Explorations, 1953–59
Introduction to the Eight-Volume Series of the 2016 Edition
by Michael Darroch (University of Windsor) and Janine Marchessault (York University)“TV Wollops the MS! The monopoly of knowledge enjoyed by print for centuries was destroyed by the mass media. After a beating by radio and movies, MS was knocked cold by TV. Observers predict that before a staggering comeback, book culture must train in a fresh air camp.”1 So claimed an inconspicuous headline in the inside rear cover of the second issue of the journal Explorations, published in April 1954. The front and rear covers depicted a spoof newspaper whose main headline pronounced, “Feenicht’s Playhouse: New Media Changing Temporal-Spatial Orientation to Self.” Now in full swing, Explorations—an experimental interdisciplinary publication led by faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto—would become the forum in which Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter formulated their most striking insights about new media in the electric age.
Explorations was not the first humanistic journal on a quest to discover common vocabularies between arts and sciences. It was, however, the first such endeavour to emerge from an interdisciplinary research team striving to understand the implications of postwar new media of communication: photography, film, radio, television, even early computing. The team included McLuhan—a little-known English professor who had arrived at the University of Toronto in 1946 eager to build a network of scholars invested in studying the materiality of media across historical and contemporary popular cultures—and Carpenter, an ambitious anthropologist studying concepts of space and time among indigenous peoples, especially the Aivilik Inuit, and moonlighting as a radio and TV broadcaster at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Carpenter recalled meeting McLuhan at his Toronto home in 1948 as a momentous encounter. He had been teaching in the University of Toronto’s anthropology department while writing his dissertation on the prehistory of Northeast indigenous cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. A lifelong friendship based on lively intellectual exchange developed between the two men. Besides being junior faculty members, they had much in common: an interest in new media, and the impact of these media on the human sensorium and forms of education and knowledge. Perhaps most centrally, they shared a profound disdain for the confining strictures of disciplinary specialisms which universities were increasingly fostering. Together they hatched a plan for a landmark think tank that would develop interdisciplinary methodologies and new vocabularies needed to make sense of the changing mediated environments of postwar North America. The group further included Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, a British town planner with ties to the Bauhaus and the British wing of CIAM or the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, which had been launched in 1928 by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, both of whom had been major inspirations to McLuhan since the early 1940s.2 Thomas Easterbrook, a political economist and longtime friend of McLuhan, was deeply conversant with his mentor Harold A. Innis’s studies of cultural economies, ancient civilizations, and their related patterns of communication and media biases across space and time. D. Carlton Williams, a psychologist rising in the university’s administration who was acquainted with mass communications research and contemporaneous studies of human sense perception, brought a scientific perspective to research. The plan for a think tank—an “experiment in communication”3—would lead to the Culture and Communications graduate seminar (1953–55), innovative media experiments, talks and conferences, and the crowning achievement, the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication. The eight coedited issues of Explorations are republished here for the first time since their original printing in the 1950s.
The Explorations research group aimed to develop a “field approach” to the study of new media and communication. While inspired by a postwar, modernist discourse of universality, no single mode of research was dominant. By their own account, the team sought “an area of mutually supporting insights in a critique of the methods of study in Economics, Psychology, English, Anthropology, and Town Planning.”4 The journal’s masthead (for the first six issues) would declare that Explorations “is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of the humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man.”5
This series description was in part lifted from the short-lived interdisciplinary journal trans/formation: arts, communication, environment, a publication rooted in modernist discourse and edited by New York abstract artist Harry Holtzman, the champion of Piet Mondrian’s legacy in the United States. trans/formation, which folded after only three issues had been published between 1950 and 1952 (all three of which were held in the Toronto seminar’s “library”), counted Tyrwhitt and Giedion among its contributing editors6 and sought to bridge disciplinary boundaries, not by attempting to synthesize ideas into a single perspective but rather by arranging myriad concepts into new dynamic patterns and configurations.7 trans/formation’s masthead “affirmed that art, science, and technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise . . . but today they are too often treated as if they were cultural isolates and mutually antagonistic. Lack of time, misinformation, specialised terminology make it hard to keep pace with advances in all fields.”8 Indeed, trans/formation’s stated intention “to cut across the arts and sciences by treating them as a continuum” was a clear inspiration for Explorations. McLuhan himself suggested to Tyrwhitt, “Perhaps we might use some of the Transformation material if there is to be no 4th issue there?”9 Tyrwhitt would later contribute a paper she had drafted for trans/formation, “Ideal Cities and the City Ideal,” to Explorations 2, tracing histories of utopian thought in urban studies.10
Explorations published writings by group members along with contributions on topics ranging from ethnolinguistics to economic theory, from art and design to developmental psychology, from psychoanalysis to nursery rhymes and bawdy ballads, from urban theory to electronic media. The journal treated culture, and cultural studies, as a landscape of experiences and knowledge. An experimental space in its own right, Explorations counted among its more than eighty contributors, scholars, scientists, and artists who were both established and emerging.
Perhaps the most representative issue of Explorations was number 4, published in February 1955, where poems by e. e. cummings and Jorge Luis Borges mingled with essays by McLuhan on “Space, Time, and Poetry,” Carpenter on “Eskimo Poetry: Word Magic,” Tyrwhitt on “The Moving Eye” (regarding cinematic experiences of urban life and comparative perceptions of ancient cities in India), and Williams on “auditory space”—a notion that “electrified” the group, as Carpenter later recounted.11 Essays by literary scholar Northrop Frye on “The Language of Poetry” and anthropologist Dorothy Lee on “Freedom, Spontaneity and Limit in American Linguistic Usage” were juxtaposed with case studies by graduate students at the time, such as English and communications scholar Walter J. Ong on “Space in Renaissance Symbolism” and anthropologist Joan Rayfield on “Some Implications of English Grammar.” A “Media Log,” largely replicated from McLuhan’s 1954 version of Counterblast, was published in addition to an “Idea File” containing insights on oral, written, and technological cultural forms culled from writings by Robert Graves, Edmund Leach, Walter Gropius, and E. T. Hall, among many others. Explorations 4 boldly announced the fledgling field of media studies as deeply rooted in anthropological and literary-poetic traditions, but equally informed by studies of mechanisation, technology, and culture. As Carpenter and McLuhan surmised, it was an interdisciplinary and experimental framework that was needed for studying contemporary culture: a problem “requiring a harmony of the arts and behavioral sciences” and an “orchestration of diverse techniques.”12
Ford Foundation
Through a grant application in 1953 to the Ford Foundation’s newly established interdisciplinary research and study program in behavioral sciences (most likely cowritten by McLuhan and Carpenter and assisted by the then doctoral student Donald Theall, but submitted under the names of all five team members), the group obtained $44,250 for a two-year research project devoted to studying the “changing patterns of language and behavior and the new media of communication.”13 With the Culture and Communication Seminar, the group proposed to meet the specific criteria of the new Ford program by establishing a kind of think tank for faculty and graduate students to tackle the specific circumstances fostered by the new media of the 1950s. As the program pamphlet explained, it was expected that the “direction of the project would be assumed jointly by a behavioral scientist and by a scholar from a related discipline” to conduct “research on a problem requiring their collaboration.” They “would organize a joint seminar, either formal or informal, dealing not only with the particular problem under study but also with the general problems of cross-disciplinary work involved. Faculty members and graduate students from the different fields of specialization would participate in both the research project and the seminar.”14 In many ways, the program echoed scholars such as Sigfried Giedion, who had long advocated for “Chairs” or “Faculties of Interrelations” at universities in Europe and North America.15 Within North America, the Toronto group’s proposal can be counted among the very first attempts to combine explicitly the study of culture and communication. The timing of this grant is significant given the scope of contemporaneous studies of media underway in the United States and Europe: functionalist and critical cultural studies of mass communications, theories of cybernetics, studies of social interaction, as well as psychological studies of the effects of media on human perception. Carpenter, initially the driving force behind Explorations, acted as editor of the first six issues—the issues funded through the Ford grant—before becoming coeditor with McLuhan for issues 7 and 8, which were sponsored by the Toronto Telegram. A ninth and final issue, entitled Eskimo (1959), combined Carpenter’s writings on indigenous art and culture of the Aivilik juxtaposed with images from filmmaker Robert Flaherty and drawings by Frederick Varley. After Beacon Press published a selection of Explorations contributions in 1960, coedited by Carpenter and McLuhan as Explorations in Communication, McLuhan later resuscitated the spirit of Explorations as a “magazine within a magazine,” a publication inside the University of Toronto’s alumni magazine, the Varsity Graduate (1964–72).The group’s proposal to Ford’s Behavioral Sciences Program is revealing of the central assumptions that would underpin the graduate seminar and Explorations. The proposal’s point of departure is not yet an assumption about the power of media forms to shape content, but rather the understanding that methods for studying new media required recognition of new patterns emerging across technological, cultural, and urban life. Underpinning the proposal is a conversation that McLuhan in particular had started with advocates of cybernetic theories. Carpenter was also of course conversant with the writings of anthropologists who were deeply involved with developing cybernetic models and metaphors within the social sciences, among others Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Cybernetic theories also came to the group through Donald Theall, who would complete his PhD dissertation in 1954 on “Communication Theories in Modern Poetry: Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot” under the supervision of both McLuhan and Carpenter. In the December 1949 issue of the Yale Scientific Magazine, Theall had reviewed Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), and with Carpenter he would introduce McLuhan to Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch’s Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951). Bateson and Ruesch’s book drew substantially on Wiener’s cybernetics and Gestalt psychology’s concept of pattern formation, while offering a distinctly interdisciplinary range of approaches to understanding the individual self within a variety of social constellations. McLuhan and Carpenter turned to these texts as well as the writings of political theorist Karl W. Deutsch, a key proponent of social science interpretations of cybernetics theories emanating from the writings of Wiener and the famous “Macy Conferences” at MIT (1946–53) in his essays on communication and information theory, social organizations, and the need for a new unity of knowledge in higher education.16 Citing Deutsch (although without reference), their final Ford proposal begins with the statement that “communications engineering does not transfer events, commodities, or services but a patterned relationship between these.”17 The authors then quickly suggest that Harold Innis was among the first to recognize this transition, an “awareness of this major change in the social drama of this century” that led Innis to “shift his attention from economic history to the nature of communication past and present” (an interpretation of Innis’s writings that McLuhan would reinforce with his essay “The Later Innis” [1953]18).
Bateson and Ruesch’s reflections on the position of the observer within the system of communication (a precursor to second-order cybernetics), and on open and closed networks of communication, are suggestive of the stance the Explorations group would take in the Ford proposal regarding their own critical outpost in Canada, enmeshed within North American and European indigenous and colonial histories. Innis, they argue, epitomized a uniquely Canadian observational post, “a bi-focal habit of vision” making natural to the outlook of Canadians “the historical and the scientific, the humanist and the technological simultaneously.”19 This outlook is represented in “the immediacy of Canadian reception of modern art and technology” by such artists as Scottish-born National Film Board of Canada animator Norman McLaren.20 A transatlantic overlaying of historical events afforded Innis—and by extension their own research group—a “complex historical vision which is natural to those who think simultaneously of the attitudes and experience past and present, of French and British, English and North American.” Innis interpreted the American Revolution as a cultural “clash between two networks of communication”: the “closed” fur trades network controlled from France and England, which was “antithetic to settlement and the natural tendency to self-government” of the “open” social network of the United States. Canada remained within the closed fur trade network for a century after the United States had abandoned them. The authors believed this Canadian habit of vision offered an opportunity to understand the transition from a mechanized to an electrified media culture across the whole continent.21
In February 1951, McLuhan famously wrote to Innis categorically rejecting linear theories of information transmission: “Deutch’s [sic] interesting pamphlet on communication is thoroughly divorced from any sense of the social functions performed by communication,” he writes, further decrying the “fallacy of the Deutsch-Wiener approach” for “its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication.”22 He then proposes an “experiment in communication” as a “means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what might be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common good. What I have been considering is a single mimeographed sheet to be sent out weekly or fortnightly to a few dozen people in different fields . . . illustrating the underlining unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye. Then, it is hoped there will be a feedback of related perception from various readers which will establish a continuous flow.”23 As he explained to Ezra Pound in the same period, the “object of [this] sheet is to open up intercommunication between several fields. To open up eyes and ears of people in physics, anthropology, history, etc. etc. to relevant developments in the arts.”24 But it is also here that we see the playfulness at stake in this project—the treatment of this “experiment” as itself a media art form that would, for all intents and purposes, develop into the Explorations project. For having just rejected the Deutsch-Wiener cybernetic approach in his letter to Innis, McLuhan would write to Wiener within weeks, stating, “As a friend and student of Sigfried Giedion’s, I have paid special attention to your Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings.” Throughout this letter, McLuhan references the original 1950 issue of Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings, drawing a parallel between his just released Mechanical Bride and Wiener’s comments on scientific discovery as the art of decoding the secrets of natural phenomena. And he concludes by suggesting that it is precisely an encounter with Karl Deutsch’s “discussion of communication and education [that] led me to envisage an experiment in communication . . . I await certain feedback responses before proceeding.”25
One such experiment from this period was to be called “NETWORK” and details the role of artists as essential circuits within the ever-increasing flux of messages: “The artist is at the centre of his network or milieu . . . By isolating and externalizing his inner drama . . . he offers the arrested means of contemplation of his time, an indispensable way of clarifying the ordinary imprecision and confusion of the endless crowd of messages circulating in the social network.” It was, in essence, a second-order cybernetic model of communication study.
The peculiar inside point of view in recent historiography, biography, photography, case histories, sociology, and anthropology is identical with the procedures of the physical sciences. Simultaneity and inclusiveness which characterize physics, painting, and poetry, in the twentieth century have always been implicit in the creative process in the arts and sciences. But current extension of self-awareness of techniques of apprehension and communication make practical a “reamalgamergence” of the domains of time and space, knowledge and power.26
Not surprisingly, the “Network” proposal concludes with the note, “Feedback: Karl Deutsch at MIT indicates serious work on communication involving Norbert Wiener, G. Kepes, and himself. Cf. books published under these names.”27
McLuhan’s “Network” experiment was arguably another step towards designing Explorations both as a serious scholarly publication project and a mosaic of ideas, a media art form in its own right. With Carpenter, McLuhan found a partner who shared the vision of an “experiment in communication,” based on a commitment to intellectual exchange and bridging disciplines. Starting in 1951, they assembled the core team as well as a broader community of thinkers from across the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences to explore the effects of new media and technologies within contemporary culture. Especially coveted was Tyrwhitt’s experience as a facilitator of research congresses with CIAM and her work with Giedion. As the proposal claims, “She had worked with him specifically on the problem of interdisciplinary study in the university and came to Toronto University especially to advance this kind of cooperation between departments of economics, political science, sociology, social work, anthropology, architecture, and town planning.”28
“Well aware of the brilliant new developments in communication study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” the Ford grant explains, gesturing both to Wiener’s cybernetic conferences and to Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication, “the undersigned propose to utilize these insights but to employ also the technique of studying the forms of communication, old and new, as art forms,” an approach already “implicit in the very title of Harold Innis’ Bias of Communication.”29 They proposed to study the effects of new media forms on patterns of language, economic values, social organization, individual and collective behaviour, always keeping in mind accompanying changes to the classroom and the networks of city life. In their eyes the central problem consisted of two aspects. First, “the creation of a new language of vision” that “arises from all our new visual media and which is part of the total language of modern culture.” The notion of a new “language of vision” recalls in particular György Kepes’s 1944 classic essay by the same title. Language of Vision proposed a radical revamping of art and design pedagogy in terms of visual communication, committed to identifying common patterns of unity across varied approaches to human experience. Kepes, a Hungarian-born professor of visual design at MIT associated with László Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus, had in 1950 staged the exhibition “The New Landscape,” a constellation of images of natural and scientific phenomena that attempted to shift our view from the static object to a method of pattern-seeing.30 Jaqueline Tyrwhitt visited the exhibit while working with Giedion and most likely brought it to the attention of the Toronto faculty members. The group would publish an early draft of Kepes’s introduction to his 1956 book The New Landscape in Art and Science. Kepes himself attempted to draw parallels between his project and cybernetics. In Wiener’s own albeit hesitant contribution to the volume, he acknowledges that “the significance of the processes of breakdown is great not only in physics, but even in the study of sociological processes.”31 Second, the Toronto group proposed to study “the impact of this total social language on the traditional spoken and written forms of expression.” These two core objectives they would pursue in the pages of Explorations through numerous contributions. As clearly indicated in an early draft of their Ford proposal, the core research group represented the five key disciplines that would supplement each other: anthropology, psychology, economics, town planning, and English.32
Exploring Interdisciplinarity
While no one discipline was privileged above the others, anthropology played a special role in creating a strong comparative framework from the start. In addition to anthropological discussions of cybernetics, the Sapir-Whorf theory was an important intellectual foundation. As with Innis, Edward Sapir (a German-born American who spent fifteen years in Ottawa working for the Geographical Survey of Canada) himself offered a multifocal habit of vision, working between linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. For the grant applicants, Sapir “brought together European attitudes towards psychoanalysis (emphasis on socially-situated personality) and North American attitudes towards social structure (culture).” Moreover, Sapir “fused the European concern with philology with [the] North American concern with dynamic patterns in language.”33 In the same way that Benjamin L. Whorf’s metalinguistic techniques examined languages to understand collective strategies of adapting to changing notions of time and space, anthropological techniques for investigating cultural aspects of new media would complement psychological studies of personality. The anthropologist and ethnolinguist Dorothy Lee was arguably one of the group’s “most influential force[s],”34 contributing six articles on language, value, and perception. Her insight that peoples such as the Trobrianders perceived lineal order differently from Western cultures had already been cited by Bateson and Ruesch (1951), and was central to the delineation of acoustic and visual cultures undertaken by the Explorations group, and in later studies by both McLuhan and Carpenter.Indeed, Carpenter’s expansive understanding of anthropology was initially the driving force behind the publication. As McLuhan would write to Tyrwhitt in 1953, while she was in India developing a UN exhibition on low-cost housing, “Carpenter is keen to start a mag in connection with the project. So we are exploring possibilities.”35 In a letter to the Canadian Social Science Research Council, the authors explained that there was a shared desire to create a distinctly Canadian journal of anthropology. With the Ford grant to “conduct a two-year interdisciplinary seminar, particularly in the fields of communications and anthropology, we felt our group might serve as the formal group to launch the desired journal.” A “tentative outline” announced Explorations as a Canadian journal of communication and anthropology.36 There was a need for a medium to bring articles together to “stimulate more and better articles, above all which will explore new fields, set trends, and communicate findings among that growing body of Canadians who are turning to anthropology and communications as new approaches to human relations.”37
The meeting of anthropology and psychology, on the other hand, while perhaps electrifying, was also fraught with tensions. As Carpenter and McLuhan wrote in a joint article for the Chicago Review in 1956, entitled “The New Languages” (later extended and republished by Carpenter in Explorations 7), “the new mass media—film, radio, TV—are new languages, their grammars as yet unknown. Each codifies reality differently; each conceals a unique metaphysics.”38 Building on the insights drawn from anthropology that language codifies reality differently, Carpenter and McLuhan saw media as essentially codifying reality, space-time, in distinct ways. Perception and experience were central elements in the study of media as cultural forms, as particular forms of mediation. Carl Williams, the lone psychologist in the group, joined the project likely at the request of the University of Toronto’s then vice president, Claude Bissell. As Carpenter recounted, Williams “sought to refine psychology to an objective science. It was for this reason he was invited to join our group. We felt we needed his bias to balance ours, and also to get Ford funding.”39 As is evident in looking at letters exchanged between Carpenter and McLuhan, a productive tension existed between the humanists and the scientists of the group that echoed divisions between critical communication studies and empirical mass communications research in the United States. The group’s aim to create art-science collaborations was intended to create a novel kind of analytic framework whereby empirical facts could stand alongside poetic and humanistic rumination.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the media experiment undertaken by Carpenter and Williams. In developing their methodologies, seminar faculty and graduate students undertook a number of critical media experiments on changing patterns of perception resulting from new media. The CBC and the then Ryerson Institute placed studio space and media equipment at their disposal. The experiment tested their central hypothesis that different media (speech, print, radio, television) lend themselves to certain ideas and values.40 With his graduate students, Williams undertook a systematic statistical analysis, later reporting in the Canadian Journal of Psychology that the results support the hypothesis that, under the conditions described, media do influence retention in terms both of immediate memory and of memory over a period of several months. The superior results of the television audience support the findings of previous experiments carried out before the advent of television [such as studies of media effects and persuasion by C. I. Hoveland and Joseph Klapper], that presentation of material by means of two sense modalities is more effective than either simple visual or aural presentation.41
Carpenter rejected such quantitative analysis. In a letter to group members of April 1955, he forcefully recounted that “my interest was media biases. I was convinced that the secret of TV was its extreme non-lineality, as opposed to the lineality of the book.” The techniques proposed by the psychologists “stressed quantitative analyses and ignored the points I wished to investigate.”42 There is little doubt that both perspectives offered valid insights into the pedagogical experiences produced by different media. It is surprising that such findings have never been fully taken up by educational media researchers. Hopefully, the republication of these early studies will renew interest in the cognitive studies of media which have focused too narrowly, according to Carpenter and McLuhan, on attention and inputs and not enough on the creative and critical aspects of perception.
What is clear in reading through the Explorations issues is that Carpenter and McLuhan were most interested in the new kinds of learning made possible through the media. Carpenter and McLuhan would go one step further than Williams by asserting that the media are transforming the human sensorium. McLuhan, in particular, was influenced by research into human perception as part of his approach to media studies since he believed that these media were altering our senses, our forms of attention and knowledge production. This is why pedagogy is absolutely central to all of his books. In the acknowledgements page of Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan credits the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and U.S. Office of Education who in 1959–60 provided him with funding to produce his Report on a Project in Understanding New Media. This was a proposal for a radical high school curriculum centered around media. Many passages and ideas from this book are developed in Understanding Media and can be seen being developed in the pages of Explorations. As such, Carpenter and McLuhan are quite specific about the materiality of the media technologies, the “new languages” under discussion both in terms of their impact on the human sensorium and the environments they are creating. This would serve as the basis for a program of comparative and experimental media studies that each would pursue throughout his academic career.
Common Vocabularies
In the history of media studies in Canada and internationally, the Explorations journal is an important starting point for defining the research agenda of the so-called Toronto School. Yet, as Carpenter has later remarked, the school was not formal. Rather, comparing Toronto to an island, he described the group as “islanders simply watching a spectacular light show from afar. Toronto . . . housed a coterie of intellectuals and artists that would meet every day at four o’clock at the Royal Ontario Museum coffee shop: McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, Carpenter, Donald Theall, John Irving, students, sometimes Easterbrook and less often Innis, and often visitors Dorothy Lee, Sigfried Giedion, Ashley Montagu, Karl Polyani, and Roy Campbell.”43 Perhaps most worthy of recognition is the fact that the foundations of the Toronto School lie in the group’s deep cross-disciplinary, international roots. These roots were largely transatlantic, but Carpenter’s World War II experience in Japan and Tyrwhitt’s work with CIAM and the United Nations in India brought an unusual range of experiences into their joint discussions.The circulation and early reception of Explorations is difficult to trace, but indications are given in group members’ correspondence and writings—though print runs typically totalled one thousand and circulation was international. As noted, Explorations was an experimental space, a project for which Carpenter himself was willing to gamble his own funds when the Ford funding was exhausted. In the April 1955 communication to the journal’s coeditors, he wrote, “What is important is that we have ideas, not yet fully articulated, that are now exciting (already they’re attracting considerable attention outside Toronto—the last three issues, Feb-Mar-Apr of Scientific American cite Explorations in reviews and article bibliographies). If we stop now, leaving the seminar incomplete, it will be just that—incomplete, which is good for neither staff nor students and will look as if we were in the thing only for the money.”44
Ultimately, aside from McLuhan, the contributions of the group’s other members to media theory have been largely overlooked. Carpenter contributed his cultural anthropological studies of visual media and indigenous cultures to the very shape that media studies would take during this period.45 Tyrwhitt acted as liaison between the group and modernist architectural movements, providing vital links to members of Bauhaus, CIAM, and later the Athens-based World Society of Ekistics. She carried many of the group’s insights to her professorship in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1955–69) and later to her role as editor of the radical urban studies journal Ekistics, initiated in 1955 by Constantinos Doxiadis, who was developing a “science of human settlements.”46 Easterbrook became chair of the department of political economy at the University of Toronto (1961–70) and later copublished with seminar student Mel Watkins, a prominent Canadian scholar and public intellectual. Williams became president of the University of Western Ontario (1967–77). Joan Rayfield joined Carpenter at Northridge, California, before returning to Toronto where she was a longtime professor of anthropology (York University). Donald Theall, one of the first graduate students, helped found the graduate programme in communication at Montreal’s McGill University before assuming the presidency of Trent University. Many of the seminar’s other students also went on to illustrious careers in fine arts, humanities, and sciences.
In 1953, the Explorations group posed a range of questions about the cultural implications of new media. “TV Wallops the Manuscript” was the conclusion: “the bout fought in the CBC studios”—a network, of course, created to foster a new sense of national unity in Canada by creating a mediated interpretation of the nation. TV’s liveness was a catalyst for McLuhan and Carpenter to see electronic media as a return to orality, a new “acoustic space,” and expressed a new aesthetics of freedom. And so, as the spoof cover of Explorations 2 also declared, the grammar of the movie and the TV screen promised to bring about the unity of arts that thinkers such as Giedion had long sought: “Unity is essential on the screen: it cannot be achieved by a production-line of specialists.”47 As McLuhan concluded in “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath,” included anonymously in Explorations 4, Telephone, gramophone, and RADIO are the mechanization of post-literate acoustic space. Radio returns us to the dark of the mind, to the invasions from Mars and Orson Welles; it mechanizes the well of loneliness that is acoustic space: the human heart-throb put on a PA system provides a well of loneliness in which anyone can drown.
Movies and TV complete the cycle of mechanization of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor which established the dynamics of Western civilization. . . .
NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present. We are back in acoustic space. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us.48
McLuhan and Carpenter’s core ideas were captured perhaps most playfully in the final coedited issue, Explorations 8, devoted to the oral as an ode to James Joyce: “Verbi-Voco-Visual.” The issue features seven essays, including one by McLuhan, that explore different aspects of oral culture—mostly concerned with a transition to a new orality. Twenty-four non-authored “Items,” which include some previously published essays by McLuhan and Carpenter, appear as humorous intellectual sketches exploring topics like “Electronics as ESP,” car commercials, bathroom acoustics, dictaphones, and of course wine. The final “Item,” number 24, entitled “No Upside Down in Eskimo Art,” reiterated McLuhan and Carpenter’s core assertion that “after thousands of years of written processing of human experience, the instantaneous omnipresence of electronically processed information has hoicked us out of these age-old patterns into an auditory world.” With the many rich new insights about new media cultures found in these eight coedited issues of Explorations, McLuhan, Carpenter, and their coeditors helped define a starting point for the emerging fields of media and communications studies.
Michael Darroch (University of Windsor)
Janine Marchessault (York University)
2016
