At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan in Space

McLuhan in Space RICHARD CAVELL The culture of print has rendered people extremely insensi­ tive to the language and meaning of spatial forms.­ McLuhan, Explorations 1 I I,­N 1973, MARSHALL MCLUHAN MADE A FILM for the Great Minds of Our Times series called Picnic in Space.1 The film begins with static and a voice­over of McLuhan speaking about several kinds of space—visual, acoustic, Greek, Roman, enclosed, open, and so forth. Then we seethe tide, against a blue background, which cuts to McLuhan walking in a parking lot set against a backdrop of buildings in the Gothic academic style. McLuhan enters an automobile and is filmed as reflected in its rearview mirror. He speaks of how the Greeks never thought of the world ascoming in2 and expatiates on the meaning of the phrase "Keep me in the apple of thine eye" (which meant, he says, "keep me in existence"). Throughout this sequence there are cuts to the film's leitmotif, a close­up shot of Pierre Mondrians Broadway Boogie Woogie (complete with boogie­ woogie piano music on the soundtrack).3 McLuhan uses this painting to represent acoustic (boogie­woogie) space (Broadway) in its allusion to a 166 discontinuous musical form that is analogous to the discontinuities of the post­Euclidean space embodied in Mondrians painting. The paintings musical interface is a further reminder that three­dimensional space is only one kind of space and that acoustic, or non­linear, space exists in the realm of sight as well as of hearing and tactility. These insights are conveyed variously, through references to Muybridge's photos of horses as proto­ cinematography, to AndyWarhol's Brillo­pad paintings and Marilyn Mon­ roe silkscreens, to cartoons and the related work of Roy Lichtenstein, and to the spatio­cultural significance of Japanese flower arranging. Most of the dialogue in the film takes place in a country field under a couple of apple trees, where McLuhan and his longtime collaborator Harley Parker (co­producer of Through the Vanishing Point:Space in Poetry and Painting [1968] and Counterblast [1969]) sit down to a picnic. (Parker is reminded of the Qu'appelle Valley and of Fort William, where he was brought up; McLuhan, of the Assiniboine and Red River Valley.) They are accompa­ nied by a woman who, in a separate sequence, is figured as an aviatrix (there is a reference to Amelia Earhart) piloting a yellow biplane; there are also visual references to the Wright Brothers, to Lindbergh, to a rocket launch, and to the rock group Jefferson Airplane4 (another allusion to acoustic space). At one point, McLuhan turns on a flashlight in the middle of this field and remarks that light does not have a point of view; it radiates in all directions at once, giving it a spherical, auditory character. McLuhan then repeats the film's opening spiel: "We ought to have a fewwords about why space has never been studied. Why not mention the Greek discovery of visual space, the Roman discovery of enclosed space and then also their discovery of the straight road? Bosch, Munch, Cubism, Joyce, hardware, software."5 Picnic in Space powerfully encapsulates the central nodes of McLuhans cultural theories, and it does so with consistent reference to space: visual, acoustic, audile/tactile, figure/ground, environment/counter­ environment, global/village, and so on. His re­emergence as an important cultural theorist has likewise taken place as part of the spatial turn of contemporary theorizing and artistic production. Yetto discuss McLuhan as a "theorist of space" provides an unusual perspective on a figure who is almost exclusively known as a theorist of media and communications.6 Given both McLuhan s early interest in the waythat the alphabet spatialized orality, however, and the influence of Harold Adams Innis's notion of 167 spatial and temporal biases, the development of these interests into a broader concern with spatialization is coherent with the overall trajectory of his intellectual career, as it is with the broader cultural currents of his time (as formulated, for example, by Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space}. This article does not seek to diminish McLuhan's importance in the field of communications and media; rather, its goal is to add another dimension to his concern with communications and media by placing it within his broader interest in the production of space. I argue that space is the single most consistent conceptual category within...