Twyla Gibson on Hippocrates' Oath

For those who may have missed Twyla Gibson's opening lecture in our fall lecture series, What is Life?, there is another opportunity to listen to one of our most insightful and brilliant scholars who connects ancient tradition with contemporary societal and cultural applications.

Twyla Gibson lectures on "Hippocrates' Oath: The Code of Ethics in Bioethics" on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, from 4:10 - 5:00 p.m., in the Great Hall, Joint Centre for Bioethics, 88 College Street.

Hippocrates' Oath has for twenty-four centuries served as the keystone of professional ethics in medicine and the template for revisions to the ethical code of conduct. This study examines the oral traditional origins, context, and history of the Oath, and explores the relevance of its principles to bioethical debates and clinical decision-making today.

No reservations required.
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Index to The McLuhan Lectures 2005

For those readers who would like a ready reference to my postings from each of this year's McLuhan Lectures, here is the complete list:

May	4	Paul Thompson	Evolution
	11	Marcel Danesi	Semiosis
	25	Lilly Koltun	Portraiture
June	1	Mark Engstrom	Collections
	8	Alexandra Palmer	Fashion
	15	Donald Carveth	Psychoanalysis
	22	David Moos	Space
	29	Deanne Bogdan	Music
July	6	Monique Tschofen	Cannibals
	13	Tony Hushion & Brian Porter	Exhibits
	20	Janine Marchessault	Screens
	27	Brian Cantwell Smith	Re-enchantment

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - Brian Cantwell Smith - Re-enchantment

In which professor and philosopher not to mention FIS Dean Brian Cantwell Smith cleverly and sometimes profoundly contemplates the dysfunctions of the end of the 20th century through the long view of post-alchemic scientific and socio-cultural history via the rhetorical if not metaphorical device of the fable thereby providing him with a perfectly legitimate escape hatch for any inaccuracies, implausible and unsupportable leaps of logic, and his steadfast refusal to consider Marshall McLuhan beyond a freshman-level literal reading of McLuhan’s most famous aphorism that implicates Cantwell Smith in his own epithet in what turns out to be a delicious irony unless it was all a satire in the first place.

And so we begin...

Cantwell Smith asks his audience to consider the rise of the religious right, and fundamentalism around the world at the dawn of this new century. He observes that those proponents of a form of totalitarian thinking provide seemingly easy answers to a complex and confusing world, and queries what “our” – that is, those who hold to a more progressive and enlightened agenda – answers might be in response to both the simplicity offered by fundamentalism, and to the challenges of the world. His position: Our answers must “build on the very best of science” or the progressive movement will lose. He claims that he will take a McLuhan-style approach in drawing from a historical context to look forward, in order to see the significance of the answers that he will propose today.

He begins his fable. Return, he suggests, to the end of the age of alchemy and the coincident rise of mechanist philosophy. Return to the age of Descartes, the age of reason. The one who coined an aphorism perhaps more famous than the medium is the message – cognito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am – Descartes was responsible for the arithmetization of geometry and development of science. Science was not possible when the mind (spirit) and the body were considered as an inseparable unit. In proposing the separation of spirit from body, the body became objectified, enabling science the means to explore, investigate, and finally understand the body as a part of the natural world in general. This dualism that Descartes introduced, according to Cantwell Smith’s fable, was intended to be a temporary and interim (350 years and counting) measure, since the mind and body cannot exist one without the other.

The benefit of this “temporary” construct was the development of our vast scientific knowledge and the birth of modernism. The cost was equally significant: a profound disenchantment of nature in the 17th century. That fateful Cartesian split involved both epistemological and ontological implications. Fundamentally, (and epistemologically) society was forced to question what was worth knowing. The shift meant that the value of knowledge shifted from the stuff of divine insight, legitimacy and authority, to the supremacy of empirical observation. Such a shift meant society could shuck the authority of the church, and adopt its own secular authority of knowledge (that later, ironically, realigned itself with the church).

From the ontological ground, we were forced to consider What was it that was being understood? The Cartesian divide meant that the physical world became devoid of meaning, understanding and spirit. The world is “ripped apart,” with spirit (and meaningfulness) banished to the realm of the church, and all the rest being free of spirit and spirituality. Empiricism was valued above all, and the common conception was that all that was worth knowing could be known in time. The end of knowledge was in sight by the end of the 19th century; science would soon have a complete, objective, rational and true account of the world that meant the end of science as a discipline.

But then, the 20th century happened, and all hell broke loose (no pun intended).

Science couldn’t explain the scientist himself, and behaviours and minds of the scientists; nor could it explain the origin of mathematics. Empiricism meant that these did not come from God. But neither did they come from the physical world, since both mind/behaviour, as well as mathematics, are abstract, with a maddening self-legitimacy that seemed to defy the pure empiricists. Could, for instance, mathematics be derived from logic? This became The Major Project of 20th century philosophy.

Bertrand Russell, Gödel, Wittgenstein, and others all identified the problems of deriving mathematics from logic, and eventually ended this pursuit. But more damage was wrought on mechanical philosophy by modernism. Relativity destroyed the mechanical model; quantum mechanics destroyed the notion of objectivity and ability to measure anything accurately. Turing showed the limitations of computers; complexity theory showed the limits of determinism. The rational world and a Eurocentric hierarchy of knowledge came apart with the end of colonialism. Even religious traditions that were based on natural philosophy found themselves losing popularity in the face of science, discovery, and pragmatism.

“People panic” in response to the loss of surety in the world, and the tools with which they make sense of the world (as in a scientifically constructed worldview based on direct observation). As the tools “break,” it is a “natural” response to begin to look at the tools themselves through which we were examining the world. Meta examination of all the disciplines began – from looking at the world to looking at the signs and symbols that signify the world. This meta-examination birthed mid-to-late 20th century post-modernism.

The attempt to derive the mind (and significance and meaning) from empirical observations of the world itself, and the examination of the tools with which these examinations were performed, refocused attention on the physical, rather than on the meaning and significance we were supposed to be thinking about in the first place. As it turns out, an examination of the tools influences and changes what the tools are supposed to be working on. (Careful, Brian. You’re dangerously close to espousing the medium is the message!)

Cantwell Smith now frames what he proposes as the “current project” for complex, contemporary times: We must retrieve the content, semantics, meaning, and significance of the world, but not in a nostalgic way that hearkens to natural philosophy or a sentimental longing for “the good ol’ days.” Rather, we must retrieve the type of humanistic engagement that was lost in the anti-contextual, post-modernist navel-gazing of the 20th century. Cantwell Smith calls for a return of subjectivity AND objectivity AND truth in order to construct a metaphysical reclamation of the world that recognizes both the humility we must feel after the scientific discoveries of the 20th century, and the humanism we must deploy after the concomitant rise of critical cultural theory.

The challenge is, how to incorporate the classical humility of science – that there is more to understand than meets the (mind’s) eye, more to the world than you think, so go and look – with the humility of social constructivism, that recognizes that one’s social location affects one’s observations and interpretations of what it is we are looking at. He frames the problem this way: How do you tell a story that seeks to approach the truth that isn’t biased from the beginning, thereby rendering it suspect? The answer is that you don’t – multiple stories aren’t mutually exclusive, despite the reality that they well may be mutually paradoxical (which, of course, provides the basis for dialectics). Multiple stories can’t be held to account for prior fundamentals, but despite that, there are aspects of common grounding that exist, and are of value. To be grounded does not mean that one must be necessarily grounded in an (ideologically privileged) untenable ground. It does mean that we must seek and identify an appropriate ground.

To accomplish this, Cantwell Smith draws our attention to the issue of materiality. If the life you lead affects your understanding of what matters, then how do we consider materiality? He points out that “matter” is both noun and verb, signifying both the stuff of existence and its significance. Hearkening back to Descartes and his temporary schism, matter-the-noun is the body, while matter-the-verb is mind; likewise material(ity) . What we must do, according to Cantwell Smith, is retrieve the sense of materiality in what matters. A material object is something that matters in people’s lives, and thus the world is once again grounded in what is important.

The vernacular conception of (capitalistic) “materialism” is actually divorced from what matters in people’s lives. The solution to the ills of the post-20th century world lie in undoing Cartesian separation. This becomes the starting point for telling a story of the world that is grounded in importance and significance. The material world divorced from what matters is an unfortunate artefact of science; likewise religion, that separates the secular from the spiritual (matter from what matters) and focuses only on the latter. Reclaiming an integral experience of the world (what McLuhan might call “involvement in depth”) can give an account of the world that explains both cultural pluralism and observed scientific reality – understanding and theory that is grounded in physical experience. We must be honest in our treatment of scientific discovery, 20th century epistemology, and cultural theory. Such honest treatment means that reactionary nostalgia and foundationalism can be transcended, thereby doing justice to both science and social constructionism, and giving voice to mattering and meaningfulness, that answers the materialism and fundamentalism upon which predatory capitalism and religious fundamentalism are “preying.”

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - July 20 - Janine Marchessault - Screens

Screens are a metaphor for consciousness, embodying the material practices of consciousness, as film makers and film scholars have known for a very long time. Yesterday’s McLuhan lecturer, Janine Marchessault from York University, uses McLuhan’s work in her examination of the connections between screens and consciousness as a way of connecting the actions of the present to the context of history. For Marchessault (and many others of us), McLuhan’s methodology provides a vehicle to understand what’s (really) going on, beyond what is obvious. Thus, she situates concrete uses of contemporary screens and technology within a historical context, specifically looking at Canada’s Expo 67, and within that context, the marvel that was the Labyrinth pavilion.

It was, according to Marchessault, “the most impressive and successful of all the multi-screen exhibits at Expo 67.” Indeed, the Expo during Canada’s centennial year was a formidable showcase of audio-visual technology and experimentation. Multiple-screen exhibits were the order of the day long before today’s ubiquitous “video-walls.” Multiple split-screens, screen components that moved independent of one another, screens that provided texture and depth, 360 degree “circlevision” screens that put the audience at centre ice during a hockey game (among other illusions), and Czechoslovakia’s “Kino-automat” – interactive theatre with audience choice of plot forks with involvement of the (live) actor who is depicted on-screen, all explored the new vistas of participatory (albeit in a rudimentary fashion) cinema.

The site and pavilions of Expo 67 itself were conceived and constructed as the epitome of urban modernity – dematerialized culture, expressed in ephemeral, moveable, impermanent, relocatable structures, characterizing the flexibility of a city in motion.

The Labyrinth pavilion was specifically designed as an impermanent, architected environment that demonstrated the relationships among between architectural theory, urban theory and media theory. According to McLuhan, communications media create environments that are inherently biased, that is, they impose their own assumptions on the user, thereby transforming the user(s) and the relationships among the users. McLuhan called for the creation of anti-environments – both physical, and cognitive – to uncover these biases, or, as he called them, hidden ground effects. One way, among many, to accomplish this is to create “hybrid media” that reveal these new forms. Marchessault draws our attention to the closing paragraph from chapter 5 (“Hybrid Energy”) of Understanding Media:

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.

Marchessault connects the iconic 1960s architecture of Buckminster Fuller to the development of expanded cinema in that era. The notion of a non-linear universe courtesy of Einstein was entering the common consciousness. Fuller reflected this expansion of thinking in his design and construction of non-linear spaces, Expo’s famous geodesic dome being exemplary. Expanded cinema likewise creates a new sense of space, consciousness and simultaneity as visualized on screen. Both of these observations are completely consistent with McLuhan’s writings on the non-linear “allatonceness” of acoustic space. Indeed, Expo 67 was the first world exposition to transcend the industrial age strictures of iron, steam and automobile (that characterized three previous Expos) to feature the “new media” of multi-modal tactile imagery as new ways of experiencing the world, reflecting an expanding conception of reality. Synaesthetic cinema relates directly to the characteristically 1960s experience of psychedelia and the expansion of mind and awareness.

“Television is the software of the earth, obsolescing cinema as documentary art,” observes Marchessault. As enacted at Expo 67, screens in their myriad experimental forms become architecture, reflecting the new medium of television that (at that time, at least) is reflexive and ubiquitous, part of an imploding picture of the earth enabled by the uncontrollable simultaneity of satellite connection.

When considered as environmental, cinema becomes less “theatrical” and more realistic, and therefore complex. This shift in perception of the nature of cinema was exemplified by Canada’s National Film Board, shifting their focus from showing their films in theatres to television. As “the medium is the message,” this shift affected the nature of what was shown – namely Canada and Canadians – shifting from a theatrical portrayal to a realistic one. At the time, television brought the (real) outside world into our living rooms.

The Labyrinth project was the NFB’s innovation at Expo, featuring large screen projection, simultaneous multi-screen recording and projection, and the introduction of “vertical editing,” that is, images that connected across multiple, horizontally and vertically stacked screens. Greater participation was demanded from the viewing audience in making the requisite connections among the screens, increasing the cognitive mobility of the audience, and reflecting the mobility of reality itself. The concept originated from Colin Lowe’s idea of environmental cinema. His original conception had the audience looking down through a glass floor to see an aerial view of Montreal from above. The idea was that the audience would have the effect of moving through space. As it was actually built, Labyrinth was comprised of three chambers.

Chamber 1 was designed with balconies overlooking two screens, one on the floor and the other vertical on one wall. The audience had to lean over to see screen on floor below. Often there were two images that had to be connected to complete the scene, such as a child on the vertical screen feeding a goldfish below. Chamber 2 was comprised of a maze of mirrored glass with lights and sounds that respond to people moving through the zig-zag path. The sounds combined human, animal and technology sounds, in order to create chaos, confusion and sense of losing oneself. The third chamber was a regular theatre with the seating in balconies. There were five screens in crucifix form (i.e. one in the centre, and one connected to the centre’s top, bottom, left and right) showing various images comprising life rituals and experiences, and found stories from a variety of cultures. The film was edited both vertically and horizontally, thereby creating complex composite images that necessitated audience participation to complete the total image, in true cool media fashion.

Labyrinth’s synaesthetic cinema created a sensory training ground for the global city and global citizen, demonstrating an expanded consciousness of the global cultural plurality that was consistent with multi-cultural focus of Canada in 1967. The relationships and clashes among the five screens of the third chamber became a metaphor (in McLuhan sense of a transformational agent) for the experience of the global village’s chaos, emergent experiences, and allatonceness, and presaged the culture of the internet. As we are now discovering, the global village is a space of experiences.

Carolyn Guertin’s response began by observing that transformative architecture may have been new to cinema in 1967, but was indeed an old concept in tradition and literature, pointing to Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, as a labyrinth that created an immersive space. She related the depth created by labyrinthine walls on what was once an open surface to the depth experience that hyperlinked new media attempts to create via internet technologies in cyberspace. Where depth of field in cinema involved the convergence of lines of light, depth of field for the online screen environment can be related to the depth of search, depth of time, or the depth of hyperlink tracking, as de Kerckhove observes.

Guertin observes that Labyrinth in 1967 had viewers, not interactors, in the sense of today’s contemporary interactive media. In fact, she makes the claim that Labyrinth was experimental, but ultimately its own dead end, since there were no follow-ons. The reason, she says, is that Labyrinth was not interactive.

While I understand Guertin’s claim, particularly from the ground of her work, I don’t necessarily agree that it is a completely useful claim to make. Considering Labyrinth from the ground of media temperature, it was a very cool experience for the audience relative to their active participation and completion. In this way, it was cinema (at the time, a hot medium) attempting to cool itself to become television-like (at the time, a cool medium). The audience connecting and completing the images to create a narrative environment is seen today in gaming environments that, I would suggest, has some of its multi-modal roots in experiments that began at Expo 67.

Guertin continues with an interesting observation: Synaesthesia is to the body what metaphor is to the mind – a way of transforming one thing (concept or sense) into another. Synaesthesia is thus used by the environmental creator (cinematographer, cyberspace designer) to confuse the mind, thereby creating a sense of immersion in acoustic space. Analogue immersive environments are psychologically transformational, as is art. The idea behind both art and immersive environments is to create a space that attempts to transcend dimensions, times, and spaces, and to link various experiences of the world in ways that transcend physicality. Simultaneity in the analogue world shifts to instantaneity in the digital.

The second responder, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand queries the metaphor of screen and cinema as ways of understanding the metaphors – that is, transformations – of our experience. Screens, she says, expand the collective memory and collective consciousness. In the past, theatrical cinema created common cultural experiences. She now asks, what are the effects of private (computer or game) screens and media? What effects do audience involvement, creative additions, and “tampering” with the original artefact engender in the audience itself as they remix, remake, and these pre-constructed (or should I say, partially constructed) environments? What are the constraints (if any) on these changes that will still allow us to afford collective remembrance, and a collective consciousness that is enabled by today’s instantaneity?

These, I think, are important and significant questions, as collective cultural touchstones become at once tribalized within apparently fragmented subcultures, but paradoxically, enacted as collective cultural experiences in the act of remaking and remixing the artefacts. In other words, the cultural commonality no longer inheres in the artefacts, but in the act of making (and remaking). This, of course, once again opens conversations about intellectual property, consumer becoming producer, participatory culture, and (he chuckles to himself) the role of museums and artefacts in contemporary culture and society.

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - July 13 – Tony Hushion and Brian Porter

“Digital Imperative – New media is the message”

Tony Hushion and Brian Porter led a “virtual” (note the big quotation marks around that highly problematic adjective) tour of ROM’s new Digital Gallery, and more importantly, it’s raison d’etre. Here’s the bottom line of their presentation: the bottom line. Their presentation is yet another strong indication that the venerable museum is first a business, and only incidentally, a custodian of culture, history and context.

The details of their presentation are fairly straight-forward. What they call the ROM’s Digital Gallery is essentially a movie theatre outfitted with touch-screen workstations at each seat. While a high-production-values video of one of the curators plays, telling the “story” of a particular gallery – the only one produced so far is the highly in demand Egypt gallery – visitors can “manipulate” various artefacts from the corresponding collection on-screen. In this case, “manipulate” means “spin a 3D image of the artefact around on the screen to see it from various angles.” The thinking, such as it is, behind this is that (1) objects under glass with labels aren’t cool; (2) curators are scarce resources but videos of curators are but a push of a play button away; (3) existing “content” can be “repurposed.” For those not familiar with corporate-speak, allow me to translate point three: “We’ve got a lot of old junk in our collection, and we can charge money for people to view their images, (since we own the copyright on the images.)” Cultural artefacts, often collected under dubious circumstances over the last century and a bit, are thus converted into “digital assets” with the intent to “develop these assets to create new opportunities for access, education and revenue.” It is important to note that the revenue theme was featured prominently and pervasively throughout the talk.

The idea is to charge schools, researchers, and the general public, to partake of this multi-modal cinema experience – the museum as theme park. While volunteers can be tour guides in the physical museum, there is only one Egyptology curator, who now can be available to all through the magic of cinema. The ultra-wide screen tour, using the latest in digital video composition, is complemented by visitors interacting with the (video representation of the) artefacts. A museum for the gamer generation, paid for by the gamers themselves. What’s not to like?

Regular readers – particularly those who are following my write-ups of the Speakers Series – may have detected a certain... oh I don’t know... cynicism shall we say?... about this particular talk. I am, in fact, disturbed (but not surprised) by the direction the ROM is taking, for several reasons. First, this initiative suggests that ROM management has little understanding about the effects of these sorts of technology. Second, it also suggests that ROM management has little understanding about the role of the institution of museum in a society that is undergoing the types of reversals we are currently experiencing.

The proposed Digital Gallery, rather than being an interactive experience, is interpassive in the extreme. Just as I have said that mass media is no longer media for the masses but media by the masses, interactive media and technologies are those in which people actively participate in creating the environment in which they are participating. It is characteristically a cool medium, that is, one that is actively completed by the users relative to the environmental ground or cultural context in which that completion occurs. It is this last proviso that removes the term “interactive” from being an absolute descriptor, to one that is environmentally and contextually defined.

Television in Marshall McLuhan’s day was, arguably, an interactive medium, as its users had to complete the fuzzy picture, and actively participated in the completion of the viewing experience with friends and family. My iconic memory of this active participation was my grandmother arguing with Walter Cronkite during the CBS Evening News. Television today has “hotted up” – couch potato syndrome being the clear evidence.

Computer applications in which users activate certain pre-programmed sequences by actuating control points (I’m generalizing the concept of clicking an on-screen button with a mouse) was interactive compared to watching television, but has become interpassive compared to, say, participation in dynamic, massively multi-user narrative, typified by some of the online role playing games.

In the case of ROM’s Digital Gallery, they have created a (hot) cinematic experience, with (hot) interpassive control of (hot) images of artefacts. The primary sense that is engaged is sight (rousing soundtrack notwithstanding). The mere fact that interpassive screens are employed does not, in my view, engage the tactile (a point of semantic disagreement between Derrick de Kerckhove and I).

The story being told by the on-screen curator is THE story. Period. Now that Egypt is done, next in line is a Canadian heritage story (since that is the choice of the donors), to be followed by Medieval (the choice of the paying marketplace). But once a given story is told, it will play, if not forever, then for a very long time, since these things are (understandably) expensive to produce. And there are a lot of galleries to monetize, I mean, digitize. More problematic is the fact that this one story is one point of view, one construction of knowledge. What is valued as knowledge, in this instance, is what is valued according to a measure of financial viability. There is very limited opportunity for a critical examination of the cultural context – or more particularly, our contemporary cultural context – as informed by an examination and consideration of the artefacts in their original ground. A fixed story precludes active engagement as a way of experiencing and understanding the many complex dimensions of cultural history. This, I believe, is a vitally important role for museums to be playing today. Rather than creating “mini-Egyptologists” from the school children who visit the museum-as-video-arcade, the museum’s objective might otherwise be to create “mini ancient Egyptians,” early Canadians, medieval feudal lords or serfs, and other actors in a total participatory environment.

So what does this Digital Gallery retrieve from the past? Highly visual. One point of view. Focus on money and assets. Little wonder the new branding is Renaissance ROM. I suppose we’ll have to wait a very long time for Gutenberg ROM, and finally, Electricity ROM, to truly bring the museum up to date.

By the way, for anyone who’s interested in what a museum could be doing in creating dynamic, participatory environments for collecting, curating, and contextualizing culture, and presenting it online, check out the Victoria and Albert Museum Online, and in particular, their contemporary collection. VaM may not be as flashy as the ROM’s Digital Gallery, but then again, the institution hasn’t just built itself a shiny new storefront, albeit one with... ahem... corrugated aluminum siding.

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - July 6 – Monique Tschofen – Cannibals

“Agents of Aggressive Order”: Letters, hands, teeth and conspicuous consumption in the early Canadian torture narrative.

Monique Tschofen begins her examination of the “early Canadian torture narrative” by focusing on McLuhan’s fascination with the break boundary – the point of reversal effected by the action of a new medium (in the general case) on an old environment. It is the so-called point of no return when the entire socio-psychological system of human interaction suddenly changes into another characteristic form, thereby creating massive disruption and dislocation in the status quo. Break boundaries typically possess several common characteristics. They are productive, in that an entirely new environment is created that (obviously) changes the context in which all prior technologies, media and conceptions exist, and therefore (not so obviously) changes their meanings in society. Thus, they are also transformative, even though those who come through the break boundary have a great deal of difficulty perceiving the transformation, while those who are “born” on the other side of the break boundary have a great deal of difficulty conceiving of the world prior to the transformation. Break boundaries are also “explosive,” meaning that the juxtaposition of old and new in the same time and place results not merely in change, but in radical, sometimes cataclysmic, change. Finally, it is at the break boundary that our environment becomes visible, that is, obviously perceptible. As a society, we can see the dynamics of the interactions enabled by the various things we conceive and create. We see them (and the total environment that they create) for what they are: structuring mechanisms that have changed out lives throughout the time that they were acting imperceptibly, except to a few who possessed the perceptual tools to see them.

Tschofen reads McLuhan work on perception and sensory balance as a treatise on human agency – as we become aware of the physical and psychic dangers that are properties of the technologies we create, we can choose how, and where, to engage them, and emerge stronger as a society and culture. [I refer to this vitally important aspect of understanding McLuhan in terms of “McLuhan as a political project.”]

She goes on to examine McLuhan’s repeated reference to the ancient myth of King Cadmus, in which the founding of Thebes was accomplished by warriors that sprung from the sowing of dragon’s teeth. McLuhan related the lineality of teeth, and the intimate relationship between mouth, teeth and language to reference the aggressive order, precision, power and violence that arises from language. In particular, it is the relationship among oral (teeth in the mouth), and written (language separated from the mouth and “sown” in lineal rows) language, and empires (warriors) that leads to McLuhan’s examination of history through the lens of The Gutenberg Galaxy. She also does a great job of explaining “the medium is the message,” as follows:

I think McLuhan is calling for a most complex hermeneutic... He’s inviting us to listen between the lines, or to see into the sounds, and to find there something important about the history of our media, and of the epistemes and cognitive styles they engender. To put this simply, he’s inviting us to ask: “What does this text let us understand about itself as a technology – about the production and reproduction and dissemination as well as the multiple effects and influences this kind of technology might yield? Can we see within it the traces of a history of our media?” In asking these questions, he’s inviting us to break the containers of our own thinking, knowing that these disruptions can be dangerous but ultimately lead us to new freedoms, because media can configure not only our situations but also our intellectual operations. Finally, through his own writing style, he’s modelling this kind of double-operation he invites us to undertake. By leaving these symptoms and traces of previous media environments, McLuhan makes secondary arguments about the history of media without needing to state them directly, showing or performing, rather than telling.

Lovely!

Tschofen then goes on to examine an aspect of early Canadian history, namely the early (violent) interactions of the British and French explorers with the first nations peoples as an exemplar of the collision between manuscript/early print culture and oral culture at a break boundary. For example, a Huron woman observed that the “Black Robes” chant incantations and spells, and subsequently a village of otherwise healthy people mysteriously die – making a connection between European prayer and European diseases. Other examples abound in the chronicles of the time that use a trope of apophasis – the narrator lament the difficulty of conveying the horror of a scene, and then proceed to do precisely that in gory, gothic detail. It is more a promise than a warning: “The program you are about to see contains scenes of violence, course language and nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.” In other words, “now that I’ve got your attention...”

Reports back from the New World were liberally peppered with tales of violence, torture and cannibalism, that Tschofen maintains comprise a “torture narrative” designed to evoke horror at the transformations imposed on the literate, mediated European body at the break boundary with a “primitive” oral society. The purpose of such gruesome tales were to provide the justification for colonization. Here were these cannibals and terror mongers who are clearly in need of the civilizing influence of European belief and education. Domination and imposition of what would be a foreign culture is justified because of the extreme and obvious need for a civilizing influence. However, using a McLuhan discourse, we find another structuring dynamic at work. Here, the torture and cannibalism depicted in written transmissions back to Europe make plain the violence at the break boundary between oral and literate societies, and the “changing epistemologies induced by media technologies.” In the rather graphic examples shared by Tschofen, the intrinsic nature of oral vs. literate societies is captured. The literate Jesuits, tortured at the hands of the indigenous peoples, connected the book (written account) to the body. The book (e.g. Bible) is one with the material body. In contrast, for the primary oral people, language is always an embodied experience; “speech-acts are always physical acts that are grounded in and return to the physical body... They cannot say anything without doing it.”

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - June 29 – Deanne Bogdan – Music

Last evening we were treated to a wonderful lecture and multiple performances, comprising live and recorded piano, operatic, technological and satirical performances. Deanne Bogdan conducted a keenly receptive audience on an exploration that originated in her personal conflict with regard to the literate, as compared with the experiential, nature of music. The resolution of this tension arises from the use of modality as the conceptual link connecting music with the perceptual frame of Marshall McLuhan.

Bogdan begins with Leonard Meyer’s query from his essay, “On rehearing music” – do repeated hearings of music contribute to an increase or decrease in musical enjoyment? Music, according to Meyer, is a meaningful communication; he draws on information theory to demonstrate how the communicative experience of music becomes transformed to information in the mind of the listener. Thus, the information gleaned from repeated listenings reaches a limit. But this dry analysis negates the “music” of music. By reframing music as information to be communicated according to the ground of, say, the (increasingly useless) Shannon-Weaver model, one is evaluating not the enjoyment of music, but rather the “enjoyment” of an information communication technology. There is an inherent profundity of music that goes beyond linear analysis: Northrop Frye maintained that anticipation of the climax of the piece and a deeper understanding of the structure never fails to heighten the appreciation of the piece.

This consideration set the tone and theme for the rest of the evening that engaged the audience in a participatory experiment consisting of multi-modal experience of (nominally) the same, or similar, music. It also became a tacit demonstration of the comparative effects of McLuhan’s most difficult concepts of hot and cool media.

A digression: “The medium is the message” suggests that we know the nature and characteristics of any medium by virtue of its effects. This applies equally when considering the relative media temperature of any medium, that is, anything we conceive or create. To say that a given medium, say television or a pizza, are hot or cool in absolute terms is neither useful nor likely correct. (Most people get it backward, anyway.) First, media temperature is always relative to the ground, or the cultural and societal context within which the medium acquires meaning. Second, the media temperature can only be judged according to the effects, or messages, that our interaction with the medium induces in us. Here are some characteristic effects of hot and cool media:

Hot Medium:

• Extends a single sense in High Definition with lots of information. This is not to say that other senses have no information, but rather that one sense’s stimulation is overpowering compared to the rest.


• Little completion or active participation to be done; less “filling in” to be done by the audience. Everything is explicit.


• Tends to exclude by virtue of its isolating properties. In the case of senses, for instance, one sense is isolated and separated from the rest; there is no balance.


• Therefore, it engenders specialisation and fragmentation. For example, with highly specialized departments and very specific job descriptions, a bureaucracy tends to be a Hot Medium.


• Normal reaction is to numb overall awareness to mitigate the Hot effects, even as one sense is heightened. An intense reaction to a very Hot Medium is a state of hypnosis or trance. We are not asleep, but we are not aware. We are also highly suggestible.


• Often characterised by short, intense experiences. Motivational speakers rely on Hot Media effects.


• Tends to capture or hijack attention.

Cool Medium — the complementary opposite effects.

• Engages multiple senses with Low Definition; less information for each.


• High in participation and active completion; audience must “fill in the blanks” — originally meant as sensory involvement only, but the description becomes very useful when it is applied to intellectual participation and engagement as well.


• Tends to include.


• Engenders generalization and consolidation.


• Natural reaction is to engage awareness and heighten perception.


• Often associated with longer term, sustained experiences.


• Tends to attract “actively aware” attention, freely given.

Cultural critic Edward Said distinguishes musical performance as an “extreme occasion,” which, according to Said reviewer, Dan Miller, is “an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. It is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible.” contrasting with the worldly – that integrates societies, cultures, and most importantly, embodied experience.

When considered as extreme occasion, each listener brings her or his unique ground to the performance, creating a unique (and isolating, fragmentary) experience that exists as the constructed connection directly between the listener and the performer. Factors that comprise the ground, and hence the context within which meaning is individual made include: the listener’s individual background and musical experience; their awareness of the genre, the ability to understand the nature and complexity of performance itself; their understanding of the historical/biographical context of the work, and other musicological information that provides the musical context, both of the composer and his/her times, as well as the setting of the form of the piece in the context of the times in which it was composed; the technical tonal/syntactic information, comprising musical structure, progressions, harmony, counterpoint, essentially the technical construction of the piece; and the interpretive information added by the performer at the moment of performance, interpretations being syntactic in nature, relating to the skill of the performer, perhaps relative to the performer’s history and prior performances.

Of course, one must ask (at least while participating in the McLuhan realm) what is the message, or the effect, of considering music as extreme occasion in this context? Relative to media temperature, it can be demonstrated (he says, satirizing professorial pomp,) that such analysis serves to heat up the musical medium, creating separation and distance among the listener, the performer, the composer and the piece. This is not surprising: consider the hot environment of the formal concert hall with its ceremony, ritual and protocol, and compare it, for example, with (hot) Renaissance perspective art that separates the viewer from the viewed. In “hotting up” a medium, it is often the case that technical appreciation replaces aesthetic experience.

Deanne Bogdan related this concept to Aristotle’s four causes: formal (the “essence” or nature of the thing), material (its substance), efficient (relating to what brings it into being, closest to the conventional, if misguided, notion of cause-and-effect) and final (its ultimate reason for being). The musical performance itself is the material cause; the information content describe above would comprise aspects of its efficient cause. However, the musical experience in totality, embodied in the listener, is its formal cause, which, according to McLuhan, is the message of the musical medium. To lessen the “extreme occasion” nature of a performance, according to Bogdan, the listener must become immersed, or totally involved in depth, with the performance, experiencing its message, actively participating in the creation of the musical experience, and essentially effecting a cool medium.

The effects of a listener’s knowledge on her/his musical enjoyment changes to a question of the effects of involvement with the experience on the engagement of the audience; how enabled is the audience to engage with the “experience of the music, not the conscious integration of the cognitive with the affective , but as an embodied sensory realm.” This notion is reciprocal: How involved the audience is with the performer intimately relates to how involved the performer is with the audience.

Thus, watching a video of a piano virtuoso, the camera attuned to every keystroke, produces a hot effect in the audience, creating the fragmentary extreme performance. On the other hand, a video of musical genius Glenn Gould shows his facial expression, his body moving with the music, his free hand conducting the playing hand – everything, in fact, except the actual pressing of the keys. That, in a very cool fashion, is for the audience to fill in.

Gould, reciprocally influenced by, and influencing, Marshall McLuhan, understood the difference between hot extreme occasion and cool intimacy and involvement in depth, and retreated from the concert stage in the mid-1960s. He created the paradoxical “double depth engagement” – an inner attunement towards the ecstasy of perfected performance combined with an outward engagement and connection with the social context of audience experience.

While Gould “put the concert audience into the junkyard,” it was not a rejection of the audience, but the rejection of the cliché of audience. The junkyard becomes the “rag and bone shop of the heart” of W.B. Yates to which McLuhan frequently refers, from which the audience will be retrieved [as archetype; see From Cliché to Archetype by McLuhan and Watson] in a new form, achieving an advancement of culture itself. The issue becomes one of creating not only sound, but sonic environments in which both the external sound and the internal process of awareness of the nature of sound can be simultaneously experienced.

Gould is thus a media environmentalist, simultaneously engaging in hot and cool experiences. Through his use of technology in the final chapter of his life, Gould makes the (re)creation of cultural ground visible. Technology reintegrates performer, composer and listener in a new way. He says, “I think our whole notion of what music is has forever merged with all the sounds that around us, everything that the environment makes available.” Listener thus becomes artist, completing the piece that exists not as extreme occasion, but as intimately embodied experience.

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - June 22 – Space – David Moos

Last evening we were treated to an exploration of Space courtesy of David Moos, curator of (among other things) the current Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Moos introduced his talk with a poem by free jazz artist Sun Ra, connecting abstract music with abstract art, and the “pivoting planes” on which words cannot be written, nor images drawn. Without naming it, Moos clearly referenced Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a cool medium that necessitates involvement and completion by the audience. Indeed, referring to McLuhan’s From Cliché to Archetype, Moos brings in the notion of aural (not “oral”) space, and with it, the space of relationships that is the subtext of his talk, and about which I’ll have more to say later.

Abstract art creates a non-objective pictorial reality, in which the relationships between the images created by the artist, and her/his audience, have no connection to the audience’s everyday relationships with the visual world. Even cubism, which is itself a representational mode – merely flattening what was a 3-dimensional object into two dimensions – is strongly connected to the visual world. Abstract art obsolesces the visual (which, as you may recall, is the dominant sense of the Gutenberg era), and introduces both the tactile and audile, both dominant sensorial modes of relationship. Abstract art, therefore, creates a space of “intellect and pure concept” in the words of Malovich.

The current AGO exhibit asks, “What is the shape of colour?” and explores the range of spatial experience created by the so-called colour field artists of the late 1950s and 1960s. Moos begins with the work of Dan Flavin, who paints with light rather than pigment. Flavin’s work changes the audience’s experience of space as the light “occupies” the space, and therefore defines it in a new way. This is characteristic of the colour field artists who set out to create a new environment through the use of large fields of colour on massive canvases or architectural structures. Colour field artists also explored the paradoxical depth of flatness, which was the logical conclusion of 100 years of art history, during which the depth of the picture plane progressively decreased.

At the time of Renaissance art, with its distant perspective vanishing point, the viewer was kept at a distance from what he was viewing. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan writes, “The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience... The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.” This involvement in depth – one of McLuhan’s most pervasive themes for the electric age – is clearly evident in the explorations of the colour field artists.

They directly introduce the experience of tactility in art, by eschewing the usual canvas priming with gesso. This allows the texture of the canvas to become a feature of the painting itself, creating a new tactile and depth experience in a 2-dimensional form. While Renaissance (perspective) art can be appreciated at a distance – and creating distance between the masses and the holy was the intention at the time – the subtle tactility of the unprimed canvas can only be appreciated at an intimate distance, the viewer being involved in depth with what is viewed, the eye becoming a surrogate for the finger.

The relationship among the artist, the art and the viewer that creates the paradox of depth in flatness can be seen in the work of Jules Olitski. Such a paradox is quite at home in McLuhan’s world. Indeed, the 1960s was a time when people from many disciplines were attempting to explore the paradoxes created by the explosion of electric technologies that recreated what was a linear world of objectivity. In literature, art, science, sociology and other fields, avant garde thinkers were expressing their attempts at gaining understanding in the face of the myriad challenges created by the reversals of electric communication technologies, and the secondary and tertiary effects. The art of Fred Sandback perhaps demonstrates this paradox best. Sandback creates sculptural space with lengths of acrylic yarn that both occupy and define space, at once creating, and negating, the notion of inside as distinct from outside. Sandback’s paradoxical works exemplify McLuhan’s idea of integral involvement in depth, characteristic of our electric times.

McLuhan is well-known for popularizing the notion of acoustic space, that he derived from University of Toronto behavioural psychologist, E.A. Bott’s “auditory space.” The idea is derived from the observation that sound comes from all around us. (This idea was, in turn, borrowed from the Pythagoreans, and later Pascal, who described nature as having its centre everywhere and its boundaries nowhere.) McLuhan writes,

The ear favours no particular point of view. We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.” We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

For McLuhan, acoustic space is a percept that extends the 3-dimensional notion of space to include time. We are in the centre of a sphere of space-time in which, as I like to say, everywhere is here, and everywhen is now.

The visual dominance of the Gutenberg era, and of Renaissance art, that define external spaces through the creation of distance and separation, gives way to interior spaces of total involvement via tactility and audility. In an analogous fashion to the separation of the integral word of a primary-oral society into sight and meaning on the one hand, and sound on the other (as meaning is coded into otherwise meaningless symbols called the alphabet), so too is integral touch separated into tactility and tangibility. In the electric age, when we are “on the air,” we are literally no-bodies, “discarnate man” in McLuhan’s words. There is no materiality – tangibility – in the cyber world, but there certainly is tactility. We touch and are touched by those with whom we form relationship in the age of instantaneous communication, regardless of where, or when, they are. And it is only through involvement in depth that we create the sort of relationship that creates this discarnate tactility.

A medium has meaning only in relationship to its ground, or context, that may be another medium, or the environment of dynamic processes created by a multitude of interacting media. In today’s world, the environment is continually being re-created through relationships of involvement in depth [and you can read that last phrase two ways]. The colour field artists of the 1960s attempted to demonstrate the effects of involvement in the depth created on a flat picture plane, creating for us a very tangible example of the paradoxical times in which we now live.

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - June 15 – Donald Carveth – Psychoanalysis

This week, we were treated to a rather bleak polemic on the Medium of Psychoanalysis and the Message of Pain, Suffering, Bleeding and Death. And, when you think about it, good ol’ Sigmund Freud wasn’t all sweetness and light.

Challenging McLuhan’s assertion that language is a medium, and hence, an extension of our self, Carveth suggested that language cannot be regarded as an extension of self, but rather a constitutive of self, that is, that which defines and shapes the self. All distinctions that enable one to recognize self from not-self (I am me; I am not my chair, desk or computer) are distinctions created by, and of, the mind. Hence, language – whether it be verbal of non-verbal – is the means whereby the mind creates the self as a distinct entity.

Realizing that Carveth is, admittedly, not a McLuhan scholar, he is, of course, left with the literal, early-McLuhan reading of the medium is the message, and the notion that medium is an extension, as separate from a constitutive. Regular readers will undoubtedly know that as Carveth described the relationship between language and the self, language is very definitely a medium (in the late-McLuhan, Laws of Media, sense), since it, in no uncertain terms, shapes us even as we shape it.

Psychoanalysis, according to Carveth, is a dialectic process that helps us discover the self as a distinct entity from all that we experience, including, as he puts it, the “pre-verbal self.” It is interesting to observe that this specific characterization – the non-integral, distinct separation of self from the world, and the fragmentation – are all characteristic effects of a hot medium. This should not be surprising, since the discipline of psychoanalysis was invented at the height of the dominance of the Gutenberg era (i.e. just before it began to head into reversal under electric conditions), characterized by industrialization and mechanization that exploded what was integral into fragmented, distinct bits. Carveth used allusions to the separation of the knower from the known, and words being used to distinguish among objects and an objectified self, somehow apart from our experience of self. Of course, to more modern and (I would prejudicially say, enlightened) thinkers, this conception is hugely problematic, and entirely characteristic of a chauvinistic, Eurocentric worldview. Little wonder, then, that Carveth’s remarks headed, from this point, towards oblivion and, well, obsolescence.

Carveth’s riff followed the path of Steiner, noting that we are “language animals,” and as such, able to create both the context of our life (the conceived world), as well as the context and conception of our own demise. Language allows us to transcend our animal nature to sociality, to become human. Through our language, we celebrate death “at the right time,” while death through “psychotic explosion” – violence and whatnot – is the reversal to animality.

Anyone with any knowledge of the social life of “animals” (not to mention their communicative abilities – viz. elephants, dolphins, primates, birds) would know that this line of reasoning is, quite simply, a crock of animal dung.

But Carveth persists: Psychoanalysis emphasizes the “wounds” (the gaps in our language-conceived self) from which emotion arises and flows, that Carveth likens to bleeding. The psychoanalytic process of dis-identification – a form of meditation that negates or sublimates the self – is necessary to understand these flows. He asks, can psychoanalysis and language be compatible? Psychoanalysis requires non-symbolic discourse (hence a variety of therapies have emerged) to break through our language-constructed self. What emerges – the “desymbolized” material – is converted to speech, and thence to self-realization, thereby reconstructing the self, now healed. Psychoanalysis must allow the wounds in the psyche to bleed and not to close, in order to permit the inevitable nihilism of psychosis to move from “death in life” to a life that learns to bear the “death-creating” functions of what is inevitably a slow process of assimilating negative emotions in the inexorable death march of our existence.

Psychoanalysis therefore teaches us how to live and how to die, and how to prepare for it, to bear our wounds (and our “crosses,” with many allusions to the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition of imposed and assumed guilt and the psychoanalytic process), and to ultimately accept suffering and death. To truly live, one must truly suffer.

No wonder psychoanalysts all see shrinks...

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - June 8 – Alexandra Palmer – Fashion

If the medium is the message, what message is fashion? As regular readers of either this blog or McLuhan know, “the side effects are the real effects.” In this context, the question that must be asked is, when we look beyond the clothes themselves, what hidden ground does fashion, and particularly haute couture, reveal?

Fashion exhibits in art museums allow designers to remake their histories. This, of course, is one of the messages of museum-as-medium. As the ground belongs jointly to the curator, and the public and community in whose context both the museum and the particular exhibit exists, the museum exhibit of fashion becomes a meta-probe into the changes of society. The fashion itself in its own time reveals much about the society of the day; fashion recast by curator in the context of a museum sets up a time relationship between the earlier, and present, days. In this way, even fashion of a time becomes “Ahistorical.”

Dr. Palmer frames the question like this: What do museum exhibits tell us about fashion? Because of the limitation in display formats, and the facts that the exhibit is static, (whereas the fashion in its day was not), and the original materials are not stable, fashion exhibits at once tell old histories, while producing new ones. In this way, fashion in the context of a museum recreate society’s understandings of both past and present.

After World War I, museum visitors have knowledge of modernity. Their opinions of what they see in the exhibits are reflexive, meaning that meaning is always measured relative to one’s own experience. For many visitors, the fashion exhibit retrieves the shopping experience, with visitors vicariously “trying on” and “wearing” the various pieces on display. The task of the curator, then, becomes on of reframing exhibits to interpret the objects in the context of a deliberately chosen cultural framework that then conveys a new meaning. This new meaning is one that is relevant to the public, becoming the statement of the curator. As McLuhan tells us, the artist begins with the desired effects and then creates the cause; this is no different than the process of the curator who, in the process of reinterpreting the earlier culture, creates meaning and message (that is, effect) for the current culture.

Dr. Palmer showed a magazine spread in which double-page spreads of fashion displays cited 18th century paintings, with movie actors playing the major parts in the paintings, and the models wearing couture from various design houses. In a marvellously McLuhanesque montage, the fashion magazine photo-spreads retrieve the old masters from museum displays’ reconstructions of the paintings, using contemporary celebrities of both the silver screen (reversal of the painting) and the runway. The paintings come to life as they are embodied in the models and the fashion, then frozen in display and photo, once again becoming art among the glossy pages of the fashion magazine.

The fashion designer, now displaying couture away from the runways, becomes artist, and with that, comes the drive to probe the cultural ground in which fashion – and particularly couture, normally exists.

Belgian designer, Martin Margiela, is a prime example. He uses unorthodox venues, such as poor neighbourhoods, for his shows and photo-spreads, and materials derived from worn clothes and Salvation Army cast-offs, to challenge (probe) the fashion industry. In doing so, he probes conventional notions of beauty, fit, and size, challenging the mantra of, “you can never be too rich or too thin.” In another example, the process of creating fashion is interrogated, with fused-seam prêt-a-porter on giant rolls of fabric, requiring only to be draped over the model and cut, or not, to suit the designer. The exhibit is reminiscent of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with long ribbons of brightly coloured fabric, terminating in a live model. Or, in a most daring probe of the inherent process of disintegration and decay to which all fashion is vulnerable, Margiela impregnated clothing with bacteria and yeasts so that the physical decay of fashion becomes the figure, rather than the ground, of the museum exhibit, bringing in aspects of reversal. Indeed, the displays were outside the museum, viewed by visitors through windows.

Fashion designers are uniquely attuned to the zeitgeist, and therefore fulfil an important probative, and predictive, value for society. Because they are required to develop new creations that are presumably never-before seen every six months, and because they must address, at some point, real purchasers, fashion designers are among the epitome of McLuhan’s description of artist: “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”

During the SARS crisis, the anonymity created by the then-ubiquitous surgical mask fuelled the fear that anyone could be a disease carrier, thereby adding to the mass hysteria. Fashion designers effected a reversal that recreated the individual in the face of the crisis through the SARS “fashion mask.”

Perhaps more telling was the dominant fashion trend of the first part of 2001, in which camouflage and military themes and materials became pervasive among couture houses and runways throughout the world. “Terrorist chic,” as it was known at the time seemed to reflect a militaristic zeitgeist, leading up to the tragic events of September of that year. After the attack on the World Trade Center, fashion’s response was patriotic, showing motifs based on the U.S. flag. Designers who were the toast-of-the-town prior to September, 2001, showing couture based on traditional Muslim garb were instantly shunned afterwards. Noting that “terrorists can also wear business suits,” fashion once again highlights that the American public is well-conditioned to focus on figure – what is obviously noticed – as opposed to ground. As a footnote to these observations, it is interesting to recall that precisely the same U.S. flag motif that became a patriotic response in 2001 was worn in the Vietnam era as a protest against U.S. militaristic intentions in Indo-China.

When fashion becomes art, the clothing themselves become less important, taking on the more interesting role as probe into our times.

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - June 1 – Collections – Mark Engstrom

While I was heading off across the pond, guest rapporteuse Arleen Schenke took up the challenge to capture, and comment on, this week's McLuhan Lecture. Thanks for the great write-up, Arleen!


When a friend asked me to go to the Feathered Dinosaurs exhibit at the ROM, I was hesitant. Visions of the dusty 1960s exhibit of dinosaur fossils caked into a plaster wall came to mind, and I had little desire to repeat the experience of viewing. But I did go, and was pleasantly surprised. It was a great exhibit, newly-minted, intellectually-stimulating, cross-culturally produced, and just the right length to manage in an afternoon visit, without recourse (as a member of the audience related) to a German-style "whole-body vibrating machine" to keep me awake and focused.

Indeed, as Mark Engstrom highlighted in his presentation, this is exactly the kind of new initiative "Renaissance ROM" is aiming to achieve. Saddled with the media matrix of the global village, computer-savvy youth, the cultural intuition that museums in their traditional guise are a dying breed, and beleaguered with accusations of cultural/racial offense, the ROM has its challenges cut out for it. Mark Engstrom, leader of research and development, architect Daniel Liebeskind, donor Daniel Li Chin, and a large project team, have asked themselves hard questions about "what the new design principles should be for the ROM", "what story the collection should tell", and how best to showcase the thousands of objects the ROM has in storage, but have rarely seen the light of day.

Taking us through visuals of the new crystalline galleries, and transformations of the old ones, Engstrom unfolded the new design principle as a reminder that objects "bear silent witness", and that what needs to be done is to transform the old vision of displaying them as "closets of curiosity" into a new story of "placing them in context". "Context" means shelving the principle of displaying objects in their environments (the dinosaur in its marshy swamp), and replacing it with a more interactive experience, as well as in different narrative structures (epic, thematic, cross-cultural, and travelling exhibits).

To create this, the ROM will boast more light and windows in its galleries, more sight lines through to the street, more multi-media, less cases around objects, more density of objects in each gallery, better pacing through the galleries and more seating, less printed text, frequent turnover of displays – in other words, a more user-friendly, amiable, happening space. The Japan gallery will still be there, but so will new constellations defying geographic areas, like the Costume Design & Textile Gallery and the 20th Century Design Gallery, as well as the Biodiversity Gallery with its live animals and invitation to interact with (real) nature.

But lest we think that this might be McLuhanesque in spirit, it's not. Alluding to McLuhan's reimagination of the ROM's invertebrate fossil exhibit in 1967, and to his idea that "exhibits should be totally immersive experiences," Engstrom decided McLuhan was a product of his time and had got it wrong. What the immersive experience came to be, he said, was "an assault on the senses". The exhibit was not well-received and was eventually derided as the "discotheque gallery". This was the same, Engstrom said, with one of the project groups he interviewed to design the new galleries – they suggested computer-active exhibits and interactive displays. "I asked them," Engstrom countered, "if they'd seen Jurassic Park. Given the way digitial imaging and special effects are advancing, how the dinosaurs appeared in that movie will be outdated in no time." So much, then, for McLuhan. "We're going from the immersive experience of the 60's to the 'label and display' principle as museums were originally." The message, it seems, is not the medium, but the object, or more pointedly, many many objects – the 'collection'. "Telling the story of the natural world is the overarching design principle," and the point is not to "immerse people in the Arctic," but "in the stuff, in the objects."

In the question period, McLuhan's thinking was brought forward again. Isn't the museum, itself, a medium? The answer: "yes, but the objects themselves have something to say, not just the museum". Another question: McLuhan said that museums are ways of putting on display ways of life that are no longer possible. Answer: "Yes, but portions of lost cultures are also recoverable by people. For example, Native Peoples often interact with objects in the museum, so we've created a special room for ceremonial activities where the objects can actually be used."

Gail Moore, the respondent, raised the enormous fallout that resulted from the Out of Africa exhibit. Engstrom commiserated, but replied that the ROM now consults with a standing multicultural committee on diversity issues. Another respondent wondered whether museums should continue to appropriate other cultures' artifacts, history, and memory, to which Engstrom replied "no, we shouldn't give them back", and that the ROM also has a repatriation policy for human remains and sacred objects. For example, the museum recently returned sacred beaver bundles and headdress bundles to the Blackfoot Nation in Alberta. A request has also been made to the Haida to carve new totem poles for ROM display, and some Native groups have wanted their objects to remain in the museum for protection and safe-keeping.

Overall, Engstrom's presentation was refreshingly compact, leaving ample time for questions. It was also a combination of marketing dexterity and intellectual rigour – if the museum isn't exactly a medium, his talk was. It told its own story, its own message – that museums aren't just cultural institutions and markers of memory, but also economic entities that need to compete for funding, branding, and panache in the global market. Merging the lines between the history and the economy of culture, Engstrom showed us how the business of memory is shaped through principles of story-telling. The ROM has lots of objects, and it will soon have lots of space. Engstrom didn't use McLuhan's language to discuss his vision of how the stories of objects will be told in the new ROM, but ultimately, his vision and speaking did tell a story. "What are we going to do with the collections?" became the most important one. What would McLuhan say?

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - May 25 – Lilly Koltun – Portraiture

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.

These are two, among very many, comments by Marshall McLuhan on artists, and their role in our modern society. Lilly Koltun, Director of the new Portraiture Gallery of Canada, brought her thinking about McLuhan thinking to bear on the artist, and in particular, the portrait artist. According to Koltun, artists and creators are the way to protect ourselves against the effects of technological change through the awareness that art-as-probe creates. McLuhan made particular note of the visual artists who were probing the conditions of his time in the 1950s and 1960s. Are we, today, experiencing analogous conditions that necessitate the unique insight that artists can provide?

As McLuhan likened ubiquitous communication to an externalization of our central nervous system, the experience of abstract art likewise connects to the multi-sensory pathways of a culture’s CNS. In this way, the patterns that emerge reveal the hidden ground (in McLuhan’s terms) that reveal the actual dynamics of a culture.

Consider Warhol’s iconic treatment of Marilyn Monroe.

As McLuhan states in Understanding Media, the content of one medium is another medium. In this famous lithograph, the obvious image (figure) is Marilyn Monroe, but the work as a whole is not. Rather, its ground, and hence meaning, concerns the medium of making, selling, and commodifying celebrity.

Or, consider Salvedor Dali's surrealist treatment of Mae West.

Unlike traditional one-point perspective, Dali does not position Mae West in space, but effects a reversal, positioning space in Mae West. As we know from Laws of Media, the act of accelerating perspective beyond the limit of its potential, as is regularly done by surrealist artists, throws perspective into reversal, thereby revealing the structure, process and action/interaction of the medium, rather than its content. Indeed it is the characteristic repositioning, or juxtapositioning, of surrealism that probes reality. Little wonder that the newspapers of McLuhan's day, a medium that is entirely based on juxtaposition, was so effective in probing reality. Newspaper becomes surrealist art. [The obvious question, of course arises: Taking newspaper as surrealist art as ground, what becomes newly revealed about the world about which it reports?]

Abstract art creates the simultaneous effect of image, performance, collaboration (between a minimum of artist and view, if not among more participants), reflexivity and juxtaposition. Little wonder that McLuhan uses it as the definitive example of a cool medium - one that necessitates participation and completion by the user/viewer. True abstract art creates an anti-environment that probes the ground-rules of both art and society.

Consider portraiture. Today's abstract portraiture can comprise performance, as in the case of Istvan Kantor. The portrait can be performed only once; any artefact that results is not the portrait. The artefact proper is itself ephemeral [.pdf].

Whereas photography once used its properties of physicality (i.e. its chemistry) to leave a "trace" that directly links to its subject matter, digitization and computer technology challenges photography's indexicality via the possibility of manipulation. But simultaneously, it introduces new possibilities for creation, via live and interactive portraits that changes the medium of portraiture into performance and participation. Portraits experience a reversal under the extreme acceleration of electric conditions, and change from a static state to dynamic.

Indeed portraits as a probe of time has changed over the ages. When portraits were painted, they captured the image of the "sitter" to be preserved for eternity. Photography introduced a reversal, where the image of the "sitter" was a way of preserving moments in time. Now, with digital photography and photo-manipulation, portraiture becomes a probe of multiple possibilities, ambiguity of the times, and the ambivalent relationships among both sitter and portrait artist, and their grounds.

Thus, the artist's job is to dislocate the old media through their art to reveal the ground effects of the new media. McLuhan's observations are as relevant now as they were forty years ago: The artist is the person in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. S/he is the person of integral awareness."

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - May 11 – Marcel Danesi – The Medium is the Sign

Marcel Danesi took the stage last evening at The McLuhan Lectures, for a talk on "The Medium is the Sign." He began his exploration by pointing to the general societal concern about those who control the mass-media. The common belief is that those who control the dissemination of information thereby control the construction of impression and thought among the public. However, Danesi points out that, despite controlling the information content, media moguls cannot control the meaning we, the public, make of the information, since meaning structure is "unconsciously" created, emerging as a result of cultural constructs and conditioning. This is, in point of fact, a great description of McLuhan's foundational notion of figure and ground: figure is what we notice, ground is everything else, and it is the interplay of figure against ground - "one medium rubbing against another medium," as McLuhan wrote, from which meaning emerges.

Danesi contends that McLuhan was the first, and perhaps the greatest semiotician, but he didn't realize it. In his unique explication of the effects of the things we conceive and create - particularly the unnoticed effects, McLuhan spoke "true semiotics" even though he didn't have the specific vocabulary of semiotics with which to express his ideas. (McLuhan, as we know, used the language of literary criticism, grammar and rhetoric, which were the areas of his training.)

A sign is both medium and message simultaneously, "signifier" and signified." Danesi held up two fingers, spread wide apart. "What does this mean?" he asked the crowd. Peace, victory, girl power (from ancient times - the inverted triangle referring to the "chalice" of femininity and fertility, retrieved later by the Spice Girls), came the answers. Depending on the cultural milieu in which an individual was raised, a given sign has a different meaning to different people, and a common meaning to those who are culturally connected, or have fluency in multiple cultural semiotics.

Semiotics essentially had its start with French philosopher Roland Barthes, who described how signs create meanings, and especially hidden meanings. But Barthes brought too much of his own cultural ideology with his creation of the field, and in particular, his hatred of American pop culture. Enter McLuhan who observed that "advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century." Through advertising, and the rise of pop culture in general, disseminated through an ever-expanding mass-media, we have created conditions for the emergence of global collective consciousness. In particular, McLuhan observed the launch of Sputnik, and the proliferation of communications satellites and proclaimed those events as the genesis of the environmental movement. Danesi pointed out that humanity's adaptation to the biosphere is dependent on the "semio-sphere" – in other words, our collective and mutual understanding of signification and evolution of the attachment of meaning to the various things we create. We are not only products of our genes, but also of historical processes. Hence signs, and the culturally derived meanings with which they are associated, become crucial to the evolution of social construction of societies. This provides an interesting connection to Paul Thompson's exploration of "evolution as a medium" at last week's lecture. And because meaning is based on shared experience and precedent, McLuhan's notion of retrieval as the dominant mode of the laws of media tetrad takes on an added significance relative to human behavioural and biological evolution.

The interpretation of signs, that symbol (or action) "X" conveys meaning "Y" is a metaphoric action, particularly in the McLuhan sense of being transformative. For example, the "V for victory," made iconic by Winston Churchill after the second world war, was appropriated by hippies and peaceniks of the 1960s as the anti-war, universally recognized, peace symbol. Note the McLuhan reversal occurring.

Danesi recalls a McLuhan lecture that he attended years ago. McLuhan said that the mass–media are both blessing and curse. While they convey information to an extent that is unprecedented in human history, they disembody us. McLuhan always said that when we are "on the air" via electronic media, we are "no-bodies." More people gain access to more information than was ever available before. But people also acquire a form of mass consciousness that, in a way, brings back or retrieves the pre-mass literacy collective mind that existed when the Church was dominant in European society. Thus, the media moguls who own and control the majority of mass media have control over the distribution of information, and therefore have the potential for tremendous social consequences. What is different now, of course, is that people themselves have the ability to seek out information from multiple sources simultaneously, creating far more individualized meanings drawn from a vastly wide array of cultural and social grounds. The relationship among "the people" and the mass-media and their respective moguls is far more complex and "problematized" today, since the mass-media themselves are social constructions, subject to the same sorts of semiotic meta-meanings as is everything else.

Such an understanding of the mass-media calls into question the myth of objectivity. According to the thinking of the Toronto School of Communication, and apparently according to Danesi's semiotics as well, objectivity is an artefact of mass literacy in which knowledge and ideas can exist separately from the knower and the thinker. In primary oral societies, the "object" (knowledge) is inseparable from the "subject" (knower or speaker). While objectivity was effectively created in the Gutenberg Galaxy, Danesi observes that objectivity has not disappeared in digital galaxy because of convergence of digitized media that accelerates the dissemination of diverse content. However, I would point out that any such acceleration has the potential to effect a reversal. Hence, we must look carefully for signs (sorry) of the reversal of objectivity, perhaps through the imposition of socially constructed meaning from ground effects. A simple example: the "objectivity" of the U.S. Fox News Network, or Canada's CanWest Global newspapers.

The implications of a reversal of objectivity is actually far more complex and subtle, as the knower and the known, or creator and creation, are no longer separate in the same sense as the author and her/his book once were. With the amplification of voice and ubiquity of presence effected by ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity, convergence of digitized media, if indeed such a convergence is occurring (and I would argue the opposite), we must question the nature of the relationship between object and subject - and whether there is another sort of "-ject" yet to be discovered - under conditions that McLuhan described as audile, as opposed to oral or visual/literate.

Throughout human history, as language/media evolve, they evolve towards greater simplicity, rather than complexity. Older forms of language, music and other forms of communicating ideas are much more complex than the forms we use today. One could observe, as McLuhan did and Paul Thompson pointed out, that we evolve through technology. Is there a law of meaning that is analogous to principles genetics? In language, complex grammar gives way to simpler syntax. (e.g. loss of cases; reduction in tenses in English over the years) But paradoxically, in reducing the complexity of the structure, modern language can express more complex ideas than could earlier language. For example, the alphabet didn't replace pictography, although it was originally derived from pictographs of goods for trade. However, the alphabet enables more complex meanings to be encoded with ever increasing efficiency. But why is efficiency a motivating force? A Harvard linguist named George Kingsley Zipf claimed that people use the fewest resources to accomplish a particular goal. This observation gave rise to "Zipf’s Law" in linguistics, namely that there is an inverse relationship between the length of a word and its rank order of usefulness and use in the language. For example, abbreviations and acronyms as economical compressions that become increasingly useful as they express complex meanings very economically. In the United States, for instance, the invocation of two juxtaposed numbers, nine and eleven, has tremendous political, legal, moral and ethical implications that have rippled throughout the society. The claim is that it is a biological compulsion to expend the least amount of effort to convey meaning without reducing meaning.

The tendency is to reduce the signifiers, while enhancing the signified, leading to a sort of principle of least effort in media studies. Alphabets were first a means of compressing signifiers while maintaining the range of the signified. Over time, other uses are found for the compressed signifiers, expanding the range of what can be signified, thereby increasing the scope and capability, while reducing the complexity of the language. Today, for example, the Internet (and mobile communication - let's just say ubiquitous connectivity) is multiplying this principle of compression, having an evolutionary effect on language. As language evolves phonetically, again we are reminded of McLuhan's assertion that the dominant form of our times is audility. Coming to grips with that notion necessitates a radical rethinking of how we teach children to communicate in schools; the current emphasis on traditional literacy taught in traditional ways may be doing a disservice to society, paradoxically lessening many children's ability to read and write.

From the audience: Why didn’t McLuhan use the terminology of semiotics, given the influence of Giambattista Vico? Semiotics was being confronted during the 1960s by the academy, and was not accepted by the sciences until the 70s, to connect how the senses connect to meaning. McLuhan did this, but did not have the language of semiotics. McLuhan understood the power of poetic language to engage the imagination via metaphor. Hence McLuhan followed Vico.

Meaning is embodied. How then do we understand the notion of information vis-à-vis embodiment? Information doesn’t exist, says Danesi (in a Shannon-Weaver context). Rather, it is meaning that is intrinsically embodied, not the transmission of signs. In semiotics, the emphasis is on the "formation" of the person when experience and sensation comes "in." What is "information literacy" anyway? In semiotics, there is no separation of information from its context and embodiment, and experience.

Cute anecdote: Danesi spoke about his grandson who, when he was 17 months old, was learning to speak. The boy had an orange cat at the time. Danesi described how he would pour juice for his grandson, and attempt to teach him what it was. As the cat entered the room, the young boy pointed to the pet and pronounced, "juice." Semiotics has the concept of "sensory knowing" For example, an infant exploring an object for the first time will experience it through all of his/her senses. This is cognition. The infant will associate the various sensory experiences with that particular instance, and later, will "re-cognize" any objects with similar sensory attributes with those first associations. Hence, the cat becomes "juice." As McLuhan said, "the right word is not the one that names the thing, but the one that gives the effect of the thing."

McLuhan Lectures 2005 - May 4 – Paul Thompson – Evolution

Last evening's McLuhan Lecture with Paul Thompson was an outstanding success, raising some fascinating issues when Evolutionary Biology is crossed with The Medium is the Message.

Paul Thompson who, in his work, combines evolutionary biology and philosophy, tackles the challenge of introducing McLuhan's vocabulary to his field. He does so by considering McLuhan’s equation, the medium is the message, as suggesting a dialectic process. Thus, he accomplishes his task for the evening by considering evolution not necessarily as a fact of nature, but rather as the human construction of a (McLuhan-style) medium.

His argument is that language creates what one can consider evolutionary changes in a culture that, over time - and relatively short time in the large scheme of things - interacts with the action of genetic inheritance. He makes the observation that language is the key to transmitting learned survival behaviours that eventually emerge, initially as genetic mutations within a population. Since the culture favours these learned behaviours, the genetic effects have a greater probability of permeating the culture, and thus the gene pool itself.

The analogy that he gives - apparently a standard example in evolutionary biology - is that of the development of lactose tolerance in adults. Simply put, mammalian adults in most species lack the enzyme necessary for metabolizing lactose. But cultures that originally migrated to northern climates developed animal husbandry as a source of food. The milk that their domesticated animals produced was allowed to sour and was made into cheese, that reduced the lactose content, thereby making it digestible. As dairy products became an increasingly important part of the diet, people who naturally had more of the requisite enzyme were able to do better in those societies, and their genes tended to spread. The "learned behaviour" of animal husbandry and cheese-making created cultural conditions in which the genetic mutation of lactose-digestion was preferred. Thus, the behavioural change induced by a technology ultimately enabled the emergence of a concomitant genetic change.

This is quite literally an example of the McLuhan aphorism, "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us," especially given the calorie content of cheese!

The general model tends to work like this: Within a population, there are a group of people who learn certain successful behaviours for the culture. As the culture itself evolves to give preference to those behaviours, there are those who are left behind because, for a variety of reasons, they are unable to learn or adopt those now-preferenced behaviours. However, it may happen that in the left-behind subculture, a genetic mutation arises that has the same effect of the learned behaviour as an innate characteristic. Since the culture cares only about effect and not cause (this is, of course, McLuhan straight-up), this person from the left-behind subculture has an advantage, and the opportunity to share her/his genes with others. Thus the genetic change permeates not only the left-behind subculture, but the dominant, learned-behaviour culture as well.

I'll bet you never thought President W's "no child left behind" policy had such a profound foundation.

Taking this idea a little further down a McLuhanesque path, Thompson examined the learned behaviour of social cooperation, that emerged, according to evolutionary biologists, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The genetic propensity to social cooperation depends on complex set of characteristics. In a pre-social population, an individual displaying traits of social cooperation (e.g. being empathetic, following rules, believing in good-will of others, etc.) amongst a sea of non-cooperating individuals, would be taken advantage of.

Culture introduces the ability to cognitively discover the benefits of cooperation that can be taught, culturally passed, and that would result in eventually ostracizing the non-cooperators. At some point, a threshold of cooperators in the population is reached, and those who are genetically predisposed to the behaviours indicative of cooperation will have an advantage, and will thrive. In this case, the medium is the development of social cooperation; the message is the discovery of enabling and shaping the ensuing cultural change, and effecting a change in the human gene pool.

In early humans, social cooperation was primitive and local. Today, social cooperation is sophisticated and global, enabled by the technologies of instantaneous communication. If the ideas that emerge from opening the evolutionary biological discourse and introducing some aspects of McLuhan vocabulary do, in fact, offer a useful explanation of the medium of evolution, future humans will be a most interesting species.

Telepathy, anyone?

Update: This article reports the findings of German ornithologists, that "Birds have learnt to imitate the ring tones of the omnipresent mobile phones... "The birds have an uncanny ability to mimic these ring tones. This has picked up in tandem with the boom in mobile phone ownership," Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre near the university city of Tuebingen here said."

And this article reporting a new finding from China: "A recent study has predicted that more male Asian elephants in China will be born without tusks because poaching of tusked elephants is reducing the gene pool, the China Daily reported Sunday... The tusk-free gene, which is found in between two and five percent of male Asian elephants, has increased to between five percent and 10 percent in elephants in China, according to Zhang Li, an associate professor of zoology at Beijing Normal University."