Marshall McLuhan as Metaphysician: Reproducing McLuhan's Implicit Cosmological Picture

Before Marshall McLuhan no one had explicitly, thoroughly or systematically analysed the mediums by which we think and act. Coded languages confer upon individuals the capacity for consciousness, for thought as we know it, which is why Wittgenstein said that the thought is the language. It may be said that conscious reflection is only made possible by transferring the energies of existence into explicit and discernible forms and patterns. 

Coded languages, as well as giving us the capacity for abstract human thought, may also be seen as defining the limits by which we can think. This is at least partially what McLuhan meant by saying that the medium is the message. The medium creates an environment that makes certain things possible and certain other things impossible. For example, Paul Levinson has argued that the idea of an abstract supreme being like God could only be adequately expressed through the abstract nature of alphabetic literacy.

For me at least, in order to adequately understand things, assessing that which makes understanding possible is the most efficient thing one can do.

McLuhan makes a basic distinction between tribal people and literate or civilized people. This distinction lies at the heart of his thought.

The spatial orientation of the tribal person was primarily acoustic. 

The tribal person lived in a world where things were experienced simultaneously, not sequentially. There was no split between past, present and future. There was no split between conscious and unconscious. 

For tribal people, what we would call the unconscious was always apparent, never suppressed, but was not apparent in an explicit, visual or even conscious way. 

Communication for tribal people was carried out primarily through speech. The complexity and spontaneity of the spoken word was a unique fleeting event that could not be analysed or reflected upon.

Writing froze the multi-dimensional dynamics of speech and experience, divided the simultaneous totality of experience into separate parts and made possible the highly concentrated explicit analyses of things and events. “The fracturing of the integrity of the word split consciousness and culture into many fragments. It transferred the rich organic compound of immemorial speech into a thin abstract cross-section which could be examined at leisure and analysed” (McLuhan, 1995: 229). Writing may thus be seen as allowing conscious reflection to come into being.

The letters of the Greek alphabet are particularly abstract. This is because phonemes do not have any resemblance to that which they communicate. “The phonetic alphabet is the only one in which the letters are semantically neutral, lacking verbal structure or force. Since the visual image presented in these letters is acoustically and semantically neutral, they have had the extraordinary effect of supporting the visual faculty independently” (McLuhan, 1995: 285). Alphabetic writing thus encourages a highly visual spatial orientation.

Due to the nature of literacy, particularly alphabetic literacy, a separation of meaning from experience occurred, which had the significant effect of separating thought from action. This is arguably the prime source of dualistic thinking in Western culture and is well encapsulated in Descartes’ famous phrase I think therefore I am which, as Capra points out (1975: 22), “led Western man to equate his identity with his mind, instead of with his whole organism”. Such an equation of identity with mind would have been unthinkable to a tribal person.

It would be useful here to make a distinction between visual and acoustic space. “A basic feature of acoustic space is its inclusiveness. Visual space is exclusive” (McLuhan, 1995: 300). It could also be pointed out that visual experience is of a more explicit nature than acoustic experience, that is to say, sights are more identifiable and fixed whereas sound is “fleeting transparent and diaphanous, it escapes our desire to capture, fixate or freeze it” (Elseasser, 2010: 137).

Due to writing, people were able to reflect upon and critically analyse experience. The results of this ability were vast. “The analysis of visually abstracted speech brought into existence very quickly the now traditional arts and sciences and their divisions” (McLuhan, 1995: 299). Further, “writing permitted the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc.” (McLuhan, 1995: 300).
 

With the introduction of moveable typography into 15^th century Europe, the effects of alphabetic literacy were greatly extended, initiating the modern civilized world as we know it today.

Print technology mechanized writing, standardizing all texts.

With moveable typography came the portable book. The portable book encouraged the formation of the private individual with a fixed point of view, as individuals could now read in isolation and form personal opinions, which, in the wider context of culture, also led to a wider variety of opinions. Reading in private also sets up the interior monologue, thus leading to psychic withdrawal (McLuhan, 1995: 61). In this sense moveable type may be seen as leading to individualism and conditioning the basic principles on which capitalism rests.

One of the habits of a literate Western person is to think in sequences. This is due to the process of mechanisation which “is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series” (McLuhan, 1964: 12).  This means that experiences are split and divided into seemingly unrelated yet linearly connected segments. This is in contrast to a holistic or mosaic approach to experience.

The introduction of electric/electronic technology in the early-mid 19^th century reconfigured the sequentiality of mechanisation and allowed, once more, for the simultaneous apprehension of experience. 

In the electric age tribal/acoustic spatial orientations have returned in many ways. 

Simultaneity of experience is typified, for example, in much 20th century science. "For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent" (Einstein: 203). Time is, according to modern physics, a simultaneous phenomena which cannot in reality be divided into independent parts or sequences. The same can be said for human beings and existence itself.

It was McLuhan’s view that literacy brought us out of the acoustic tribal world and into the visual civilised world. This transition resulted in an increase in explicit analytical conscious awareness but also resulted in a rigid split between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, as well as many other rigid splits, and a decrease in awareness of the multi-dimensional dynamics of acoustic space and experience. This limited awareness of the complexity of multi-dimensional experience held so long as we lived in an alphabet/print oriented culture, because, as established in the introduction, mediums define the limits by which thought can operate.

In the electric or information age the unconscious is once more apparent and inescapable as a result of retrieved forms of acoustic simultaneous awareness, and yet we have retained, precisely through the continuing power and presence of literacy, a unique conscious awareness of complex experiences which tribal people simply did not have. We now have the potential to be aware of the multi-dimensional acoustic world that envelops us,  as has been well demonstrated through much modern art, science and thought in general.