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

Making Sense of McLuhan Space

Making Senseof McLuhan Space GORDON A. GOW 1V±ETAPHOR is APOLESTAR in the work of Marshall McLuhan: everything revolves around it. His journey through media, culture, and mind was guided largely by means of metaphor, since his thoughts on technology, his method, and his mode of presentation wereall intimately oriented toward it in some form or another. Yetthe contempo­ rary study of metaphor in McLuhan's work is made difficult precisely because it is so pervasive. This paper is an initial attempt to chart some of the contours of a persistent form of metaphor in McLuhan's work— namely, that of space. Spatial metaphor, as I will demonstrate, performs three crucial functions in McLuhan's study of media, including one that has resulted in a shift in the very basis for studying media dynamics. From a pragmatic standpoint, a better understanding of spatial metaphor in McLuhan's work may lead to important insights applicable to contempo­ rary technology assessment. Literary scholar Donald Theall called McLuhan "a master of meta­ phor" (considered the mark of true genius in the world of Aristotelian rhetoric) who recognized how to leverage the power of metaphor for rhetorical and pedagogical value. In his critical review The Medium is the Rearview Mirror, published in 1971, Theall described McLuhan's method as follows: "In McLuhanese, his metaphors could be described as provid­ ing a 'Do­It­Yourself­Creativity­Kit.' In this way, even the initially less 186 adequate metaphors [i.e., those that seem to confound more than clarify] can be useful for meditation which will lead to some kind of creative insight."1 McLuhan's use of metaphor demands a kind of U­Think approach to moving ideas. The reader is given the task of closing the circuit. In addition, however, Theall points out that many of McLuhan's metaphors are also depth charges, a depth technique for exploration.2 In other words, McLuhan used seemingly obdurate metaphors to force the willing reader to put on and ponder and play with the oddities until they give way to insight. In Counterblast, for instance, he prods us with a geographic metaphor to describe the impact of the written word: "Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech."3 Theall described this approach ascreating "apseudo­synecticgroup­ think method for participation." Here Theall is referring to the synectic theory of creativity that was first articulated by William J. J. Gordon in 1961.5 Gordon based his theory on the notion that creativity involves the coordination of familiar things into new structures, and that self­reflexive thinking and paradox are strategies helpful to this process. McLuhan's expression "Breakdown as breakthrough" characterizes the general theory of synectics. SinceTheall alludes to it only in passing, it may be worthy of closer scrutiny in terms of its similarities to McLuhan's own approach to creative thinking. McLuhan's method was characteristic of what he might have re­ ferred to as a cool technique that invokes metaphor to encourage participa­ tion, eschewing the idea of absolute truth and rewarding constructive, creative thought. He used metaphor as a heuristic device for exploration— a technique that would continue throughout his work and ultimately evolve into the form of the tetrad. On the one hand, metaphor is the medium, a rhetorical device, by which McLuhan struck a responsive chord with his readership; on the other hand, however, metaphor is also a message in his work. Inspired by the views of Cambridge luminary I. A. Richards, McLuhan identified metaphor as a basic operating principle of communication technology: "All media," he proclaimed, "are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new form."6 "The spoken word," for instance, "was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environ­ ment in order to grasp it in a new way."7 In other words, McLuhan 187 believed that the spoken word performs a metaphorical operation by translating sensation into abstract utterance. Using Richards's terms, we could say that the utterance is the vehicle that packages and delivers sensory experience to the tenor—in this case, the consciousness of a listener. Most significantly, however, the formal properties of speech not only deliver experiencebut transform that experience aspart of the process of translation—hence, the notion that we let go of environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Speech transforms consciousness and our way of getting...