The Future is Technoclassical: Signs of the McLuhan Century (Part Two)

If the difficult and polarizing aphorisms of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might be appreciated, not as provocative and likely misleading pop cultural soundbites, as they were in the 1960s,¹ but rather as foundational insights through which to understand, and act in, the present digital world, how might we begin to formulate the contemporary significance of a figure who occupied – not unintentionally – the status of intellectual jester to the postmodern dominion of 20^th century televisual media?  In other words, since the media revolution addressed by McLuhan was the 19^th-20^th century demise of the “Gutenberg Galaxy” (or the printed book’s cultural supremacy) and the rise of  a “post-literate” society shaped by the electric media forms of radio, wire service news, and television, can McLuhan’s insights also shed light on the 21^st century revolution, whereby the mass media consumer images that replaced the intellectual absolutism of book culture are themselves being widely devalued, as was suggested in the first post of this series,² by the digitally-powered return to absolutes and cultural foundations (e.g. a technoclassical culture)?

To begin to answer these questions, we might look at one of the key areas that signaled, in the previous post, the fascinating convergence between digital technology and the classical values imparted by the liberal arts – education.  The topic of education serves as a guiding motif throughout the career of McLuhan, beginning with his 1942 doctoral dissertation The Classical Trivium, continuing in the preliminary research for his 1964 book Understanding Media, which began as a project funded by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), and providing the theme for his last non-posthumously published book The City as Classroom.  Indeed, in McLuhan’s dissertation, the deep interchange between technology and classicism that would undergird his subsequent work is intimated in his discussion of de translatione studii³ (or the “transfer of learning”). Through this phrase, medieval authors designated the education that would inform the newly created university as the simultaneous preservation and updating – via multiple historical and geographical routes – of the training in intellectual virtue and sensibility of classical Greek and Roman learning.  As we will later suggest, it is clear that McLuhan’s own cultural contributions were the product of an effort to continue the translatio studii into the contemporary technological world.

It is thus no surprise that early in his career McLuhan thoroughly surveyed the so-called “Chicago fight,” wherein, at the University of Chicago, some of the most pivotal trends in 20^th century American education were developed and fiercely debated.  Instructively, paired with his later adoption of media analysis, McLuhan’s 1940s critique of the Chicago fight helps us see that the two major attempts to renew humanistic education at the University of Chicago – namely, the organicist “social efficiency” approach of John Dewey and the literary “Great Books” approach of Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins – were well-intentioned failures due to neglecting the effects of the intersecting media environments of the 20^th century.  What is of even greater significance, however, is that, while Dewey’s social constructionist model of student-centered learning provided the egalitarian and anti-essentialist justification for the “progressive” education that is now disintegrating under the “technoclassical” present, McLuhan’s analysis shows that the apparent return to cultural foundations promised by Adler and Hutchins’ study of the “Great Books of the Western World” also falls short of the translatio studii demanded by the contemporary technological world. In fact, due to the failure to adapt the techniques of classical learning toward an understanding of the contemporary “languages and grammars of the media,”⁴ the Great Books curriculum – particularly under the lead of Adler – would merely echo, according to McLuhan, the narrow fascination with logical aptitude and ungrounded progress characteristic of John Dewey’s program.  Nevertheless, through briefly exploring the inadequacies of such a classical retrieval, we might also bring some of the contours of the technoclassical present into sharper focus.

While only partially representative of his view of the situation, McLuhan’s 1946 article “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America” compellingly illustrates the Chicago fight – or, in McLuhan’s words, the “splenetic interchanges…shrieking across the No-Man’s Land of the curriculum” – ⁵ by providing an example of how “Modern America” might indeed be seen as a translatio studii of the “Ancient Quarrel” that McLuhan detected in the intellectual tension at the heart of the classical trivium. Summarizing his PhD thesis, McLuhan explains that, from Ancient Greece to the European Renaissance, the three liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) were implicated in a “quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand.”⁶ 

Firmly on the side of the grammarians and rhetoricians, McLuhan convincingly argues that the traditional structure of classical learning – and its ability to access the deep metaphysical order which provided its intellectual principle – was only sustained through the subordination of dialectic, or logical method, to the analogical arts of grammar and rhetoric.  Thus, while “the [modern] eclipse of the grammatical method by mathematics after Descartes reduced the art of grammar to mere matters of accidence and syntax,”⁷ the classical art of grammar as the very foundation of the verbal arts of the trivium was, according to McLuhan, the means of attaining an encyclopedic knowledge of language, and its use in literary tradition, so as to read the various phenomena of the so-called “Book of Nature” as analogical signs of the cosmic order inscribed by the Divine Logos, or Word of God. Inheriting this tradition from the Greek and Roman stoics, the early Church Fathers applied the art of grammar to discerning how both the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of Scripture” illuminated each other through the unified resonance of God’s Word, thereby perpetuating the classical approach whereby “language was viewed as simultaneously linking and harmonizing all the intellectual and physical functions of man and of the physical world as well.”⁸ Equipped with the abstract, dialectical art of testing and arranging arguments, the art of grammar reached its culmination in the Ciceronian art of rhetoric, wherein the encyclopedic wisdom of ethical, religious, and scientific literature was paired with the eloquence and political prudence required to exercise one’s intellectual virtue for the “common good” of the classical city-state or, later, the Christian “city of God.”⁹

In “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America,” McLuhan assigns the Great Books program of Hutchins and Adler – though, tellingly, he directs almost all of his references to Hutchins rather than Adler¹⁰ – to the side of grammar and rhetoric. McLuhan writes, “The end of education as described by Hutchins is the making of the citizen. The citizen is rational man equipped for social and political life by means of encyclopedic (non-specialized) training in the arts and sciences (the great books program).”¹¹ Essential to Hutchins’ view, McLuhan notes, is the principle that one can only serve one’s community well by first perfecting the virtues specific to human nature as “a rational animal and hence a political animal,”¹² whose mind and speech are a “mirror or speculum of the Logos.”¹³

In contrast, John Dewey and the educational reformer Alexander Meiklejohn, represent, for McLuhan, the dialectician’s side of the “Ancient Quarrel,” which can be traced back to the Platonic and Aristotelian emphasis on syllogistic logic over poetic wisdom, but which gains considerable influence with the medieval rise of the “schoolmen” or moderni after Peter Abelard’s dialectical interpretation of scripture in the 12^th century.¹⁴ Ultimately, strengthened by the systematic abstraction of the 16^th century logician Peter Ramus, and the mathematical method of René Descartes, dialectics eclipses the analogical tradition of grammar – and, thereby, the metaphysical basis of the trivium itself – through the grounding of truth, not on the interpretation of literary tradition, but on the formal precision of quantitative analysis.¹⁵

It is this reduction of truth to abstract instrumentality that McLuhan associates with Dewey and Meiklejohn’s positions on education, noting that “scientific knowledge and method are the ultimate bases of social and political authority for men like Professor Dewey.”¹⁶ Viewing the human person as a “technologically functional unit in the state,”¹⁷ Dewey and Meiklejohn, McLuhan asserts, reject the metaphysical essence of the human person as being at the core of communal life: “a conventional representative of nineteenth-century social thought, such as Dewey or Meiklejohn, regards the collectivity as the basic thing. The individual has no nature which is not conferred on him by the collectivity. Man is not a rational animal.”¹⁸

Informed by McLuhan’s later work, the association of Dewey’s progressive educational ideas with 19^th century social thought adds greater nuance to McLuhan’s dualistic formulation of the Chicago fight.  Importantly, while in his 1946 article McLuhan places Dewey’s scientific managerialism within an unbroken development of dialectical technique in modern western culture, McLuhan’s later differentiation of the media environments constituted by print technology and by electric technology suggests that, not only was Dewey’s progressivism largely a departure from the abstract dialectics correlated to print culture, but that both Dewey’s progressivism and Hutchins and Adlers’ conservatism were inadequate models of education precisely because they incorporated the psychological attitudes of both print culture and electric culture in unreflective and ultimately incoherent ways.  It will be the object of the next post to develop this analysis.

1. Put together by music producer John Simon and PR expert Jerome Agel, the 1967 audio version of McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects aptly demonstrates the pop cultural context of McLuhan’s playful attempt in the 1960s to raise awareness of the perceptual effects of media. ↩︎
2. See The Future is Technoclassical: Signs of the McLuhan Century (Part One) ↩︎
3. Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W.T. Gordon (Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2006), 90. ↩︎
4. Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media (National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1960), 1. ↩︎
5. Marshall McLuhan, An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America, The Classical Journal, 41, no. 4 (1946), 156. ↩︎
6. Ibid, 157. ↩︎
7. McLuhan, Classical Trivium, 17-18. ↩︎
8. Ibid, 16. ↩︎
9. Ibid, 74. ↩︎
10. As will be discussed in a later post, McLuhan regarded the philosopher Mortimer Adler as a staunch dialectician and thus, while embraced by the University of Chicago president Hutchins as key in shaping the Great Books program, a figure who was essentially at odds with Hutchins’ classical humanism. As McLuhan writes in “The Failure at Chicago” (an unpublished essay from the 1940s), “What I think has not been noticed is that Hutchins and Adler really hold strongly opposed positions. Adler’s differences with current education are merely personal and accidental. Nobody could be less concerned with contemporary or any culture than he. As much as a plastics engineer, he is of ‘know-how’ all compact. A man of method and techniques. A dialectician for whom education can never include training in sensibility or taste…Mr Hutchins, however, is really opposed to these highly abstract methods and stresses…There is considerable irony, therefore, in the fact that Mr. Hutchins has chose[n] as the scene of his reform a university least amenable to it, and for his agents the most gifted of his enemies.” Marshall McLuhan, The New American Vortex (V 4). “The Failure at Chicago”, n.d., Vol. 63, File 40, Marshall McLuhan fonds, 1871-1987, National Archives of Canada. ↩︎
11. McLuhan, Ancient Quarrel, 156. ↩︎
12. Ibid, 157. ↩︎
13. Ibid, 158. ↩︎
14. Ibid, 157. ↩︎
15. For a thorough analysis of the decline of the grammatical basis of the liberal arts, as framed by McLuhan’s later media theory, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1962). ↩︎
16. McLuhan, Ancient Quarrel, 156 ↩︎
17. Ibid, 156. ↩︎
18. Ibid, 157. ↩︎