ToKers:
During his first intense solo-consulting project (c. 1959), the famous
"Project 69" (so-called because that was the sequence number for its
sponsor, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, roughly
today's PBS, and nick-named "Vat 69" by McLuhan), Marshall worked
through the foundations of what would be his signature ideas about the
senses.
However, as we have discovered in our own research, he was wrong.
In 1961, before "Gutenberg Galaxy" or "Understanding Media" were
published (and when he was possibly considering relocated to
Philadelphia to run the Annenberg Center there), the still largely
unknown McLuhan published his "Inside the Five Sense Sensorium" in the
still-new journal "Canadian Architect" (attached.)
Here are the concluding sentences of the concluding paragraph --
"If our massive new electronic media [i.e. TELEVISION] are direct
extensions [presaging the subtitle of UM] of sight and sound and touch
and kinesthesia [more on that below], is there not urgent need to
consider a possibility of a consensus [ditto] or ratio and balance
among these for our collective sanity? Even a slight disturbance of
the balance among our private senses can drive us to wits' end. We
live in a time when whole peoples have gone out of their wits when
impelled by new massive forms [impossible to understand without
Aristotle's understanding of the "City"] such as radio. Psychologists
explain what when the field of attention has a center without a margin
we are hypnotized. Such is the condition of tribal man, past or
present [he viewed ELECTRICITY as "re-tribalizing"]. The problem of
design is to understand the media forces in such wise that we need
never sink into the zombie tribal state where we can meet that Africa
which Conrad immortalized in his 'Heart of Darkness.'"
In his "Project 69" report to NAEB, Marshall finished his analysis of
this "consensus" with a proposal that these media "effects" (as
opposed to their "impact") should be understood in terms of "sensory
closure" (abbreviated "SC"), which was still in place at the end of
the 60s when he met his "final" collaborator, Barrington "Barry"
Nevitt (1908-95, who I met shortly before his death.) This "closure"
was also at the root of his fascination with synesthesia, or the
sensory faculty which allows some people to "see sounds," "taste
colors" &c. The location of that closure/consensus/ratio/balance is
what was once known as "Sensus Communis" (aka the "common sense.")
Thus Eric McLuhan's important (and final) book, "The Sensus Communis,
Synesthesia, and the Soul: An Odyssey" (2015, which I helped him
with.) In "Sensus Communis," Eric explores the 4-volume Henri du
Lubac "Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture" (with Vol 4
still not translated from the French which Eric read it while studying
for his PhD at the University of Dallas in the 1970s.) This "shift"
in the use of *sense* is important, since these "four senses" become
the basis of the Tetrad (and the Facebook group that I run), which is
the heuristic that Marshall used to replace his earlier "Vat 69" SI/SC
"sensory" formulation while re-writing UM into what would become "Laws
of Media" (1988.)
Marshall's earlier use of the "senses" with Sensus Communis appears to
be (at least partly) an artifact of his own PhD studies -- granted by
Cambridge in 1943 but written at St. Louis University, in part under
the influence of Bernard Muller-Thym. "Bernie," who later became a
pioneering management consultant and likely introduced Marshall to
Peter Drucker, had published his own "The Common Sense, Perfection of
the Order of Pure Sensibility" in "The Thomist" in 1940. And Bernie's
own PhD was from the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (PIMS)
at the University of Toronto, a stone's throw from where Marshall
would eventually set up his own "Centre for Culture and Technology."
What Bernie had apparently failed to notice, seemingly continued in
McLuhan's own work, was the the Sensus Communis isn't the "end" of the
story. While that faculty is, as Bernie suggested, the "perfection"
(which means "completion") of the "senses," that clearly isn't the
source of human *perception*. Indeed, McLuhan's own insistence on the
priority of "percepts" over "concepts" was undermined by his failure
to carry this process all the way through -- making much of what he
later said "unintelligible" for those who tried to sort all this out.
As Bernie, Marshall &al should have known -- since it is not at all
disguised in Aquinas (who they both seemingly read carefully) -- is
that our *external* senses (i.e. the ones Marshall first talks about)
need to be "processed" through what are widely known as the *internal*
senses. These consist of the Sensus Communis *and* Imagination,
Memory and Cogitative Reason -- as discussed by Thomas in Summa
Theologica, Book I, Question 78, Article 4: "Whether the Internal
Senses are Properly Distinquished."
These "internal senses" were at the heart of Medieval psychology
(indeed for roughly 2000 years) -- which, alas, had been largely
forgotten in McLuhan's times (including by the "Thomists.") When he
says "Psychologists explain . . . " in his 1961 article, and, indeed,
when he uses the term "wits," he is unfortunately way out
over-his-skis. There were *zero* psychologists at that time who
understood what was actually involved in perception (including the
Gestaltists who Marshall relied on) and, alas, few who understand it
today.
It wasn't until 1975 that Ruth Harvey (at the Warburg Institute in
London, where Dame Francis Yates had published her "The Art of Memory"
in 1966, of which McLuhan had gotten a review copy, and "The
Rosicrucian Enlightenment" in 1972) published her "Inward Wits:
Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance." And it
wasn't until 1990 that Simon Kemp published his "Medieval Psychology."
Crucially, for our own research, it wasn't until 2007 and 2016 until
we met him) that Mark Barker completed his own PhD "Cogitative Power:
Objects and Terminology" at the University of St. Thomas (unpublished
but promised for online release.)
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Inward-2DWits-2DPsychological-2DRenaissance-2DInstitute_dp_085481051X&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=v8HH3DUFuAmWIJ2Y55dfeV57MJcowEGrQXi8t3uttGg&s=0kFTuzLiUV6OwLY_kw-Na7j1XxI1imR6Qv6CfAtYN3I&e=
On the basis of this new research, it is now possible to "extend"
Marshall's own efforts, for the first time. His focus on the
"external senses," followed by his son's focus on the exegetical
"senses of scripture" can finally be described in terms of the
"internal senses" -- where the "perceptual" action that "precedes"
emotions/concepts actually all takes place.
And, just in time, since this is at the crux of today's shift from
TELEVISION to DIGITAL -- which is now forcing us to "revalue all
values" . . . !!
Mark
############################
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
|