McLuhan’s Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility

Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes Review Mcluhan's Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility Donald Theall Richard Gavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Marshall McLuhan's work has not been the subject of many genuinely scholarly books, nor has he, with few exceptions, been regarded as an artist or as a significant figure in the pantheon of Canadian culture. Consequently, Richard Cavell's recently published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography is a signlficant addition to the literature about McLuhan. In this profusely documented study of McLuhan as a "space theorist,11 Cavell seeks for an all-encompassing formula to explicate the phenomenon of a quintessentially Canadian McLuhan, who had a substantial hnpact throughout the world iri the 1960s and then again in the 1990s. Gavell locates the vision that creates such an impact in McLuhan's discovery of the idea of 11 acoustic space11 (a 11 percept," according to McLuhan). "Acoustic space" has become one ofthose phrases like "global village," "the medium is the message" and the "Gutenberg Galaxy," which are synonymous with his name. The peculiar attractiveness ofthis percept is that it is shnultaneously abstract and yet material, describing "unenclosed space" and hence pennitting discussions about measure, movement through 11 spacetime " and speed. "Acoustic space" as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from the description of "auditory space" in the behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of the University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in the Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist KarlWilliams. Bott's idea, that auditory space "has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions shnultaneously,'' immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been hnmersed 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 the seminars and of the early multidisciplioary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded the idea of auditory space, christening it "acoustic space" to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to the contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dhnensional geometry and the new physics. Volume 37 • No. 3 • (Automne 2002 Fall) 251 252 Review • Donald Theall At considerable length and with copious. documentation, Cavell illustrates the importance of this perception to McLuhan's work and demonstrates how it made him attractive to contemporary artists in Canada, the United States and Great Britain who were working in the wake of the 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 the first time, readers can see the extent of McLuhan's effect on the visual and conceptual art of Iain and Ingrid Baxter, the music of R. Murray Schafer and the concrete poetry of bp Nichol. McLuhan also influenced Quebecois intermedia artistJacques Languirand. Readers will see part of the significant rple McLuhan's work played in the artistic endeavours ofJohn Cage, Merce Cunningham, Dick Higgins and the Fluxus group and Gerd Stem. With Cage and Cunningham particularly, McLuhan shared a special interest in and dedication to JamesJoyce. The most remarkable aspect, and the one most fully deveJoped by Cavell, is McLuhan's influence on his Canadian compatriots. The third thrust of the argument in McLuhan in Space is the importance of McLuhan's Canadianism. He remained dedicated to Canada in his understanding and vision of the 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 the phrase "cosmic consciousness," an idea that has strong affinities with the more abstract aspects of acoustic space and which therefore played into McLuhan's later fascination with the literature of cosmic consciousness as well as his near-mystical vision of acoustic space. Cavell avoids any significant reference to the depth and complexity ofMcLuhan's dassical and medieval framework and never confronts...