McLuhan’s Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility

Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Marshall McLuhan's work not been subject of many genuinely scholarly books, nor he, with few exceptions, been regarded as an artist or as a significant figure in pantheon of Canadian culture. Consequently, Richard Cavell's recently published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography is a significant addition to literature about McLuhan. In this profusely documented study of McLuhan as a theorist, Cavell seeks for an all-encompassing formula to explicate phenomenon of a quintessentially Canadian McLuhan, who had a substantial impact throughout world in 1960s and then again in 1990s. Cavell locates vision that creates such an impact in McLuhan's discovery of idea of (a percept, according to McLuhan). Acoustic become one of those phrases like global village, the medium is message and Gutenberg Galaxy, which are synonymous with his name. peculiar attractiveness of this percept is that it is simultaneously abstract and yet material, describing unenclosed and hence permitting discussions about measure, movement through space-time and speed. Acoustic as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from description of in behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist Karl Williams. Bott's idea, that auditory space has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously, immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been immersed in then-contemporary writers concerned with space, including art and architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, visual artist and designer Laszlo Mohly-Nagy and classicist Francis Cornford, author of The Invention of Space. With Ted Carpenter, co-founder of seminars and of early multidisciplinary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded idea of auditory space, christening it to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dimensional geometry and new physics. At considerable length and with copious documentation, Cavell illustrates importance of this perception to McLuhan's work and demonstrates how it made him attractive to contemporary artists in Canada, United States and Great Britain who were working in wake of modernist radical avant-garde: Duchamp, Picasso, Klee, Leger and P. Wyndham Lewis. McLuhan was also attractive to Dadaists, futurists, cubists, constructivists, abstract expressionists and surrealists. For first time, readers can see extent of McLuhan's effect on visual and conceptual art of Iain and Ingrid Baxter, music of R. Murray Schafer and concrete poetry of bp Nichol. McLuhan also influenced Quebecois intermedia artist Jacques Languirand. Readers will see part of significant role McLuhan's work played in artistic endeavours of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Dick Higgins and Fluxus group and Gerd Stern. With Cage and Cunningham particularly, McLuhan shared a special interest in and dedication to James Joyce. most remarkable aspect, and one most fully developed by Cavell, is McLuhan's influence on his Canadian compatriots. third thrust of argument in McLuhan in Space is importance of McLuhan's Canadianism. He remained dedicated to Canada in his understanding and vision of new globalized world of media. A number of Canadians influenced McLuhan: E.A. Bott, Carleton Williams, Richard Maurice Bucke, Reginald Fessenden, John Murray Gibbon, Bertram Booker and R.E. Wilson. Bucke is particularly interesting since he coined phrase consciousness, an idea that strong affinities with more abstract aspects of acoustic space and which therefore played into McLuhan's later fascination with literature of cosmic consciousness as well as his near-mystical vision of acoustic space. …

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