Maelstrom Escape Strategies Part Two: Behold, the Vortex
We ended off part one with “because we are not helpless, we need not be hopeless.” In Part Two, we start to look at some history in the development of Marshall McLuhan’s thought. What’s remarkable to me is that Marshall himself didn’t always believe that we are not helpless – in early writings, he believed that media were too complex to hope to be able to understand much less control. The remarkable thing is that he changed his mind about that after looking at media more closely. It turns out that we can indeed ‘understand media.’ He then spent the rest of his working life dedicated to furthering the goal of a world where we are conscious agents rather than ‘technological idiots.’ In this, he was a true humanitarian.
In the first part of this section, we behold our vortex. We begin to study its nature and see whether it’s truly beyond our comprehension and control, or perhaps within our power.
Maelstrom Escape Strategies was originally produced as research for Eternal. And now we are open sourcing it for you.
From Impossible to Possible
“The problem faced by any explorer in our time, as McLuhan observed, is to invent tools that reveal the current situation, not to make logical connected statements:
‘Connected, sequential discourse, which is thought of as rational, is really visual. It has nothing to do with reason as such. Reasoning does not occur on single planes or in a continuous, connected fashion. The mind leapfrogs. It puts things together in all sorts of proportions and ratios instantly. To put down thoughts in coded, lineal ways was a discovery of the Greek world. It is not done this way, for example, in the Chinese world. But to deny that the Chinese have access to reason would be ridiculous. They do not have rational discourse at all by Western standards. They reason by the act of interval, not by the act of connection. In the electric age we are moving into a world where not the connection but the interval becomes the crucial event in organization.’”
(Eric McLuhan, ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication’ in ‘Theories of Communication’, 2011)
“In today’s rapidly changing environment, people have two major concerns: to discover the new problems this environment poses, and to develop ways of coping with these problems.”
(City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media.’)
“We now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.”
(‘for Dot Zero Magazine’ tss, 1964)
By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”
(‘Man as Media’ 1977)
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As early as 1951, in ‘The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man,’ Marshall McLuhan drew inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story ‘A Decent into the Maelstrom.’ In it, Poe’s narrator describes how he was sucked into a giant ocean vortex, or maelstrom, and by keeping his wits about him, by studying the action of his environment, was able to formulate and execute an escape strategy, and live to tell the tale.
“Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force, is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vorticies of energy created by our media present us with possibilities of evasion of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”
(‘Man as Media’ 1977)
It is one of Marshall’s enduring metaphors which he would deploy over and over during his career, and moral of the story boils down to this:
We are not helpless.
WE ARE NOT HELPLESS
Moreover, despair is optional, as is survival.
DESPAIR IS OPTIONAL, AS IS SURVIVAL
In Poe’s story, a fisherman and his two brothers flirt with disaster one too many times and are rewarded as expected. Two brothers are lost—but one survives.
This story should sound familiar:
In pursuit of wealth, they take great risks, and eventually they can’t avoid the seemingly inevitable.
It’s a numbers game.
IT’S A NUMBNESS GAME
Marshall McLuhan’s hope was that the analogy holds all the way through. There’s little doubt that we are in the midst of a terrible vortex. The signs are all around us. All is not well. Poe’s sailor had the advantage, a dubious comfort, that the cause of his misery was quite obvious. The cause of our misery is less clear.
WE DON’T KNOW WHO DISCOVERED WATER, BUT WE KNOW IT WASN’T A FISH
We’re battling less the forces of Mother nature, more the forces of our own nature. It is in our nature to be ignorant of many things, our heads stuck in the sand. As if ignorance somehow frees us from responsibility.
IGNORANCE OF CAUSES IS NOT FREEDOM FROM EFFECTS
It might be well to ask whether we need to remain in this state. Whether we can afford to.
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“We can think things out before we put them out.”
(1965 interview)
It’s an odd thing. Marshall didn’t always believe that we could do very much. He wasn’t always of the opinion that
“Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening.”
(letter to Life magazine, 1966)
In an essay from 1955, he said:
“Improvements in the means of communication are usually based on a shift from one sense to another and this involved a rapid refocusing in all previous experience. It is, therefore, a simple maxim of communication study that any change in the means of communication will produce a chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of culture and politics. And because of the complexity of the components of this process, prediction and control are not possible.
(‘A Historical Approach to the Media,’ 1955)
But then in 1960 he wrote that we could:
“…study the modes of the media in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.”
(Report, 1960)
What happened?
How did Marshall McLuhan go from helpless to hopeful?
What made him turn around and dive head first into the maelstrom?
In 1958 he was given a grant from the National Association of Education Broadcasters (Washington, D. C.) to develop a curriculum for high school students for the ‘study of new media.’ He took a sabbatical from his position at St. Michael’s College, where he was an English Professor, and spent the next year and a bit deconstructing media and constructing methods for their study.
“Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technology makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation.”
(letter to Life magazine, 1966)
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as we are willing to contemplate the situation.”
(‘The Medium is the Massage’, 1968)
The NAEB grant gave him the means to study the modes of the media, and this work would give him much of the foundation from which he built his methods.
It was here that he turned communications study into media study by a vast broadening of the category of what a ‘medium’ is, what ‘media’ are.
FROM AN ‘EXTENSION’
“The personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into human affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
(Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964)
TO AN ‘ENVIRONMENT’
“The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike.”
(UM, ’64)
“There is no kind of technology, from speech and clothes to satellites and computers, that does not constitute an environment of services and disservices.
Speech transforms all perception. So does clothing.”
(letter, February 28, 1973)
TO ‘EVERYTHING (A HU)MAN MAKES OR DOES’
“…everything man makes and does, every process, every style, every artefact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology — every product of human effort...”
(Laws of Media: The New Science, 1988)
Some might argue that the category broadens so far as to be meaningless, but I would suggest that it broadens is far enough to be meaningful.
“The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy.”
(Understanding Media, 1964)
AN INCREASE IN HUMAN AUTONOMY
“It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments, all media have the effects that geographers and biologists have associated with environments in the past. … The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike.” (‘Education in the Electronic Age,’ 1967)
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THE RELATION OF ENVIRONMENT TO ANTI-ENVIRONMENT (1965):
Somewhere after ‘Understanding Media’ was published, Marshall McLuhan took an environmental turn. His 1965 essay, ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’ marks this perceptual shift to seeing the ‘psychic and social’ effects of technologies as an ‘environment of services and disservices’ – as an environment like our natural one but of our own making. As it happens, in 1965 Marshall was yet to realize, as he did some years later, that this perceptual shift had occurred as a result of Sputnik and the new satellite environment, as the inevitability of ‘ecological thinking’ applied to his own work in studying the nature of human innovation.
“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiement tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel.”
A crucial feature of the essay is the position of the artist as less a supplier of aesthetic objects than an indispensable agent of perceptual awareness. An invaluable, if often unwitting, source of information regarding changes in the technological millieu underway quite beneath the perception of the average person, quite ‘invisible’ and yet felt.
This is one of the big dilemmas in this whole project:
how to make known the unknown? How do you perceive what you can’t perceive?
“It is useful to notice all of the arts and sciences as acting in the role of anti-environments that enable us to perceive the environment. … when we live in a museum without walls, or have music as a structural part of our sensory environment, new strategies of attention and perception have to be created.”
This notion of ‘anti-environment’ is very useful.
I often think of comedians as ‘anti-environmentalists’ of this sort. Jerry Seinfeld for example seems to have built a career on perception: “you ever notice that…?” Seinfeld is a great noticer.
Street artists are also great at getting us to notice things we don’t generally notice. Banksy, for example, once did a play on Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring.’ He picked a rather plain looking brick wall which featured a round object (a security alarm I think) and used it as the ‘pearl earring,’ re-creating Vermeer’s piece around it.
What strategies might we employ to notice what’s happening to us?
What’s become habitual?
Beneath our notice?
“Our typical response to a disrupting new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment.”
We generally use the new thing to do the job of the old thing before discovering what new things we can do with the new thing.
It is artists who are out there on the edge exploring the possibilities. They rarely get any thanks.
What they produce is often offensive to people whose sensibilities were set by earlier technologies.
OUR TECHNOLOGY SETS OUR SENSIBILITY
The funny thing is that what seems edgy today will frequently seem tame tomorrow.
“The artist as a maker of anti-environments permits us to perceive that much is newly environmental and therefore most active in transforming situations.”
It was his contention (borrowed from Joyce in ‘Finnegans Wake’, naturally) that ‘when invisible, it’s invincible.’ We can’t break a habit we don’t know we have. We can’t address an effect when we don’t know its cause.
“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.”
(letter to Jacques Maritain, May 6, 1969)
I’m not sure we’re as afraid of responsibility as we once were. The new generation of people leading innovation seem much less motivated by money, much less at the mercy of greed, and much more sincere in wanting to create a better world for all.
They just need to understand that the medium is the message.
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Thank you for reading. Next week we’ll have a second serving setting up the question (or solutions) we’ve been cautiously approaching: can we actually get out of this mess, and how?
deeply inspiring
Love you and your family's work.