned the masthead of Wired, the print Gospel of the internet, a tribute to how a formerly obscure literary professor transformed the way the world views communication. The impact of his thought, notes Wolfe, cannot be overestimated, akin to that of Freud or Einstein.

The Catholic Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan was very reticent about his Catholicism.

If you check his Official Bibliography, the only book which touches the subject was written by his son Eric, some twenty years after his death.

The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion and Media

Edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek with an introduction by Eric McLuhan. Wipf and Stock Publishers (1999)

If you look through the introduction Eric gives us in this book, which I transcribed, he does not assures that it was McLuhan Catholic conviction which is behind his, how do I say, creation, collection of opus, oeuvre, perhaps: His work. Eric, also, although not in a completely acceptable way, declares that the real basis of everything his father did, was based on his Doctoral Thesis, on the Trivium. Andrew, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and son of Eric, recently, in a seminar presented May 29th, 2020 by Mr Madhusudan Mukerjeey at Anant National University (India). confirms the same idea, i.e., everything Marshall McLuhan did, boils down to his PhD. Thesis. We have to bear in mind that Andrew is just coming out of a three years scholarship where he carefully analyzes his grandfather’s work, figuring exactly when and how the medium is the message. appeared.

McLuhan himself, in several occasions, uttered statements, not to mention complete interviews, which leaves a lot more room about the universe of his ideas. Since they were scattered along the way, I introduced the following entries, where I try to substantiate more completely and resonantly with his oeuvre, what role his Catholic faith plays in his work and his ideas. I spoted the following issues:

The Medium and the Light – review by Vialogue
Passion and Precision: The Faith of Marshall McLuhan – Derrick de Kerckhove
Discarnate Man – Clues given by McLuhan himself
The Mystical Side of Marshall McLuhan

The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion

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Introduction by Eric McLuhan

No man’s stature is increased by the accumulation of myths, and nothing is detracted from genuine historical greatness by the consideration of a man’s purely human side.

Heinrich Fichtenau on Charlemagne (The Carolingian Empire – Toronto: University Press, in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1978,82,86, page 25)

Perhaps the person most surprised by McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism was Marshall himself.
He told me the story of his conversion several times over the years that we worked together. It had in his mind two phases. The first consisted on how the Church and its claims repeatedly intruded on his attention while he was trying to focus on other scholarly matters – so often and so powerfully that he eventually felt forced to deal with them. The second consisted of the events that precipitated his actual conversion and acceptance into the Church.
The first phase took many years and includes the time in the mid-to-late thirties that he spent up in research for his PhD at Cambridge University. As that document formed the basis of not only his intellectual approach to the Church but also much else in later studies in communication. I will go into a bit of detail.
Marshall McLuhan was raised on a loose sort of Protestantism. That is, the family living in Edmonton, Alberta was liberal as to which denomination – Baptist Methodist, etc. – they followed. They, like many independent thinking Protestants, didn’t really “belong” to one or another, but would attend on a weekend whatever Church or meeting place could provide the best or most interesting preaching, the best “mover”. I cannot help mentioning here what seems to me a curious coincidence: rhetoric and public speaking run through my father’s life as a sort of ground-theme or bass-line over which the rest is played. His mother, Elsie, was on the stage as a one woman show of readings and interpretations, His father was an insurance salesman – and renowned as a good talker and raconteur. My father’s brother, Maurice, also became a speaker: a minister and preacher, and, later, a teacher. And the woman my father married, my mother, trained as an actress, studied and taught dramatics and public speaking, and directed plays. He himself became renowned for his skill as a speaker. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of trivium (rhetoric, dialectic and grammar) and he made rhetoric his particular study: Practical Criticism, which is based in rhetoric, formed the secret underpinning of his entire approach to media and literature. My father had decided to write his dissertation about an obscure but vigorous Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). Researching that spirited satirist clearly meant digging into the back-ground of the quarrels he engaged in. One thing led to another; before long my father decided that he would have to write more than the brief note he had planned to explain the differences between Hashe and his principal antagonist, Gabriel Harvey. The two men, it turned out, were merely the latest combatants in a struggle that had been going on, by then, for over 1500 years and which for hundreds of years more showed no signs of abating. (In many ways, it can be seen still raging beneath the major arguments in Western intellectual and political and religious circles today, but that’s another story). By the time he was finished, the brief background note had turned into the first three-quarters of one of the most learned theses that Cambridge had ever seen. He dug back through our intellectual traditions beginning with their foundations in the educational systems and techniques bequeathed us by Greece and then Rome, and pursued them on through the Middle Ages, the period of Scholasticism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and ending with some remarks about James Joyce in the twentieth century. The time covered began with Cicero in Augustan Rome and ran to Nashe in Elizabethan England; the matter concerned the debates and rivalries – surprisingly consistent – that distinguished various intellectual camps and even such great universities as Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. All this was necessary to put Nashe and his activities “in context”: without it, much of Nashe’s activity seemed, even to Elizabethan experts, quite inexplicable; with it, perfectly rational. Needless to say, Nashe soon took a back seat to the panorama that unfolded, one which my father was evidently the first for centuries to uncover and discuss. For many hundreds of the years covered in his investigations, the antagonists were clergy. And their debates concerned not simply this or that idea or doctrine but rather the very tools of intellectual endeavour, the nature and seriousness of philosophy and literature, and the techniques of interpretation and their spheres of application. It was on these terms that McLuhan encountered Catholicism, terms that concerned the nature of human understanding and the entire practice of learning and tradition of interpretation right across the whole of the arts and the sciences. Today, these are considered recondite “academic” debates, arguments of little practical significance. But for well over a thousand years they were the very foundation of schooling and society, the cornerstone of all politics and policy. And if they were vital to understanding Nashe, they also underlay the differences between the Church and the Protestant reformers. Nashe represented the age-old claims of grammar (allied with rhetoric) for dominance in the trivium – which meant dominance of both the intellectual world and the political one; Harvey, the rival claims of the dialectical reformers in literary and theological matters. There was at this time little or no distinction between literature, theology and politics. To get a sense of the debate, call to mind the rivalry between conservatives and reformers, or capitalists and socialists, and magnify the differences four or five-fold.To accomplish this background meant that he had to embark on a study program of encyclopedic dimensions (He had arrived at Cambridge with both a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Manitoba, he proceeded to acquire at Cambridge another B.A. and M.A. before moving on to the PhD.) He decided that he had to master and then draw the outlines of the trivium, which had for many centuries been the traditional Western system for organizing intellectual activity. The trivium compressed all knowledge into three streams: rhetoric (communication) dialectic (philosophy and logic), and grammar (literature, both sacred and profane, including modes of interpretation). Grammar included written tests of all sorts, as well as the world and the known universe, which were considered as a book to be read and interpreted, the famous “Book of Nature.” Incredible as it may seem, the job had never before been done. Certainly, there were – and are – plenty of histories of philosophy, for example, and histories of literature as well as accounts of rhetoric. But when each of these is viewed not singly but as one of a set of Siamese triplets,the perspective changes enormously as does the entire significance of every development in the histories. His reading, then, covered the widest imaginable area and, because the Catholic clergy was intimately involved in most of it, he became familiar not only with what they had said on a wide array of matters but also with why they had taken this or that position.The reading included the standard classics: the principal philosophers, such as the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle and representatives of the main philosophical schools; the rhetoricians; the major literary and poetical texts; and the principal; schools of textual exegesis of everything from Homer to the Bible. Interpreters of the Bible included Origen and Philo of Alexandria, who set the pattern for centuries of later practitioners. He read the Apostolic Fathers, of course, as well as their interpreters and commentators, and the entire of the ante-Nicene Fathers. (I recently found his own battered 24 volume, second hand set of Ante-Nicene Fathers, each volume obviously read, and many annotated and cross referenced, some of them heavily. It is the same with the five volume set of the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, also used in the thesis.) He was quite able to read Latin and Greek as well as the standard languages of scholarship, French and German. IN short he had, from early his literary studies, also surveyed the entire spectrum of Catholic doctrine and philosophy – an overview such as few Catholic theologians possessed. (From the introduction of his thesis, unpublished)Consequently, when he came to consider the essential truth or otherwise of Catholicism or to discuss its merits he did so with a profound and encyclopedic knowledge that far surpassed that of the average convert, to say nothing of that o the “cradle Catholic” or even of the average priest or theologian. Ironically enough, his learned approach to the Faith was simply a side-effect of his studies: he had not set out to investigate Catholicism. Rather, while mapping out the intellectual background of the Nashe-Harvey disputes he picked up an extensive grounding in Catholic theology and the hidden underpinnings of the Reformation. When it came time, therefore, to investigate the Church and its claims, he already knew where to look for evidence or proof, how to look (that is, how to allow for partisanship and bias), and what to look for.Let me insist right away that my father was not a theologian. Nor did he undertake formal theological studies in preparation for any of the pieces included in this collection, although he would naturally have boned up a bit on this or that topic before writing. For the most part, his Catholic education was the ordinary of the convert – as amplified by his own study. Out of curiosity, he did red St. Thomas Summa Theologica, for example (in Latin as well as in English) and the Summa Contra Gentiles, among other things. And he had trained in philosophy as part of his study at Cambridge for the doctorate in English. He had taken the trouble to acquaint himself with a lot of the basic material as part of his study of the trivium. My father frequently attributed his conversion to the influence of two writers, St.Thomas Aquinas and GK Chesterton, particularly the later’s What’s Wrong with the World and Orthodoxy – in much the same way that C S Lewis credited his own conversion to reading GKC’s The Everlasting Man. Not surprisingly, then, McLuhan’s first published academic article was on Chesterton, and we reproduce it here as our first chapter. Although it does not concern itself with theological disputation, we include it because of his fondness for Chesterton’s way of thinking, and because of the place that Chesterton (also a convert to Catholicism) holds in the story of his conversion. His introduction to Chesterton’s writing and thought had occurred much earlier, during his days as a student at the University of Manitoba. he had been fascinated with Chesterton’s wit and style and acuity of perception and had even tried imitating his style on occasion. (Imitation was the traditional way to learn to write, one that he often advocated.) As J.G.Keogh wrote in the December 1996 Ottawa Chesterton Newsletter:

From Cambridge McLuhan carefully mailed home to family and friends all his copies of G.K.’s Weekly. Even before coming to England, he had been fascinated by Chesterton. René Cera’s wife once showed me a clipping from the student newspaper during McLuhan’s days at the University of Manitoba in the early thirties, saying “Shhhhh! Don’t let Marshall know I’ve shown you this”, the subject being G.K.Chesterton.
Chesterton’s familiar way with paradox showed my father how to operate on the border between idea and metaphor, between concept and percept. During the great depression, he and a fellow student from Manitoba, Tom Easterbrook, worked their way across to England on a cattle-boat to attend Cambridge together. (Tom, a lifelong friend, studied economics at Cambridge and went on to head the Department of Economics at University of Toronto.) One day, at Cambridge, Tom handed my father a copy of GKC’s What’s Wrong With the World, saying, “Here, Mac; I think you’ll like this. I hated it.”At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church – what Chesterton called (another book title) The thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn’t rest. Either it was true, or it wasn’t. either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.The matter had to be tested ‘ on its own terms; that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, “Lord, please, send me a sign.” He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. But for many years the matter did not go past the stage of Intellectual assent.Practical Criticism demands that the reader perform texts and so find the voice that utters them. In turn, finding the speaker’s tone and feeling leads directly to analyzing the audience and the effect produced. A great deal of stress is thus placed, for the critic, on training of sensibility and of multisensory critical awareness. The experience of performing a poem or passage supplies the basis of understanding and of analysis, and is never subordinated to the ideas sit contains. Consequently the stress is on percepts more than on concepts. He often reminded that Catholics cannot pick and choose doctrines as can Protestants. Catholics have an authority to help with both teaching and interpretation, a translatio studii. You accept Catholicism all as a piece or nothing at all. Appositely enough, faith, the Church had always taught, is a way of knowing. Faith, as the Epistle to the Hebrews (New Testament) points ou, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”This distinction between concept and percept, ideas and sheer awareness, became crucial to revealing much in media study and in mediating upon the Church and related Matters. McLuhan wrote to Jim Taylor, then editor of The United Church Observe, that he did “not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever-present fact – an occasion for continuous dialogue.” (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, page 362). He stated that he was

…a Thomist for whom the sensory order (i.e., the world) resonates with the Divine Logos. I Don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion. Analogy is not a concept. It resonates. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the Divine Logos. I think of Jasper, Bergson and Buber as very inferior conceptualist types, quite out of touch with the immediate analogical awareness that begins in the senses and is derailed by concepts or ideas (idem, pages 368,369)

To a Catholic, faith is not simply an act of the mind, that is, a matter of ideology or thought (concepts) or belief or trust, although it is usually mistaken for these things. Faith is a mode of perception, a sense like sight or hearing or touch and as real and actual as these, but a spiritual rather than a bodily sense. (The Protestants, he found in his research, had decided to regard faith in terms of ideas and concepts. Their decision meant that they had, in terms of the trivium, hitched their fortunes to dialectic, and abandoned the old alliance of rhetoric and grammar to which the Church still resolutely adhered.) Faith, we Catholics are taught, is a gift of the Holy Ghost, available for the asking – in prayer. As a way of knowing, faith operates in the realm of percepts, not that of concepts. It is a mode of spiritual awareness and knowing, as acute an as real as vision touch, smell, hearing.
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No healthy sense needs constant questioning and reexamination: if you can see or hear, well enough; you don’t have to keep asking yourself, “Can I see? Can I Hear? You know beyond question whether you can hear or not, and it has nothing to do with theory or concepts. This attitude the outsider reads as arrogance or delusion, or both. Hence the paradox of assent (which appears to the outsider as blind subservience), on the one hand, and the Church’s intense intellectualism, on the other. Hence, too, that other paradox that the Church is infinitely larger on the inside that it appears from the outside.T become a Catholic has been for centuries equated with committing intellectual suicide – a reputation largely engendered by the free thinking-Protestant antipathy to Catechisms and authority. But the catechism, as McLuhan had found, gave shorthand answers to incredibly complex questions. In his research he had viewed the prolonged process of development of doctrine and the centuries-long process of testing and defining doctrines. He had studied for himself and written extensively in the theses about the Translatio studii – the tradition of learned commentary on texts both sacred and profane, what the Church called “Tradition” (and literary study calls ‘the tradition'”. Using the Tradition means engaging in a complex conversation: distinctions of past and present are suspended and everyone is your contemporary. Less than a century earlier, John Henry Cardinal Newman had written his own celebrated Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine, which discussed the exact manner in which new doctrine was tested by Tradition. And T.S.Eliot, something of a hero in Cambridge literary circles, had just recently written, in obvious imitation of Newman’s Essay, his own statement, Tradition and the Individual talent.” (note at the appendix)–If the first phase occupied a number of years of intense erudition and scrutiny, the second phase took far less. Her is his account, many years (1970) after the fact:
“I had no religious belief at the time I began to study Catholicism. I was brought up in the Baptist, Methodist and Anglican churches. We went to all of them. But I didn’t believe anything. I did set out to find out, and literally to research the matter, and I discovered fairly soon that a thing has to be tested on its terms. You can’t test anything in science or in any part of the world except on its own terms or you will get the wrong answers.The church has a very basic requirement or set of terms, namely that you get down on your knees and ask for the truth. I was told by one of my friends, “You don’t believe in (Our Lord) therefore you can only pray to God the Father; you cannot pray to the Trinity.” I prayed to God the Father for two or three years, simply saying “Show me.” I didn’t want proof of anything. I didn’t know what I was going to be shown because I didn’t believe in anything.I was shown very suddenly. It didn’t happen in any expected way. It came instantly as immediate evidence, and without any question of its being a divine intervention There was no trauma or personal need I never had any need for religion, any personal or emotional crisis. I simply wanted to know what was true and I was told… Wham! I became a Catholic the next day.
What was that day like?
It’s easy to describe. I was with a group of people who said as I spoke, “Why aren’t you a Catholic?” I couldn’t think of one reason, I was beat. I became a Catholic at once, because I knew that was the divine work.I had converted myself by working at the the whole question. I didn’t have any point of view, any problems; I had no difficulties. I’ve never had any difficulties by the way, faith is not a matter of concepts: It’s percepts, a matter of immediate reality.”
He was baptized and confirmed on the same day: 25 March 1937, Holy Thursday. In his journals for the rest of his life he never failed to mark the anniversary, but always on Holy Thursday before Easter, whatever the calendar date.—In introducing this collection of his observations about religion, I think it proper to note that Marshall McLuhan was not reticent, exactly, about his Catholicism, but neither was he given to discussing
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it lightly. He was not what might be called a “public Catholic” or a “professional Catholic.” He never considered writing a book about his faith. At one point, though, as we were working with a group of themes for what later became Laws of Media (University of Toronto, 1988), some church controversies or difficulties, probably in newspaper articles, crossed our bows. The result was the chapter outline for a book on Christianity in the Electronic Age (Chapter 18, below). He carefully kept his private and public lives quite separate. For example, he very rarely ventured his private opinion about any matter, such as the media, that he was called upon to discuss publicly and professionally. A trained – and immensely learned – critic and observer, he was quite able to detach professional observation from personal feeling. To illustrate: once a student in one of his literature classes asked him, did he experience any feelings when reading a poem? they had just spent an hour or more on exhaustive analysis and critical examination of some verses. He was evidently quite surprised at the question and replied that of course he experienced feelings. He seemed to feel that the answer was obvious. The student (himself a poet) then asked, why then did he never mention, let alone discuss, these feelings in class? Didn’t it occur to him that perhaps other students needed some inducement or encouragement in the matter. some guidance as to how to respond more fully to poetry? My father replied. In effect, such matters were naturally private and not a proper subject of public or critical discourse. (He was quite candid, tough, once in 1969, to a group of graduate students: “I have never failed to thrill at the words in the Mass: ‘mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilis reformasi” – man, who had been amazingly and wonderfully made before the fall, was even more wonderfully remade at the Incarnation. The theology on this subject is mostly lacking: there isn’t any.”)Such an attitude is difficult to imagine today, when feelings of every stripe are virtually required of everyone, and of public figures in particular. People who can compartmentalize their beings so strictly seem to us to be cold, inhuman, unfeeling. Yet there are many people among us still who belong to that former age and set of habits, and who regard the matter of privacy not only as absolutely normal but also as absolutely necessary to both sanity and civilization. In fact, such control of the emotive faculties is a normal consequence of alphabetic literacy and is part of the private individualism that it breeds; our contemporary surprise or dismay at it gives some indication of the degree

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of our own estrangement form literacy and privacy. Possessed of a firm sense of private identity, he conducted his classes with the courtliness of a gentleman of an earlier era, a manner he may have picked up at Cambridge. Although outspoken about the present he was always formal and gentlemanly in his classes in contrast to today’s classroom practice, he never used first-name chumminess with his students.He once wrote to the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, whose work he admired and often used, that, in addition to privacy, there was a technical reason for not bringing religious matters into his discussions of media and their effects:”I deliberately keep Christianity out of all these discussion lest perception be diverted from structural processes by doctrinal sectarian passions. My own attitude to Christianity s, iself, awareness of process.”

I have occasionally, in the years since his death heard my father’s methods and insights dismissed as “applied Catholicism the contention being that he was simply a tool of the Catholic Church Or that his media work is just ages-old Catholic doctrine in new clothes and that he is merely spouting some Catholic party line. (The people who make such assertions clearly must not be Catholics: the Catholics were themselves as irritated by is insights as everyone else and never detected the slightest relation to doctrine in his observations,) At a recent (1997) conference at York University in Toronto at which Neil Postman and Arthur Kroker were featured speakers, the new conventional line was revealed: it runs, “McLuhan’s work is basically age old Christian Humanism in modern dress.” (One might as well charge that Northrop Frye was simply a tool of the Masons, or that his literary theories were merely age-old Masonic philosophy dressed up and regurgitated as literary criticism.) There’s evidence aplenty in the chapters that follow to discourage or disprove any such imputation. But it is true that he used to drive ossified conservatives and the slow-witted to distraction. Himself neither a raving liberal nor a tight lipped conservative, he was rather a learned man on a constant quest for understanding. In an interview with Gerald Stearn, he refuted the suggestion that his work on media derives from Catholicism or Catholic doctrine:
There have been many more religious men than I who have not made even the most faltering steps in this direction. Once I began to
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move in this direction, I began to see that it had profound religious meaning. I do not think it my job to point this out. For example, the Christian concept of mystical body – all men as members of the body of Christ – this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions. however, I would not try to theologize on the basis of my understanding of technology. I don’t have a background in scholastic thought, never having been raised in any Catholic Institution. Indeed, I have been bitterly reproached by my Catholic confreres for my lack of scholastic terminology and concepts. ( McLuhan: Hot and Cool: A Primer for the Understanding of & a Critical Symposium with a Rebuttal by McLuhan, ed Gerald Emanuel Stearn – NY: Dial, 1967, page 267)On occasion he would remark to a Catholic colleague that his own approach to media was similar to St.Thomas’s methods of understanding, for example – as a means of engaging the colleague. This was not to say that his work derived from Thoma’s but that they were in parallel. He found insight in the most disparate places and never hesitated to co-opt it whenever it could be useful. . St. Thomas was particularly useful because he had addressed many of the same problems. Aquinas pointed out that all being was by analogy with the font of being, God. My father’s idea of media as extensions was that they were analogues to our limbs and organs Thomas made much use in his work of Formal Causality; my father’s idea of a medium as an environment of services as disservices is exactly that of Formal Causality – which may be why so many people have trouble with it. As he wrote to Fr.John Culkin (see letter, page 76), bellow:

(Fritz Wilhelmsen) is interested in working on St.Thomas’s theory of communication, and I have pointed out to him that Aquinas designates his audience, the people he wants to influence and alter, in the Objections of each article. Then I realized that the audience is, in all matters of art and expression, the formal cause, e.g., fallen man is the formal cause of the Incarnation, and Plato’s public is the formal cause of his philosophy. Formal cause is concerned with effects and with structural form, and not with value judgments. My own approach to the media has been entirely from formal cause. Since formal causes are hidden and environmental, they exert their structural pressure by interval and interface with whatever is in their environmental territory. Formal causes are always hidden, whereas
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the things upon which they act are visible. The TV generation has been shaped not by TV programs, but by the pervasive and penetrating character of the TV image, or service, itself.
At the same time, he saw a direct relation of another kind between media study and study of th church and the scriptures. He wrote to one correspondent, “The Church is so entirely a matter of communication that like fish that know nothing of water, Christians have no adequate awareness of communication. Perhaps the world has been given to us as an anti-environment to make us aware of the word.” (Letter to Kristin L. Popik, 28 May, 1971, in the National Archives of Canada collection)Rather constantly, over the years, before breakfast he used to read a few verses from the New Testament each morning in English and then in two or three other languages. This provided a double benefit: that of refreshing – or learning, on occasion – a language. (Like many scholars, he knew two or three other languages fairly well – Latin, French, and German, for example – and could read roughly in several more.) His morning reading of the NT used, among others, Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French. Often, the “mediating” produced insights into both areas, media and the meaning of a passage. For example, he wrote bill Kuhns:
It is the same as the difference indicated in Luke 8:18: “Heed how you hear.” The entire text depends on understanding that. Those who get the word of god as a wonderful idea or concept soon lose it. those who get it as a percept, a direct thing interfacing and resonating, are those who represent the “good ground.” The sower and the seed image is a direct anticipation of the gestalt figure-ground relationship. All those who are having difficulty with their Catholic faith today tend to be the victims of a Post-Renaissance conceptualized theology and catechism.. (Letter, 5 January, 1970, in the National archives of Canada collection. In a letter to Allen Maruyama, he amplifies, “…’The user is the content’ – always – so that the hearer who has ears to hear is able to respond to the revealed word because of the content of his own being. There is a good deal of this sort of observation in the Acts, chapters 16-17. The message is the effect on the general society, whereas the meaning is the effect on the individual, but don’t say that I think ‘the medium has no content’! All media are mythical in the strict sense of being artificial fictions, and forms designed to enhance or speed human transactions. Letter to Allen Maruyama, 11 January 1972, National Archives of Canada collection)
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That figure-ground relationship was central to his approach to the study of media. The approach, based in formal causality, that is, in observing the form of the media and discussing them as forms and as having formal power over their users, derived variously from the ancients. from the Tradition, from Eliot’s remarks about con-formity, from the new Structuralism, from Practical Criticism, from audience study, et. He wrote, “The study of effects has lately driven me to the study of causality, where I have been forced to observe that most of the effects of any innovation occur before the actual innovation itself. In a word, a vortex of effects tends, in time, to become the innovation. It is because human affairs have been pushed into pure process by electronic technology that effects can precede causes.”(Letter to Muriel Bradbrook, 5 November, 1971, National Archives of Canada collection) One observation directly owing to working with figure/ground dynamics and their relation to formal causality came about when we read one morning in the papers another article discussing the controversy over the Anglican church’s intention to ordain women. After some discussion, he quickly dashed off this little note for future reference:
This is just a note about the ordination of women, which concerns “formal causality,” i.e., structural form which is inseparable from “putting on” one’s public. The writer;s or the performers public is the formal cause of his art or entertainment or his philosophy. The figure/ground relation between the artist and his making is an interplay, a kind of intercourse. This interplay is at its peak in all performance before the public and is characteristic or role-playing in general. There is, as it were, a sexual relation between performer and public, which relates specifically to the priest or minister. The congregation is necessarily feminine to the masculine role of the priest or minister. The congregation is necessarily feminine to the masculine role of the priest. (This is characteristic also in medicine, of the surgeon who is only exceptionally a woman.) It is, therefore, this inherent sexual aspect of the priesthood that makes the ordination of women impractical and unacceptable to a congregation in their feminine role.Perhaps there has been insufficient thought given to the nature of role-playing in its metaphysical or formal causality. This is a propos the local headlines about Anglican synod OK-in the ordination of women.(On Centre for culture and Technology stationery, dated June 20, 1975, never used.
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The notion of formal cause and its relation to ground crops up in several of the chapters. below.He frequently turned his attention to examining the relation between the church and media:
It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems which Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian … All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse (a wide extent of anything).There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the “Prince of this World” is a great P.R. Public Relations man, a great salesman of a new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, pages 386-387) He was continually amazed at the reluctance, often the downright refusal, of people to pay attention to the effects of media, and at their hostility to him for what he revealed. They included those, clergy and lay, who enthusiastically embrace the latest technologies without regard for their effects. Such people are blindly eager to make the Mass or sacraments, or the congregation the content of each new gadget or technology that comes along – in the interest of “bringing the Church up to date” and “making the Church relevant.” They are quite innocent of the power of these forms to transform their users – innocent but not guiltless. they share the Protestant attitude, “if God gave them to us they must be good.” McLuhan incessantly studied and occasionally wrote about these new forms and their impact on the Church. One article (Chapter 13, below) showed, in particular, that the use of microphones on the altar would destroy the psychology of the Latin rite: it would signal the replacement of sacral prayer with pedagogic conversation. events have proven him right.He saw a parallel between Christians and non-Christians in their common reluctance to look at the media themselves.s As he wrote to Alan Maruyama.
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You seem to have forgotten your own contribution here! After we had discussed phonetically literate man as the only private individual in human history, you mentioned that the reluctance [of this type] of Western man to consider the effects of his own technologies upon his psyche and society was simple resistance to any invasion of privacy. Let us recall how violently people resisted and resented Jung and Freud when they invaded our privacy. I see no reason, however, to suppose that the Christian is more inclined to study these matters than the non-Christian.” ( Letter to Allen Maruyama, 11 January 1972, National Archives of Canada collection)
Again,
I continue to be baffled by the panic and anger people feel when the effects of any technology or pursuit are revealed to them. It is almost like the anger of a householder whose dinner is interrupted by a neighbour telling him his house is on fire. This irritation about dealing with the effects of anything, whatever, seems to be a specialty of Western man. ( Letter to Peter Buckner, 19 June, 1974, National Archives of Canada collection)
Further conversation aided in finding at least one source for the resistance:
Bob Logan [a colleague at the University of Toronto] mentioned that many people resent me because I have made so many discoveries and from the point of view of subliminal life this may well be a clue. People feel angry when something they had “known” all along surfaces. It happened with Freud. The point is, we create our subconscious ourselves and resent anybody fooling around with it.. When I study media effects, I am really studying the subliminal life of a whole population, since they go to great pains to hide these effects from themselves. (Letter to Barbara Rowes, 15 April, 1976, National Archives of Canada collection)
Constantly frustrated by encounters with bureaucratic intransigence, he turned to studying the difficulty facing print-based bureaucracies immersed in electricity.
You can see hoe this [difficulty] afflicts the vast predominance of nineteenth-century mentalities that constitute the bureaucracies
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of the Catholic church. In the electric or resonant age of tactility, they are hung up; they don’t understand “drop out” as the necessary mode of dialogue and interface but merely the scrapping of their entire world, and of any conceivable world… Aquinas has been translated into visual terms from the first and never more than by Gilson. Naturally, I am distressed at the total unawareness of the rationale of electro-technics among the Catholic hierarchy. There was no one at the Council of Trent who understood the psychic and social effects of Gutenberg. The Church is no better off now, humanly speaking. (Letter to Rev. Walter Ong, S.J., 18 December 1968, National Archives of Canada collection)
Much significance has been attributed to the appointment of my father to the Vatican’s Social Communications Committee. I regret to say that the significance has been grossly inflated. The appointment was made, true. But it meant little other than receiving in the mail from time to time a notice of a meeting (always to be held in Rome) or some such. My father tried several times to strike up a correspondence with someone, anyone, on the committee. He was anxious to be of some service and to help them with the study and understanding of media. His efforts attracted, unfortunately, no response, which was a source of great disappointment.Equally, a great deal of significance has been attached to his habit of attending daily mass. Another exaggeration, I fear. First, recall that St. Basil’s church was and is at the centre of the campus of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. For those who have their offices and classes there, it is almost impossible to get from office to classroom without having to go around – or at least quite near to – the church. My father’s office at “house 96” lies less than a hundred yards away from the church, and his later Centre for Culture and Technology not twice that distance. To get from either to the little dining room at Brennan Hall staffed by the College also requires walking around the church. What more natural than to drop in for a noon mass in passing as it were? The mass was always well-attended in those days, by faculty and students alike. Nothing exceptional about it, really, but daily mass makes a wonderful way to punctuate the academic day to keep in touch with priorities, and to mediate on the morning’s readings or put some current problem into perspective.He had a number of unusual theological ideas, among them the
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observation that, given the structure of the Church, if there were only two Catholics left in the world, one of them would have to be Pope. Unusual, perhaps, but theologically accurate: it throws a peculiar light on the papacy and its relation to the rest of the faithful. He also warned (in “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters.’ Chapter 17, below, ) that
Perhaps the besetting Catholic danger is to live with the truth until one is not concerned to look at it. We know it so well that we “couldn’t care less.”
he pondered the popular slogan “God is dead” when it was current, and observed in his journal, “Suddenly really got the ‘God is dead’ message. They mean that the Incarnation was his death because He became visible Now in the non-visual time, the visual alienates them” (25 July 1967) And he wrote his friend Marshall Fiscwick that. “Apropos Pop Theology, the god who is dead, of course, is the Newtonian God, the visual image of a visually-organized cosmos. With the dethronement of the visual sense by the audible-tactile media of radio and TV, religion, or the relating to the divine, can no longer have a primarily visual bias. The present irrelevance of our political and educational establishments stems from the same situation. God, of course, is not involved in any of this.” (Letter of 5 January, 1973, National Archives of Canada collection) He also pointed out that “If the Catholic schools of the future choose to program themselves electronically they would create a symmetry between the secular environment of information and the environment of grace.” (“Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes,” 1969)My father had no aversion to discussing unusual or outré ideas. He and I once discussed the notion of there being life on other planets. Somehow the conversation came around to what the Church might have to say about such an idea. He pointed out (this is not discussed in the chapters below) that while it is accepted that Adam in the Garden clearly possessed all knowledge, quite possibly he conveyed a very great deal of it to his children. It is entirely possible, therefore, that they, one or more of them, relocated to some other part of the universe for a while, to see how we might get along and work out the problems.And a colleague, Joe Keogh, wrote in the Ottawa, Ontario G K Chesterton News of a curious exchange between my father and
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Toronto’s (then) Archbishop Pocock. The good Bishop, it is said, once asked that given John’s famous prologue to the fourth gospel, did this not indicate that Christ Himself is the archetypal example of the medium as a message? He readily assented.Here, from a letter, is another example of how media study can illuminate a theological matter in an unusual manner:
Another characteristic of man’s humanity is his freedom in community, which the Christian community provides, Christian freedom is found in the corporate freedom in the mystical body of Christ, the Church. The electric age has so involved man with his whole world that he has individual freedom left. He only has a corporate freedom in the tribal context. The hope of man is that he can be changed sacramentally so that he will eventually come to an awareness of himself in his community and discover individual freedom in the community. ( Letter to Allen Maruyama, 31 December 1971, National Archives of Canada collection)
Instead of dropping the matter there, he went deeper, writing to many friends and colleagues
[Eric] Havelockwas the person who explored the fact that the private individual person was in fact an artefact, or development, from the technology of the phonetic alphabet. I think that this is a very great and urgent theological matter at the present time. If the private individual, as we know him in the western world, is indeed an artefact rather than an inevitable aspect of the human condition, then we have to regard the Greco-Roman tradition and western literacy in quite a special light….I am myself completely baffled by the relation of the Greco-Roman tradition to the Church at the Incarnation and the Passion occurred in the Greco-Roman context. Since God does nothing in vain and nothing idly, or insignificantly is providence in setting the Church centrally in the Greco-Roman context has an enormous significance which has merely been taken up to now. At the present time, when the entire Western establishment is dissolving very rapidly under the impact of electric technology and when tribal man is resuming his dominance over the world, the question of the relevance of the Graeco-Roman thing
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becomes a central concern… If the private person is an artefact, then it becomes criminal to perpetuate him technologically in the electronic age.(Letter to Alexis de Beauregard, 11 May 1972 National Archives of Canada collection).
It now seems clear, from the remarks in this book about the media and about Vatican Councils, I and II, that there will have to be a Vatican Council III in the very near future. The purpose of this third Council will, like that of Vatican Council II, also be pastoral and will be to respond to the current assault on our society by the computer. It will have to deal with shedding the bureaucratic and administrative apparatus that the Church accumulated in response to the alphabet and to print. something more like the Eastern Church may be in the offing: there will still be a magisterium and a doctrinal authority and a Pope but no longer a Rome, that is, no longer a centralized bureaucracy. Asked about this aspect of the Church, McLuhan replied to the interviewer (in1970)
In its merely bureaucratic, administrative and institutional side, I think, it is going to undergo the same pattern of change as the rest of our institutions. In terms of, say, computer technology, we are heading for cottage economies, where the most important industrial activities can be carried on in any little individual shack anywhere on the globe. That is, the most important designs and the most important activities can be programmed by individuals in the most remote areas. In that sense, Christianity – in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form – is certainly irrelevant. (See below, page 85)
My father had made a date to give a talk, at the outset of the fall term, 79, on the topic of “Discarnate Man and the Incarnate Church.” to a class at St.Michael’s College, or somewhere similar nearby in Toronto. Just before he was due to give the talk he had the stroke that took away his power of speech. That topic, however, plays a large role in the essays that follow. The reader might be interested in piecing together, form remarks in the chapters below, the probable text of that talk – The Talk He Never Gave.

The Medium and the Light

Veja em Português

By Vialogue

Introduction

For many hundreds of the years covered in his investigations, the antagonists were clergy. And their debates concerned not simply this or that idea or doctrine but rather the very tools of intellectual endeavour, the nature and seriousness of philosophy and literature, and the techniques of interpretation and their spheres of application. (xi)

The trivium compressed all knowledge into three streams: rhetoric (communication), dialectic (philosophy and logic), and grammar (literature, both sacred and profane, including modes of interpretation). Grammar included written texts of all sorts, as well as the world and the known universe, which were considered as a book to be read and interpreted, the famous “Book of Nature.” (xi-xii)

…the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn’t rest. Either it was true, or it wasn’t. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetuated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing. (xiv)

To a Catholic, faith is not simply an act of the mind, that is, a matter of ideology or thought (concepts) or belief or trust, although it is usually mistaken for these things. Faith is a mode of perception, a sense light sight or hearing or touch and as real and actual as these, but a spiritual rather than a bodily sense. (xv)

…a thing has to be tested on its terms. you can’t test anything in science or in any prat of the world except on its own terms or you will get the wrong answers. (xvii)

The Church is so entirely a matter of communication that like fish that know nothing of water, Christians have no adequate awareness of communication. Perhaps the world has been given to us as an anti-environment to make us aware of the word.

The study of effects has lately driven me to the study of causality, where I have been forced to observe that most of the effects of any innovation occur before the actual innovation itself. In a word, a vortex of effects tends, in time, to become the innovation. It is because human affairs have been pushed into pure process by electronic technology that effects can precede causes.

The writer’s or the performer’s public is the formal cause of his art or entertainment or his philosophy.

There is, as it were, a sexual relation between performer an public,

It is, therefore, this inherent sexual aspect of the priesthood that makes the ordination of women impractical and unacceptable to a congregation in their feminine role.

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems which Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether … There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the “Prince of this World” is a great P.R. (Public Relations) man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.

He was continually amazed at the reluctance, often the downright refusal, of people to pay attention to the effects of media, and at their hostility to him for what he revealed. They included those, clergy and lay, who enthusiastically embrace the latest technologies without regard for their effects. (xxiii)

I continue to be baffled by the panic and anger people feel when the effects of any technology or pursuit are revealed to them. It is almost like the anger of a householder whose dinner is interrupted by a neighbour telling him his house is on fire. This irritation about dealing with the effects of anything whatever, seems to be a specialty of Western man.

Christ Himself is the archetypal example of the medium as message… (xxvii)

Part I Conversion

1. G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic

…there are two principal sides to everything, a practical and a mystical. (3)

Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it, it is still a mystery. – G.K. Chesterton

For the real world is not clear or plain. The real world is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal surprises. Comfort is the blessing and curse of the English … For there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

All profound truth, philosophical and spiritual, makes game with appearances, yet without really contradicting common sense. (5)

…when the goal of Progress is no longer clear, the word is simply an excuse for procrastination. (6)

There is no such thing as a Hegelian story, or a monist story, or a determinist story .. Every short story does truly begin with the creation and end with the last judgment.

The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.

2 “The Great Difficulty About Truth”: Two Letters to Elsie McLuhan

Now religion-hunting even in its worst phases is yet a testimony to the greatest fact about a man, namely that he is a creature and an image, and not sufficient unto himself. It is the whole bias of the mind that it seek truth, and of the soul which inspires our very life, that it seek that which gave it. The great difficulty about Truth is that it is not simple except to those who can attain to see it whole. (14)

The deepest passion in man is his desire for significance. … It is the most frustrated passion where men are huddled together and taught to admire luxury. (17)

I could have never respected a ‘religion’ that held that reason and learning in contempt — witness the ‘education’ of our preachers. I have a taste for the intense cultivation of the Jesuit rather than the emotional orgies of an evangelist… (22)

3. “Spiritual Acts”: Letter to Corinne Lewis

The first thought which a Catholic has of God is that which a man has for a real friend. (25)

There is nothing proper to human nature which is not perfected and assisted by the Church. Every human faculty finds its true and use and function only within the Church. That is hard for Protestants to realize, because religion with them is so commonly a matter of restrictions and prohibitions. The Church, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with action. Since potency can only become real through act. The Protestant has, or had, a half-truth. he starves on a half loaf, foregoing his rightful heritage, much as the paranoiac imagines his dinner to be poisoned. (25-26)

Orthodoxy is intellectual honesty as regards divine things. Heresy is intellectual and spiritual lying — lying to God Himself. (26)

…since our free will is the most fundamental character we possess, I feel the utmost repugnance to influencing another person, except where readiness to inquire, examine, or consider, is obvious. (28)

Part II The Church’s Understanding of Media

4 Communication Media: Makers of the Modern World

Whether you conceptualize it or whether you verbalize it, you live in a global situation in which every event modifies and affects every other event. (34)

…this global-village world of ours is entirely the result of the force of telegraphic, teletyped communication — information that is moving at a relatively instantaneous rate. (34)

The concept of relevance is a twentieth-century concept. (34)

Any substantial form impresses itself upon you without benefit of awareness or conscious attention on your part. (37)

The meaning of a work of art…has nothing to do with what you think about it. It has to do with its action upon you. It is a form: it acts upon you. It invades your senses. It re-structures your outlook. it completely changes your attitudes, your wave-lengths. So our attitudes, our sensibilities, are completely altered by new forms, regardless of what we think about them. This is not an irrational statement, or a philosophical notion. it is a simple fact of experience. | I am prepared to say that the new media of communication are forms — not simple ones, but complex forms. (38)

The global village is not a place where one thing happens at a time. Everything happens at once. What we must have, therefore, is a means of coping with an all-at-once world. The artist and philosopher can perhaps help here. (38)

Until you learn to read and write and notice letters on a line right-side up, there is no horizontal or vertical axis in the visible world. Cave painters used no horizontal or visual axis. They painted. (41)

Everything penetrates everything else. Everything is at once. [Pre-literate man] doesn’t sort things out and put them in places; he lives in an all-at-once world because he lives by ear. It’s only after long periods of literacy that people begin to trust their eyes and begin to follow the structure of planes and lines of force that the eyes experience. The eye is to the pre-literate man a very inferior organ. (41)

…the all-at-once electronic media compel us back to the dialogue form. In terms of formal causality, the dialogue is a necessity of education today. the old idea of presenting packaged information one-thing-at-a-time, visually-ordered, is completely at variance with our electronic media. I’m talking about their formal structure. (42)

The written word (print aside) is a detribalizing force. … The lines of the famous roads that made the empires were literally paper-routes; when papyrus ended, they ended. (42)

The fact is that you pay attention to written words in a new way. you inspect them statically and develop the habit of segmenting or arresting the movements of the mind. This gives man the power of withdrawing from that auditory structure which is the tribe. He just breaks off. He withdraws into a private world created by his ability to inspect static aspects of thought and information. (43)

…because o it static aspect, the written word inspires the human mind with doubt. … Scepticism is the very form of written culture. (43)

As long as you take a firm moral stand in the Western world you will rally a great number of people to your cause regardless of how deficient you are in understanding the situation. (44)

5 Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin

I do not think that the powerful forces imposed on us by electricity have been considered at all by theologians and liturgists. … Theologians have the impression, I imagine, that everything will return to normal in a very short time. Well, no! (45-46)

At this speed, we cannot adapt to anything. Our entire mode of thought is based on equilibrium: “Things will return to normal,” we think. But equilibrium is a principle inherited from Newton. No balance is possible at the speed of light, in economics, in physics, in the Church, or wherever. (46)

I even became a Catholic while studying the Renaissance almost exclusively. I became aware of the fact that the Church was destroyed or dismembered in that era by a stupid historical blunder, by a technology. Medieval culture based on manuscript allowed for a style of communal life very different from the mass community which appeared with print. The Gutenberg revolution made everyone a reader. (46)

In the manuscript era, texts were rare, which explains the small number of readers. … The printed book accelerated the entire operation and, in doing so, completely modified the image of the old human community. In the same manner, in our time, we can say that the automobile, by its new type of acceleration, destroyed the traditional human community — even more so than print did. No one stays in one place long enough to strike up an acquaintance with anyone. (47)

Print provoked the development of nationalism, because for the first time, everyone could see their mother tongue and not just hear it. In fact, people’s consciousness of their national identity took root in a visual ground. The world of print is visual. (47)

But, the eye isn’t a unifying force. It tends towards fragmentation. It allows each person to have his own point of view and to hold to it. Gutenberg thus accents separation in space and in time. With the book, one can withdraw inward, in the egocentric and psychological sense of this term, and not, indeed, in the spiritual sense. The printed alphabet creates, in large measure, fragmentation. (47)

Luther and the first Protestants were “schoolmen” who were trained in literacy. They transposed the old method of scholastic discussion into the new visual order: they thus used the new discovery of print to dig the trench that separated them from the Roman Church. … This slide toward the visual also explains the appearance of sects. (48)

…the Church came into being when the Greek phonetic alphabet was still in its first stages. Greco-Roman culture was still in its infancy when the Church came into being. (48)

But pre-Platonic Greek culture, that is to say, pre-alphabetic, was based on the magical use of speech: it also furnished man with a particular theory of communication and psychic change. The pre-Socratics, Heraclitus in particular, were acoustic people. They lived in a world abounding with voids, gaps, and intervals. For them, things stirred, intersected, and reacted on each other. (48)

This Greco-Roman culture,…seems to have been imposed on the Church like a shell on a turtle. (49)

…the orthodox person, in the etymological sense of the term, confines himself to one aspect only. (49)

…if it is true that the first effect of cheaply printed books was to create the illusion of self-sufficiency and private authority, its ultimate effect was to homogenize human perception and sensibility by making centralization possible to an extent previously unknown. (49)

But now an electric world is unfolding, acoustic in nature because it is instantaneous and simultaneous. (49-50)

When everything happens at the speed of light — at electric speed — the Greco-Roman world gives way. (50)

Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven’t even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact. (50)

The Oriental opposes technology and innovation because he is acutely aware of their magical power to transform the world. He turns inward. His universe is of an oral and acoustic type. (50)

Here is how scientists now characterize the two sides of the brain. The left hemisphere specializes in analysis; the right hemisphere, in global or holistic thought, with a limited aptitude for language. The right hemisphere governs the succession of words not so much as a logical sequence but as resonant interfaces. This hemisphere is, first of all, responsible for our orientation in space, our artistic enterprises, our artistic abilities, the image we have of our own body, the way we recognize faces. It concern everything we take as a whole. Thus we recognize a face not by a particular trait, but by the face taken as a whole. The right hemisphere treats information much more diffusely than does the left hemisphere: information is distributed more vaguely. The right covers the field of perception in its entirety, whereas the left concentrates on one aspect at a time. (52)

Gutenberg attaches itself to the left hemisphere; the oral, the acoustic and consequently the electric, to the right hemisphere. … thus, the entire Western world — what we call civilization — from the Greco -Roman era onwards come from the left cerebral hemisphere, if not entirely, then at least for the most part. The Gutenberg event gave a disproportionate push to visuality. It launched an era of left-brain dominance, that is, of logical, sequential, and visual control. (52)

Babin: When it was said “God is dead,” did it not mean, at least in part, “Newton is dead”?

McLuhan: Without a doubt. The world that made sense according to Newtonian categories was quickly crumbling. But the God that this culture has adored, wasn’t He a bit too much cast in the image of a particular type of man? Wasn’t He too rationalized, a sort of divinity for deists? (53)

Indeed, the solution lies in the complementary nature of the two cerebral hemispheres. For, anatomically, these two hemispheres are complementary, and not exclusive. Neither mode is more important except in transitional forms of awareness. It is culture that makes one or the other dominant and exclusive. A culture builds itself on a preference for one or the other hemisphere instead of basing itself on both. Our school system, like our Catholic hierarchy, is completely dominated by the left side of the brain. The result was mostly confusion. Ecumenism, too, I suppose attempts to play both hemispheres equally, but it leaves me perplexed. (53)

6 The De-Romanization of the American Catholic Church

De-Romanization is a fact ever since the telegraph. Any speed-up of communication de-centralizes. Slow forms of communication centralize: information is localized and the decision-making takes place at the centre. All this is reversed by electric speed when information becomes available at the same moment everywhere. (54)

Only artists are able to live in the present. Saints are artists, too. you never heard of a saint who lived in the past or future. Saints want to live in the present. That’s why they are intolerable. (54)

How did Romanization come about? Rome was entirely a product of technology — a bureaucracy, a classification system like a dictionary or a phone book. But in a world of electricity, classification gives way to involvement and men live the apostolate of pain. When you are involved in other people’s lives, you are involved in their being, their pain. (54)

Ancient Rome fell when the Egyptians no longer sent papyrus and the Roman bureaucracy no longer had a way to communicate. It wasn’t until the Renaissance, when the Chinese sent papyrus back to Europe, that Roman bureaucracy became powerful again. Then there was a vast clerical staff and centralized administration. Gutenberg stepped up centralization a thousand times and bureaucrats could achieve dimensions of centralization and bureaucracy not dreamed of by the Romans. (55)

when man worshipped pagan idols, it meant the worshipping of tools. (55)

…at the instant of Incarnation, the structure of the universe was changed. All of creation was remade. There was a new physics, a new matter, a new world. … The moment God touched matter its very structure was altered, its potency was enormously enhanced. So was man’s. Modern science is aware of this, not necessarily as revealed truth, but simply as truth. | The first Adam was an aesthete. He simply looked at things and labelled them. The second Adam was not. He was a maker, a creator. The human being sharing in the second Adam has the mandatory role of being creative. Passivity is not for man; creativity is mandatory. (55)

Being wide awake is frightening, a nightmare. (56)

7 “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse”

The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men… | What McLuhan does is “probe” (his word) and provoke (my word) his listeners and readers to notice what they tend to overlook: how our inventions shape us. (59)

McLuhan sees humanity returning in an electric age to the pre-alphabetic stage of tribal life where “hearing is believing.” When the alphabet came into the picture, “seeing was believing,” and when print ushered in the Gutenberg Galaxy of moveable type, what dominated was a linear, uniform, connected, continuous way of approaching the world. (59)

…if there were only three Catholics in the world, one of them would have to be Pope. Otherwise, there would be no church. There has to be a teaching authority or else no church at all. (61)

That unique innovation, the phonetic alphabet, released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spell of tribal societies. Visual detachment via the written page also gave the power of the second look, the moment of recognition. This released people from the bondage of the uncritical and emotionally involved life. It also fostered the cult of private competition and individual emulation in sports and politics. The quest for private power came quickly. | Today, the alphabet is being wiped out. It is being wiped out electrically. The Church does not know that its fate is tied to literacy; she never has known this. She has taken it for granted because she was born in the middle of literacy. (63)

The Church has never claimed to be a place of security in any ordinary psychological sense. Anyone who comes to the Church for that purpose is wrong: nothing of that sort is available in the Church. There never has been: it isn’t that kind of institution. At the speed of light, there is nothing but violence possible, and violence wipes out every boundary. Even territory is violated at the speed of light. There is no place left to hide. The Church becomes a Church of the soul. (64)

The new matrix is acoustic, simultaneous, electric — which in one way is very friendly to the Church. That is, the togetherness of humanity is now total. Everybody is now simultaneously in the same place and involved in everybody. The present Church demands an extreme unworldliness. But that’s easy now. It is easy to be unworldly. What it means, though, is that everything we’ve been accustomed to is obsolete now. (64-65)

8 “The Logos Reaching Across Barriers”: Letters to Ong, Mole, Maritain, and Culkin

Out of it has come modern science, with the possibility it offers for increasing the subjection of matter and impregnation of matter by spiritual forces…

Imagination concerns direct contact with divine archetypes whereas fancy is merely human and cognitive. … the imagination is a mode of divine union for the uncreated divine spark hidden in our corrupt clay…

Every new technology is an evolutionary extension of our own bodies. The evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology in an eminent degree since electricity. Each extension of ourselves creates a new human environment and an entirely new set of interpersonal relationships. The service or disservice environments (they are complementary) created by these extensions of our bodies saturate our sensoria and are thus invisible. Every new technology thus alters the human sensory bias creating new areas of perception and new areas of blindness. This is as true of clothing as of the alphabet, or the radio. (70)

…the ancients attributed god-like status to all inventors since they alter human perception and self-awareness. (71)

The consequences of the images will be the image of the consequences.

When the Gutenberg technology hit the human sensibility silent reading at high speed became possible for the first time. Semantic uniformity set in as well as “correct” spelling. The reader had the illusion of separate and private individuality and of “inner light” resulting from his exposure to seas of ink. (71)

The speed-up of print permitted a very high development of bureaucratic centralism in church and state, just as the much greater speed-up of electricity dissolves the echelons of the organization chart and creates utter decentralism — mini-art and mini-state. Whereas the Renaissance print-oriented individual thought of himself as a fragmented entity, the electric-oriented person thinks of himself as tribally inclusive of all mankind. Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as a spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electrical engineer. (71-72)

May I suggest that just as the Roman clergy defected in the Gutenberg era on the illusion of the inner light, even greater numbers may be expected to defect under the mystical attractions of the electric light. Since our reason has been given us to understand natural processes, why have men never considered the consequences of their own artefacts upon their modes of self-awareness? … There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved. Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions. (72)

9 International Motley and Religious Costume

…costume is not so much “dressing up for” people as “putting on” the public. (75)

Nudity is not nakedness, since the nude expects to be seen whereas the naked person does not. In fact nakedness is the “put off” of all power and dignity and social being. This fact draws attention to clothing as equipment and technology and power. Clothing, indeed, is weaponry… (76)

…could it not be said that the religious who abandoned corporate costume in order to wear the private dress of the mere job-holder are abandoning their social function as much as any espionage agent? … The mere fact that many feel the need to abandon the costume of social service and corporate ministry in favour of the anonymity of mere dress, may be a token of the time when the hidden environment of the Mystical Body may once more have to resort to an invisible ministry. (77)

The mystic may have to take up the middle ground between gaudiness and poverty which is, or used to be, middle-class respectability. This is where “international motley” may be of some help in revealing a strategy of an anti-worldly kid. (77)

10 Electric Consciousness and the Church

A sense of private substantial identity — a self — is to this day utterly unknown to tribal societies. (80)

One of the amazing things about electric technology is that it retrieves the most primal, the most ancient forms of awareness as contemporary. There is no more “past” under electric culture: every “past” is now. And there is no future: it is already here. You cannot any longer speak geographically or ideologically in one simple time or place. (80)

The effect of TV on the young today is to scrub their private identities. The problem of private identity vs. tribal involvement has become one of the crosses of our time. (80-81)

I am myself quite aware that there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the “death of Christianity” or the “death of God” occurs the moment they become concept. As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive. (81)

Job was not working on a theory but on a direct percept. … All understanding was against him; all concept was against him. He was directly perceiving a reality, one revealed to him. (81)

Theology is one of the “games people play,” in the sense of its theorizing. But using direct percept and direct involvement with the actuality of a revealed thing — there need be no theology in the ordinary sense of the word. (81)

Christ is the medium and the message.

Concepts are wonderful buffers for preventing people from confronting any form of percept. Most people are quite unable to perceive the effects of the ordinary cultural media around them because their theories about change prevent them from perceiving change itself. (83)

The need for participation in group sand social forms always requires some code whether verbalized or in the form of costume and vestment, as a means of involvement in a common action. (83)

Things use to change gradually enough to be imperceptible; today the patterns of change are declaring themselves very vividly because of the speed at which they occur. That is what pollution comes from: pollution is merely the revelation of a situation changing at high speeds. (84)

…participation today is a universal pattern in which audience becomes active. There is no more audience in our world. On this planet, the entire audience has been rendered active and participant. (84)

Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self. Where the technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity is in for trouble. When you have a new tribal culture confronting an individualist religion, there is trouble. (85)

…the Church as an institution has no relevant future. … Christianity — in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form — is certainly irrelevant. (85)

Myth is anything seen at very high speeds; any process seen at a very high speed is myth. I see myth as the super-real. The Christian myth is not fiction but something more than ordinarily real. (86)

11 “A Peculiar War to Fight”: Letter to Robert J. Leuver, C.M.F.

Going along with the total and, perhaps, motivated ignorance of man-made environments is the failure of philosophers and psychologists in general to notice that our senses are not passive receptors of experience. (91)

When a new problem becomes greater than the human scale can cope with, the mind instinctively shrinks and sleeps. (91)

There is no harm in reminding ourselves form time to time that the “Prince of this World” is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electrical engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environment is invincibly persuasive when ignored. (93)

…affluence creates poverty, just as the public creates privacy… (93)

The principle of complementarity is indispensable to understanding the unconscious effects of technologies on human sensibility since the response is never the same as the input. This is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy where it is explained that the visually oriented person stresses matching rather than making in all experience. It is this matching that is often mistaken for truth in general. (93)

12 Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin

…we teach catechism as though we were trying to get people to swallow a nut without first breaking the shell. (94)

I’ve noticed that the real goal of those who go to these gatherings isn’t obvious; it could be about isolating oneself by losing oneself in the crowd as much as it could be about satisfying any communal needs. | Another paradox: while our past spirituality was made up of external manifestations, like individual dress and designated places of worship, the new spiritual form seems to emphasize group and inner experience. (96)

Christianity is all about transforming the image we have of ourselves. (97)

Isn’t the real message of the Church in the secondary or side-effects of the Incarnation, that is to say, in Christ’s penetration into all of human existence? Then the question is, where are you in relation to this reality? (102)

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same. (103)

To say that the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ is the theological affirmation; it’s the figure (in the gestalt sense). But to say that Christ touches all men — beggars, hobos, misfits — is to speak of ground, that is to say, of the multitude of secondary effects which we have such great difficulty in perceiving. (104)

Part III Vatican II, Liturgy, and the Media

13 Liturgy and the Microphone

The Bible Belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

…auditory space means hearing from all directions at once… (107)

TV has the power to sue the eye as if it were an ear. (110)

This is the nature of acoustic space, which is constituted by its centre being everywhere and its margin being nowhere. Without the microphone the speaker is at a single centre, while with the microphone he is everywhere simultaneously — a fact which “obsolesces” the architecture of our existing churches. (110)

In a word, the mike makes worshippers demand an intimate and small group of participants. On the other hand, the microphone, which makes it so easy for a speaker to be heard by many, also forbids him to exhort or be vehement. The mike is indeed a cool medium. (112)

…the microphone is incompatible with vehement exhortation or stern admonition. To a public that is electrically participant in a completely acoustic situation, loudspeakers bring the sounds of the preacher from several directions at once. The structure of our churches is obsolesced by the multi-directional media speaker system, and the older distance between speaker and audience is gone. The audience is now in immediate relation with the speaker, a factor which also turns the celebrant around to face the congregation. These major aspects of liturgical change were unforeseen and unplanned and remain unacknowledged by the users of the microphone system in our churches. (114)

The electronic man starts with the effect desired and then looks around for the means to those effects, whereas the old visual culture had accepted all the available means as a kind of destiny or irreversible fate which drove him towards every-changing patters, regardless of the cost.

| Without attempting to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the visual world whose structure had dominated recent centuries, it is important to know that visual structure is not compatible with the free play of information and simultaneous patterns of experience. Under visual conditions, to have a goal or objective is by no means the same thing as anticipating effects. The builder of a church or a university may well begin with some idea of the effects he wishes to create, but at very high speeds of traffic and of both population and information movement the most august structures may cease to be service environments within a single life span. Even before such obsolescence occurs, those in charge of these services may inadvertently introduce subsidiary techniques which upset the entire structures. Thus, in this century the telephone has rendered the organization chart of many big businesses quite inoperative, and the microphone has introduced effects into the liturgy which nobody had expected or planned. (114-115)

One of the biggest paradoxes of our time is the universal disease of being unwanted. … The same electric means which involve us in others in depth, almost eliminating space and time in our lives — these same means also deprive us of most of what had been considered private identity and individuality in recent centuries. (115)

…loss of private identity means loss of strongly envisaged goals and objectives, accompanied by an eagerness to play a variety of roles in the lives of other people. The need to be “wanted” by others comes with loss of private identity and also of community. In a world of rapid movement and change, everybody is a nobody, … In liturgical terms, loss of identity means loss of clerical vocations, and moral permissiveness means loss of the need to go to Confession. (116)

14 Liturgy and Media: Do Americans Go to Church to Be Alone?

Is there an insoluble conflict between the role of the Church to change man and the power of the Greco-Roman rational culture to invent and hold him fixed? (118)

Home is for privacy all over the world, except in America. … the young are shedding the established forms of seeking privacy outside and community inside the house. (119)

America is becoming producer- rather than consumer-minded, and this relates to media on one hand, and to liturgy on the other. (120)

Speech is the encoded form of the collective perception and wisdom of countless men. Speech is not the area of theory or concept but of performance and percept. (123)

The U.S.A. is the only place in the world where Western man had literacy from the beginning. (127)

No preliterate man ever experienced the peculiar isolation and individuality of the Western literate man. The pre-Christian Hebrews did not have it. The Oriental does not have it now. (128)

Apart from those shaped by the phonetic alphabet, the universal condition of man has been corporate and tribal and family-oriented. (128)

For communication is change, and Christianity is concerned above all and at all times with the need for change in man. (128)

…as soon as men identified God with His creation they also glorify their own handiwork as extensions of God. The initial merging of God and His creatures may have begun with art and technology. (129)

Since theologians don’t seem interested, I feel impelled to ask whether the Church has any inherent and inseparable bond with the Greco-Roman tradition of civilization. (129)

…whereas the Church has through the centuries striven for centralism and consensus at a distance from the faithful, the electrical situation ends all distance and, by the same token, ends the numerous bureaucratic means of centralism. … A complete decentralism occurs which calls for new manifestations of teaching authority such as the Church has never before expressed or encountered. (134)

15 “Achieving Relevance”: Letters to Mole and Sheed

The electric transformation causes us to resist and to reject the old visual culture, regardless of its value or relevance. (137)

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything — it’s just the beginning. (139)

The electro-technical forms do not foster civilization but tribal culture. (139)

16 Liturgy and Media: Third Conversation with Pierre Babin

The multiple speakers simply bypassed the traditional distance between preacher and audience. The two were suddenly in immediate relation with each other, which compelled the priest to face the congregation. (144)

A language is the encoded form of the collective perceptions and wisdom of many people. And, poetry and song are the major means by which a language purifies and invigorates itself. (144)

Language is, as it were, the great organic and collective medium that assimilates and organizes the chaos of everyday experience. Language is the conscious organ of the auditory imagination where countless change and adjustments take place, much like the way dreams in the night purge daily experience. (145)

I have always considered that once people knew the Truth they could produce beautiful things, at least if they wanted to. (148)

Part IV Tomorrow’s Church

17 Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters

When we look at any situation through another situation we are using metaphor. (154)

…of the nineteeth century that its distinction lay not so much in the arrival at any particular discovery as in the discovery of the technique of discovery itself. (156)

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. (161)

…pre-literate societies based on a monopoly of the spoken word, are static, repetitive, unchanging. … writing is the translation of the vocal or audible into spatial form. Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. (161-162)

The empires of Alexander and the caesars were essentially built by paper routes. But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial network. It is obvious that writing cannot have the same meaning or function for us that it had for earlier cultures. (162)

…any channel of communication has a distorting effect on habits of attention; it builds up a distinct form of culture. The printed page, for example, is extremely abstract as compared with the spoken word or with pictorial communication. The printed page created the solitary scholar and the split between literature and life which was practically unheard-of before printed books. The printed page fosters extreme individualism compared with manuscript societies. (163)

…the Protestant cannot but take a different view of the passing of the pre-eminence of the printed book, because Protestantism was born with printing and seems to be passing with it. There again, the Catholic alone has nothing to fear from the rapidity of the changes in the media of communication. But national cultures have much to fear. In fact, it is hard to see how any national culture as such can long stand up to the new media of communication. (163)

It is popular or unpopular to attack advertising. But it is unheard-of to take it seriously as a form of art. Personally I see it as a form of art. And like symbolist art it is created to produce an effect rather than to argue or discuss the merits of a product. (163)

What the advertisers have discovered is simply that the new media of communication are themselves magical art forms. All art is in a sense magical in that it produces a change or metamorphosis in the spectator. It refashions his experience. In our slap-happy way we have released a great deal of this magic on ourselves today. We have been changing ourselves about at a great rate like Alley Oop. Some of us have been left hanging by our ears from the chandeliers. (164)

It is interesting that poets and artists have none of the objections to technical innovation that most men experience. (164)

The movie reconstructs the external daylight world and in so doing provides an interior dream world. Hollywood means “sacred grove,” and from this modern grove has issued a new pantheon of gods and goddesses to fashion and trouble the dreams of modern man. (165)

One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a “story” in the reality to make it exciting and “spectacular.”

…neo-realism, it seems to me, is to have realized that the necessity of the “story” was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant, too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are. (166)

The cinema’s overwhelming desire to see, to analyse, its hunger for reality, is an act of concrete homage towards other people, toward what is happening and existing in the world. And, incidentally, it is what distinguishes “neo-realism” from the American cinema. (167)

…human perception is literally incarnation. (169)

I suggest that our faith in the Incarnation has an immediate relevance to our art, science, and philosophy. Since the Incarnation all men have been taken up into the poetry of God, the Divine Logos, the Word, His Son. But Christians alone know this. And knowing this, our own poetry, our own power of incarnating and uttering the world, becomes a precious foretaste of the Divine Incarnation and the Evangel. We can see how all things have literally been fulfilled in Christ, especially our powers of perception. And in Christ we can look more securely and steadfastly on natural knowledge which at one and the same time has become easier and also less important to us. (169)

18 The Christian in the Electronic Age

Chapter 8 The Church of Tomorrow. When time and space have been eliminated by electric communication, the Church becomes one as never before. (177)

19 Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput

Basically, then, a society which is hostile to art is hostile to life and to reason. (193)

20 The God-Making Machines of the Modern World

The revolutionary situation which faces us would appear to have suggested to Lindberg that the man-made machine is the new universe for the making of gods. And whereas the machine of nature made whatever gods it chose, the machines of man have abolished Nature and enable us to make whatever gods we choose. perhaps a better way of saying this would be to suggest that modern technology is so comprehensive that it has abolished Nature. The order of the demonic has yielded to the order of art. (198)

21 Confronting the Secular: Letter to Clement McNaspy, S.J.

22 Tomorrow’s Church: Fourth Conversation with Pierre Babin

The new vocation is hard to visualize: it is above all an inner requirement. Not that long ago, we had the idea of a unique goal or calling in life. However, young people can no longer accept this. They refuse to apprentice themselves for a career designed to last a whole lifetime. They want to have more than one vocation. And our entire sense of time is changing. (205)

We are still discussing things on a hardware level, with rigid formulas, and we forget the essential, the software, our inner-directed attention to Jesus Christ. Also, instead of unity, we risk even more fragmentation. The solution in no way consists of reintroducing Protestant elements inspired by the Gutenberg revolution into the Catholic Church. We should aim for another kind of unity. (208)

When ordinary language is used at Mass, thanks to the mike the congregation and the speaker merge in a kind of acoustic bubble that encompasses everyone, a sphere with centres everywhere and margins nowhere. Without a microphone, the orator is located in a single spot; with the mike, he comes at you from everywhere at once. These are the real dimensions of acoustic oneness. (208)

The Westernization of the Church, the fact that it was founded on a Greco-Roman base, therefore visually oriented, meant that from the outset ninety percent of the human race was excluded from the Church. Only a very small portion of people alive at the time had access to Christianity. Today, thanks to electric information, the speed of communication, satellites, Christianity is available to every human being. For the first time in history, the entire population of the planet can instantly and simultaneously have access to the Christian faith. (209)

— VIA —

Reading McLuhan is no easy task. So, many of the notes that I’ve given here are provocations worth considering, interpreting, and deconstructing, more than actually “understanding” (though there is plenty that is captivating). There is also much to disagree with, and push back on. Regardless, the value of engagement and mental churning is worth it. If faith, e.g. “religion” (i.e. “the light”) is to shine, we must be willing to ask questions of the other forms of light that are monopolizing our humanity. It is to this task that McLuhan takes us. I’m truly grateful for his work and the ways in which new intellectual and spiritual refractions are illuminated which, without a “McLuhan,” may have remained invisible.

Discarnate Man

Veja em Português

The Rise and Fall of Nature

by Marshall McLuhan

“At the speed of light, minus his
physical body, man is discarnate, and
discarnate man is not related to ”Natural Law’,”

A basic principle in all media observation concerns the effect of putting one medium inside another. Siegfried Giedion pointed out the origin of visual space as occurring when the arch is put inside a rectangle, cf. the Arc de Triomphe.

When any medium becomes the content of another, that which is contained becomes an art form. When the movie became the content of TV, the movie was at once elevated to the status of an art form. Prior to that, the movie had been common, or popular entertainment. When Sputnik (1957) went around the planet, the planet became programmable content, and thus became an art form. Ecology was born, and Nature was obsolesced.
In the 5th century B.C the new phonetically literate Greek had invented Nature by classifying various phenomena and thus putting thorn inside the visual space of classification. It was this visually ordered “Nature” that was ended by the new environmental fact of Sputnik .The concept of planetary ecology came into play at once. “Spaceship Earth” was recognized as having no passengers, but only crew. Sputnik is an information environment. i.e. a software environment which transforms the old “external” Nature. In the same way, when man is “on the phone” or “on the air,” moving electrically at the speed of light, he has no physical body He is translated into information. or an image. When man lives in an electric environment his nature is transformed and his private identity is merged with the corporate whole. He becomes “Mass Man.” Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not a physical quantity. Mass man was first noticed, as a phenomenon in the age of radio, but he had come into existence, unnoticed, with the electric telegraph.

In this short introduction to his article, some very important notions are mentioned, if not introduced:

Discarnate
Natural Law
The effect of putting one medium inside another
Ecology
Obsolescence of one concept by a new one
Phonetical environment
Visual space
Information environment
Electrict environment
Loss of private indentity: Mass man

As Andrew C. Stout puts it at

Incarnation and Digitization: Marshall McLuhan and the Digital Humanities

And I sumarize:

While pre modern cultures were primarily auditory and multi sensory, print culture trains the eye intensely rather than the ear. However, electronic technology has radically changed the cultural landscape, ushering in a “post – literate age.” Through radio, television, and the telephone, global events become immediate realities.

New technologies have the paradoxical effect of both being products or extensions of our existing faculties and also of reshaping our environments in ways that can radically recalibrate the operation of those faculties and senses.
Technology is an extension or augmentation of human senses which has the power to shape and reshape our environments.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan traces how the Western consciousness had radically reoriented itself through print technology, and in Understanding Media he explained how electronic media reshapes humanity into citizens of a “global village.”

Electronic media erases time and space. This prompts McLuhan to ask, “Must the Greco-Roman Church take a stand against the inner tribal and discarnate dynamics released by the electric information environment?” Instead of seeing electronic media as an extension of the body that demonstrates the radical potential and supernatural end of human nature, McLuhan here calls into question whether such technology is compatible with his own understanding of the Christian faith.
A medium like the telephone is an example of disembodied presence: “Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate.
While McLuhan focuses on the “discarnate” or “disembodied” nature of electronic media, others have highlighted the physical characteristics of virtual technology and digital media. Paul Lévy, writing in the relatively early days of the internet, builds on McLuhan’s insights about technology as extensions of human senses. In contrast to McLuhan, he assumes a “noncatastrophic point of view” when dealing with virtualization. While “virtual” is often used as a synonym for “illusionary” Lévy insists that “The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence.”

Virtual presence, whether by telephone, TV or computer screen, or virtual image, is in fact an extension of physical presence. It is nonetheless a real  presence which relies on a physical substrata. In this respect, virtuality is not “unreal” or “disembodied” but both physical and more than physical
As McLuhan observed in light of print and electronic media, so Hayles Observes of digital media –  human consciousness is thoroughly malleable.
A key distinction for Hayles is that between “materiality”  and “physicality.”  We can talk about the physical features of a computer screen, wires, circuitry, etc. – but still fail to give an account of technological innovation: “What counts is rather the object’s materiality . Materiality Comes into existence, I argue, when attention fuses with physicality to identify and isolate some  particular attribute (or attributes) of interest
You cannot have materiality, in this sense,without the physical or the embodied, but materiality also transcends the physical. Materiality is indeterminate and plastic, unlike pure physicality. Materiality “cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically as a discrete entity. Requiring acts of human attentive focus on physical properties, materiality is a human-technical hybrid.” It is the material, not thereductively physical, that provides the conditions under which humans can coevolve along with their digital tools.

Passion and Precision: The Faith of Marshall McLuhan

The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can’t destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that’s probably what it needs.

– Marshall McLuhan

Precision

This is a rock-hard statement and a rock-hard foundation for Marshall McLuhan’s life and works. Much more than “a fragment shored up against one’s ruin” as T. S. Eliot said of his encounters with truth, McLuhan’s faith was a seamless totality which informed and shaped his thoughts and his life.

When I interviewed American journalist Tom Wolfe for a radio program on McLuhan, I asked him how he had perceived McLuhan on their first meeting in a fashionable New York restaurant full of celebrities. Wolfe paused and reflected for a moment, and in his slow, thoughtful characteristic way, said:

“McLuhan walked straight to our table absolutely unperturbed by the famous faces around us. I immediately sensed an aura of spirituality surrounding him, something that I couldn’t exactly define; later, during our conversation, it appeared clearly: this was a man with a quest.”

“A man with a quest” is the title I gave to the radio program because I had personally experienced time and again in my encounters with McLuhan the presence of certitude.

McLuhan did not convey this impression or feeling of certitude with words. We rarely talked about religion directly. And yet I don’t know of any experience, any reading or any conversation with anyone which had a more determining influence on my own faith than Marshall’s calm assurance as to what really mattered in life. It was so strong that to this day I am convinced that the communication of faith is still a matter of mysterious personal contacts, in spite of the powerful means of communication available to the Church today for mass evangelization.

Marshall, being a private person, did not volunteer information on himself and this is maybe why he did not talk about his faith readily. Nevertheless, he never refused the occasion to affirm it when he was called upon to do so either in public or in private. Many times I heard him answer the question, usually delivered in a bewildered tone, “Are you really a Catholic?” with: “Yes, I am a Catholic, a convert, the worst kind,” leaving the asker more baffled than before. You could sense his pride and his amusement all at once in this standard response which was nevertheless always new because of the renewed contrast between the sophistication of worldly concerns and the simplicity and humor of this statement.

Faith, of course, is not something which can easily be expressed in words in the best of times. I remember that once, pressed by an overload of worries, in the middle of a conversation about the French adaptation of his book From Cliche to Archetype, I asked him one of the few personal direct questions I ever ventured with him, “Marshall, what does faith mean to you?” and he answered right away, as a matter of fact, a simple definition: “Paying attention, faith is paying attention, not to the cliches of religion only, but to the ground of the total man, which is the archetype. You come to the faith by prayer and by paying attention.”

In one of the few published statements on this matter, he explained to Pierre Babin during an interview on “Media and Liturgy” that “… prayer and liturgy are one and the same. They are the only means to become in tune, to hear Christ and to bring the whole man into play.” In the course of this interview he refers to the image of “tuning” oneself to faith, implying that the possibility is always there but that it is the task of the Christian to ready himself for the communication. Later in the interview, he gave his own interpretation of St. John’s cryptic statement: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Since I did not have access to the original transcripts of the interview in English, I am obliged to retranslate McLuhan in his own language, something I have been perversely accused of, by Marshall’s critics:

“It’s all in the Gospel according to St. John: ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear;’ that is, let him tune in on the right channel! Yet most people do not have ears to hear, but only to listen. To listen is merely to pay attention with one’s eyes, so to speak, namely to comprehend the way words come to you. But that is not hearing, that is not being ‘in tune’ with the communication. Christ Himself uses this metaphor. He makes a distinction between listening and hearing. The scribes were ‘listeners,’ they were looking at written words: ‘It is written that so and so … and you say so and so.’ But they didn’t have a clue. They used their ears not for hearing, but only for listening. This is what happens today: you may have all the necessary titles and yet remain incapable of tuning in properly.

“Christ also said: ‘My sheep know my voice. I know my sheep and they know my voice. But if you cannot hear me, you do not belong to my fold.’ This kind of thing is said many times in the Gospel: these people do not belong to my fold, they do not hear. If they hear my voice, it is because the Father let them. In other words, the Father has programmed them from within to hear Christ. You find this everywhere in St. John, the notion that the Father has given Christ certain people to hear him, while the others are merely listening; they can’t tune in. They understand nothing. It’s a great mystery!”

This passage remains one of the few complete descriptions of what appears to be Marshall’s own access to his faith, and also a ground for his lifelong preoccupation with the acoustic nature of modern media.

—

Trying to make sense of the puzzling contradictions in the religious and secular opinions of his contemporaries, the 17th century French thinker, Blaise Pascal came to the conclusion that there were two principal and often mutually exclusive forms of access to knowledge and perception. He called one l’esprit de geometrie – the mind of geometry – and the other, l’esprit de finesse the spirit of understanding – which he also called “le coeur,” the knowledge of the heart. Pascal’s definition of faith is also one his most quoted “Pensees”:

It is the heart which feels God and not reason. This is what faith is: God made accessible to the heart, not to reason. (LAFUMA 424)

A long tradition of philosophy has succeeded in guarding us against trusting our emotions for the reliable ordering of our knowledge and perception, but maybe what Pascal means, even though he uses the now sentimental metaphor of the heart, is not an emotion after all, at least not a single emotion, but the very nature of understanding itself. I have never known McLuhan to trust even for a moment the mind of geometry for anything that demanded understanding. What Pascal called l’esprit de finesse, he called by a simple English word: perception. Though I have no reason to think that he did not deeply respect the theological tradition and the Church’s dogmas, he did not relate it with matters of faith without always trying to bring out a perceptual relationship with the practice of daily Christian life. This is what comes across in this application of the medium and the message theme to the understanding of the Bible:

“To say that the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ is a theological concept. It is the figure. But to say that Christ reaches all men, tramps, beggars and failures, that is the ground, namely a host of secondary, hidden effects which we do not perceive easily. In fact it is only when Christianity is a living experience that the medium really becomes the message. At this level figure and ground meet again. This goes also for the reading of the Bible: we often talk about the content of the Scriptures, thinking that this content is the message. But that is not so. The real content of the Bible is the person who is reading the Bible. Some, as they read it ‘hear’ it, others don’t. All are users of the word of God, all are its content, but only a few really perceive the message. That message is not the words, but the effects of those words on you. It is conversion.”

Conversion

Converts and conversion loom large in McLuhan’s life. His official entry into the Catholic Church at the age of twenty-five took place in Cambridge on Holy Thursday, 1936, but he had begun his conversion long before. As the story goes, it may have all started in a used bookstore in Edmonton, where McLuhan was browsing for books with his lifelong friend, the economist Tom Easterbrook. Easterbrook told me that when both came out of the store, they compared what they had bought. Marshall had a textbook of economics and he had picked up, not exactly knowing why, Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World? Both looked at their books and then at each other, and Easterbrook said to Marshall, handing him the Chesterton: “This feels more like your kind of stuff; why don’t we swap?” They did just that and Marshall proceeded to read the book at once, and everything else he could find by Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other controversial Catholics.

As befits both McLuhan’s personal leanings and the subject at hand, all the information I have gathered about his conversion belongs to the oral tradition, springing from interviews with Morris McLuhan, his brother, his son Eric, Tom Easterbrook and Father John Kelly.

Morris McLuhan told me about the early years of growing up as Baptists, fearing the Pope and the Catholic Church as the incarnation of the Devil and the sure way to eternal damnation. The McLuhan’s next door neighbours in Edmonton were Catholics and according to Morris, the children were held at a safe distance from personal contact with them. Marshall’s father was “a gentle farmboy from around Owen Sound who had missed his calling for the ministry, but who managed to inspire it in Morris who took a degree in Theology at Emmanuel College in Toronto and became a minister for the United Church for twenty-five years.”

Marshall’s mother, according to many reports, was the driving force behind his energy, his intellectual curiosity and his often rebellious attitude towards established authorities particularly in matters concerning ideologies. Elsa McLuhan, as Easterbrook calls her, had a very strong personality and a keen interest in dramatic arts. She had studied dramatic arts in Winnipeg to become later the “Ruth Draper of Canada,” organizing tours East and West during the Depression, speaking and acting one-woman shows in front of umpteen congregations. Morris claims that when he toured the country in his ministry, “there was not one pulpit from where to speak, where she had not preached before.” She had a beautiful voice and Morris mentioned that she knew how to read the Scriptures in such a meaningful way that it made a lasting impression on the two children. But she also encouraged the reading of English literature, particularly in Marshall because she could sense and foster a growing interest for the power and the beauty of language. Indeed Morris has reasons to believe that the literary influence of the poets and the style of Belloc and Chesterton had a greater impact on Marshall’s conversion than any particular theological consideration.

While doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, McLuhan took interest in the Moral Rearmament Movement which was gathering momentum during the thirties. However he was not attracted by its more sensational elements of dramatic conversions and allegiances, but as source material for university debates against the upholders of socialism and Marxist theories. He was a fierce debater and Morris recalls that he was often accused of adopting a Roman Catholic position by his adversaries. This made little impression at the time because he was not even considering then the question of faith, let alone the idea of converting. This came later, mainly while he was in Cambridge and came into closer contact with the writings of Chesterton and with Thomas Aquinas through the early works of Etienne Gilson.

The conversion was prepared by two years of prayer but it came about quite suddenly. Eric says that sometime before the Holy week in 1936, his father was among friends in Trinity Hall and he was talking, again, about religion. At that point, one of the attendants said to him: Marshall, since you can’t stop talking about these things, why don’t you convert?” Marshall looked at him and said: “Why not?” and a few weeks later became a Catholic. He then wrote to his father that he had become deeply troubled by the fact that he did not have a faith during his undergraduate years in Canada, and that he had prayed for two years, on his knees before he made the decision to become a Catholic. He hoped that this decision would not hurt his father’s strong Baptist feelings. Herbert McLuhan’s reaction was moderate but Marshall’s mother burst into tears and said that he would never become a university president. Morris’s assessment of the long process was that beside the literary influences, it was the continuity of the Catholic Church and the sacraments which had determined the conversion rather than the theological arguments. McLuhan’s own words to Edward Wakin confirm this intuition:

“I never came into the church as a person who was being taught Catholic doctrines. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church through ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell: when people leave the Church, they have quit praying. The active relating to the Church’s prayer and sacraments is not through ideas. Any Catholic who today has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church. That’s meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.” (Wakin 11)

It should not come as a surprise that McLuhan’s first publication was an article on “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic”, which appeared in the Dalhousie Review in 1936. In it he quotes a line from one of the writer’s novels, a line which he applies to Chesterton, but which could just as well apply to himself in retrospect:

“He had somehow made a giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.”

And McLuhan comments:

“Mr. Chesterton himself is full of that child-like surprise and enjoyment which a sophisticated age supposes to be able to exist only in children. And it is to this more than ordinary awareness and freshness of perception that we may attribute his extraordinarily strong sense of fact.” (15: 456)

This comment in turn brings to my mind a friendly conversation with Father Kelly during the lunch hour at St. Michael’s College when, after Marshall, who was not present at the time, had made some rather enigmatic comment about some matter concerning religion of which I was trying to make sense. Father Kelly smiled broadly and said: “Oh well, Marshall has the faith of a child!” This remark, with its tone and the full colour of the voice, rang in my mind for many years afterward, and now I can finally understand how great a compliment it really was.

The Alphabet and the Church

McLuhan once told me that what had attracted him most in Chesterton was his perfect familiarity with and proper handling of important paradoxes. He explained to Pierre Babin that paradoxes are normal in religious matters. Pascal also cultivated paradoxical notions about man, religion and the faith. He saw in paradoxes the only way to relax the stifling demands of rationality so as to open the way for a deeper understanding of simultaneous complex issues. By opposition, McLuhan said, “Orthodoxy, in the etymological sense of the word, is to corner oneself into a single point of view” (Babin 37). Pascal was aware as any serious reader of the Scriptures of the countless apparent contradictions which they contain, but it is in these contradictions that he saw the strength of the Scriptures, not their weaknesses. In a fairly McLuhan-like fashion, he wrote:

“Thus to understand the Scriptures, one must reach a meaning which brings together all the contradictory passages; it is not enough to reach one that resolves some contradictions and not others, but one which resolves them all. (Lafuma 257 – my translation)

This amounted to the discarding of formal logic and strict rationality for the understanding of Scriptures, and it required the infinitely more demanding perception of the heart. McLuhan’s faith possibly resembled that of Pascal in that both were too exacting to accept approximate truths or to slough off contradictions to achieve a systematic vision. Both shared passion and precision. For Pascal the greatest paradox was the fact of his contemporaries’ growing indifference to their personal salvation despite their greater than ever access to the most important information concerning them. That paradox was resolved partly by McLuhan as we shall see shortly, but McLuhan’s own great paradox was to sort out the historical relationship of the Church to the phonetic alphabet and to print technologies. He revealed to Pierre Babin that he had become a Catholic while he was studying the Renaissance as an almost exclusive preoccupation:

“I soon realized that the Church had been shattered and fragmented during this period by a stupid historical accident, by technology. The medieval culture based on manuscripts allowed for a community lifestyle which was very different from the mass community which was fostered by print. The Gutenberg revolution made readers out of listeners.
…
“The printed world is a visual world. But the perceptions dominated by vision are not a unifying force. They lead to fragmentation. They allow each individual to hold on to a private point of view.
…
“With a book, you can retire within, in the egocentric and the psychological sense, certainly not in the spiritual sense; that is, indeed, a fragmentation.” (Babin 35)

This and related insights of McLuhan have the greatest relevance to the history of the Catholic Church and even more relevance to our personal faith today. The central problem can be stated in simple terms: if faith, as McLuhan described it, is indeed a question of deep hearing, then the specialization of communication in visual forms, and especially in the careful articulation of meaning in verbal and visual terms, such as the printed word, can represent a real threat to faith, if it is allowed to dominate understanding to the exclusion of hearing. I am not saying that every man became a reader overnight after the first Bible came off Gutenberg’s press, but I am saying that the printed word soon changed the forms of teaching and learning at the nerve centers of the propagation of faith, and that the effects of these changes trickled down to the most illiterate members of the population over the three centuries which preceded Nietzsche’s casual realization that “God was dead.”

I do not think that I am betraying McLuhan’s thought by giving such an emphasis to the effects of the printed word to affect the perceptions involved in faith. Among twenty questions which precede a major article published in June, 1972, in The Critic is this one which goes to the heart of the matter:

Why has Western man, and why has the Catholic Church no theory of communication of secular psychic change? (Do Americans Go to Church to be Alone?)

McLuhan felt that as western man was learning to read and write, not only was he gradually depriving himself of the benefits of traditional and oral forms of community living, he was also screening himself from his own senses and reprocessing all his information patterns in abstract propositions devoid of sensory content. This development deeply affected doctrinal knowledge and, according to McLuhan, gave rise to profound schisms as he explains here to Pierre Babin:

“It is obvious that the possibility for each reader to have exactly the same words in front of him for any length of time had a deep effect on doctrine. Anybody could now think about it alone, go back to it and invent a private point of view on the matter. This was not the way of the former manuscript tradition, because the whole process was much more acoustic than visual and the communication was predominantly oral.

“Take the scholastic method of discussion, for instance, the quaestiones disputate. It was oral. But Luther and the first Protestants were schoolmen who could read. They adapted the older method of scholastic discussion to the new visual order: thus they used the recent discovery of print to dig the trench which separated them from the Roman Church.” (Babin 36)

One of the constant preoccupations of McLuhan was to understand the relationship of the Church not only to the print technologies, but to the invention of the alphabet itself.

He was certain that there had been a determining factor in the beginning of Christianity at the onset of Greco-Roman literacy, but I am not sure that he ever came to a satisfying conclusion regarding this matter because the last time we talked about it, he said that it was still a great mystery to him. Again, he said to Babin:

“Allow me to point out that the Church began when Greek phonetic writing was in its infancy. The Greco-Roman culture was still in its cradle when the Church began to settle. This is not a mere accident of history, but a providential decree. However no one has attempted to study this question in the history of religions. It is taken for granted. It is not even suggested that it might have an exceptional significance for the Church. I have looked for information on this matter, but there is hardly anything, a few short papers here and there. (Babin 36-37)

McLuhan adds a little further that “the pre-Platonic culture … was grounded in the magical use of speech.” Of course other forms of script existed then elsewhere in the world and had existed long before. McLuhan has always insisted that it is the phonetic, not just any alphabet, that brought about the psychological revolution which created western man. I have pursued this point relentlessly for the last six years and here are some of the conclusions I have tentatively drawn: the invention of letters for vowel sounds in the consonantic scripts borrowed by the Greek from the semitic tribes brought about a completely new access to language. It seems that whereas the forms of writing preceding the truly phonetic alphabet were committed to support memory, the new phonetic variety introduced the possibility of changing the nature of the information, thus enabling writers and readers to invent new information rather than being satisfied with assimilating established knowledge.

Technically speaking, the phonetic alphabet was much more than an information storage system, it was an information-processing system. How was it different from the older semitic forms? It was different because the use of fixed letters for the sound of vowels made it possible to read any Greek manuscript without any previous knowledge of its content, a thing which is impossible, even to this day, when you read the Koran or the Talmud in their original script forms. This is much more important than it sounds at first hearing, because it means that writing could now be detached from the process of communicating meaning. In other words, with the Greek alphabet and all its derivatives, you could begin to manipulate meaning, not only by manipulating the listener as you could have in any oral communication, but at a distance, so to speak, from your study or your cell, simply by manipulating the system of signs which you were using to create the meaning.

The impression gave birth to silent reading

The most devastating consequence of this development is that communication would one day become secondary to the production of a well-ordered meaning. Even as it gradually displaced the center of gravity of all communications from human interactions to textual production, the phonetic alphabet turned oral speech into an art form which was called rhetoric. Throwing a net on speaking and analyzing its various components to select only those which could produce desensorialized meaning, the alphabet’s fundamental drive was to reduce live speech to silence. But the silencing of communication was not possible until script-form had reached sufficient uniformity to be read conveniently in silence. It is print which fostered silent reading. Reading became a private experience inviting retreat and solitude instead of community oriented activities; and ultimately silent reading began to change the very shape of thinking from an activity still tied to the senses to an experience abstracted from environmental contact and based almost exclusively on representations.

The relationship of all this to the Church can be found in the changing of attitudes to the Bible and the Scriptures. The paradox is that while the new script, which was highly congenial to translations (because it depended on sounds alone and not on meanings) fostered the diffusion of the Scriptures in the whole Greco-Roman world, it was also destined to silence the Word of God and turn it into thought alone unsupported by the participation of the whole being of man. The separations between the body and the soul, the head and the body, and the person from the community all come from the single shift of meaning from live communication to mental cogitation.

I think that what began to happen gradually is that, after the invention of print, the Scriptures, which for most people might have been only the support of a daily religious practice, became the center of all religious preoccupation for those who could read. Hypnotized by the sacred textual evidence, the commentators gradually lost touch with the living presence of communication. The Letter soon dominated the Spirit in all but the most inspired theologians and clerics.

One of the most revealing comments about the Bible was made to me by a great Jewish French poet, Henri Meschonnic, who is also the first writer to have attempted to translate the Bible directly from the Hebrew to the French without the biases of the Greek Koine. He said that the Christian tradition was laboring under the illusion that it was in possession of the whole Bible, but that in fact, in all our translations, we had only been able to convey fifty percent of the meaning because we had consistently disregarded the rhythms and the specific prosody of the original Hebrew text. He explained to me that, in the Hebrew original, the full meaning of the Scriptures cannot be conveyed by the text alone, but that it must be read aloud because it contains prosodic indications which guide the delivery in such a way as also to have a direct effect on the whole body of the listener. He concluded by reminding me that the word used by the Hebrew to designate the Bible, micrah, does not mean scripture, but live speech. I believe that the implications of such an important observation should inspire a truly ecumenical interaction between Judaic and Christian scholars.

I think it is in order to let McLuhan himself give his conclusion to this preliminary investigation as he gave it to Pierre Babin:

“It is thus that, paradoxically, the Church found itself incarnated from its beginning in the only culture which was elaborating stable and fixed positions. The Church, which gives and demands from man a constant change of heart, took over a visual culture which values permanence over everything else. This Greco-Roman culture, which seems to have been superimposed on the Church as the shell of a turtle, does not provide for the possibility of a flexible and realistic theory of communication and change. It is this hard shell which stands between the Church and the other cultures of the world which have flexible, adaptable and evolutive forms.”

The Microphone and the Church

Assuming that most of what precedes is plausible, it is all well and good for the past, for a time when the only means of communication were the spoken and the written word, but what about the present, with its extraordinary potential for renewed oral communication? There again McLuhan publicly deplored the fact that the Church was not paying sufficient attention to the consequences of the electrification of the word:

“The 19th century bureaucrats who assembled at the Second Vatican Council in 1962 were naturally as unaware of the causes of their problems and reforms as the representatives of the Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th century. There was not a single individual at the Council of Trent who understood the effects of print on the spiritual schism and psychic distress of the religious and political life of that time. At the Second Vatican Council, the participants paid no attention to the causes of their problems in their new policies and prescriptions.” (Wakin 6)

McLuhan addressed himself more often to the questions regarding modern liturgy and its changes than even to the effects of the alphabet and print on the Church of the past. Predictably, the direction of his investigation went straight to the medium, namely the electrification of the modern church. In his understanding, the developments following this technological transformation are of dubious benefits as he explains here to Babin that the first victim of the microphone was the Latin mass:

“The Latin mass is not a victim of Vatican II, but of the introduction of microphones in the churches. A host of people, including the Church official are bemoaning the fact that Latin disappeared from the Catholic Church without knowing that it was the immediate consequence of a technical innovation which they greeted with enthusiasm. Latin is a very “cool” verbal form which gives precedence to murmurs and whispering. The use of a P. A. system, however, makes indistinct muttering simply unbearable. It accentuates and intensifies the sounds of Latin without providing any more bearing to its significance.” (Babin 155-156)

As I understand this, McLuhan implies that as long as we were governed by a print culture, the use of Latin was perfectly justified because it was the language associated naturally with the forms and rituals of a unified cultural ground. In other words, when the whole emphasis of the Church’s attitude was on the textual significance of the Christian message, Latin was more than a dead language, it was a sacred language. But when the emphasis shifts to communication proper, that is the actual transfer of total information from the celebrant to the congregation, not only must he now adopt the vernacular languages which are accessible to his public, but he must also turn around and face it. It is literally a turn away from the text and towards the addressee. But there is more to this.

Being grounded in a strong literary formation, McLuhan was extremely sensitive to the values of language generally and of his own vernacular in particular:

“Language is infinitely more than a conventional way to convey ideas; I am speaking here of spoken language, of the oral tradition. His kind of language is the coded expression of collective wisdom and perceptions of countless people. Thus poetry and song are the best ways to purify and fortify language. What people have failed to understand, in my opinion, is that any technical innovation changes the human environment and thereby disturbs all the levels of perception; consequently, new solutions must be found in language. Language is, so to speak, the greatest collective and organic medium which assimilates and organizes the chaos of daily life. Language is the conscious organ of the auditory imagination which harbors the daily adjustments and changes, just as night harbors the purification of dreams. Such was the role of the oral tradition in the cultures which did not know writing. After the invention of writing, whatever remained of oral form still played an important role in that way. But the piling up of printed material tended to smother little by little and to silence this tradition: whatever escapes this smothering is still enough to foster a living popular culture.

…

“In my opinion, it is at this level that the communication of faith can occur, not by the transmission of concepts and theories, but by the interior transformation of persons, not by the expression of the highlighted figures of the faith, but by the ground of secondary effects which transform life. If the vernacular, which is now utilized in liturgy, is to play this transforming role, it should first be allowed to be truly ‘popular.’ But this need brings to light one of the most traumatizing developments of the recent liturgical reform: I am referring here to the intrusion of bureaucratic processes in the Catholic communities. The liturgy of the Eucharist is indeed in the vernacular today, but it is regulated by special committees whose contact with language is limited to the dryness of computer languages! Without its oral dimension of familiar usages and rhythms, the vernacular is in great danger of becoming a wasteland and a spiritual desert.” (Babin 157-158)

There are many other important insights that have come out of the absolutely serious attention McLuhan has paid to the problem of today’s church, but I will limit myself to one more observation before concluding on a more personal note about McLuhan’s own attitude to these matters.

McLuhan was very concerned with the details of spontaneous as well as bureaucratic reforms of the Liturgy. The case in point is the matter of costumes and role-playing. He said to Edward Wakin that: ” … costumes were never so important in the history of the Church as now. The Church is going to private dress at a time when all the kids want to get into costume. They don’t want private dress. They want costumes” (Wakin 10).

Even though this sounds like a puny detail which, in terms of today’s youth might even be construed as obsolete, it points to a much more significant issue which is that of role-playing. Again he explains to Wakin what has happened to the church in this regard:

“The Roman hierarchy after Gutenberg, had acquired a great deal of the organizational chart patterns of specialism and rigidity. Improved written communication made possible the development of a huge Roman bureaucracy, transforming the Roman pontiff into a chief executive. Further improvement in travel and communication brought the pontiff into more immediate personal relation to his subjects. … [But] when things speed up, hierarchy disappears and the global theater sets in. [Today] the Pope is obsolete as a bureaucratic figure. But the Pope as a role-player is more important than ever. The Pope has authority. After all, if there were only three Catholics in the world, one would have to be pope. Otherwise there would be no church. There has to be a teaching authority or else no church at all.” (Wakin 8-9)

This new dimension of role-playing meant for McLuhan that today’s religious preachers and teachers must become mystics and live in the community rather than retire behind the authority of the sacred text and the walls of the institutions.

Passion

To complete this hardly adequate survey of McLuhan’s perceptions about the Church past and present, you might want to know what was his personal opinion about all these changes. This he very rarely expressed in public, but he did so to Edward Wakin and I feel that it is only fitting that I let him speak for himself on the concluding note of this paper which I present as a humble homage to his memory:

“I don’t expect to be comfortable. The Church has never told anybody that it is a place of comfort or security in any ordinary psychological sense. Anyone who comes to the Church for that purpose is wrong. There is nothing of that sort available in the Church. There never has been. No, it isn’t that kind of institution. At the speed of light there is nothing but violence possible, and violence kills every boundary. Even territory is violated at the speed of light. There is no place left to hide. It becomes a church of the soul. Christ said: ‘I do not bring you peace but the sword.’ The church as the custodian of civilized values and so on – that church is all over, I’d say. We are on a life raft. That sort of survival operation.

…

“I have never been an optimist nor a pessimist. I’m an apocalyptic only. Our only hope is apocalypse.

…

“Apocalypse is not gloom. It’s salvation. No Christian could ever be an optimist or pessimist; that is a purely secular state of mind. I have no interest whatever in secular institutions as places to have a nice or a bad tine. I don’t understand that kind of mentality. I guess it has taken me quite a long time to get to this state; it didn’t happen overnight.” (Wakin 11, 7)

Note: Adapted from a presentation given by Derrick de Kerckhove June 4th, 1982. Reprinted with permission. Full text available from the Media Ecology Association.