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
2. See Darroch, 2008; Darroch & Marchessault, 2009, Geiser, 2010; Darroch, 2014; Darroch, 2016a, Darroch, 2016b.
3. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Eds.), Letters of Marshall McLuhan, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987: 223.
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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
4. Herbert Marshall McLuhan Fonds, held in Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in Ottawa. Further references to the McLuhan Fonds will be identified as LAC followed by the call number MG 31, D 156, the volume number, and the folder number (here: LAC MG 31, D 156, 145, 35).
5. Front matter, December 1953–June 1956, Explorations 1–6.
6. The list also included Le Corbusier, Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, György Kepes, and S. I. Hayakawa, among many others.
7. See Anna Vallye, 2009, “The Strategic Universality of trans/formation, 1950–1952,” Grey Room 35:28–57.
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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
8. Front matter, 1950, trans/formation: arts, communication, environment 1.
9. Marshall McLuhan to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 8 December 1953. Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1885–1980). Royal Institute of British Architects, TYJ/18. RIBA British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collection, London.
10. Ellen Shoshkes, 2014, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design, Farnham, UK: Ashgate: 147.
11. Donald Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001: 241.
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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
12. Edmund S. Carpenter, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, H. M. McLuhan, W. T. Easterbrook, and D. C. Williams, 1953, “University of Toronto: Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of Communication,” Ford Foundation Archives, New York: Rockefeller Archive Center. Grant File PA 53–70, Section 1, 1–11, here page 3.
13. Ford Foundation, 1953, Ford Foundation Annual Report 1953, New York: Ford Foundation: 67. The Ford Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Program had the stated goal of “improving the content of the behavioral sciences” by specifically supporting “interdisciplinary research and study.” Launched in 1952, the program aimed to help the “intellectual development of the behavioral sciences” by “improving their relationship with such disciplines as history, social and political philosophy, humanistic studies and certain phases of economics” (67).
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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
14. “Announcement of Interdisciplinary Research and Study Program.” Ford Foundation, Behavioral Sciences Division. LAC MG 31 156 204 26.
15. See Sigfried Giedion, 1987, “A Faculty of Interrelations,” in D. Huber (Ed.), Wege in die Öffentlichkeit (pp. 160–63), Zurich: Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur.
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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).
16. See for example Karl Deutsch, “Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge,” in Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and R. M. MacIver (Eds.), Goals for American Education: 9th Symposium (pp. 55–139), New York: Harper, 1950.
17. Carpenter et al., 1953: 1. The phrase comes from Karl Deutsch’s essays “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science” (1951a: 241) and “Mechanism, Teleology, and Mind” (1951b: 194), and is reiterated in his book Nationalism and Social Communication (1953 [1966]: 93), when he discusses cybernetic concepts of information, message transfer, and complementarity. This book would be part of the Culture and Communication Seminar library holdings.
18. Marshall McLuhan, 1953, “The Later Innis,” Queen’s Quarterly 60(3): 385–94.
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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
19. Carpenter et al., 1953: 1.
20. They also include Disney in this list of “Canadian pioneers of the new cinema medium”, whose Canadian-born grandfather offered a perhaps more dubious national connection. Carpenter et al., 1953: 1.
21. Carpenter et al., 1953: 1.
22. Molinaro et al., 1987: 222.
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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.
23. Molinaro et al., 1987: 223.
24. Molinaro et al., 1987: 218.
25. Marshall McLuhan to Norbert Wiener, 28 March 1951. File 135, Box 9, Norbert Wiener Papers, MIT Archives.
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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
26. LAC MG 31, D 156, 149, 4. See also McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, 30 January 1951. Box 46, Folder 2, Hugh Kenner Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
27. LAC MG 31, D 156, 149, 4.
28. Carpenter et al., 1953: 10.
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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
29. Carpenter et al., 1953: 4.
30. See Reinhold Martin, 2003, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, chapter 2: “Pattern-Seeing” (pp. 42–79).
31. Norbert Wiener, 1956, “Pure Patterns in a Natural World,” in György Kepes (Ed.), The New Landscape in Art and Science (pp. 274–76), Chicago: P. Theobald. See also Martin, 2003: 38.
32. “Changing Patterns of Man and Society Associated with the New Media of
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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
Communication.” Draft of Ford Foundation Proposal, likely 1953. LAC MG 31, D 156, 204, 26.
33. Carpenter et al., 1953: 2.
34. Edmund Carpenter, 2001, “That Not-So-Silent Sea,” in Donald F. Theall (Ed.), The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (pp. 240), Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
35. Marshall McLuhan to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 24 July 1953. Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.
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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
36. LAC MG 31, D 156, 203, 30. See also Jana Mangold, 2014, “Zwischen Sprache/n: Explorationen der Medien zwischen Kultur und Kommunikation 1954,” Zeitscrhift für Medienwissenschaft 11:155–62.
37. Letter addressed to the Canadian Social Science Research Council, likely mid-1953. LAC MG 31, D 156, 145, 41.
38. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, 1956, “The New Languages,” Chicago Review 10(1): 46.
39. Carpenter, 2001: 241.
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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
40. Edmund Carpenter, 1954, “Certain Media Biases,” Explorations 3:65–74; Carpenter and McLuhan, 1956; Edmund Carpenter, 1957, “The New Languages,” Explorations 7:4–21.
41. D. C. Williams, J. Paul, and J. C. Ogilvie, 1957, “Mass Media, Learning, and Retention,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 11(3): 162–63.
42. Edmund Carpenter to Explorations Group, April 1955. Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, TyJ\17\4.
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renew interest in the cognitive studies of media which have focussed 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
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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
43. Carpenter, 2001: 251
44. Edmund Carpenter to Explorations Group, April 1955. Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, TyJ\17\4.
45. See Harald Prins and John Bishop, 2002, “Edmund Carpenter: Explorations in Media & Anthropology,” Visual Anthropology Review 17 (2): 110–40.
46. See Constantinos Doxiadis, 1968, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements, New York: Oxford University Press.
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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.
47. See inside front cover of Explorations 2, April 1954.
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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.
References
Alfred Hallowell Papers. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
Carpenter, Edmund S., Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, H. M. McLuhan, W. T. Easterbrook, and
D. C. Williams. 1953. “University of Toronto: Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of Communication.” Ford Foundation Archives. Grant File PA 53–70, Section 1, 1–11. Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
Carpenter, Edmund. 1954. “Certain Media Biases.” Explorations 3:65–74.
Carpenter, Edmund. 1957. “The New Languages.” Explorations 7:4–21.
Carpenter, Edmund. 2001. “That Not-So-Silent Sea.” In Donald Theall (Ed.), The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (pp. 236–61). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Carpenter, Edmund, and Marshall McLuhan. 1956. “The New Languages.” Chicago Review 10(1): 46–52.
Darroch, Michael. 2008. “Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951–1957.” Canadian Journal of Communication 33(2): 147–63.
48. “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath.” February 1955, Explorations 4:31–33.
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Darroch, Michael. 2014. “Sigfried Giedion und die Explorations: Die anonyme Geschichte der Medienarchitektur,” Johannes Passman (Trans.), Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 11:144–54.
Darroch, Michael. 2016a. “Giedion and Explorations: Confluences of Space and Media in Toronto School Theorisation.” In Norm Friesen (Ed.), Transatlantic Developments in Media and Communication Studies (pp. 62–87). Basel: Springer International.
Darroch, Michael. 2016b. “The Toronto School: Cross-Border Encounters, Interdisciplinary Entanglements.” In David W. Park and Peter Simonson (Eds.), The International History of Communication Studies (pp. 276–301). New York: Routledge.
Darroch, Michael, and Janine Marchessault. 2009. “Anonymous History as Methodology: The Collaborations of Sigfried Giedion, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group 1953–1955.” In Andreas Broeckmann and Gunalan Nadarajan (Eds.), Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and Migration of Knowledge (pp. 9–27). Weimar: VDG.
Darroch, Michael, and Janine Marchessault. 2014. “Introduction: Urban Cartographies.” In Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault (Eds.), Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (pp. 3–21). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Deutsch, Karl. 1950. “Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge.” In Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and R. M. MacIver (Eds.), Goals for American Education: 9th Symposium (pp. 55–139). New York: Harper.
Deutsch, Karl. 1951a. “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science.” Philosophy of Science 18(3): 230–52.
Deutsch, Karl. 1951b. “Mechanism, Teleology, and Mind.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12(2): 185–223.
Deutsch, Karl. 1953 [1966]. Nationalism and Social Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Doxiadis, Constantinos. 1968. Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. New York: Oxford University Press.
“Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath.” February 1955. Explorations 4:31–33.
Ford Foundation. 1953. Ford Foundation Annual Report 1953. New York: Ford Foundation.
Ford Foundation Archives, Project Cards B-87, 1–6. New York: Rockefeller Archive Center.
Geiser, Reto. 2010. Giedion in Between: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Transatlantic Exchange, 1938–1968. Doctoral dissertation. ETH, Zurich.
Giedion, Sigfried. 1987. “A Faculty of Interrelations.” In D. Huber (Ed.), Wege in die Öffentlichkeit (pp. 160–63). Zurich: Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur. [First published in 1943. Michigan Society of Architects Weekly Bulletin 1:1–4.]
Hugh Kenner Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1953. “The Later Innis.” Queen’s Quarterly 60(3): 385–94.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1960. Report on Project in Understanding New Media. New York: National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.
Mangold, Jana. 2014. “Zwischen Sprache/n: Explorationen der Medien zwischen Kultur und Kommunikation 1954.” Zeitscrhift für Medienwissenschaft 11:155–62.
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Martin, Reinhold. 2003. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Molinaro, Matie, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. 1987. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Norbert Wiener Papers, MIT Archives, Cambridge, MA.
Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1885–1980). Royal Institute of British Architects, TYJ/16–18. RIBA British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collection, London.
Prins, Harald E. L., and John Bishop. 2002. “Edmund Carpenter: Explorations in Media & Anthropology.” Visual Anthropology Review 17(2): 110–40.
Ruesch, Jurgen, and Gregory Bateson. 1951. Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton.
Shoshkes, Ellen. 2013. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Theall, Donald. 1949. Review of Cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener. Yale Scientific Magazine 24(3): 4, 40, 42.
Theall, Donald. 1954. Communication Theories in Modern Poetry: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Doctoral dissertation. Toronto: University of Toronto.
Theall, Donald. 2001. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
trans/formation: arts, communication, environment. 1950–52. Volumes 1–3. Harry Holtzman, ed. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz.
Vallye, Anna. 2009. “The Strategic Universality of trans/formation, 1950–1952.” Grey Room 35:28–57.
Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wiener, Norbert. 1956. “Pure Patterns in a Natural World.” In György Kepes (Ed.), The New Landscape in Art and Science (pp. 274–76). Chicago: P. Theobald.
Williams, D. C., J. Paul, and J. C. Ogilvie. 1957. “Mass Media, Learning, and Retention.” Canadian Journal of Psychology 11(3): 157–63.
Research for this Introduction has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Standard Research Grant and an Insight Grant, and through Dr. Darroch’s 2015 Visiting Fellowship, Institute for Modern Languages Research, University of London. We are indebted to Dr. Kurt G. F. Helfrich, Chief Archivist and Collections Manager, Royal Institute of British Architects, British Architectural Library, and to Bethany J. Antos, Archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center, as well as to the estates of Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt for their considerable support. Aspects of research on the history of Explorations have been published in Michael Darroch, 2008, “Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951–1957,” Canadian Journal of Communication 33: 147–69; Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault, 2009, “Anonymous History as Methodology: The Collaborations of Sigfried Giedion, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the Explorations Group (1951–55),” in Andreas Broeckmann
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and Gunalan Nadarajan (Eds.), Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and the Migration of Knowledge (pp. 9–27), Weimar: VDG; Michael Darroch, 2014, “Sigfried Giedion und die Explorations: Die anonyme Geschichte der Medienarchitektur,” translation by Johannes Passman, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 11:144–54; Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault, 2014, “Introduction: Urban Cartographies,” in Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault (Eds.), Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (pp. 3–21), Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; Michael Darroch, 2016a, “Giedion and Explorations: Confluences of Space and Media in Toronto School Theorisation,” in Norm Friesen (Ed.), Transatlantic Developments in Media and Communication Studies (pp. 62–87), Basel: Springer International; Michael Darroch, 2016b, “The Toronto School: Cross-Border Encounters, Interdisciplinary Entanglements,” in David W. Park and Peter Simonson (Eds.), The International History of Communication Studies (pp. 276–301), New York: Routledge.
Summaries of All Eight
Explorations Volumes
Explorations 1
Explorations 1 took an audaciously new approach to communications and cultural research “cutting across” studies in anthropology, literature, social sciences, economics, folklore, and popular culture. From Copernican revolutions (Bidney) to a seventeenth-century translation of Sweden’s Mohra witchcraft trials (Horneck); from senses of time (Leach) to the meaning of gongs (Carrington); from Majorcan customs (Graves) to a typography of functional analysis (Spiro); from Veblen’s economic history (Riesman) to contemporary stress levels (Selye), the issue also included one of György Kepes’s earliest drafts on fusing “art and science,” an essay on Freud and vices (Goodman), and a return to childhood in Legman’s work on comic books, before concluding with now classic essays by McLuhan and Frye. The cover of Explorations 1 depicts a series of masks from the award-winning film The Loon’s Necklace (Crawley Films, 1948).
Explorations 2
Explorations 2’s mischievous spoof covers, both front and back, inside and outside, were labelled “Feenicht’s Playhouse,” a reference to the Phoenix playhouse of Joyce’s Wake. The key playful headline, “New Media Changing Temporal and Spatial Orientation to Self,” was accompanied by multiple hoax articles, including “Time-Space Duality Goes” and “TV Wollops MS,” a reference to television’s apparent power over manuscript culture as evidenced by the group’s media experiment at CBC studios. Exemplifying the playfulness of the core faculty’s discussions about new media and behaviour, it is not surprising the McLuhan would publish in this issue his now famous article “Notes on the Media as Art Forms” alongside essays by other seminar participants: Tyrwhitt resuscitated an unpublished article, “Ideal Cities and the City Ideal,” a historical survey of proposals for ideal urban
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designs (originally drafted for the defunct journal trans/formation: art, communication, environment). Carpenter’s “Eternal Life” is a first analysis of Aivilik Inuit concepts of time; then student Donald Theall’s “Here Comes Everybody” offered a snapshot of his research on Joyce and communication theories in modern poetry; anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who would visit the seminar in March 1955, offered a review of David Bidney’s challenge to scholarly traditions in his 1953 book Theoretical Anthropology. In addition, Carpenter fleshed out the contents with contributions from political economy, anthropology, psychology, and English: the second part of Riesman’s Veblen study; Lord Raglan on social classes; Derek Savage on “Jung, Alchemy and Self”; the New Yorker’s Stanley Hyman on Malraux’s thesis of the “museum without walls”; and A. Irving Hallowell’s extended essay on “Self and its Behavioral Environment”—the inspiration for the spoof cover.
Explorations 3
Explorations 3 was initially planned as a volume dedicated to Harold Innis. In the end, the issue would only include Innis’s essay “Monopoly and Civilization,” introduced by Easterbrook, and a series of reflections in “Innis and Communication” by seminar participants. In November 1954, the Explorations researchers attended the “Institute on Culture and Communication” organised by Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Louisville’s Interdisciplinary Committee on Culture and Communication. A number of the contributions to Explorations 3 are essays or early drafts of contributions related to this conference (Birdwhistell, Lee, Trager & Hall). The issue also includes the initial, and substantially divergent, assessments of the group’s first “media experiment” at CBC studios (April 1954) in the contributions by Carpenter and Williams. The issue is rounded out with an excerpt on reading and writing (Chaytor), a new translation of Kamo Chomei’s Hojoki (Rowe & Kerrigan), a study of utopias (Wolfenstein), a reading of Tristram Shandy (MacLean), reflections on Soviet ethnography (Potekin & Levin), a reading of Shelley’s hallucinations as narcissism and doublegoing (McCullough), a critical reassessment of the science of human behaviour (Wallace), and “Meat Packing and Processing,” an anonymous entry, likely by McLuhan, alluding to Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948). Like Explorations 1, the cover depicted an indigenous mask
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from the Northwest Coast also represented in the Crawley film The Loon’s Necklace (1948).
Explorations 4
According to McLuhan, Explorations 4 was planned as an issue devoted to Sigfried Giedion. Published in February 1955, with a cover adapted from Kandinsky’s Comets (1938), Explorations 4 was devoted to issues of space and placed a strong emphasis on modes of linguistic and poetic thought across multiple media. Poems by e. e. cummings and Jorge Luis Borges mingle with essays by seminar leaders McLuhan on “Space, Time, and Poetry,” Carpenter on “Eskimo Poetry: Word Magic,” Tyrwhitt on “The Moving Eye” (regarding comparative perceptual experiences of Western cities and the ancient Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri), and Williams on “auditory space”—a notion that “electrified” the group, as Carpenter later recounted. Northrop Frye and Stephen Gilman’s essays on poetic traditions were juxtaposed with Millar MacLure and Marjorie Adix’s odes to Dylan Thomas, who had died in 1953. Case studies by then graduate students Walter J. Ong on “Space in Renaissance Symbolism” and Joan Rayfield on “Implications of English Grammar” were aligned with Dorothy Lee’s contribution on “Freedom, Spontaneity and Limit in American Linguistic Usage” and Lawrence Frank’s early draft of “Tactile Communication.” Both Lee and Frank had presented their contributions at Ray Birdwhistell’s “Institute on Culture and Communication” in Louisville, in 1954. A “Media Log” and the now famous entry “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath,” both largely replicated from McLuhan’s 1954 Counterblast pamphlet, were published anonymously. In addition to “Our Enchanted Lives,” a memorandum of instructions for television programming adapted from a Procter & Gamble memo, “The Party Line” offered a second alleged memorandum “To All TIME INC. Bureaus and Stringers.” An “Idea File” containing insights on oral, written, and technological cultural forms was culled from writings by Robert Graves, Edmund Leach, Walter Gropius, and E. T. Hall, among many others. With Explorations 4, the group revealed its commitment to the belief that communication studies was deeply rooted in anthropological and literary-poetic traditions, but equally informed by studies of mechanisation, technology, and culture.
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Explorations 5
The cover of Explorations 5 returned to the playfulness of issue 2: the image of the famous Minoan “Our Lady of the Sports” figurine, held at the Royal Ontario Museum (the authenticity of which has long been disputed) was set in front of the Toronto Daily Star’s 8 April 1954 Home Edition front page, featuring the headline “H-Bomb in Mass Production, U.S.” This juxtaposition between ancient artefact, contemporary media, and technological production set the stage for the issue: starting with Daisetz Suzuki’s description of “Buddhist Symbolism”, the issue follows with McLuhan’s famous analysis of TV and radio in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Such contrasts of new media forms continue with a “Portrait of James Joyce,” an excerpt of a 1950 “Third Programme” BBC documentary edited by W. R. Rodgers, and the two-page “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, set in experimental typography designed by Harley Parker and Toronto’s Cooper and Beatty Ltd. The issue further juxtaposes essays by E. R. Leach on cultural conceptions of time and Jean Piaget on time-space conceptions of the child; anthropologists Claire Holt and Joan Rayfield on interpenetrations of language and culture and Carpenter’s study of Eskimo space concepts; Rhodra Métraux on differences between the novel, play, and film versions of The Caine Mutiny; Roy Campbell on the fusion of oral and written traditions in the writings of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, including an excerpt of his 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Harcourt Brown on Pascal; economist Kenneth Boulding on information theory and Easterbrook on economic approaches to communication; and an excerpt from Daniel Lerner and David Riesman’s work on the modernisation of Turkey and the Middle East. Tyrwhitt and Williams contributed reflections on the seminar’s second media experiment in “The City Unseen,” an analysis of students’ perceptions of the environment of the then Ryerson Institute. Anonymous entries included “Colour and Communication” and a transcription of satirist Jean Shepherd’s radio broadcast “Channel Cat in the Middle Distance,” likely courtesy of Carpenter. The issue is rounded out with a Letters File and an Ideas File, with contributions from E. R. Leach, Patrick Geddes, and Lawrence Frank.
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Explorations 6
Writing to the Explorations Group in 1954, Carpenter worried about the funds from the Ford grant that were available for publishing this issue. Explorations 6 was funded through the sales of issue 5 and possibly Carpenter’s own funds. The cover image for this issue was a section of The Great Wave, by Katsushika Hokusai. According to Carpenter’s letter, this issue summarizes the group’s “ideas and findings,” which though “not fully articulated” were “new and exciting.” He saw the issue as “a full seminar statement.” Indeed, the issue brings together the interdisciplinary reflections and comparative media studies that characterized the group’s methodology: a brilliant essay by radical anthropologist Dorothy Lee on “Wintu thought” (Lee would ultimately publish six essays in Explorations and had a significant influence on the seminar) and two essays on television that were solicited to reflect upon different geographical differences that shaped the experiences of the new medium—one in the US (Chayefsky) and the other the Soviet Union (Sharoyeva, the “top man” in the USSR television system). Also included were Giedion’s classic essay on cave painting; a reflection on the phonograph alongside a consideration of “print’s monopoly” by C. S. Lewis; as well as essays by McLuhan on media and events; language and magic (Maritain); writing and orality (Riesman); color (Parker); the evolution of the human mind (Montagu); and the anonymous entries “Print’s Monopoly” and “Feet of Clay,” likely drafted by McLuhan and Carpenter, which take up conflicts between old and new media environments. This issue contains the full spectrum of the weekly seminar’s research undertakings over a two-year period.
Explorations 7
Explorations 7 (1957), the only issue without a table of contents, was edited by Carpenter and McLuhan solely and, with issue 8, sponsored by the Toronto Telegram. Easterbrook and Tyrwhitt were away, and Williams wanted his name taken off the masthead, allegedly because of the publication of American writer Gershon Legman’s infamous “Bawdy Song . . . in Fact and in Print,” a history of erotic writing. McLuhan had contributed to Legman’s short-lived but hugely influential magazine Neurotica (1948–52), so the two had a previous connection. But the tension between Williams
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and the editors might have also been due to their different interpretations of the CBC/Ryerson media experiments which explored media sensory biases with a group of students discussed in issue 3 by Williams in scientific terms, and here again by Carpenter in his essay “The New Languages” in cultural terms. Carpenter argues that each medium (radio, TV, print) “codifies reality differently.” To accompany this opening essay, they each included anonymous entries: the essay “Classroom Without Walls,” later attributed to McLuhan, explores the ubiquitous mediasphere outside educational institutions, which teachers must begin to consider as an inherent and unavoidable pedagogical experience, followed by “Songs of the Pogo,” a reference to the popular comic and LP of the period, which pervaded the McLuhan home. McLuhan saw relationships between “Jazz and Modern Letters,” juxtaposed with Carpenter’s reflections on the acoustic character of ancient and preliterate symbols, masks, and traditions in “Eternal Life of the Dream.” Dorothy Lee contributed two essays to the issue on lineal and non-lineal codifications examined in the Trobriand language with responses by Robert Graves. The focus on educational matters also included a review of Riesman’s Variety and Constraint in American Education as well as examinations of the cultural specificity of the Soviet press, Soviet novels, and Soviet responses to Elvis Presley. The particularity of an oral and noncapitalistic culture had been an important point of comparison for the Explorations Group, especially Carpenter and McLuhan. Harley Parker designed the issue’s cover.
Explorations 8
Explorations 8 (1957) is perhaps the most famous of all the issues. It was devoted to the oral—“Verbi-Voco-Visual”—and was edited primarily by McLuhan and again published by the Toronto Telegram and the University of Toronto. The issue was filled with visual experimentation; framed by extensive play with typography in the spirit of the Vorticists and for the first time the extensive use of “flexitype” by Harley Parker, then display designer at the ROM. Seen throughout are Parker’s experiments with typography as well as color printing, the first time in the history of the journal. A photomontage from László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947) depicting a man’s face with an ear juxtaposed over an eye is the frontispiece to the issue. The issue features seven essays, including one by McLuhan, that explore
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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.”
Michael Darroch (University of Windsor)
Janine Marchessault (York University)
2016
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