McLuhan's Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 2002 by Theall, Donald

Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

Marshall McLuhan's work has not been the subject of many genuinely scholarly books, nor has he, with few exceptions, been regarded as an artist or as a significant figure in the pantheon of Canadian culture. Consequently, Richard Cavell's recently published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography is a significant addition to the literature about McLuhan. In this profusely documented study of McLuhan as a "space theorist," Cavell seeks for an all-encompassing formula to explicate the phenomenon of a quintessentially Canadian McLuhan, who had a substantial impact throughout the world in the 1960s and then again in the 1990s. Cavell locates the vision that creates such an impact in McLuhan's discovery of the idea of "acoustic space" (a "percept," according to McLuhan). "Acoustic space" has become one of those phrases like "global village," "the medium is the message" and the "Gutenberg Galaxy," which are synonymous with his name. The peculiar attractiveness of this percept is that it is simultaneously abstract and yet material, describing "unenclosed space" and hence permitting discussions about measure, movement through "space-time" and speed.

"Acoustic space" as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from the description of "auditory space" in the behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of the University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in the Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist Karl Williams. Bott's idea, that auditory space "has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously," immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been immersed in then-contemporary writers concerned with space, including art and architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, visual artist and designer Laszlo Mohly-Nagy and classicist Francis Cornford, author of "The Invention of Space." With Ted Carpenter, co-founder of the seminars and of the early multidisciplinary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded the idea of auditory space, christening it "acoustic space" to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to the contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dimensional geometry and the new physics.

At considerable length and with copious documentation, Cavell illustrates the importance of this perception to McLuhan's work and demonstrates how it made him attractive to contemporary artists in Canada, the United States and Great Britain who were working in the wake of the modernist radical avant-garde: Duchamp, Picasso, Klee, Leger and P. Wyndham Lewis. McLuhan was also attractive to Dadaists, futurists, cubists, constructivists, abstract expressionists and surrealists. For the first time, readers can see the extent of McLuhan's effect on the visual and conceptual art of Iain and Ingrid Baxter, the music of R. Murray Schafer and the concrete poetry of bp Nichol. McLuhan also influenced Quebecois intermedia artist Jacques Languirand. Readers will see part of the significant role McLuhan's work played in the artistic endeavours of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Dick Higgins and the Fluxus group and Gerd Stern. With Cage and Cunningham particularly, McLuhan shared a special interest in and dedication to James Joyce. The most remarkable aspect, and the one most fully developed by Cavell, is McLuhan's influence on his Canadian compatriots.

The third thrust of the argument in McLuhan in Space is the importance of McLuhan's Canadianism. He remained dedicated to Canada in his understanding and vision of the new globalized world of media. A number of Canadians influenced McLuhan: E.A. Bott, Carleton Williams, Richard Maurice Bucke, Reginald Fessenden, John Murray Gibbon, Bertram Booker and R.E. Wilson. Bucke is particularly interesting since he coined the phrase "cosmic consciousness," an idea that has strong affinities with the more abstract aspects of acoustic space and which therefore played into McLuhan's later fascination with the literature of cosmic consciousness as well as his near-mystical vision of acoustic space. Cavell avoids any significant reference to the depth and complexity of McLuhan's classical and medieval framework and never confronts the full pedigree of acoustic space, a pedigree that moves from the Pythagoreans through Alanus de Insulis to Pascal. In the twelfth century, Alanus defined God as "an intelligible sphere, whose centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere." This became Pascal's definition of nature: "an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere."

McLuhan viewed Canada - and himself, for that matter - as an "early warning system," a sort of cultural DEW line that would alert Americans to the dangers and complexities of the new electric and post-electric media world. This influenced his sense of space. He lived in a land where there is a great consciousness of space, and he was influenced by that land. Ted Carpenter's work on the Inuit, as expounded in Explorations 9: Eskimo, affected McLuhan's understanding of space. Cavell treats this influence as secondary to the significance of Canadian intellectual P. Wyndham Lewis, the painter, essayist and satirist, and to the even greater presumed significance of Canadian academic Harold Innis. Lewis is mentioned from time to time throughout the book, but he is not given as central a role in McLuhan's percept of space as he deserves, although his influence predated that of Innis by many years. (Lewis was known to McLuhan in the 1940s.)