Making Space
A new perspective on a Canadian Icon
by Sue Bowness

from The Literary Review of Canada, December 2002

McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. By Richard Cavell, University of Toronto Press, 322 pages, hardcover ISBN 0802036104

My first encounter with Marshall McLuhan was in my rural high school library (a room about 20 square feet with four rows of bookshelves) when McLuhan's book The Medium is the Message literally feel off the shelvers while I was reaching for another. Opening it, I found a book unlike any I'd seen before, with a collaged layout, and strangely juxtaposed images and aphorisms. The one that captured my attention the most, and that I still have clipped to my bulletin board was 'There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening'.

There are two groups of McLuhanites: the first is the serious scholars, who truly do understand McLuhan and usually have devoted a large part of their lives to considering his theories. The second is the recreational McLuhanite group, and those of us in it are the type who tack aphorisms to our bulletin boards and keep a copy of Understanding Media on our shelves, occasionally picking it up and leafing through it idly. While we may not understand McLuhan as well as the first group, we sure would like to, and that's why we need the first group to occasionally come out with books that re-present his theories in a new way, renewing our fascination. Richard Cavell, author of the new McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, is clearly one of the dedicated. His new work, which re-evaluates and repositions McLuhan's entire body of work from a spatial perspective, argues that space is the unifying concept of his work, and that McLuhan himself was clearly a spatial theorist, partiularly on the topic of acoustic space.

While Cavell's book is obviously an important piece of scholarship, it is also a welcome read for those of us in the recreational McLuhanite group. Cavell has done us a particular favour - not only does the book walk us exhaustively through the ways in which McLuhan's theories relate to space, but it also acts as a refresher on the oeuvre itself. Cavell considers the ways in which McLuhan influenced and was influenced by fellow scholars, artistic contemporaries and students (Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Walter Ong) and the connections between McLuhan's theories and artistic works being produced by avant-garde artists such as bpNichol and Glenn Gould.

Although space is the vantage point of Cavell's analysis, he explains that "this study does not seek to lessen McLuhan's importance in the field of communications and media; rather its goal is to add another dimension to McLuhan's concern with communications and media by placing it within his broader interest in the production of space." He emphasizes that this perspective is meant to augment and enrich previous considerations of McLuhan. Yet he goes on to assert the primacy of this new spatial perspective, "what this study does argue is that space is the single most consistent conceptual category within McLuhan's highly eclectic body of work". It is a bold statement considering that communications is traditionally the field where McLuhan is deemed expert. Yet Cavell suggests the notion is apparent even in McLuhan's first musings about communications theory; when he insisted media were extensions of our senses the larger, spatial implication was "that our bodies were now mediators of space through the technological extensions of our perceptual ability".

Cavell considers McLuhan's interest in spatiality as part of a paradigm shift from a culture concerned with linear time to a cultural ethos more concerned with spatiality and simultaneity. The modernist and postmodernist concerns with spatiality are highly relevant, as these were the historical moments that most interested McLuhan (though overtly modernist, his sensibilities were in fact postmodern). The writers he was most fascinated with, such as Joyce, Mallarme and Ezra Pound, allowed him opportunity to reflect on the spatial concerns of these eras, as their work initiated a progression from a realm of sequentiality to a realm of simultaneity, from a print culture to a more visual one. For McLuhan, Joyce's writing, (partciularly in Ulysses) exemplified the shift from linear reading/meaning to a more simultaneous version, in which references or cross-references evoke historical meanings, and wordplay or context suggest double meanings in addition to the linear narrative of the story. Cavell argues that McLuhan realized that similar simultaneities and cross references were also happening in other realms besides the literary, and that these prompted him to reconsider the traditional linear way of looking at communications. Cavell explains that McLuhan's "shift from content to context, from message to medium, represented - in terms of the historical development of communications theory - a shift from time to space, though in McLuhan's formulations these terms were interwoven dynamically and were presented relationally." McLuhan saw modernism as an important transitional phase into this new dynamic spatial interpretation.

From his initial assertion that McLuhan was interested in the subject from the start, Cavell moves quickly into a short history of space that not only alerts his reader to the different facets of spatiality itself (oral, aural, literary, historical, geographical, cultural) but also summarizes the views of McLuhan's predecessors and contemporaries - Joseph Frank (whose 1945 essay 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature' is considered a cornerstone in the field), Wyndam Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, Bertram Brooker - on the subject. The scholar whose influence Cavell emphasizes most extensively is Innis, from whom McLuhan derived the insight that contemporary culture was biased spatially. Cavell points out that it is through critical consideration in his essay "The Later Innis" that McLuhan begins to really develop his notions of space: "What McLuhan needed was a concept of space that was not static and not limited to the visual. He found this dynamic in the concept of acoustic space, a concept with the utterly poetic ability of uniting the qualities (so admired by Innis) of the oral and the aural while maintaining the notion of space bias." Innis' thesis was that communications media developed space and time biases (for example durable media such as parchment, clay, and stone emphasized time whereas lighter media such as paper emphasized space). To Innis, the growing imbalance in favour of visual/print culture was a bias that would ideally be corrected, as he mournfully equated the loss of orality with the loss of other values such as historicity and morality. In embracing space as a framework, McLuhan was addressing the bias suggested by innis while also developing his own theoretical response to the growing simultanaeity he witnessed in (post)modern society. As Judith Stamps points out, McLuhan did not see himself as working against spatiality as a whole but against the primacy of visual space, which he challenged with the new, acoustic notion.

Following this general analysis of McLuhan's early considerations of space, Cavell proceeds to consider the development and expansion of these notions in subsequent books, notably The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media. He delves into the ways in which the central ideas in each of these texts contested or reinforced other scholarly writing at the time in ways that refined these notions of space. The Mechanical Bride, for example, is considered in light of its intertextual dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Gideon; Cave;; examines the ways in which McLuhan fell in with, but eventually departed from, both these scholars. Cavell emphasizes that these works were valuable to McLuhan as a starting point for working out his own theories of acoustic space, enabling him to delve deeper than either thinker into the idea of space, its history, and its nuances. Cavell does sometimes indulge in a bit of spatiality himself, going off into longish tangents about McLuhan's interactions with one scholar or another's work (he spends a long time, for example, on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents). These can be forgiven however, as they ultimately add to the richness and breadth of the examples in the work.. In the second half of the book, Cavell continues to weave together various artists and their work, effectively showing the omnipresence of McLuhan's theoretical ideas within the concrete productions of practicing artists.

In a very McLuhanesque way, Cavell uses an 'Interface' chapter between the first 'Spaced' and the second 'Scaped' parts of his book, in which he explains that his project in the second half will be the slightly different pursuit of locating McLuhan in the "anti-environment of artistic production;" that is, to examine how he influenced Canadian artists such as bpNichol, and R. Murray Schafer as well as international entities such as the Independent group in England, and the Situationists in France. As the second half of the book progresses, Cavell identifies the arts that McLuhan favoured most as the "arts of space" a term "used almost interchangeably with 'plastic arts' to denote those forms architecture, painting, sculpture-that are to be distinguished from the 'arts of time-music and dance". He explains that McLuhan was attracted to these arts and others because they exemplified notions of simultaneity he had already encountered in the work of Joyce and Mallarme, and tested the boundaries of communicated space and epresentation. For McLuhan, these modernist writers and artists such as Jackson Pollock truly exemplified the problems of spatiality that he was examining.

McLuhan's own more visual works, notably The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village, as well as his lesser known pamphlet publications such as the "CounterBlast" pamphlet that he put out in 1954 following the Massey report, or his "Dew-Line Newsletters" of the later 1960s, are given in-depth consideration , as performative art in their own right and also in terms of their active commentary on visual space and layout. Beyond McLuhan himself, subsequent chapters consider the "Visible Speech" in the poetry of bpNichol and music of Glen Gould, both in terms of their own prerogatives and the way in which they reflected McLuhan's notions of orality and dynamism.

In a conclusion entitled "Postface", Cavell not only reiterates the spatial currents that he argues run throughout McLuhan's work, but the incidental benefits of this vantage point. For him, the major advantage is that of seeing McLuhan in a new way, as a spatial theorist with particular insights in the field of acoustic space. However, he points out that reconsidering McLuhan as a spatial theorist provides several fringe benefits, including the opportunity to clarify McLuhan's debt to Innis, and the insight that McLuhan's consideration of the history of mechanization is closely related to his theorizing of visual space. As well, the critical art which McLuhan himself produced can be seen as largely based on insights that emerged from radical juxtapositions, and that "McLuhan dynamized these juxtapositions as his 'laws of media.'", Cavell asserts that "understanding McLuhan as a theorist of spatial effects provides a productive critical context for reassessing his work and opens up significant areas of research" and suggests that appropriate areas include McLuhan's influence on Canadian cultural production and policy, and understanding media as a material phenomenon that has a material effect on all aspects of social and cultural production.

Although it is debatable whether spatiality is in fact the one "concept that shines most brightly through McLuhan's work" ( a statement that will no doubt engage scholars who have devoted their own efforts to other themes) Cavell does provide a compelling exploration on how the notion of space creeps through McLuhan's output. In addition to highlighting McLuhan's explicit discussions of space, Cavell perhaps even more helpfully points out where McLuhan's arguments touch on the concept of spatiality even when the subject is not being explicitly addressed. Another advantage of Cavell's book is that the focus on space allows us a glimpse into McLuhan's vast array of work without being overwhelmed by its scope. It also allows readers to consider him as a true artist or at least a true player in the artistic world himself, as many of the themes in his spatial theory are ones he concretized in his own artistic production. In his myriad of examples from every spatial realm imaginable, Cavell succeeds in providing not only an overview of the general history of spatial theory but also a convincing sense of how space weaves subtly, and sometimes overtly, throughout McLuhan's own notions about media, literature, and art.

For the recreational class of McLuhanites , this book is a really dense presentation of his work (as most McLuhan criticism necessarily is), yet Cavell's careful explanations of the nature McLuhan's scholarly connections and critical rapport make it clear that the author has considered the limited perspective of a general audience. That is not to say that his book is not a scholarly work - it is, and scholars will no doubt appreciate the depth of his insights more than the less well-versed reader Yet since McLuhan himself was not entirely stuck in the space of the academic world, it is fitting that this book is not either; it considers artistic culture contemporary to McLuhan, and its scope reaches out of strict McLuhan studies into the realm of Canadian cultural commentary. In making his text accessible to the casual reader , Cavell in fact does the McLuhan studies world a service; it is a field that risks fading into general under-appreciation unless its casual armchair scholars are thrown a good, readable bone once in a while, to purchase and put next to our copy of Understanding Media on the bookshelf.