A Spring Descent Into McLuhan’s Maelstrom

A Spring Descent Into McLuhan’s Maelstrom

for Eric McLuhan

I.

My wife took me on a tour of the backyard garden, and pointed out a small lupine-like plant with white flowers. “I moved the sweet william your father gave me and it’s much happier here.”

I looked, and said “Isn’t that woodruff?”

“Yes, of course, sweet woodruff!” she said. And we moved on to the tulips.

But as we walked around the garden, I was thinking, how did that recollection of ‘woodruff’ work? If you had asked me if I knew what sweet woodruff was before she showed it to me, I would have said no. If you had shown me a picture, the same. Of course I made the connection by association in memory when my wife told me my father had given it to her. There, nothing more to be seen here.

Or is there? Memory implies time, something preserved and carried forward, a body with lived experiences. ‘Memory’ is a word, a neatly compressed concept for recollection, and maybe more. The silent intellectual word is a little whirlpool in the body’s mind, the word retrieved from the body’s experiences, resonant patterns in the intellect, senses, emotions and memory which ‘recall’ and ‘name’ the object in a new dissociated compressed form. A name is not just a stable object isolated in thought, removed from its ground; it remains a dynamic, resonant activity in the mind. The stability attributed to that object as word is an artifact, or percept, of writing, which fixes words on stone or paper or skin. Think of your parents, your children, a close friend or lover; the word in mind ripples with associations compressed into the label of a name. Thinking a word is a covert mimetic loop of bodily association reenacted every time the word is thought or spoken. Despite centuries of being obscured by verbal thought, the body’s ‘memory’ continues to speak to the mind beneath the veneer of language, even as we no longer listen.

II.

I have been retyping a badly faded xerox of a 100 page paper Eric McLuhan sent me in 1976 on the Logos, a complement to Marshall’s dissertation on the Trivium, and much of the foundation for Eric’s prologues to Laws of Media and The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, among others. It was never polished for publication, but both its references and themes are familiar, including passing references to the McLuhans’ concern with the shifting ground of media effects.

Their approach centers around four deeply embodied and interrelated principles, intellect, mimesis, synesthesia and memory, as the dynamic roots of consciousness and culture. Mimesis, synesthesia and memory are all active processes embedded inextricably in body and sense, in living. They are incarnate. And all three act in every moment making sense of the present and shaping the future. Intellect, or reason, stands apart as a figure in a ground, as a word or name pulls a concept into relief in consciousness. The silent word in the mind is discarnate until spoken or enacted; but it is a mistake to think of this resonant thought as passive or static.

The McLuhans made much of the transformation of culture when speech became written, the new changing the old. The word as speech is the content of writing; after writing fixed the word as an object in the mind, speaking and thinking became more discrete self-conscious acts. What is the content of the Word before writing? Can we examine that transformation from wordlessness to word in an analogous manner to speech’s transformation by writing? The McLuhans and their ideas about the Logos have shown the way.

The classical tools of grammar and rhetoric created by the Greeks and Romans about the actions of the Word provided the McLuhans the primary example of obsolescence and retrieval as speech changed under the influence of writing. The Greek and Roman rhetors and grammarians did a kind of ‘post-mortem’ or rear-view reassessment of the old Logos after writing, taking the shifting meanings of the pre-literate Logos and adapting (retrieving) it for their times. The Greeks thought of Logos as both Reason and Speech, and the Romans preserved that with Cicero’s ratio atque oratio. Both McLuhans have gone over this progression in detail with help from Havelock, Ong and Innis, among many others. The rhetors anatomized the Word as utterance with the five parts of rhetoric. Cicero, following a foundation created by Isocrates and others, systematized the Greeks efforts into the V parts of rhetoric: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and pronunciatio, as the many considerations an orator needed to address to speak effectively. Quintilian continued this teaching and it became the basis of the traditional curriculum of rhetoric for centuries. The history of the V. parts after writing is well-established. After writing, the use of the V. parts devolved into a sequential process for composing an effective speech; efficient causality and content predominated. Here is the conventional take on the V. parts:

Inventio (or Reason) is the topic or idea to be addressed; the figure which begins the oratorical process, i.e. persuading the jury of the innocence or guilt of the accused.

Dispositio, often translated as ‘arrangement’; the order of the argument.

Elocutio is style, consisting of high, low, or middle style, and the many figures of rhetoric at the orators command. The original idea was decorum, the manner of appropriate address for the audience. Without speaking before a live audience, the bias of writing reduced this concern to adornment, and came to be regarded as much less significant than inventio’s Reason.

Memoria is memory, conventionally explained as the many devices the orator uses to memorize his speech; also how the subject and its argument relates to the past, the tradition, and its impact on the future.

Pronuntiatio, or delivery, is giving the speech, bringing together all the other parts in an orchestrated performance. As an act incorporating all the ‘preceding’, it also stands apart at the end of this conceptualized sequence.

This approach applied to formal oratory diminishes the action of Logos dramatically, from a reciprocating mimetic explanation of language process to a product-focused efficient cause which ends with the delivery of a speech.

For the pre-literate Greeks the Logos was a rich ambiguous presence signifying reason, language in its entirety, and a single word, any word. Eric McLuhan always emphasized that the V parts were a synchronic whole, a chord, five perspectives on the unified act of speech, word and body. He maintained that together the five represented a complete anatomy of the integral Word, or Logos, a ground operating behind all language, five perspectives with which to address the Word (one word and all of language) as an active transformative technology (analogous to the simultaneous action of four perspectives in the McLuhan Laws-of-Media tetrad). Every word is a center with an ever-widening margin of associations, the hinge between the newly split body and mind. The five parts of rhetoric anatomize the actions of logos as utterance, a rear-view mirror assessment of the obsolescent oral Word after writing. But the Word occurs within the ground of the body, has the body as its formal cause. The actions of the Body become the content of the Word. How might the five parts look analogically from the other side of the looking glass?

III.

The five parts of rhetoric as a chord describes an active synchronic unity of parts, a unique mimetic ground around the many bodily acts of speech. Each part shapes all the others; in fact, each of the five parts are a ground for all the others. We are accustomed to think of thought and speech as discrete acts; they have been experienced as such since writing. But because they share common grounds in both body and language they remain inextricably bound to each other. The aural environment is a never-ending, repetitive, reciprocating cycle, as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass among many others have been trying to show us. The contents of non-verbal thought are rooted in the actions of the body: sense (outer; including the customary five and the synesthetic motor senses like proprioception, balance, etc.), emotions (inner), intellect (understanding as image), memory, and utterance (gesture and exclamation before words). These together form the root realm of the McLuhan percept. ‘Naming’ then not only designates an object or concept for intellectual and verbal recall. ‘Naming’ obsolesces the old form of understanding as well as the body, integrated with thought before Word; it retrieves the body in a new relation as a discrete concept after the Word. After the Word, language obscures its roots in the actions of the body, but the verbal and non-verbal continue in parallel as complements and counter-environments for each other. After the Word becomes an object, a Name, language joins percept in the mimetic loop of memory. The body’s experiences and actions remain, seemingly covered by an ever thickening veneer of language and technology.

So, my reckless proposal: a V part division of the incarnate pre-verbal formal cause of the naming Word, the opening swirl of the maelstrom Logos. As the Body, the content of the Word, precedes the conceptual separation of senses, mind and action, the ‘parts’ of this anatomy are ambiguous and overlap. A strict correspondence to Cicero’s five parts, or even five discrete concepts, should not be expected.

Inventio : : Intellect or Reason; the figure or ‘content’ of image, intent, understanding, invention that is named.

Dispositio : : Mimesis; imitation, repetition, reciprocity; posture and decorum, the awareness of others in a communicative exchange, environment of communion, audience and participation.

Elocutio : : Synesthesia; all the senses, inner and outer, proprioception, motion and emotion, in concert.

Memoria : : Memory; not as efficient cause or diachrony, remembering a fact or even history; but as synchronic formal cause underlying the patterns of each of the others.

Pronuntiatio : : Naming, as the recognition of a figure in a ground to be carried forward, the formal cause of concept, the silent utterance of the mind; and as the cycle mushrooms, deliberate utterance and action of any form, including technology.

Let’s look at each more closely.

Inventio

The ‘first’ part of this anatomy of the Word’s formal cause, my inventio, the theme, break-out idea, invention, innovation, the opening figure newly revealed in the ground. Inventio stands apart as figure or catalyst, yet together dispositio, elocutio and memoria force the figure inventio into relief at the start as its formal cause. There is a dynamic and cyclical mimetic tension between inventio, the transformation enacted by pronunciatio, the inner act of naming before utterance, and memoria. Memoria brings both the shoulders to stand on from mimesis and synesthesia, and the conventions to escape from, the tools inventio needs for effective variation. After the figure or object has been named, inventio rejoins memoria, the figure merges into the ground to bear on the next present and the future. This is why Eric McLuhan maintained that inventio contains all the others. The mimetic cycle of word, utterance and technology continues. The Word acts, and is acted upon. “Causes cause causes” said Marshall McLuhan.

Dispositio

Dispositio is mimesis. As formal cause, this is the bath in which the language user bathes, a percept outside of the content of words. The McLuhans’ idea of mimesis as a communion of use surrounding language and technology is quite broad and flexible. The common philosophical theories of mimesis are too limiting:

Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, the effect of an “imitation of an action” in an audience is just a small indication of the full spectrum of mimetic action in individuals and cultures.

Auerbach’s mimesis as a theory of of visual representation is too reductive of the many sensory modes of mimesis.

Deliberate acts of imitation are the tip of the iceberg, conscious content in a whole mimetic ground. The important part of mimesis is not what is imitated, not the re-cognition, the rehearsal, or even the delivery, but the reciprocity and communion (or contrast) between speaker and audience.

Rene Girard’s ‘mimetic desire’ centers around the mimetic roots of violence and identity (an echo of McLuhan’s idea that violence is is a quest for or defense of ‘lost’ identity, the loss of congruence between an individual and the present culture).

The idea of mimesis as the principal manner of learning in pre-literate cultures, now obsolete after writing and print, is pedagogy focused on content and efficient cause in the classroom.. Yes, educational content moved into books with different mimetic effects. The cultural effects of literacy discussed in detail in The Gutenberg Galaxy would not have occurred if media-related mimesis did not remain an important aspect of learning. Now the content of learning and socialization has moved into the digital realm, and a new mimetic cultural identity is emerging around those media.

McLuhanesque mimesis may include all these, but none of them encompass its whole. McLuhan’s mimesis is firmly rooted in the actions of the body as the incarnate ground of both percept and Word, the pre-verbal ground for language and technology, however many innovations are overlaid, obsolesced and retrieved on top of the present — the true meaning of intermediation.

Elocutio

Elocutio refers to the senses, another set of five in common parlance, as the primary input from the outer world (this includes of course more words from the talk spoken by others — as a reminder of the maelstrom we’re in). Peter Godfrey Smith, a biologist, describes primitive animals with sensory pathways that do not meet, merge or cross-talk. For instance, an eye on the left side of the head and an eye on the right side are inputs which never intersect or combine, behaving as reflexes. He describes the step-up in evolutionary complexity when the senses meet in the nexus of nerves which becomes the brain, and how the inputs combine there synesthetically to make a whole greater than its parts, often in ways we cannot recognize. And this includes the senses of the inner world, feelings and emotions.

The McLuhans maintained that the five senses (and more) were synesthetically one in a ground of touch. The McLuhans came to recognize that even if the self-conscious synesthetic awareness of ‘synesthetes’ seemed to be an exceptional variation, synesthesia itself was the rule for all. Self-conscious synesthetic awareness may in fact be a breakdown revealing the ground of ordinary functioning. Walking and talking are synesthetic phenomena. The eyes, ears, and muscular proprioception combine to keep us upright relative to gravity and the horizon. The inner ear works with the eyes to maintain balance as we move. Anyone who has experienced vertigo knows how an inner ear problem can upset vision as the world spins and turns upside down. And while we talk, the ears listen to our friend’s talk, taking in intonation, pace, mood, and hesitation that are subtler than our vocabulary can describe; our eyes watch for cues in posture and expression, seeking congruence or discord with the content of the words. It’s not perfect, there is no one-to-one correspondence; a partial understanding is a moving target in a maelstrom of sense impressions requiring both conscious and unconscious attention.

The assignment of mimesis to dispositio and synesthesia to elocutio is somewhat arbitrary. Before the Word, the wholeness of the body was not broken. Mimesis, the concept from philosophy, corresponds broadly to dispositio as arrangement, the body composing itself for an action. Synesthesia, the concept from biology, corresponds to elocutio, the input of the unified senses. Mimesis and synesthesia are profoundly interdependent and incarnate, impossible to separate except conceptually. The two are both content and ground for each other. Their loops intersect and combine in every moment within the action of the body; the divisions of movement, sense and emotion are artifacts of print’s bias for specialization, real as abstractions only in the mind as ‘words’. They cannot be separated in living. Mimesis is synesthetic and synesthesia is mimetic. Taken together as a unified ground, not discrete concepts, mimesis and synesthesia form much of the bodily content of both the Word and McLuhan media study.

IV. Memoria

Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The intellect ‘remembers’ names, facts, objects, vocabulary, etc.; but it does this in concert with mimesis and synesthesia through memory, not on its own. Intellect needs memoria to combine ideas and create variation (the foul, and obsolescent, rag and bone shop of invention and innovation). Mimetic memory lets us to wake up in the morning and speak the language we know, shape the sounds and utter the words the intellect wants to say. So for synesthesia as well. We expect our eyes, our inner ear, and all the organs of proprioception to work together in an accustomed manner when we walk down the street. When we speak or act intentionally, memoria coordinates the intent of the other parts while we are acting; as importantly, this body-centered memory fills in the context for social thought and action. Mimesis and synesthesia both use memory to set, recognize and anticipate accustomed patterns (what has happened and what is anticipated to happen — the past projecting the future); perhaps we should say the patterns in percept created by synesthesia, mimesis and intellect are memory. After we act or speak, memoria adds the effects of what we have done into its patterns of intellect, mimesis and synesthesia.

When we look at memoria as ground rather than figure, it’s clear that it underlies each of the other parts because it bears their patterns to them, both diachronically and synchronically. Inventio can be described as the silent inner utterance of memoria (pronunciatio), delivering ideas to the thinking mind to create understanding with. Ideas, not necessarily words. The pre-verbal mind thought in images before words, in feelings and sensations it did not have words for (inner), and shared them with others by gesture and grunts (utterance). Speaking then in words is both an enhancement and retrieval of showing (remember the actions of the tetrad are simultaneous). Memory as a ground is not a passive receptacle we search; memory constructs images and (m)utters words to the intellect and shapes what it will do.

Pronunciatio

The last of the five parts, pronuntiatio, might seem out of place in a pre-verbal ground centered around the body before the word. The body’s needs and actions are the formal cause for the naming of concepts. The howl of anger, the sigh of delight, the gesture pointing out game, the sniff of contempt, the giddiness of laughter are all utterance, body and meaning at one in the act of communicating. Before the word, these acts still addressed others, an environment of users communing, joining a repertoire of communication. This repertoire of mimesis, synesthesia and intent is already a maelstrom before the word; language adds clarity and complexity. And so it goes with every additional technology.

V. Welcome to the Maelstrom

The McLuhans postulate that all technologies are extensions of language as an embodied act; that using a technology utters a transformative word. All media are mimetic, technology is a form of speech. And that use also transforms the user. The user acts and is acted upon. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan described the mimetic effects of writing and print. Copying and reading manuscripts undermines oral mimesis with every act of reading by miming the alphabetic qualities which create detachment and privacy: abstraction, fragmentation and sequentiality. Print turned the manuscript letter into a crisp high-definition image, created the first mass audience with mechanized reproduction, and increased the number of readers, so being read to was gradually replaced by private silent reading. The written word became voiceless, disembodied. McLuhan described these effects as ending the old oral mimesis. But he did not mean writing and print ended mimesis entirely; only the particular integral form of mimesis created by a predominantly oral culture when thinking and speaking were one act. Writing’s disruption results in a new synesthetic sensory ratio as the aural is disrupted in favor of the visual, the concrete, the objective. Concept attempts to still the disorder with stable objective definitions, isolating the figure within its dynamic ground. This abstraction is a useful, and reductive, illusion, an attractive veneer over the real turbulence of language meaning and association beneath its surface. In this context, McLuhan’s focus on the percept of becoming discarnate centers on the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ such abstraction from the body drives.

The media effects which the McLuhans described might seem to be passive — what happens to the user, whether consciously or not. But what happens when the user plays within the same figures and grounds deliberately? Changes the percepts himself? Two examples readily come to mind. The simplest: any figure / ground drawing like the famous ambiguous rabbit / duck drawing, or Magic Eye pictures, those flat planes of rippling color. Both undergo a focal shift which change the ground by revealing new figures. Rabbit ear becomes duck bill, or a new 3D topographic image emerges in the flat pattern as focus shifts from surface to field. The creator composes them deliberately, and the users can master the technique (techne) to see them. The mastery of that techne is itself an action, and an extension of the creator’s utterance.

The second example is more significant: Finnegans Wake. Joyce saw past the content of words into the mimetic action of language as a linguistic ground. Then he turned the understanding (percept: conscious re-cognition of a pattern) into a technique and aimed it at his audience. Percept and concept become a whole active logos by combining in an action which can transform the reader. Joyce throws the reader into the maelstrom, where he must swim or drown by reading with all the elements of the Logos, the V parts of the Word and the V parts of the body, actively engaged.

The Word is a re-cognition of a figure isolated in its ground, an object named. This is a multi-leveled process which begins with abstraction from the whole experience of the body. The immediate and most positive effect is unveiling or revealing (revelation) of understanding. But the name (Gr.: nomos) for this recognition is also a disruption in a previous unity, the status quo, a new figure standing out in relief from the ground. In a sudden manner the discovery or revelation may seem strange or monstrous; in a matter of great scale like a new medium which disrupts cultural stability, a threat to personal and cultural identities. Intellect strives to still the disruption by isolating the new figure from its former ground in definition as concept and rationalize the new figure in the changed ground. The effect of this well-intentioned formalized abstraction nonetheless creates unreal illusions of stability by fixing the broken abstracted pieces like butterflies on a board. Revelation, disruption, breakage. The unity of ground is broken, until a new ‘stable’ whole emerges. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Any stone thrown into the pond of consciousness ripples through intellect, sense, feeling and memory. ‘Fact recall’ focused on a particular word makes meaning in the moment from their pattern of mutual association. These ‘associations’ in thought, sensation and emotion (n.) in mimetic memory are also actions; let’s call them thinking, sensing and feeling (v.), and each sends ripples through all the others. Some associations may be known but unnamed and so beyond, or outside, words, whether feelings, for instance anxiety, or sense, the skilled woodworker’s tactile understanding of different woods.

This complex of associations around a word, e.g. ‘woodruff’ , all our words, is loose and messy. The nexus of associations for each word thought and spoken is unique for each of us. The pattern may, or may not, vary between episodes of recalling the ‘name’ from its different associations. Every word, already a little swirl of association in itself, sets off ripples in others. The percepts of the body and the concepts of the mind fall in the consciousness pond constantly, and not only from private thoughts and percepts but from the technologies we use and the speech of others as well — too many inputs coming too quickly to process sequentially and analytically; all we can hope for is pattern recognition. What we share in the collective aggregation of this ceaseless exponentially-expanding, constantly contracting melee becomes culture, another reinforcing, re-enacting, reciprocating part of the mimetic loop. Discerning what is shared and what is personal becomes impossible.

For those mysteries of the linguistic maelstrom, there is poetry.

The many figure / ground relations which the McLuhans pointed to, which culminated in the Laws of Media tetrad and Eric McLuhan’s Sensus Communis, are tools for examining the active active and dynamic work of the Logos as expressed in speech, writing, and all forms of technology. The ‘literate’ V part Logos begins with invention and ends with the speech; the oral Logos is a cycle, a maelstrom inner and outer, body and language, that never ends. The conventional image of the maelstrom is the swirling whirlpool sucking sailors and ships to the bottom. The McLuhans were also cognizant that the maelstrom spun outward, Yeat’s ‘widening gyre’ from ‘The Second Coming’:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

In Poe’s maelstrom, the center is too strong; the sensory bias is too high. In Yeat’s gyre the center dissolves. The question for McLuhan was how to live creatively in the resonant interval between these two extremes.

You can enter the maelstrom with any word, a word as innocent as ‘woodruff’. One word is a swirl of associations rooted in the body, circling around and away from the name in intellect (or reason), mimesis, sense (external sense and internal ‘feelings’ = emotion), the patterns of memory, and action. The maelstrom swirls continually. There is no beginning; where and when you jump in doesn’t matter. When we sailors navigate the current patterns skillfully, we are comfortable. But when the ground shifts, the pattern of turbulence changes and we must adjust. We cannot master the new pattern from the outside as an objective observer; we must keep an eye and ear to wind and wave, manage the sails and keep a skillful hand on the tiller. You will have to deal with the whole, even as you discern the parts and causes of the complex movement in figures and ground. Fare forward, voyagers!