This page is referenced by:

• 1 2018-08-30T21:27:36-07:00 Explorations 1 18 plain 2018-09-17T19:15:18-07:00

  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).

• 1 2017-11-05T11:59:55-08:00 Media as Extension and Environment 12 plain 2017-11-05T14:07:54-08:00

  Michael Darroch & Janine Marchessault
  
  

  
  
  In late 1961 or early 1962, Marshall McLuhan wrote his closest collaborator, Edmund Carpenter, in one of their many reflections to carry forward their effort to establish interdisciplinary media studies in the journal
  
  
  Explorations:
  'Karl Popper in the Open Society discusses more idea of production and consumption as externalization of organic process. Seems this is about the extent of Marx idea of technology change as affecting our lives. Not a clue to technology altering our cognition or perception. You check me out on this Ted? Page 79 of Ed Hall’s Silent Language talks
  of technologies as externaliz. of teeth, hands, back feet etc, but not of the organs of perception, such as happens with media. You know of any study of media as extensions of five senses? If we can get this fact into circulation we can expect some improvement in general awareness and responsibility of media use.'
  
  McLuhan’s work and indeed the work published in the interdisciplinary
  experimental journal Explorations did indeed focus on the phenomenology
  of media broadly defined through perception. McLuhan and his collaborators
  were unique in emphasizing the body as a sensory platform, a
  mediator of experiences and thus as the locus of knowledge. This is why
  the experimental methodologies of artists from Cézanne to James Joyce
  to the Symbolists and Vorticists to the Bauhaus and to Eisenstein (to
  name only a few) were central to the ‘exploration.’ It was this spirit of
  experimentation with forms and ideas that emerged from the back and
  forth and the interplay of words that gave the exploration its unique and
  exciting character of discovery. Perceptions communicated through language
  were not static entities but dynamic nodes of deciphering through
  the dialogic interchange always tied to the diversity of the human sensorium
  across the cultures of the world – thus radical anthropology was
  central to the exploration.
  
  An experimental interdisciplinary publication led by faculty and graduate
  students at the University of Toronto from 1953-1959 served as a
  container for this post-war experiment in thinking through media in the
  electric age – such a publication would provide the intellectual fuel for
  McLuhan’s future publications such as Understanding Media (1964). The
  journal served to disseminate some of the insights and experiments of
  the Culture and Communications graduate seminar (1953-55), an innovative
  media think-tank of the 1950s. Alongside McLuhan and Carpenter, town
  planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, political economist Tom Easterbrook, and
  psychologist D. Carl ton Williams brought insights and experience to
  their discussions.
  
  The Explorations research group aimed to develop a ‘field approach’
  inspired by aesthetics to the study of new media and communication.
  While enthused 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.’ 1 In developing their methodologies, and with cinema and TV
  on their minds, seminar faculty and graduate students undertook a number
  of critical media experiments on changing patterns of perception
  resulting from new media. They set about testing new and old media by
  acquiring ‘the antidote of related media like print,’ as McLuhan would
  later write about the typewriter.2 To copy excerpts and take minutes, they
  purchased a Remington Rand typewriter and, anticipating Kittler, would
  debate the psychological effect of the shift from handwriting to print. The
  Canadian Broadcasting System and the then Ryerson Institute later placed
  studio space and media equipment at their disposal. Their experiment
  tested their central hypothesis that different media (speech, print, radio,
  television) lend themselves to different kinds of pedagogical experiences.3
  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
  focussed too narrowly, according to Carpenter and McLuhan, on attention
  and inputs and not enough on the creative and critical aspects of
  perception.
  
  One of McLuhan’s best known aphorisms translated the work of the
  Explorations Group into the notion that the ‘medium is the massage’:
  All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their
  personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical,
  and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
  unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of
  social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way
  media work as environments.4
  
  McLuhan’s interest in media as an environment drew upon Hans Selye’s
  stress theory of disease to theorize the impact of the media on bodies in
  terms of a metamorphosis akin to disease and addiction. Carpenter and
  McLuhan published Selye’s research on stress in the first issue of Explorations.
  5 Selye (1907 — 1982) was a Hungarian endocrinologist, who was
  the first to give a scientific explanation for biological stress.6 He founded
  the ‘Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery’ at the University of
  Montreal in 1945, and devoted his life to studying its effects of stress on
  biology. McLuhan and Selye corresponded regularly in the 1960s and
  1970s, and Selye invited McLuhan to join the board of his Institute.7 The
  first symptom of this new electric environment, which is the result of the
  extension of the human nervous system, is ‘numbness’ and ‘narcosis’.
  In Understanding Media, McLuhan relates the effects of the media amplification
  of our senses to a ‘collective surgery’ upon the whole social body. He
  writes: ‘For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the
  incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is
  numb. It is the entire system that is changed. The effect of radio is visual,
  the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among
  all the senses.’ 8 McLuhan sees the electric environment as a homeostatic
  system. According to Selye’s theory of adaptation and disease, any physical
  extension will need to maintain equilibrium, and as such he regards
  any technological extension as an ‘autoamputation.’ In the midst of the
  electric environment, we ‘numb’ our (extended) central nervous system
  ‘or we will die.’ The new media support an awareness of others and of
  social responsibility, yet they also produce anxiety and indifference; that
  is the only way to live with the reality that in ‘the electric age we wear all
  mankind as our skin.’ 9
  
  Philosopher Catherine Malabou sees McLuhan’s 1960s work on media
  as potentially useful for theorizing media in the context of climate change.10
  McLuhan is concerned with the new sensory experiences and collective
  sensibilities produced by the narcotic cultures of media. This notion of
  addiction is especially useful Malabou points out, for understanding the
  way in which media (smart phones, games, television serials, social media
  connectivity) are fundamentally addictive. Media as extensions of the
  human senses, become so implicated in our quotidian life that we cannot
  be without them; they are part of our physical nature. Media as extensions
  and environments (that is, as complex interconnected ecologies)
  may constitute a starting point for exploring ways of living and sensing
  in a damaged world.
• 1 2017-11-05T15:15:16-08:00 Summaries of All Eight Explorations Volumes 5 plain 2017-11-05T15:23:36-08:00

  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 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 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.

  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.

  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 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 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.”