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• 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article “Notes on the Media as Art Forms” alongside essays by other seminar participants: Tyrwhitt resuscitated an unpublished article, “Ideal Cities and the City Ideal,” a historical survey of proposals for ideal urban designs (originally drafted for the defunct journal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.”
• 1 2018-09-17T19:23:58-07:00 Explorations 8 1 plain 2018-09-17T19:23:58-07:00 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 xii 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.”