It is not difficult to visualize the mask of McLuhan the Oracle: we see a good discarnate version of it in the documentary The Medium Is the Massage.1 Released in 1968 and based on the volume published the year before, we have a powerful series of images showing McLuhan the oracle in the process of translating his thoughts into speech. In an effort to translate his ideas orally, that is, not through a linear sequence but through verbal pronouncements, McLuhan is portrayed through close-ups, his face always at the centre of the scene. The overall effect is quite enchanting: he appears to be uttering uncanny formulas – oracular pronouncements – orchestrated to facilitate memorization. Alert audiences soon realize that those formulas are in the probes and puns we have already encountered in his writings. We also know that, through the years, many have tried to interpret them in various contexts. So much so, that even though they were first uttered by a capable elocutionist well aware of rhetorical strategies, in time those same words have in turn been twisted, oversimplified, over-celebrated. In the hands (or mouths) of either too skeptical or too faithful interpreters, they have often flipped into their reverse and become slogans: McLuhan’s archetypes have become clichés. As with all oracular pronouncements, it is the listeners and not the oracle who produce and adapt meaning to their contingent needs. Why should it have been any different for the oracle of the University of Toronto Coach House?
It seems to me that of the various masks we have put on McLuhan, the oracle is the most suitable one. Oracle is a term which traces back to a form of communication related to oral societies, and the idea of clairvoyance which is traditionally associated with the oracle’s powers is also strictly connected to the oracle’s endowments as an observer and as a storyteller. Questioned by her/his own people about future events, the oracle stood between humans and gods, mediating between ignorance and knowledge. Speaking from the navel of the world, or from another cave in the Mediterranean city of Cumae, the most famous oracle of Delphi, or others less popular but equally intriguing, such as the Cumaean Sibyl, gave their responses in the form of obscure sentences, which the audience was compelled to interpret and translate into meaningful prophecies. The oracle’s ambiguous responses were inscribed into the popular oral tradition, and linked to the history and vicissitudes of the community, but were also open to different, even opposing, interpretations. The oracle’s response always followed his/her observation of a given environment: the flight of birds, the way the water flows, the way a leaf falls, are all signs that the oracle perceived and rendered orally through a narrative which is intentionally arcane: it must preserve the prestige and power traditionally connected to the mystery of reading the signs of fateful nature. To read and to know meant, in fact, power, and it still does. The oracle’s pronouncements are therefore based on a rhetorical construction capable of embedding experience in an ‘open’ way, but often conveyed through formulas or riddles which, though arcane, are nevertheless easy to remember. The oracle’s responses are built, not upon an analytical or linear construction, but upon an analogical and associative verbal assemblage of images, which must be revealed first intuitively, and then questioned and analysed for their possible meanings. The oracle’s prophecies are therefore conceived as a poetic translation of natural signs, which often acquire a full meaning only when the events have in fact taken place. The listeners have a role to play: it is through their interpretation of the oracle’s speech that words acquire meaning. As mediators of knowledge, the oracles urge their audience to enquire further, to take responsibility and connect to what is eventually ‘revealed.’ The warnings on the Temple of Delphi leave no doubt:
I warn you, whoever you are …
Oh, you who wish to probe the arcanes of nature, if you do not find within yourself that which you seek, neither shall you be able to find it outside.
If you ignore the excellencies of your own house, how do you intend to find other excellencies?
In you is hidden the treasure of treasures.
Oh, man, know thyself and thou shall know the Universe and the Gods!
Come to think of it, McLuhan’s mosaic aims to do just that. It does not offer a final interpretation or final truth; instead, it engages its readers in a reading process conducive to experience and the production of meaning through a verbal construction which might sound arcane. But it is only different from what audiences would expect. And, just as has happened to the oracle’s pronouncements, McLuhan’s statements have become clearer through time: we have come to know ourselves and our electric environment better, and we have started to access the electric universe and gods.
The oracle belongs to a society which is predominantly oral and tribal. Marshall McLuhan belonged to a literate society which was rediscovering a new orality through electric media, while evolving into the post-literate environment we live in now. Through his oracle’s mask, McLuhan retrieved, in fact, an ancient oral tradition which he employed to adjust literacy to the high-tech communicative potentialities. I do not think it is by chance that Walter J. Ong, who came to know McLuhan’s work firsthand when they met at Saint Louis University and who attended classes on the Renaissance and rhetoric taught by the Canadian scholar, is the one who has postulated the interfacing of literacy and orality. In both his letters and books, Ong often acknowledged that McLuhan was in fact ‘a superb teacher’ who ‘could stir people’s minds.’2 Through his teaching and conversations, McLuhan insisted that in the electric age a different approach to writing could contribute to restoring the balance between oral and visual perceptive modes, in turn restoring harmony between inner and outer worlds. It is in this direction that McLuhan’s acoustic writing began to operate.
While McLuhan applied orality and its rhetoric to literacy through artistic modes, Ong contributed a scholarly investigation of their interface. In his classic Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), he overtly acknowledges the pioneering role of McLuhan’s ‘oracular pronouncements, too glib for some readers, but often deeply perceptive’;3 Ong discusses McLuhan’s probes as ‘gnomic’ sayings, and suggests that McLuhan’s investigations, even though they are based on literacy, re-enact oral interplay. To define McLuhan’s probes as ‘oracular pronouncements,’ as he does, implies perceiving them as uttered or outered statements; in other words, Ong tells us that, by impersonating the oracle of the electric age, McLuhan probed the artificial nature of the new environment, and mediated its signs through what we can appreciate today as witty post-literate sayings. Ong insists on McLuhan’s ‘vast electric learning and his startling insights,’ and on his ‘oral-textual contrasts,’ while he at the same time hints at the fact that literacy is ‘infinitely adaptable’: ‘Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all … such reconstruction can bring a better understanding of what literacy itself has meant in shaping man’s consciousness toward and in high-technology cultures.’4 This is what the mosaic can do for us. Let us now discover how the oracle enters McLuhan’s written body.
In Orality and Literacy, Ong defines some basic tenets pertaining to orality which can be summed up as follows: oral-based expressions are additive rather than subordinative; aggregative and not analytic; redundant or copious; conservative or traditionalist; directly related to the human lifework; agonistically toned; empathic; homeostatic (that is, preserving inner equilibrium); situational and not abstract. If we assess McLuhan’s mosaic in the light of these characteristics, we realize that, in fact, it matches almost all of them: the mosaic is therefore a literate oral form of communication, that is, a post-literate form of writing which readjusts literacy through and to oral cognitive modes. I trust Ong when he says that ‘the basic of orality of language is permanent,’ so much so that while oral expression can exist without writing, writing cannot exist without orality.5 Consistently, McLuhan’s mosaic is a literate form which can be appreciated as an orally based expression translating McLuhan’s oracular pronouncements, as well as his way of being in the world. We know that, especially in his later years, McLuhan resolved to dictate his ideas as they came to him; it is fascinating to notice that they came to him in the form of probes or puns or aphorisms, something that can be witnessed by watching his video interviews. Hence his language, be it uttered or written down, mirrored a frame of mind which he trained and consolidated through his humanistic roots: McLuhan experienced his own world while inhabiting an ancient oral tradition which he had put on since his years at Cambridge. That is the quintessential McLuhan we discover and retrieve through the mosaic. Orality is therefore a fundamental component of his post-literate oracular language: it is not just a way to dress his prose, but his own way to function, as a scholar and as an individual.
According to Ong, orally based thoughts and expressions are first of all ‘additive rather than subordinative.’6 Similarly, McLuhan’s mosaic is built upon a series of additive juxtapositions (both/and, and/and) and not upon subordinate clauses. The various comments on his probes are either quotations or statements, which are offered and delivered, not according to a subordinate logic, but as being equally important. The invitation to open his books and read/explore them from any page is a consequence of a paratactic construction based on equity and not on hierarchical or linear order. The mosaic is a direct syncretic and therefore additive form which immediately renders the simultaneity of perception, action, and reaction of living in the acoustic space of the electric environment. Subordinative forms of narrative are inevitably linked to visually based approaches. Linear progression is, in fact, structured to provide reinforcement around a central concept, embellished and complemented through ideas which are perceived as subordinate or accessorial to it, much like the by-side elements framing the vanishing point of a carefully conceived canvas.
In McLuhan’s mosaic, new concepts add to the previous ones, forcing them all to realign in the light of the insight that the new fragment encapsulates. Altogether, they give shape to a complex ground, and the various probes and quotations are perceived as figures, all equally present and all equally important. The mosaic conceptualizes the difference between ‘method’ and ‘knowledge broken.’ A similar difference is found, for instance, when comparing a painting by Cimabue and a painting by Raphael, that is, when comparing late Middle Ages and Renaissance visual art: in the latter, perspective is what conveys a visual order to the scene, and the ideas of foreground and background translate into a subordinative rendering of the various elements whose narrative has been arranged by the painter. Observing a late Middle Ages canvas is a different experience: everything is offered as if standing on the same plane and simultaneously; proportions are not rendered realistically, but symbolically or emotionally, and to appreciate its narrative we have to complete the canvas through what we already know. We contribute to that very narrative ourselves; we convey order and importance to what we see and experience. As McLuhan would say, in a Renaissance painting, figures and ground separate; in a Middle Ages canvas, they collapse. Each painting strategy mirrors a different environmental setting: Renaissance society was, in fact, an accomplished literate society; the Middle Ages were instead an age of transition from the oral to the literate. A few centuries later, other works of art mirrored another shift, from the literate to the post-literate: from the late nineteenth century, post-Impressionism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Expressionism, and other avant-garde schools of painting returned to additive renderings, now complicated by the simultaneous re-conceptualization of evolving physical and emotional realities. They were re-entering orality.
A form which does not subordinate but adds is also ‘aggregative rather than analytic’; as such, Ong teaches us that oral expressions depend on ‘formulas to implement memory.’7 This is a crucial passage in his analysis because he also discusses formulas in relation to the making of commonplaces; since both terms play a role in the way we have come to approach McLuhan’s pronouncements, it is worth investigating how these terms relate to the interfacing of literacy and orality in his own form of communication.
Ong retrieves the evolution of commonplaces in relation to their original double meaning: LOCI COMMUNES (commonplaces) were in fact either ‘seats of arguments considered as abstract headings in today’s parlance’ or ‘collections of sayings (in effect formulas) on various topics … that could be worked into one’s own speech-making or writing.’8 In a given society, commonplaces and formulas can therefore serve two different functions: originally, they bring the community together and constitute a shared knowledge which they condense so as to facilitate memorization; in time, their semantic depth flattens, and they remain as mere decorative elements of either speech or writing. What was originally conceived to preserve the unity of a group becomes, instead, a tool to captivate and persuade the audience: the rhetorician who best performs his/her speech wins consent. We consider, in fact, rhetoric to be the art of persuasion. Craft is perhaps a better definition, as rhetoric has rules that its disciples have to learn: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio are the five classic parts of rhetoric one has to master to become a good orator. The idea of ‘good orator’ changes through time. In the ancient oral society, the good orator addressed all knowledge by mastering the liberal arts of the trivium. But in time, a split took place between grammarians and dialecticians, based on a different interpretation of how to pursue knowledge. Through precepts was the strategy of choice if you were a grammarian; through concepts if you were a dialectician. Hence, if you decided to be a grammarian, rhetoric would become your sister art in the exploration of the book of nature through language and its etymology; if you were to become a dialectician, rhetoric was the craft you needed to mesmerize your audience and disseminate your truth. Grammar and rhetoric combined led to broken knowledge (aphorisms); dialectic and rhetoric combined led to method (formulas). The split of the liberal arts of the trivium ends the spirit of the School of Athens and opens the gates to the School of Paris, to modernity: from then onward, logos is no longer both language and reason, but either one or the other. Soul and mind proceed separately, and, in Western society, method wins over aphorisms.9
The basis of all eloquent speech was, therefore, the act of inventio, that is, the discovery or finding of arguments, which you could improve through dispositio and elocutio; the former helped you to ‘dispose’ or arrange your arguments; the latter contributed to their formal and stylistic elaboration and made your elocution unique. Over time, though, inventio shifts from an original activity to a simpler operation of stock-taking: arguments and findings accumulate in sayings, which are then stored in the individual or collective memoria, or memory. Artfully retrieved and repeated in front of an audience through an actio, a public speech, the shared formulas, sayings, commonplaces, were finally perceived as reassuring manifestations of popular wisdom. This transition is typical not only of orally based societies, but also of the first chirographic renderings of speech, usually in a poetical form. In pristine forms of literacy, formulas – which an oral community perceives as the synthesis of complex experiences and which constitute an aggregative moment for the community – are turned into rhetorical devices enabling the community to memorize a collection of sayings, which are now part of the folklore and traditions of that very community. This is the case, for instance, of the Anglo-Saxon kenning in poetry, a rhetorical figure which encapsulates things and people in verbal expressions which become popular and stay in people’s minds as a shared rhetorical alphabet.
Within the humanities, McLuhan perceived himself as a grammarian; doubtless, his probes constitute the synthesis of a broader set of speculations that they store and render available to the community at any time, provided that the community shares not only the same knowledge, but also a similar approach to it. So conceived, McLuhan’s mosaic is in fact an analogical form juxtaposing discrete units and textual fragments which are tremendously aggregative. It is this characteristic that brings us into the picture as active readers, as a community which accepts the task of linking each condensed probe to a broader set of data (knowledge). If we perform our task successfully, we preserve and experience the various meaningful nuances the probe embeds (the medium is the message/massage/mass-age/mess-age); if we do not, we continue to turn it into a formula; that is, we preserve only one of its many meanings. From probes to formulas, from archetype to clichés – this is particularly true if the probe is quoted outside of its original text, that is, if it is deprived of its simultaneous interplay with other probes or with their relevant ground. We often hear McLuhan’s probes repeated as all-fitting formulas. Such formulas as ‘the medium is the message’ are now part of a shared jargon people use worldwide. Doubtless, there is a positive element in this: we often speak mcluhanese at a global scale, even though we are not always aware of it; we have put on McLuhan’s language to embellish our conversations and to consolidate our belonging to a world community, our ‘global village.’ We have gained some cohesion as a worldwide audience, but we have certainly lost track of the original source: Marshall McLuhan. We are passive, not active, users of McLuhan’s language; we do not appreciate its potentialities and have flattened its original function. By so doing, we not only dismiss the mystery of his oracular pronouncements; we also miss the potentialities of his post-literate interface. Moreover, we tend to delegate others to interpret those pronouncements for us. Beside an oracle often stood a high priest who acted as an interface between the audience and the oracle. While the oracle’s pronouncements mediate what is unknown (the future) and what is known (nature), leaving the audience acoustically suspended with a multitude of meanings, the high priest turns the circle into a line: he or she mediates the arcane and solves, that is, interprets, the riddles for us. From multiple choice to one-way understanding, from archetype to cliché – generally speaking, today’s media analysts, the priests of the high-tech world, do not employ McLuhan’s mosaic as a device: generally, they are still distracted by its content; they are not focusing on its form. McLuhan’s books are more than packages for his ‘slogans’: they are interactive educational tools in which it is the interplay between form and content that conveys meaning. They are, so to speak, processes not anthologies; they are not just collections of sayings. Not understanding such a difference is a way to actually kill McLuhan, not just his oracular mask.
McLuhan was not a moderate oracle; understatement was not his favourite rhetorical device. He loved to talk – his biographers tell us that he used to call friends in the middle of the night to share his ideas with them. Wordiness was to his written body what blood was to his physical body. While his grand media narrative can be reduced to a few tenets and to four simple laws, that same narrative is told again and again all through his books, while continuously probing both media and environmental situations. McLuhan’s mosaic pinpoints redundancy or copiousness, another feature of oral forms of communication.10 Repetition is therefore a strategy he consciously employed when performing his oracular pronouncements to develop intertextuality between lines, paragraphs, chapters, and, of course, the text, its outer context and readers. The ideas underpinning his explorations are presented several times in his texts through slightly changed statements in a way which recalls another rhetorical device typical of early forms of poetry, that is, variation. Through variation, in fact, the same idea was repeated throughout the text in order to accustom the readers to it. For example, in Understanding Media, the idea that TV is a ‘re-action medium’ – that is, a cold and therefore involving medium11 – is a core idea and is repeated again and again in the volume. The repetition is often carried out through loan-translations (a copia or a calco) positioned only a few pages apart, as in the case of the Mckworth head-camera: this experimental device monitoring the physical responses of TV viewers is introduced twice with almost identical words, to emphasize the involving character of TV as a medium.12
Of course, you can also say – as many critics have – that McLuhan did not polish or edit his books as he should have. But, in fact, he was pursuing his own writing strategy, which, in turn, mirrored his frame of mind, his way of thinking. Repeating the same concept in different parts of the same volume, juxtaposing it to new ideas, new associations, new glosses, keeps readers engaged. It sounds more like conversation than predication: don’t you repeat things more than once when you want to make sure that your listener is in fact with you? Repetition also breeds familiarity and encourages readers to retrieve a series of thoughts which might have previously gone unnoticed; it is a way to trigger new implications for old content. It is a strategy that all storytellers know: the same plot is repeated before old and new audiences, thus creating a communal bond and a shared mythology. Each time, however, good storytellers either add or change some of the details, so as to keep interest alive and to encourage participation in a renewed process of discovery.
Redundancy and copiousness also relate to what Ong defines as the ‘conservative or traditionalist’ character of orality: you say over and over what you have experienced and what you know, in order to preserve it against time. The risk is that this ‘inhibits intellectual experimentation’ due to the ensuing establishment of a ‘highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind.’13 Prior to the written form, memorization was the only way to retain experience. In fact, the characteristics of orality examined so far aim to facilitate memorization; its being additive, aggregative, formulaic, and redundant contributes to preserving arguments and their related experiences. By translating these characteristics, McLuhan’s mosaic also aims to retain what has been previously learned. In this sense, we can consider the mosaic as a form of writing which is literally conservative, as it preserves and retains knowledge through literate language. But being also post-literate, that is, being an oral-literate and not simply either an oral or a literate form of communication, McLuhan’s mosaic does not necessarily mirror a conservative set of mind (the one which keeps the small tribe, or the little community, together); it does not inhibit intellectual experimentation, unless, of course, you turn probes into formulas, that is, unless you close the window, so to speak.14 As a form, the mosaic preserves knowledge while triggering intellectual experimentation. Or, better, the mosaic triggers intellectual experimentation precisely because it preserves the complexity of knowledge through its broken language. It is the dislocation of a visual medium according to old and new oral/acoustic modes which enables the use of literacy to ‘reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all.’15 McLuhan’s post-literate mosaic uses several oral communicative features. However, it gives shape to more complex experiences which no longer belong to a group limited in time and space, but to the heterogeneous crowds who now inhabit the world of instantaneous communications. Intellectual experimentation is enhanced not inhibited. How readers approach the oracle’s pronouncements, whether or not they read them as plain clichés or slogans, or use them as probes, depends on their skill in reading through them.
Words matter; language matters; language, so to speak, weights. In the mosaic, language does not translate theoretical speculations, but pragmatic and solid investigations, just as does an imagist poem: words are things; they are actions, not abstractions. Again (yes, I’m repeating things: are you with me?), McLuhan’s retrieval of the logos is to be understood as the retrieval of ancient grammar. Knowledge is experienced not taught. Percepts counterbalance concepts. Metaphysics meets Physic. Logos retains its original complexity: logos as logic, and logos as verbal. McLuhan goes back to a tradition which is clearly pre-Platonic: it is Plato who replaces Homer’s storytelling and opens the doors to literacy, and later to ‘the School of Paris’ (the school of dialecticians), as the new pillars of Western culture. In Understanding Media, McLuhan indicates Plato as the one who started to envisage a new educational system based on specialization.16 McLuhan’s storytelling aims instead not to preach reality but to perform it, that is, to bring it and his readers together through an active and engaging act of reading which is, in itself, a way of experiencing reality and knowledge; it is an act of reading which aims to learn the evolving grammar (the basic principles) of the ‘depth-involving newness’17 of the post-literate age. It is difficult to mediate what we constantly experience because we are too involved in it to actually grasp it. But the mosaic succeeds in rendering the simultaneity of the electric age; as a post-literate form, it is close ‘to the human lifework’ of its time, which is now characterized by ‘the absence of elaborated analytic categories depending on writing to structure knowledge.’18 The mosaic triggers actions; it performs a role and participates in the process of understanding. It is a direct rendering of the electric wholeness, a live show of the world in action. Whereas linearity encourages specialization, McLuhan’s writing encourages holism and tries to convey wisdom and knowledge as a whole; and he asks his readers to play the same game. It is a strategy which does not seek to win consent, but which encourages confrontation and challenges; McLuhan’s mosaic is therefore ‘agonistically toned’ because ‘by keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifework, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.’19 And it was a struggle which also transcended the mosaic and reached the oracle: his approach to knowledge was questioned, debated, and opposed as much as it was celebrated.
A performative storytelling is therefore a narrative which engages and challenges not only the teller, but also the audience. In oral societies, this idea well translates the mimetic approach to both language and environment. Orality is in fact ‘empathic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.’20 Writing is a medium that brings objectivity and makes us look at things from a distance. Speech is a medium that abridges distance between individuals and their environment. Literacy encourages detachment and rationality; orality encourages involvement and intuition. Anthropologists have shown us that oral societies do not share our idea of private space, nor our idea of the self or of the individual: they have not elaborated the idea of distance typical of literate Western societies. Oral societies do not experience a dichotomy between inner and outer world; their way to approach their environment is mimetic. Individuals inhabit a space together and share experiences within a choral context that they preserve and defend. In this sense, Ong defines oral societies as being ‘homeostatic’21 and ‘situational rather than abstract.’22 They live in the present; their communal bond is reinforced through storytelling, whose goal is to preserve the knowledge they have acquired through experience, by doing and not by theorizing. In our post-secondary orality societies, such an inclusive and mimetic way of living is artificially retrieved. We tend to live in the present, in the here and now (‘Life is now’ was the slogan of a popular wireless telephone company), and technology helps us in that. We juxtapose reality and its mediated rendering, sometimes blurring the two levels in an uncanny scenario, as when we watch TV on our mobile phone while travelling on buses or waiting in line to enter a public office. And we use language in paradoxical ways to express all that, often unconsciously. What is a reality show? What is now real? What is fictional? Do we think about these linguistic and conceptual paradoxes when we employ language this way? Or are we numbed by the homeostatic characteristics of our accelerated depth-involving newness? McLuhan loved paradoxes and played with them; but he did so consciously and with a probing intent. Playing with the mosaic trains us to both ask and answer these questions, but not because it tells us how to do that: we engage with situations, we experience them, we perform. We learn by doing.
As a performative storytelling, while re-enacting the movement, the mosaic trains us to work on its patterns. It takes us inside (as orality does) and keeps us detached (as literacy does). It is a dynamic form which brings together inner and outer landscapes, and recreates cognitive experiences leading to knowledge, not through distance, but through inclusion. It does it through literacy, which is here meant not to guide us, but to involve us and tune us into the electric sensibility; our idea of being – that is, direct participation in action and events – replaces the idea of becoming – which implies a traditional acquisition of knowledge based on a rational and progressive approach to experiences perceived through distance as other than oneself. It is through the retrieval of the whole logos that we regain control of the world in progress and perform an active role in the process: ‘Before writing, logo was active and metamorphic rather than neutral: words and deeds were related, as were words and things. The logos of creation is of the same order: “Let there be light” IS the uttering or outering of light.’23 The mosaic creates knowledge, not through notions, but through a constant challenge to its readers.
‘I warn you, whoever you are …’