Both love and truth are in the eyes of the beholder. Many of McLuhan’s former students keep saying that McLuhan got the sixties, by that implying that he was among the few who engaged with the countercultures of the time, while the academic world resented them. Fair enough. But McLuhan was not, as the same students also imply, in favour of those counter-cultures tout court. Neither was he against them. Those who considered McLuhan as one of them, be they Frye’s anti-intellectuals or activists, were but interpreting his oracular pronouncements one way. McLuhan was both inside and outside his time; like Poe’s mariner, he contemplated the 1960s maelstrom through the interplay of all the various figures in turn emerging from the water spirals. And, like Poe’s mariner, he also had some fun in doing it. His playful detachment made him popular – that is, trustable – among very different audiences alike. Today, it is easier for us to realize that McLuhan’s broader vision enabled him to guide others through the maze of the electric age. He helped to bring some light. This is what a guru does:
Guru
The syllable gu means shadows
The syllable ru, he who disperses them,
Because of the power to disperse darkness
The guru is thus named. (Advayataraka Upanishad 14–18, verse 5)
A guru is therefore a teacher, someone who disperses the shadows of ignorance and enlightens his pupils. As a media guru, McLuhan enlightened many different pupils both inside and outside his classrooms; and, being a popular guru, he attracted all sorts of pilgrims, including those who were leaders and sages in their own temples.
Imagine that it is the late 1960s, in Toronto, and that you are crossing the St Michael campus, rushing to your next class or meeting. All of the sudden, you see John Lennon and Yoko Ono arriving at the Coach House and entering Marshall McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology. Then imagine that happening on a regular basis: a never-ending procession of celebrities from both the corporate or institutional world and the world of countercultures entering McLuhan’s temple at the University of Toronto. McLuhan was more than just the media guru: he was the gurus’ guru, discussing the future of communication and technology with other popular people, as diverse as Lord Beaverbrook, Keith Carradine, and Pierre Trudeau. McLuhan was a sought-after figure for both young rebels and representatives of the most traditional institutions: he was in demand among both those who believed in and defended the establishment, and those who wanted to turn it upside-down. In that, McLuhan-the-media-guru was unique: at a time of dramatic technological change, he was perceived as a lighthouse by all sorts of mariners lost in the new media maelstrom. It is as if both President Obama and Sarah Palin went to the same spin-doctor!
In the 1960s, when the three Ms of the day were Marx, Mao, and Marcuse, McLuhan provided a fourth M; it was the only M who never fought for a specific political or cultural cause, even when brought close to either one or the other.1 He explored across situations, engaging with whomever was interested in his ideas on communication. McLuhan probed not only people and ideas, but also new media as factors of change affecting the making of a new technological holism which was relevant among political, corporate, and cultural agencies alike. Through his language, he brought the opposites together: ‘Computers are the LSD of the corporate word’ was a perfect probe that he coined to epitomize what stood beyond that holism, something that he defined as the depth-involving newness of his time. How could you not be fascinated by his knowledge of what was going on in the world when all previous wisdom and authority were constantly questioned? Inevitably, in the 1960s his media guru mask prevailed and was soon translated into an icon, which crystallized McLuhan into the ‘high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media.’ This definition was offered as an introduction to a famous interview published by Playboy magazine in 1969, which consolidated McLuhan’s fame worldwide, but which also led to the misunderstanding later recalled by Northrop Frye. In that interview, McLuhan is cast as a pop guru enlightening different audiences on the new media metaphysic, discussing ‘psychic communal integration made possible by the electronic media,’ and reading the youth counterculture in terms of the new electric tribalism. Those of you who take time to carefully read that interview will immediately realize that McLuhan was, in fact, discussing a very complex set of social, cultural, anthropological, and technological issues; but they are all blurred by the overwhelming introductory captions. What I want to do instead in this chapter is to approach the mask of the media guru as the one bringing into the mosaic the fertile encounter between Eastern and Western cultural traditions.
The mosaic is in fact based on a renewed idea of time-space interplay which characterizes both traditional Eastern philosophies and Western scientific discoveries in the field of physics which, at the turn of the previous century, led to the technological developments that McLuhan himself was later experiencing and unveiling. Let’s start by stating that McLuhan considered the meeting of Eastern and Western traditions as the inevitable consequence of the dynamics of the new media, leading to the sudden clash and juxtaposition of different cultural systems; but he also perceived that encounter as an opportunity for both cultures to enter into a fruitful dialogue, that is, to learn from each other. Together, they could work out and engage with the evolving sensibility of the global village, an environment which was now shared by all cultures alike and which McLuhan defined as the fourth world of instant communication embracing all the pre-existing worlds.2
We can now approach the mosaic as the interface through which the dialogue between Western and Eastern cultural traditions is consciously enacted. It constitutes a new space through which lights disperse shadows and the media guru guides you out of environmental ignorance.
McLuhan’s idea of depth-involving newness is based on a renewed approach to space which he developed by juxtaposing Eastern philosophies, Western physics, and, as we will further explore in the following chapter, modernist experiments. It was a bold juxtaposition which immediately resonated with the countercultural holism of the 1960s and 1970s, when cross-investigations of apparently unrelated – if not opposing – fields of study were encouraged. Written in 1975, physicist Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism is still an Evergreen best-seller and a classic of countercultural holism. Even though it was published at a time when McLuhan had already established his own writing technique based on his interdisciplinary approach, The Tao of Physics became a revealing subtext of his later productions, and especially of Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media.
As we shall see, McLuhan’s interest in Eastern cultures and quantum physics did not originate from a systematic study of both areas of knowledge; rather, it was often derived from indirect sources. Doubtless, he had a generalist (and very much criticized) approach to both domains; and yet this approach was based on a clever intuition conveyed through a conceptual and operative metaphor. McLuhan translated both Eastern literacy and philosophy, and the principles of quantum physics, into the idea of field-approach – field being both a basic concept of the latter, and a precise image mirroring the complexity of the former. McLuhan used this term to epitomize his way of probing the hidden pattern of forces always at work in any given environment. His field-approach dismissed the classic physics idea of space, and embraced the new quantum physics concept of space-time continuum (literally: ‘The four-dimensional continuum of one temporal and three spatial coordinates in which any event or physical object is located’). It is, in fact, a more dynamic approach. through which all investigated situations are considered to be shifting, their state depending on the constant interaction between things and people, as well as environmental conditions. In such a vision, the linear concept of distance is replaced by the acoustic idea of interval, meaning the space of interaction through which both action and reaction (that is, interactive communication) are activated. This functional idea, bringing together quantum physics and Eastern cultures, was often developed through paradoxes which challenged logic and encouraged indeterminacy and relativity: ‘The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory’; ‘The method of the twentieth century is to use not a single but multiple models for experimental explorations – the technique of suspended judgment.’3 It is an idea which also reconfigures the role of the players (be it the Western scientist or the Eastern philosopher) because they are asked to choose their understanding of the paradox (be it the uncanny result of an experiment, or the ambiguous riddle of a koan) from among a network of meaningful alternatives which are all possible at the same time. In both domains, the paradox is therefore applied as a strategy to accommodate what, in appearance, is disconnected or unrelated but which, in fact, is not. As Heisenberg himself recalled, all the contradictions will later be understood, following the progress of discovery.4 Paradoxes are as central in McLuhan’s mosaic as they are fundamental to his provocative probes.
McLuhan’s cross-reading of different domains, and his holistic approach to a renewed idea of field, anticipate an attitude also later explored by literary critics. For instance, in her seminal work, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Katherine Hayles describes the isomorphic approach to the idea of field characterizing scientific and humanistic research alike from the turn of the previous century. She defines the characteristics of the new narrative in terms of ‘its fluid dynamic nature, the inclusion of the observer, the absence of detachable parts, and the mutuality of component interactions.’5 It is a definition which also applies well to McLuhan’s mosaic, which is a narrative based on a juxtaposition of field models derived from various exemplary domains, from ads to avant-garde experiments, from haikus to aphorisms. In particular, to develop his own idea of space and translate it into a model encapsulating his own explorations, McLuhan made great use of literature and the arts to mediate between different cognitive (classic and atomic physics) and cultural (Western and Eastern philosophies) approaches.
To this end, observations on various ideas of space and the related psychodynamic implications are scattered throughout his works, and they are then elaborated into a systematic methodology in a volume that was conceived with artist Harley Parker and published in 1968: Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. The intent of this book is nothing less than the investigation of the history of humankind through the interplay of painting and poetry, in order to reveal how ‘men have groped toward the arts in hope of increased sensory awareness.’ It is an ambitious project pursued through the constant juxtaposition of an inner and an outer journey, through poetry and painting respectively: ‘a journey inward’ – through poetry – and ‘a journey outward to the appearance of things’ – through painting. Inner and outer landscapes are interfaced through the arts in order to trigger a renewed awareness.6 Here, the inter-art study is meant not to simply investigate the effects of one art on the other one, but, instead, to speculate on how cultural and environmental experiences have affected the human sensorium, with clear effects on our sensibility (to be understood as the way in which individuals perceive things) which the arts have registered and rendered through time. The authors write to prove that ‘all the arts might be considered to act as counter-environments or counter-gradients,’ so much so, that they ‘can serve to increase the level of awareness, at least until they become entirely environmental and unperceived.’7
The cross-reading of artistic situations and production is conceived as a training for readers on how to become active players and how to work out the hidden pattern of forces underpinning one’s own visible environment in real time. It is a follow-up to Pound’s idea of the artist as ‘the antenna of the race,’ now updated by McLuhan as the image of art as the new DEW (Distant Early Warning) line, a definition which relates to the establishment of a system of radar stations in Arctic Canada during the Cold War. As a new technology, radars replaced the previous barrage-balloons system employed as an anti-aircraft environment during the Second World War.8 To render his idea of how art and literature should now be employed, McLuhan juxtaposes two technological metaphors, each implying a different approach to the way observation is carried out: the balloon system offers a top-bottom perspective; whereas, radar replaces it with full-scale observation. The former is visually based and, as in a Renaissance canvas, perception is oriented in relation to a given visual vanishing point; whereas the latter is acoustically based and, as in a painting of the Middle Ages, perception reveals objects altogether and simultaneously. These two metaphors develop from a different approach to space, which is, in fact, the crucial paradigm in defining what we imply by ‘perception.’ However, as McLuhan notes in Through the Vanishing Point, we are not always aware of space, nor of our relation to it, because we tend to perceive it as an invisible component of our own reality: ‘To contemporary man space is a cliché, an unexamined assumption: it is environmental, and modern man is therefore unaware of it.’9 It is another way of saying that water is unknown to a fish until it discovers air.
When discussing space, McLuhan confronts Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion,10 and argues that space is not a container for people or things; rather, space is created by people and things. It is not given, as it is reconfigured each time in relation with the modes of interplay between individuals and things within a dynamic context which is constantly evolving; it is a concept that contemporary architecture has fully exploited, creating forms which mould new spatial geometries and suggest to us new ways of moving through space (think of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or of Daniel Libeskind’s New York Green Garden Tower). It is for this reason that the idea of space of tribal societies (acoustic space) differs from the idea of space of Renaissance man. Similarly, the idea of space of Renaissance man (visual space) differs from that of the individual living in the electric age. And yet, the idea of space of the individual living in the electric age somehow recalls that of tribal man, as ‘the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.’11 As the Italian Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni declared, when entering the electric age individuals become ‘primitives of an unknown culture.’12
As McLuhan probes in Through the Vanishing Point, the different perception of spatial existence is reflected in different sensorial modes which the arts have registered over time. Spatial existence also reflects different societal matrixes and different cultural models, in turn characterized by different approaches to knowledge and different scientific paradigms. In McLuhan’s mosaic, space becomes a structural tenet reflecting his perception of the fourth world. To better appreciate this idea, some of Capra’s tenets in his The Tao of Physics can be recalled as investigative patterns, in turn bridging Western science and Eastern philosophies as conceptual hybrids opening our doors of perception. In fact, Capra’s positive comparison of Western rational knowledge, Pythagorean ‘mathematical mysticism,’ and modern physics, on the one hand, and Taoism and Eastern mysticism, on the other hand, is another way to translate countercultural holism, that is, a way to look for connecting patterns rather than differences between apparently opposing and very different contexts. In Capra’s volume, ‘field’ is a key concept used to merge apparently dichotomic approaches. The physicist does not read his materials through Newton’s rational logic; rather, he anticipates Hayles’s ‘cosmic dance’ and works out a complex patchwork of field connections. In this book, Capra himself challenges the traditional Western scientific discourse through a holistic approach to both nature and the human mind. His premises are to be found in the shocking epistemological revolution which physicists began in the late nineteenth century and which came to full maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century:
… Newtonian mechanics was for a long time considered to be the final theory for the description of all natural phenomena, until electric and magnetic phenomena, which had no place in Newton’s theory, were discovered. The discovery of these phenomena showed that the model was incomplete, that it could be applied only to a limited group of phenomena, essentially the motion of solid bodies … Today we know that the Newtonian model is valid only for objects consisting of large numbers of atoms, and only for velocities which are small compared to the speed of light … This does not mean that Newton’s model is ‘wrong’ or that quantum theory and relativity theory are ‘right.’ All these models are approximations which are valid for a certain range of phenomena … The Eastern mystics, too, are well aware of the fact that all verbal description of reality are inaccurate or incomplete.13
We can define Capra’s approach to knowledge as at once holistic and ecological, because new scientific models integrate and interact with all previous ones. Earlier forms of scientific models are not simply replaced or made obsolete; rather, they are accepted with all their limitations – by approximation. Their understanding is therefore extended by the acceptance of their scientific and cognitive incompleteness or indeterminacy (as Heisenberg admitted, ‘One had learned that the old concepts fit nature only inaccurately’).14 They are preserved even though new discoveries are considered more relevant, and there is an awareness that even the latter can only provide a better understanding, not of a given scientific principle, but of its approximation. This is a paradox and a crucial tenet that forces us to reconsider the very idea of scientific truth or law, which is no longer understood as dogmatic but as a ‘work in progress.’ As we shall see in Part Three, McLuhan himself challenged the idea of scientific law or statement in his posthumous volume Laws of Media: The New Science, a volume which contains several references to Capra’s ideas. The subtitle refers to Vico’s idea of ‘New Science,’ a philosophical interpretation which undermined the modern idea of science in Descartes and Newton. In his preface to the volume, Eric McLuhan recalls that, working on a new edition of Understanding Media, his father started by reviewing its most severe criticisms; he found that some of the most recurring criticisms ‘seemed to form a chorus of that’s all very well for you, but it’s NOT scientific.’15 Hence, Laws of Media stands as a paradoxical challenge to that accusation. For Capra, as well as for McLuhan, the interval between various levels of approximation is what triggers curiosity and encourages further testing and research. The process of discovery is therefore conceived as a continuous dialogue which also gives meaning to errors and indeterminacies; old models are part of, or contained in, new ones, and knowledge is a continuous networking of possibilities.
A fascinating account of this process of discovery is offered by Werner Heisenberg in his volume Physics and Philosophy when he discusses the historical development of the quantum theory. The volume is, in fact, a beautiful journey into the change of approach to knowledge that the new physicists took at the turn of the previous century, when their experiments somehow dismissed most of what was traditionally accepted by classical physics. The description of Planck revealing his conceptual shift to his son while taking a long walk in the Grunewald wood outside of Berlin constitutes a powerful image conveying the acceptance of conceptual limits and the entering of a new cognitive wilderness which, in fact, turns those limits into positive stimuli. Heisenberg recalls how these scientists (himself, Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, and others) accepted contradictions and paradoxes as part of their process of discovering theories which, nevertheless, were substantially true. He offers many examples of how ‘again and again one found that the attempt to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics led to contradictions.’ Heisenberg admits that ‘the strangest experience of those years was that the paradoxes of quantum theory did not disappear during this process of clarification; on the contrary they became even more marked and more exciting … By this time many physicists were convinced that these apparent contradictions belonged to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics.’16 This is an idea which, in literature, the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford adopted when stating that his new impressionist novels were based on ‘suggestions not dictates.’17 Consistently, all his main characters are uncertain in their actions; they doubt and hesitate, and aporias become a structural tenet of his narrative.
The idea of paradoxical interrelated patterns is common to Eastern philosophies as well, whose very nature is holistic and ecological. Not only are Eastern philosophers aware of the complexity of each experience, but they also acknowledge the importance of paradoxical aspects of reality – an act which linear thinking cannot convey precisely because paradoxes cannot be fully explained. Paradoxes must be processed through the technique of the suspended judgment. All related speculations are therefore translated through a system of signs (ideograms), each relating to a set of experiences. Eastern literacy developed through communicative techniques which enhanced an aggregative rather than analytical combination of those very signs; the Japanese koans and haiku are at once poetical renderings and ways to experience the world. They are boxes of knowledge to be memorized and investigated. This implies that reading a koan or a haiku is a very active experience. It is an event: meaning depends on the probing of the conceptual aggregation encapsulated in a few words. What the new physics and Eastern philosophies have in common, as Capra clearly points out, is the acceptance of contradictions as the ordinary way of thinking, and the ordinary language, when confronting paradoxical situations. In other words, they both acknowledge the approximate nature of all statements, that is, the relativity of all translation of factual and conceptual discoveries into ordinary language.
In fact, in an effort to contain the complexity of intellectual experiences underpinning new scientific or philosophical discoveries, both groups employ symbols to condense information: scientists to contain something for which ‘they would need several pages of ordinary writing,’18 Eastern philosophers to convey the complexity of the probing itself (their real experience) while offering content. Both these ways of rendering reality are at once abstract and compressed, but they are based on a meaningful correspondence to the facts and the ideas they stand for. Both are complex literate systems that engage readers in a participatory process which transcends the mere visual approach. The readers themselves are to provide the connections and retrieve not only what each symbol stands for, but also how that relates to all other juxtaposing symbols, that is, to their hidden patterns.
McLuhan’s interest in Eastern culture and its forms of communication, as well as his interest in new scientific discoveries, were not born in the 1960s. These interests dated back a few decades and evolved from his discovery of modernist avant-garde experiments. It is important to recall that McLuhan’s sources were often secondary sources, namely, experimental forms of writing pertaining to the Western world of the twentieth century avant-gardes and adopted to pursue engaging poetical projects. For modernist writers, the search for new forms was neither a naïve nor an inspired act, but a conscious act mirroring their new way of conceiving reality. Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and other great masters of modernism abandoned the Romantic idea of the work of art conceived as a mechanism and adopted a more modern one of presenting their work as an organism; each component, each fragment of the whole, was not only a part of it, but also a representation of the whole itself, a sort of metonymical rendering of the more complex reality. It is an idea clearly derived from the new sciences of their time, as it introduces a dynamic concept which also includes the observer as an active part of the organism itself: it is an idea which relates to the presentation of a process, or of a work in progress. The image of the organism therefore constitutes a much more appropriate model to refine new aesthetics, which were already working with the ideas of movement and interplay in order to suggest an elusive and not a descriptive approach to reality. Regarding Eastern arts or letters, the modernist discoveries were not based on anthropological or ethnological investigation into ‘otherness’ as a pursuit of a real understanding of a different civilization; these, too, originated from an intellectual exploration aiming at challenging previous representative canons. Generally speaking, the search into Eastern philosophies was not a search pursued to understand and appreciate diversity as such, but an ambiguous appropriation of communicative codes functional to one’s own aesthetical quest. Following a similar path, McLuhan’s mediated probing of the field approach and of the ideogram derives from the need to respond to the above mentioned cultural and cognitive challenges of his time. He collaborated with scientists, as well as with cultural anthropologists, but his interest was primarily guided by his will to explore and compare different forms, techniques, and technologies of communication, to probe actuality in the pursuit of his media grand narrative.
In McLuhan’s mosaic, Western literacy acquires the potential and significance of opening the traditional linear structure; and, in so doing, it acquires characteristics also similar to those we found in oriental cultures, where the ideogram is conceived as a true gestalt:
For the ideograph even more than the hieroglyph is a complex Gestalt involving all the senses at once. The ideogram affords none of the separation and specialization of sense, none of the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the key to the phonetic alphabet.19
Following Pound’s experiments with language, McLuhan interpreted the ideogram as a complex form which preserves a harmony and a deep connection between signifier and meaning unknown to the phonetic alphabet, and which involves all the senses simultaneously. Even though it appears visually as a sign, the ideograph still preserves a mode of perception which is multi-sensorial, referring to a series of images in nature, combinations, situations, and actions which force the reader into active sensory and cognitive participation. The passage from orality to literacy in Eastern societies did not contribute to a sensorial change since it relied upon a non-phonetic form of writing which preserves and renders an acoustic environment with its multi-sensorial dynamics: ‘… non-phonetic writing does not isolate the senses. Tactility is not a sense but an interplay of all senses.’20 The ideogram is therefore associated with the idea of acoustic or tactile space, an idea which will be further commented upon later in this chapter, but is here associated with the idea of mimesis. This concept is key to understanding why in McLuhan’s writing the acoustic dimension is conceived as tactile – or interactive– to the point of the two terms (acoustic and tactile) being often used synonymously – a fact which detractors used as evidence of McLuhan’s lack of precision and of his superficial treatment of things.
Such an idea of tactility is enhanced by Eastern literacy. Whereas the phoneme represents the extreme atomization of sound and, therefore, the extreme fragmentation of space and knowledge in micro units detached from a meaningful context, the ideogram is a complex and intricate unit which preserves a harmony between perception and conceptualization. Whereas the phonetic alphabet isolates the figure from the ground, the ideograph preserves the two in a syncretic way. Following the adoption of the phonetic alphabet, in the Western world,
the letters … came to be regarded as not only having no meaning but also as having no properties. The alphabet served as the formal cause of the dialectic (logic and philosophy) and of visual (geometrical) space.21
Western literacy encouraged an imbalance between the eye and the ear and contributed to the theorization of visual space; both situations were unnatural and led to abstract perceptions and dissociated sensibilities:
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.22
Visual space is the only form of space that is purely mental: it has no basis in experience because it is formed of abstract figures minus a ground, and because it is entirely the side-effect of technology.23
Visual space is therefore presented as an artificial space created through the consolidation of Western literacy, in relation to a technology that spreads and extends words but, at the same time, modifies their power of being capable of containing the whole world. Literacy is a form of expression which separates percept – that is, the mimetic and immediate perception – and concept– that is, the cognitive process of reasoning which enables us to objectify our experience by detaching from what we perceive and observe. In sensorial and cognitive terms, the process results in a separation between inner and outer worlds, between the inner self and the broader set of external situations. The self also becomes a clear concept through the adoption of the phonetic alphabet and the spread of literacy because this medium encourages a form of introspection unknown in oral and tribal cultures and puts the individual, not the group, at the core of the community.
As discussed all through The Gutenberg Galaxy, it is precisely through the adoption of the phonetic alphabet that a clear difference between Western and Eastern sensibilities arose. From this point onwards, the former was taught through new pedagogical models that promoted one sense (sight) at the expense of others; whereas, the latter preserved a sensorial balance enabling an immediate identification between the individual and the environment. In time, the different approaches to literacy inevitably mirrored different models of social organization, wherein human relationships were regulated either according to roles and holistic knowledge (East), or according to specialization and specialist knowledge (West): ‘… the numerous specializations and separations of function inherent in industry and applied knowledge simply were not accessible to the Chinese.’24 Contrary to Western literate societies, Eastern societies tended to be participatory and inclusive, preserving cognitive modes also typical of oral societies.25 In Eastern participatory and inclusive societies (as well as in oral societies), cohesion also derives from the immediate, mimetic identification between those who observe and perceive, and what is observed and perceived. Such reciprocal interplay annuls the individual self because perception is based on an inclusive and synesthetic act. In Western societies, ‘typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.’26 Perception thus relies upon the prevalence of sight over other senses and results in a mediated translation, not of what people experience, but of what they see. Perception becomes, in fact, perspective and is based on a clear-cut distance between the observed landscape or situation and those who observe. Points of views, angles of visions, are all expressions which reveal how ‘typography cracked the voices of silence’27 and gave men an eye for an ear.
In the Western world, what evolved was the idea of an empty space separating ground and figures on the basis of linear parameters. In visual space, people and objects are situated depending on continuity, sequence, or proportions, and empty space is elaborated in terms of visual distance. And yet, such an idea of continuity is, in fact, an abstraction because the idea of empty space, of vacuum, did not exist until the development of Euclidean geometry, according to which each object creates its own space. This idea was not fully conceptualized among Eastern cultures, where literacy had a different structure and space was never perceived through distance but rather through interplay and inclusion. This implies that our view of space is never other than the view of the observer, and that it is the observer who determines that view because of his/her own observation. Such an idea also pertains to quantum theory, as acknowledged by Heisenberg: ‘… what happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it.’28
Similar to oral culture, in Eastern cultures the idea of space did not extend to the same idea of vacuum as in Western cultures. Things and individuals were perceived, not according to the idea of continuity (linear concept), but instead according to the idea of simultaneity (acoustic concept), in which all is present at the same time. McLuhan returns to such an idea when presenting his laws of media. In discussing it, Eric and Marshall McLuhan quote from Capra and his cross-cultural (and countercultural) holism, pointing out how
the East bypassed hardware and absolute concepts in favour of precepts, that is a ‘direct, non-intellectual experience of reality.’ ‘The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view – one could almost say the essence of it – is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality’ (The Tao of Physics, 174). The East, which never had a phonetic alphabet, never had a Euclid and never developed absolute concepts of space and time.29
In Eastern cultures, space and distance between objects were not understood as clearly defined and delimited concepts. Instead, they constitute the harmonic interval through which interplay occurs. It is, therefore, an approach to space which enables all identification with one’s own environment. In other words, it is a point of contact with that which is perceived as us – and which then becomes us – and not something other than us: ‘The Chinese uses the intervals between things as the primary means of getting “in touch” with situations.’30
The idea of tactility (to be in touch) mirrors here the idea of acoustic space, implying the simultaneous interplay of all senses to feel, be, and become what we experience. In Laws of Media, Eric and Marshall McLuhan quote Jacques Lusseyran to discuss tactility and the way blindness enhances it: touching objects which you cannot see makes you ‘tune in on them’; you become part of what you touch, which, in turn, becomes your own extension.31 You do not live in front of things, but with them; you inhabit an acoustic space in which perception is not distorted by the abstraction of one of the senses (i.e., sight) and leads to a total identification with the environment. Contact takes place through various elements which are all present at the same time in a harmonic and simultaneous relation: ‘Tactile space is the space of the resonant interval, as acoustic space is the sphere of simultaneous relations. They are as invisible as osmic or kinetic space (smell or stress).’32
In Laws of Media, McLuhan borrows the term resonant interval from Werner Heisenberg, who used it to convey such an idea of touch;33 it is an idea already encapsulated in Albert Einstein’s observation that ‘there is no empty space, that is, there is no space without field.’34 The tactile identification which McLuhan elaborates through the interaction of paradigms of oral and oriental cultures is, therefore, consistent with the re-creation, in a contemporary age, of an environment remodelled by the medium of electricity, in line with what was being explored by the new quantum and atomic physics. Electricity is, in fact, a tactile medium as it reintroduces to the Western world a multi-sensorial mode of perception which renders the interaction between the individual and the environment integral once more. It is precisely this type of perception, re-enacted by the electrically conceived oral, acoustic, and tactile environment, which McLuhan tries to re-create in his writing, as the latter is conceived in a way to help readers to readjust to the new electric sensibility: the mosaic embeds the psychic communal encounter with electronic media. Its form is articulated according to spatial models borrowed from Eastern artistic experiences, which McLuhan, borrowing from the early studies on the brain of Julian Jaynes and Robert J. Trotter,35 metaphorically translated as being right-brain hemisphere cultures encouraging parataxis instead of connectives; discontinuity is not only a rhetorical device, but a performative strategy to activate readers’ interplay with their environment, in turn encouraging mimesis and participation in the learning process. It is a model also in tune with the electric scenario, a similitude which McLuhan renders by quoting from another book pertaining to the Eastern tradition, Okakura Kazuko’s The Book of Tea: ‘The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.’36 Role playing defines Eastern traditions, whereas specialization defines Western ones. A flexible paradigm defines a culture dominated by the right-brain hemisphere; a more rigid paradigm defines a culture dominated by the left-brain hemisphere. In McLuhan’s writing, paratactic association and discontinuous juxtaposition open spaces that readers are invited to probe, since they are not empty spaces; nor are they errors of syntax. These spaces are resonant intervals to be used as suggestions, as moments of deep interplay with the text and with the context, that is, with the ground to which everything in the text constantly relates. It is a form of juxtaposition that should also be read according to oriental cultural models: the potentialities of suggestion are encouraged; as readers, we are invited to enter the interval and to ‘fill up the full measure of [our] aesthetic emotion.’37 In the mosaic, space between probes, quotations, and comments is the space of interaction, of contact between author and reader, the space of active participation. Acoustic space puts us in touch with the real essence of the media guru; it allows us to perceive him well beyond his masked surface. We are not engaged with a linear fragmented vacuum, as many dialecticians explained, but with a meaningful interval which readers are invited to let resonate: let the guru resound; get in touch with him through his written corpus. Explore the unsaid connections through his network of analogies, which are enacted by the juxtaposition of figures and ground, that is, of probes, texts, and subtexts, and also by your own subjectivity and knowledge. It is role playing – in the Eastern sense of the word – which, in the contemporary Western age, modernist experiments began to investigate and to elaborate, as in the case of the acoustic writing of the imagist poets; in their poems, ‘the words stop and the meaning goes on.’38
McLuhan’s fascination with these modernist experiments lies precisely in the fact that they encourage a dialogue between linear and acoustic worlds and, by doing so, help to reveal the short- and long-term side effects of the impact of the fourth world on already-existing environments. In Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan discusses Pound’s ‘one image poem’39 as a form capable of overcoming the visual limits imposed by Western literacy through the elaboration of the associative model offered by the aggregative structure of oriental ideograms, and their paratactic combination in koans and haikus. In his analysis, McLuhan associates these forms with the idea of interplay, as well as with the idea of a complex system, two concepts which modernist writers had translated and unified into new participatory or tactile forms. In this way, modernist experiments may be regarded as useful models for mastering and merging Eastern and scientific heuristics in order to heighten sensorial perception. McLuhan uses these experiments as counter-environments which expand the level of awareness through their broken knowledge conceived to make individuals experience and participate in the process of discovery so as to let the meaningful intervals resound.