Series Foreword to the Eight-Volume Series
of the 2016 Edition

Michael Darroch (University of Windsor) and Janine Marchessault (York University)



Explorations was an experimental interdisciplinary publication led by faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto in which the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the radical anthropologist Edmund Carpenter formulated their most striking insights about new media in the electric age. 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. The eight coedited issues of Explorations are republished here for the first time since their original printing in the 1950s.

The Explorations research group aimed to develop a “field approach” to the study of new media and communication. While inspired by a postwar, modernist discourse of universality, no single mode of research was dominant. By their own account, the team sought “an area of mutually supporting insights in a critique of the methods of study in Economics, Psychology, English, Anthropology, and Town Planning.”1 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 both established and emerging scholars, scientists, and artists.

The think tank and the journal were supported by a grant from 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). 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.”2 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 before becoming coeditor with McLuhan for issues 7 and 8, which were sponsored by the Toronto Telegram. A ninth and final issue, entitled Eskimo (1959), combined Carpenter’s writings on indigenous art and culture of the Aivilik juxtaposed with images from filmmaker Robert Flaherty and drawings by Frederick Varley. After Beacon Press published a selection of Explorations contributions in 1960, coedited by Carpenter and McLuhan as Explorations in Communication, McLuhan later resuscitated the spirit of Explorations as a “magazine within a magazine,” a publication inside the University of Toronto’s alumni magazine, the Varsity Graduate (1964–72).
The group’s proposal to Ford’s Behavioral Sciences Program is revealing of the central assumptions that would underpin the graduate seminar and Explorations. The proposal’s point of departure is not yet an assumption about the power of media forms to shape content, but rather the understanding that methods for studying new media required recognition of new patterns emerging across technological, cultural, and urban life. Underpinning the proposal is a conversation that McLuhan in particular had started with advocates of cybernetic theories. Carpenter was also of course conversant with the writings of anthropologists who were deeply involved with developing cybernetic models and metaphors within the social sciences, among others Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Cybernetic theories also came to the group through Donald Theall, who would complete his PhD dissertation in 1954 on “Communication Theories in Modern Poetry: Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot” under the supervision of both McLuhan and Carpenter.

“Well aware of the brilliant new developments in communication study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” the Ford grant explains, gesturing both to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic conferences and to Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication, “the undersigned propose to utilize these insights but to employ also the technique of studying the forms of communication, old and new, as art forms,” an approach already “implicit in the very title of Harold Innis’ Bias of Communication.”3 The Toronto group 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.” 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.4

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) 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.”5 The anthropologist and ethnolinguist Dorothy Lee was arguably one of the group’s “most influential force[s],”⁶ 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.

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 different kinds of pedagogical experiences.⁷ 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.

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. 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. Carpenter and McLuhan would assert that the media are transforming the human sensorium, an idea captured perhaps most playfully in the final coedited issue, Explorations 8, an ode to James Joyce devoted to the oral, to the new “acoustic space” of the electric age: “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.” In the history of media studies in Canada and internationally, the Explorations journal is an important starting point for defining the rich new insights around new media cultures that the Toronto School helped inaugurate.


References
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 F. 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.
Ford Foundation. 1953. Ford Foundation Annual Report 1953. New York: Ford Foundation.
Ruesch, Jurgen, and Gregory Bateson. 1951. Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton.
Theall, Donald. 1954. Communication Theories in Modern Poetry: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Doctoral dissertation. Toronto: University of Toronto.

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1. 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).

2. 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).

3. 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. Grant File PA 53–70, Section 1, 1–11. Rockefeller Archive Center, New York: 4.

4. “Changing Patterns of Man and Society Associated with the New Media of Communication.” Draft of Ford Foundation Proposal, likely 1953. LAC MG 31, D 156, 204, 26.

5. Carpenter et al, 1953: 2.

6. Edmund Carpenter, 2001, “That Not-So-Silent Sea,” in Donald F. Theall (Ed.), The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (p. 240), Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

7. Edmund Carpenter, 1954, “Certain Media Biases,” Explorations 3:65–74; Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, 1956, “The New Languages,” Chicago Review 10(1): 46–52; Edmund Carpenter, 1957, “The New Languages,” Explorations 7:4–21.