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THE TORONTO SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONSDonald F Theall

In 1950 Toronto was a relatively small city of around a million residents with apredominantly British ambience, and the University of Toronto had less than fifteen

thousand students, including graduate and professional schools._ Yet it was shortly tobecome the focal point for major contributions to the study of communication, cultureand media. Before the late 1930s Toronto had two professors, Eric Havelock andHarold Adams Innis, who would later become associated as two of the forerunners of aschool of thought initiated by a group of individuals from widely different disciplineswere all interested in the practice and problems of communication and culture._ This isthe sense in which it is used with relation to such groups as the Cambridge School ofEnglish and the Chicago School of Communication, the latter usually considered asincluding John Dewey and George Herbert Mead among others such as Robert Parksand Cooley and the former by such individuals as F.R Leavis and his wife, Queenie,and I.A. Richards among others. That school would be brought to fruition by Marshall

McLuhan, a professor of literature and a literary historian, and Edmund Ted Carpenter,a young anthropologist and archeologist. Initially it would come to embrace individualsfrom such diverse areas as psychology, political economy, and town planning, and laterelectrical engineering and industrial engineering.

This created a unique multidisciplinary synthesis for the early 1950s, which firstexplored the future implications of Inniss political economic history of communicationfrom Egypt and the Ancient Near East to the contemporary U.S. in which he first positedthe importance of the loss of a bias for time in the rise of the technological mind andHavelocks classical scholarship exploring the shift from orality to literacy in classicalGreece. To these earlier insights the group who launched the Toronto School broughttogether: McLuhans knowledge as a scholar of Elizabethan drama, contemporary

English and the history of the major mode of education, the trivium (grammar, logic andrhetoric) from Grecian times until the Renaissance; Carpenters archeologicalfascination with primitive art and patterns that connect, his experience with Inuit andNew Guinea cultures and his interests in contemporary anthropology; JacquelineTyrhwitt, a modernist planner associated with Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes andSiegfried Giedion (Tyrhwitts interests in town planning and the history of planning andarchitecture led in 1950 to the invention of a map overlay combining four types of data:elevation, geology, hydrology and farmland); Thomas Easterbrook, a professor ofeconomics and colleague of Harold Innis; and Carleton Williams, a psychologistimmersed in behaviorism and empiricism. Shortly afterwards this would becomplemented by the knowledge of electronics and cybernetics of two engineers,James Hamm (later a President of the University of Toronto) and Arthur Porter, as wellas by artists, art theorists and historians from the Ontario College of Art who associatedthemselves with the group.

In this complex blend of interests the predominant aspects were those ofMcLuhan and Carpenter supplemented by a somewhat lesser influence from Innisspolitico-economic history of the transformations of communication and Havelocksclassicism. Within the mixture were to be found all of the elements which later becamerelevant to the ideas associated with McLuhan, with mcluhanism and with media


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ecology._ By the 1950s anthropologists and archeologists had become interested incultural and communicative ecology from one direction, while contemporary and near-contemporary poets and artists together with architectural historians and town plannershad become involved with what was essentially cultural ecology from another direction.Joined to the sense of cultural history in which McLuhan was already an important

figure within the academic community, and the social scientific sense of that historyrepresented by Inniss work, this combination provided a unique interdisciplinarymovement for that moment in time.

In 1983 in a lecture to an audience in Paris at a UNESCO sponsored symposiumon McLuhan, I coined the phrase The Toronto School of Communication to describethis phenomenon as an analogy with what at that time was widely known as TheCambridge School of English._ There was a deliberation in my doing this, sinceMcLuhan as an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Cambridge wasassociated with this movement during its major impact on literary studies, literary theoryand the connection of popular culture with those subjects. Intuitively (and mostprobably consciously), therefore, McLuhan viewed the multidisciplinary project that he

and Carpenter started as the establishment of a school of thought which would have asubstantial future impact (or perhaps more precisely it should be called a school ofperception since both McLuhan and Carpenter became more concerned with perceptsthan concepts) .

Before turning to details of the principles and methods of this particular medley ofspeculations and practices employed by this rather diverse and loosely affiliated groupof people, there are certain environmental or ecological factors in the time, place andmilieu which are crucial to understanding its importance and how that contributed toshape the study of media ecology. First, there is the particular role of Canada at thatmoment in time, as noted by both Innis and McLuhan a country in which the traditionsof the British Empire and of the newly emerging American Empire were interminglingwith a culture that still responded to its British, French and Celtic ancestry. Canada bythe late 1940s was necessarily becoming more influenced by and economicallydependent on the United States which created among Canadian scholars andintellectuals an acute sensitivity to the practices and effects generated through theactivities of media, particularly advertising, propaganda and public relations. This wasone of the phenomena that produced the Toronto School. McLuhan would latermemorialize this by speaking of Canada as a Dew Line with respect to media effectsand their global impact (punning on the acronym, D.E.W., of the 1954 military DistantEarly Warning System of radar built across the North of the Continent of North Americaby the U.S., as an early warning system against nuclear attack).

Second, there was the phenomenon of post-war nationalist propagandaintensified by the inception of the Cold War with Communism, particularly the U.S.S.R.,and then the actual war with North Korea. Canadian intellectuals, including Innis andMcLuhan had become particularly sensitive to this in that the Canadian propagandaproducer, The Wartime Information Board which had been headed by the documentaryfilm maker and theorist, John Grierson was transformed after the War into the NationalFilm Board of Canada, with John Grierson as its founding head. Grierson clearly sawone of the Boards major roles in terms of counter-propaganda to the advertisingpropaganda of the United States and developed the Boards early program of shaping


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the national image of the Canadian North, the true North strong and free. This officialapproach in Canada further sensitized both Innis and McLuhan to the important role ofadvertising, public relations and media in using communication for control andreinforced their early critiques in The Bias of Communication and in The MechanicalBride.

In the third place, the relative newness of an independent Canada meant thatMcLuhan, Innis and Havelock functioned in a city and a university where the leisure (ifnot the wealth) existed to pursue seemingly erudite and esoteric inquiries. Toronto wasa place amazingly free from the pressure of most major American cities, and theUniversity of Toronto, not having been impacted by military-industrial research, stillprovided until the end of the 1950s a reasonably pressure-free academic environmentwith a strong inclination toward critique. Incidentally, with respect to this aspect it isinteresting to remember the way in which McLuhan reiterated on a number of occasionsthe historic linkage between the term school and the Greek, scholia, whose originalmeaning, as emphasized by Plato and Aristotle, was leisure.

Initially, therefore, what came to be the Toronto school of study, practice and

method of communication and culture was firmly historically grounded, since McLuhan,Innis and Havelock (as well as Tyhrwitt and Easterbrook within their fields) werehistorians and Carpenter as an anthropologist with strong archeological interests wasalso partly oriented towards pre-history and the history of aboriginal cultures. It wasalso strongly grounded in aesthetics, poetry and the arts, since McLuhan wasessentially a literary and artistic theorist and a historian of literary education andHavelock had been a student of classical literature and culture; their interests beingcomplemented and supplemented by Tyrhwitts knowledge of the history of planningand architecture and Carpenters deep involvement in the art and artifacts of aboriginalcultures, particularly the Inuit.

Even though their early work was financed by a Ford Foundation grant of$40,000 there was among this early Toronto group also a strong recognition of the needfor independence of the academic university from the corporate sector and the militaryarm, as reflected in Inniss writing on the university in Bias of Comunication (althoughlater McLuhan as he moved further into the media circuit after l965 would appear tomove away from this position). Innis had warned in his essays A Plea for Time andA Critical Review of the dangers from the corporate, the military, and the media andfrom within the university itself to the absolute necessity of research free from politicaland fiscal influence the opposite of which came to fruition within less than twodecades after his death in 1953._ Just as one of these essays in Inniss Bias wasentitled a Critical Review, the early approach among the Toronto School was directedtowards developing a critical history and critical analysis of communication, a role towhich Havelocks work contributed even though Havelock himself was virtually totallydisinterested in such issues. By 1950 McLuhan had already published a satirico-criticalbook on advertising, The Mechanical Bride (1951), and a very critical article on ThePsychopathology of Time, Life and Fortune first published in Neurotica (1949).

Yet the most unique factor in these activities (other than McLuhans unqualifieddevotion to radical modernist literature and art, particularly James Joyce, WyndhamLewis, Ezra Pound, the Cubists and the Dadaists) was the introduction by Carpenter ofa spectrum of anthropological and archeological concerns including the beginnings of


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ethnolinguistics the exploration of body language, and linguistic structure the earlymoments of cultural ecology, the new culture, personality and society approach inanthropology_ and the study of the interconnection of cultural patterns. In the earlylibrary of the McLuhan-Carpenter seminars there were such books as: AnthropologyToday, a huge survey of the field in the early 1950s produced from the papers

contributed for a heavily funded conference edited by Arthur Kroeber; the CollectedWritings of Edward Sapir; Ruth Benedicts Patterns of Culture; books by MargaretMead, Gregory Bateson and G.H. Mead as well as the early writing in structuralistlinguistics associated with George Trager and Henry Lee Smiths programs for the U.S.Department of States Foreign Services Language Program. The impact of this variedbody of material on the heritage of Innis and Havelock and on McLuhans almostencyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the liberal arts and of the significance of therevolutions within all the arts from 1830 to 1950 laid the groundwork for what was tobecome the set of percepts produced through the alchemistry of the Toronto School andultimately propagated internationally as mcluhanism. This vision formed one of thefoundations of what has come to be known as media ecology as well as of why

McLuhan was revived early in the 1990s to be adopted as the patron saint of the newmedia movement.The point at which to begin then is the coming together of McLuhan and

Carpenter within the context of Toronto in the late 1940s, a marriage of a softer, non-behavioural social scientist, a forerunner of the human sciences, with a historian ofliterary education and of contemporary poetry and the arts. Within this encounter, Innisultimately played a secondary role, since the ways in which they supplemented andcomplemented Innis used some of his insights, but critiqued and transformed themthrough principles and methods derived from archeology, poetry, the medieval,Renaissance and post-Enlightenment arts, aesthetic criticism and anthropology. SoInniss largely Indo-European politico-economic account of cultural history isreconfigured through anthropological and aesthetic conceptions of culture andcommunication. This interplay can be discovered in the groundbreaking Explorations inCommunications, the journal of the Ford Communication and Culture seminars which inlate 1953 launched the Toronto School and to which many who were to become leadingintellectuals subscribed Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Claude Lvi-Strauss andJacques Derrida._ The majority of articles in the journal concern the anthropological,linguistic, literary and aesthetic interests of the group, although there is the occasionalsignificant article from political economists, psychologists and scientists

So the major threads of the Toronto School were contributed by McLuhan,Carpenter and their two forerunners, Harold Innis and Eric Havelock. Havelocks majorcontribution was the specific concern with the differences between orality and literacyand the specific association of this with the moment in ancient Greece when Platoanalyzed the transformation from orality to script (writing). Complementing andsupplementing this were McLuhans own researches into the history of teachingcommunication from Greece and Rome to the eighteenth century carried out throughthe traditional teaching of the liberal arts (artes liberales), particularly the trivium and hisanalysis of the impact of print in the Renaissance and later on interpretations of thisteaching. Carpenter, on the other hand, complemented and supplemented this with hisstudy of Inuit language and culture combined with the cultural theories that involved


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studies of body language, gesture, other modes of silent language and linguisticrelativism.

Inniss major contribution was his identification of the historic role of media andtheir impact on relationships of power and control what created the important conceptof a medium as enabling a monopoly of knowledge relating this to the difference

between time based media emphasizing duration and hierarchy and space based mediaemphasizing flexibility and non-hierarchical organization. Though paradoxically, thehierarchically time based media such as stone and writing stressed centralization, whilethe spatially based media such as papyrus and radio stressed decentralization.Carpenter complemented and supplemented this with examples from aboriginal andnon-Indo-European conceptions of time, space, and environment. McLuhancomplemented and supplemented it partly by a more inclusive poetic perception aboutthe nature of a medium, but primarily by juxtaposing his knowledge of the history ofancient ideas of communication -- in which education and culture are involved toInniss analysis of a history of the materiality of communication messages becoming thenext transformation of the relationship between political economy and the flow and

movement of staples through transportation.Inniss concern with space-time, while complementing the interest of the TorontoSchool, had developed, slightly earlier, somewhat tangentially to it. McLuhansfascination with space-time had its foundation in his study of contemporary poetry andthe arts, including the impact of modern mathematics and physics, while Carpentershad arisen from the impact of contemporary physics and linguistics on anthropologicalthinking and his archeological awareness of the importance of prehistoric art as amedium. Inniss treatment of space-time was much more materially grounded in hisanalyses of the interplay of space and time in the development of the movement ofstaples, information and people in the vastness of Canada researches that he carriedout into the fur trade, the cod fisheries, and the development of the Canadian PacificRailroad and then shifting to the pulp and paper industry moved to communication, themovement of information. But this work was linked to two themes that interested him;first, the rise and fall of empires, since empires were intrinsically involved in the growthand development of Canada; second, to the problems of political and economic controlexercised by historical moments in the rise and fall of empires, and by the nature of themeans and modes of transmission themselves. So at the time of Christ, the shift to themore flexible media for transporting written messages had a crucial role on the rangeand scope of Roman control.

What interested Innis most was the way that this history reflected onunderstanding the present moment with the rise of the American Empire under theimpact of new media of communication new media, such as radio, were transferringthe imperial power from Europe, particularly Great Britain, to the United States. But healso explored the political impact of new media within the U.S. which is illustrated, forexample, by how he examined the role of the radio in Franklin Roosevelts amazingassault on the power of the press, largely through the use of this oral mode ofcommunication in his so-called fireside chats. Yet what was most impressive was theway in which in Empire and Communications Innis traces the history of communicationstage by stage from ancient Egypt with its use of stone as a medium to the mid-twentieth century with radio and the beginnings of TV. He further proposed the concept


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that each choice of media created for its world a bias arising from the mode ofcommunication either towards space or time, favouring hierarchy and centralization orflexibility and decentralization respectively.

Inniss position, which has something to do with the role his work played inMcLuhans Ford Seminars, was that of a left liberal critique of the emerging marriage of

media, of propaganda now transformed to promotion and of a thrust towards imperialcontrol. While Innis was essentially a conservative Liberal Canadian, this led him tobecoming a figurehead for what later emerged as the New Left, while still remaining asignificant figure for old liberals. But ultimately his direct influence on McLuhan,Carpenter and many of their earliest followers has been exaggerated, for while Innis,even more than Havelock, contributed to this evolving dialogue, his position wasreasonably tangential to their major thrust as exemplified in the third issue ofExplorations in which there was the sole contribution from Innis just shortly before hisdeath. The commentaries on his contribution were provided solely by graduatestudents in the Ford seminars, not by McLuhan or Carpenter._

More than Inniss contribution, the body of anthropological knowledge that

Carpenter provided was critical in determining directions that the perceptions of theToronto School would develop. While Innis did refer occasionally to anthropologistssuch as Sapir or earlier sociologists, such as Durkheim and Weber, and while he hadbeen at Chicago and encountered the Chicago School of Sociology, Carpentercontributed more of the social scientific ideas which shaped the Toronto School. Heplayed a major role in the shaping of the Ford seminars and of the ideas that arose inthe early seminars. Carpenters contribution to an anthology of essays selected fromExplorations that he published in 1960 was entitled The New Languages, which is anearly statement from the mid-1950s of the principle that English is a mass medium. Alllanguages are mass media. The new media -- film, radio, TV are new languages._

Writing of those early days of the Toronto School in relation to Explorations andthe early seminars Carpenter points out the importance of Dorothy Lee, a Harvardanthropologist, noting that she produced from 1948 onward: a series of remarkableessays on languages that lacked or minimized temporal tenses, adjectives, metaphors,first-person singular, as well as all equivalents to our verbs "to be & "to become";languages that blurred the distinction between nouns & verbs, that conjugated &declined from plural to singular, but also possessed forms alien to Standard Indo-European languages .... I write about her here because she was Explorations mostinfluential force._Later he adds that the entire group of anthropologically inclined language researchers atthe time were all more or less influential elements within the Toronto group, beginningwith a reference to Benjamin Lee Whorf: Whorf died in 1941, so his influence onExplorations was only indirect. Dorothy Lees, however, was direct. Six essays by her,as well as four commentaries on those essays, appeared in successive issues. Lettersfrom her filled several folders. She met with our group repeatedly, first in Louisville at aconference organized by Ray Birdwhistel. Also in attendance were Edward Hall, GeorgeTrager, Henry Lee Smith, Margaret Mead, Larry Frank, Robert Armstrong, and otherswhose contributions constituted about a fifth of Explorations._

These authors not only contributed to McLuhan and Carpenters explorations ofspace and time, but also made contributions about language, gesture, and the language


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of movement (kinesics) as well as the very central concepts of tactile communicationand of anthropologically and sociologically derived models of culture andcommunication all of which finds their way into McLuhans writings. Even in arguingagainst there ever having been a Toronto School, Carpenter (perhaps motivated bymodesty, since if McLuhan was the focus of such a group, Carpenter was its

foundation), further illustrates how all of these elements interplayed throughout the1950s when he notes:All this was also happening elsewhere in North America, but with one difference:

from Toronto, you could see it happening. It was like living on an island, studying themainland. You saw the whole show. Its main event was the electronic revolution. Thelocal blackout highlighted that distant glow.

There was never a "Toronto School of Communications." It was simply a bunchof islanders watching the greatest show on earth. A table in the museum coffee shopserved as meeting place. There, at four oclock, McLuhan & Tyrwhitt & I gathered, alongwith Don Theall & John Irving, a few students, occasionally Easterbrook, rarely Innis,plus Dorothy Lee, Sigfried Giedeon, Ashley Montagu, Karl Polyani, Roy Campbell, a

dozen other visitors, and talked until the place closed.Toronto had other oases, all unofficial._Carpenter is right in that no one used the phrase Toronto School, but they allinteracted with one another in such a way as to make it perfectly legitimate to speak of itas a school of thought a fact that is supported by the way Carpenter establishes thatthere was a unique perspective provided by the Toronto of the 1950s.

For its moment in history Explorations and the Ford Foundation seminars inCulture and Communication brought together a unique combination of factors: acombination of Inniss historical sense with that of McLuhan, as well as his aestheticsmodified by Carpenters archeological and historical view of primitive cultures andaboriginal groups and Tyrhwitts sense of the history of architecture and technology inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a unique emphasis on media, includinglanguage, as art forms arising from a combination of an interest in kinesics, gesture,silent language and early structuralism; an awareness of the growing significance of therestored relationship between art and technology which is associated with McLuhan andTyrhwitts knowledge of the academic work of Mumford, Geddes and Giedion as well asMcLuhans knowledge of early radical modernism (Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism,Constructivism and Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Pound).

What this meant was that for the first time a dedicated interdisciplinary group wascommitted to the project of examining all cultural artifacts as media and thus to includethe examination of media as an art form. This is quite clearly illustrated in two distinctyet complementary ways by the final two issues of Explorations, 8 and 9. Explorations8 (1957) was the only issue produced solely by McLuhan with the assistance of theartistic and typographic design of Harley Parker. It was his second essai concrte (thefirst being a mimeographed, paper edition of Counterblast (1954) which was publishedwith the subtitle, Verbi-Voco-Visual (a phrase from Joyces Finnegans Wake)_ Itexplored satirically and epigrammatically a variety of themes relating culture, media andart through their functioning in the process of human communication. It wassupplemented by some short essays written by other contributors.Explorations 9: Eskimo was produced solely by Carpenter. It was composed of a series


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of brief essays on Eskimo culture written by him, particularly concerning their perceptionof space, time and of their language and everyday culture (art). These essays asignificant early example of visual anthropology were juxtaposed with pictures ofpaintings by Frederick Varley, a major Canadian painter who had visited the Arctic in1944 and photographs by Robert Flaherty, a documentary film maker who had shot the

film Nanook of the North in 1920 distributed by the National Film Board of Canada.Although McLuhan and Carpenter had first met in 1948 their real partnershipbegan with the planning of their Ford project in 1952. Most of the foundation of whatwas to become media ecology had been laid through the seminars, Explorations andother publications when Carpenter left Toronto in 1960 . The growing significance ofcultural ecology within anthropology and the ecological nature of Carpenters approachto the groups he studied, like the Inuit, all had ecological implications, implicationsclosely related to the way the McLuhan group perceived media and the relation of art tomedia and culture. The combined approach of the last two issues of Explorations in late1957 and 1959 coupled with The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and a report that McLuhanwrote for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (1960) assembled the

early vision of this group, including even intimations of McLuhans later tetrads, whichmarked his posthumous works, Laws of Media and The Global Village. Carpenterbelieves the Galaxy to have been McLuhans best book and for that matter the last realbook he published, although the posthumous publication of the Laws of Media with hisson Eric certainly harks back to this early period.

Lets examine the nature of that foundation provided by the Toronto School. Itgrows out of the coming together of four distinct academic traditions within the contextof a fifth, the University of Toronto. Eric Havelock born in Great Britain was trained atOxford in Classics, and Marshall McLuhan born in Edmonton, raised in Winnipeg and agraduate of the University of Manitoba later received another degree and a doctorate atCambridge in their English School dominated by F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards andsemantics, while Harold Innis, a Canadian, did his doctorate at Chicago University, andTed Carpenter, an American, was educated at and received a doctorate from theUniversity of Pennsylvania. This blend was to bring aspects of the social sciences inthe U.S., including the Ivy league with Franz Boass archeology, and Kroeber andSapirs anthropology and the Chicago School(s) of economics and of sociology withfigures such as Veblen, G.H. Mead, John Dewey and others togther with the traditionaleducation in the classics and early modern language and literature associated with theOxbridge tutorial system. That blend would include a wide range of intellectualexperience, but also bridge an elite, intellectual approach with a more democratic, yetfundamentally humanistic one.

The foundation of the Toronto School begins with Havelock and the way heinterpreted Aeschyluss play, Prometheus Bound, as a commentary on the dilemma ofthe rise of technology and its creation of a new sense of space, time and memory in apost-technological world dominated by a shift from orality to writing an argument hewas later to develop at great length in a book McLuhan praised highly, The Preface toPlato.

Innis openly admitted Havelocks influence on his own work with his interest incommunication technologies and the shift in biases toward time and space whichresulted in various media. McLuhans early work in his Cambridge doctoral thesis,


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Thomas Nashe and the Learning of his Time, and his first book, The Mechanical Bride,provided him with a unique access to Havelocks work, presenting possibilities ofreinterpreting, expanding and critiquing many of Havelocks, and later Inniss, insights.McLuhan was able to use the history of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric and their impacton shaping the poetic and directing learning from Greece to Elizabethan England to

extend Havelocks history of Greek culture to that of the history of culture from theRoman Empire to the Reformation.From the mid-1950s McLuhan used his earlier hermeneutic work on advertising

and other modes of popular culture in The Mechanical Bride to establish links withHarold Inniss translation of Havelocks orality and writing into a history of media fromstone and papyrus to print and radio. The work he had done in The Bride prepared himto make the move from embracing media as forms of art or popular art and culture andto link them simultaneously to technologies of transmission. McLuhans work ongrammar, logic and rhetoric as the technology of speaking and writing enabled him tointuit the relation between Havelocks analyses of Greek culture as the beginnings of anintellectual and technological culture to a history of modes of expression as

technologies intricately interlinked with their means of transmission.Carpenter brought to this mix the means of extending the method of Havelockand Innis back into pre-history and also beyond the limits of Indo-European history toconsider the cultural histories of primitive and aboriginal cultures. The theories oflanguage, gesture, art and communication that Carpenter brought to the projectstretching back from the Trager-Hall group to Sapir and Boas deepened and enrichedthe relationship that McLuhan was establishing between art, media and technologies.This, by intersecting with Tyrhwitt and McLuhans knowledge of Mumford and Giedionswork on the history of art and architecture, generated the combined way in which themethod and practice of the Toronto School evolved as an understanding of thesimultaneous analysis of media as modes of expression and as modes of technologicaltransmission. Their work in the early 1950s led to what Raymond Williams described asthe convergence of three senses of media:There has probably been a convergence of the three senses: (i) the old general senseof an intervening or intermediate agency or substance; (ii) the continuous technicalsense, as in the distinction between print and sound and vision as media; (iii) thespecialized capitalist sense in which a newspaper or broadcasting service somethingthat already exists or can be planned - is seen as a medium for something else, such asadvertising._

The predominant analogy, which evolved from the Toronto School, that mediaare like works of art, was established as a practice and method positing the fact that allcultural objects and most cultural phenomena were the result of a process of making, asboth McLuhan and Carpenter had noted. Later this was further reinforced byobservations such as those derived from Gregory Batesons earlier work from the1940s, culminating in his essay on the Bali, Style Grace and Information in Primitive

Art (1967) which noted that for the Bali everything was art, because they believed thatthey strived to do everything well. Implicit in such attitudes were the beginnings of theapproach within cultural studies to such questions and of the way that theorists ofcultural studies collapsed together the so-called higher arts, the popular arts, the newer


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media and other cultural objects. This method of procedure, which was already in placeby the fall of 1953 when the Ford Seminars were launched, stressed the inter-relationship of communication and culture and their further interrelationship withtechnology. This meant that a decade or so later, McLuhan was referring to his programas an interdisciplinary (though it might have more properly been called transdisciplinary)

investigation into technology and culture.The significance of this inter-relationship of art and media becomes clear inMcLuhans many and various comments about art. In the posthumous Laws of Media,which reflects the work of his early period from 1950-1964, McLuhan notes "The artist isthe person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and theenvironments created by technological innovation._ In the light of this, it is extremelysignificant that at the outset of The Gutenberg Galaxy, he had argued that there mighthave been some advantage to substituting the word galaxy for the wordenvironment, since any technology tends to create a new human environment._Such a statement reflects the acute consciousness of the role of environment and of thenecessity of a cultural ecology which had developed among the Toronto group in the

seminars. Clearly Carpenter, Tyrhwitt and McLuhan all were concerned withenvironmental and ecological issues and their overlap with arts and technologies. Inthat process the figure we ordinarily speak of as the artists and their productions, theworks of art themselves, are, particularly for McLuhan and Carpenter, anti-environments.

All of this had to do with the way that media reshapes people; or as Carpenterput it in a title of a book he had begun collaborating with McLuhan but finished himself --They Became What They Beheld a motif which was crucial to all of Carpenters work,as exemplified in Explorations 9: Eskimo where Inuit life is constantly shaped by theirenvironment and where additions to it such as the technology of the Primus Stove openup new ways of experiencing their environment. As McLuhan puts it in the openingwords of the Galaxy, Technological environments are not merely passive containers ofpeople but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike._ Inthe process it became natural to speak of this interaction in terms of cultural ecology, asMcLuhan does in the Galaxy in a discussion of the attitudes towards print among theChinese :My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the humansensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has quitean appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses.Language being the form of technology constituted by dilation or uttering (outering) of allour senses at once, are themselves immediately subject to the impact or intrusion ofany mechanically extended sense. _

All of these motifs arise from the activity within the Toronto School during the 1950s andare here articulated by McLuhan as one of the central concerns of his ongoing project.It represents both a sophistication and extension of Inniss vision of the relationshipbetween media and people in the ongoing dialectic of politico-economic biases being re-balanced through the movement of media history.

If acoustic space (constructed upon Carl Williamss early contribution onauditory space to the seminars and Explorations) was one of the first breakthroughs of


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the Toronto School and one closely integrated with the writing of Havelock and Innis, itwas partly because it simultaneously re-situated the oral tradition, but also allowed for areconstituted understanding of the implications of aurality as being environmentallyconditioned and conditioning._ Acoustic space permitted a new way of viewing theemerging environments created by a variety of electrically based media and of relating

their interaction with the environment to an interaction with the ear and sound inprimitive environments. It also posited that there would be a transformed acousticspace itself effected and conditioned by the newest technologies as well as conditioningthem. Moreover, it also blended well with the sense of the tactile which the TorontoSchool was developing the awareness that all technologies from speech to TV effectthe ratio of the senses which must be of great concern to cultural ecology. In hiswritings from Eskimo (1959) until They Became What They Beheld (1970) and O Whata Blow That Phantom Gave Me (1973) Carpenter stressed this concept of auditoryspace, its unique importance to ecological shifting of space and time owing toenvironment, enivronmental change and technology. Rather than simplisticallyopposing auditory space to the visual, he opens up the complexity throughout history of

the role of space and time.In all of this the Toronto School stressed the intellectual observers point of view.This is crucial for understanding their perspective which necessarily does not adopt aparticipant perspective, although recognizing inevitably the detached observer must beinvolved and effected. This is combined with a rejection of the specialist or expert asthe definer of the understanding of these complex communicational processes. that is,the image of Poes maelstrom, which McLuhan had developed in the 1940s and used inThe Mechanical Bride. That image speaks of a sailor who trapped in a maelstrommanages to survive by observing the dynamics of the whirlpool, which allows him tosave himself by riding it to shore. This was a particular contribution of McLuhans to theToronto School, since it reinforced Inniss detached, yet highly critical, stance towardthe growing power of the corporate, military and political over research andcomplemented Havelocks detached intellectual position. In developing a sense ofcultural ecology, the Toronto school implicitly developed a critique of societys permittingthe growth of technology and media without thinking of ways to balance its possibledistortions or manipulation. But intellectually they felt that had to be grounded indetachment and independence

In 1967, commenting in an interview with G.E. Stearn on an event of 1957,McLuhan noted that the revolution in information had begun with Sputnik on October 4,1957, because at that point Ecology with a capital E was born. The world had beenturned into a work of art becoming through satellites another cultural subject._ Thisenvironmental transformation in the very midst of the activity of the early seminars andExplorations in Toronto obviously confirmed for them their approach toward the impactof the evolving world of electric information. Such an approach meant that by the end ofthe 1970s in a discussion with Louis Forsdale, McLuhan could comment on the rise ofthe study of media ecology and media ecology programs in the United States as anextension of what the Toronto School and its students had been about, for as hesuggests to Forsdale, Media ecology means using the media so that they help eachother instead of just wiping each other out. He expresses it more precisely in TakeToday where he notes: Ecology is the simultaneous awareness of the interplay of the


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total field of processes. The simultaneity pushes the most banal situations into highrelevance._ Seeing that the Toronto school was grounded on a foundation of critiqueand correction (in McLuhans case, utilizing satire as an instrument) this was the mainthrust of what they began in the mid-twentieth century, preparing for the millenniumYet for McLuhan and Carpenter the intellect and art were crucial as instruments and

methods in achieving the rescue effort.In 1991 the French philosopher, Giles Deleuze, in collaboration with thepsychotherapist and media analyst, Flix Guattari, analyzed human thinking in such away as to establish that artistic process in its involvement with percepts and affects is

just as much an activity of thinking as the cognitive process of the philosopher is with itsdevelopment of concepts or that of the scientist and technologist, with their.development of functives and propositions._ Such an approach finally permits arecognition of McLuhan and Carpenters continuous assertions that while being thinkersand intellectuals, they were working with percepts and implicitly affects. This makesmost of their writings appear poetic and aphoristic in terms of the tradition of FrancisBacons Essays to which McLuhan frequently alluded throughout his career._ In a

techno-scientific age, the Toronto School was developing a way of reinserting intointellectual discourse the value of grammatico-rhetorical (a poetic) exploration of media,culture and technology.

After all, the road began with McLuhans using the exegesis of ads and otherpopular cultural phenomena such as comic books, newspaper pages, mass audiencemagazines, popular best sellers and the like to teach students how to read poetry.Carpenter supplemented Mcluhan by utilizing Sapirs writings, Boass theories of formand primitive art and early structural lingusitics to examine cultural objects as if theywere art forms. Their collaboration was further reinforced by their mutual mode ofwriting prose-poem-like essays about cultural ecology as exemplified by McLuhan inthe Galaxy, and Understanding Media (in which Carpenter collaborated by carrying it tocompletion) and by Carpenter in Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me and TheyBecame What They Beheld. In the process they both used what at the time would havebeen described in literary circles as the devices of wit puns, verbal play, paradox,amibiguity, tricks with language such as paralellisms, anthitheses and play with vowelsand consonants. Their method of writing was directed towards increasing the readersor listeners perceptual and affective understanding of the phenomena underconsideration.

McLuhan, as a literary scholar interested in Renaissance and Eighteenth Centurysatirists (Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, Sterne, Swift and Pope among others)and James Joyce, structured most of his works partly as contemporary learned satiresIn a letter correcting misstatements made about his work by a Canadian professor ofEnglish, McLuhan asserted: "Most of my writing is Menippean satire, presenting theactual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image."_ Such a comic critique ofthe contemporary world is central to the approach which the leaders of the TorontoSchool adopted in their own writings and one which was apparently approved by theirother associates such as Tyrhwitt, (who invited McLuhan to Greece to participate in aconference with her and the promoter of Ekistics, Constantin Doxiadis), or Easterbrookand Hamm, who remained lifetime friends and supporters.

This may seem to move far from the Toronto School as one of the earliest steps


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towards media ecology. Yet the combination of the poetic and the satiric had beenspecifically directed in the case of James Joyce, McLuhans prime literary influence, atthe individuals encounter with the environment of the contemporary city in Ulysses andwith the transformation of the world resulting from the new technologies and the modesof living that they had created in Finnegans Wake. Such works apart from their artistic

merit were profound examples of cultural ecology. (In this Joyce would be followed bymany later writers such as Pynchon, Burroughs and Vonnegut as by many ecologicallyconscious SF writers such as Brunner, Lem, Leguin and Gibson). What McLuhan andto an extent Carpenter did was to turn the devices used in satiric fiction into meditationson the actual life and conditions of their contemporary world. Like the Menippeansatirists he admired ,McLuhan felt that all moralization should be implicit and shouldarise from the way the sensitization to percepts and affects intensified the individualsawareness of the contemporary maelstrom of a society nearly totally dominated bytechnologies managed by a few. So the style of McLuhan and of Carpenter was onethat intensified perceptions and contextualized them in an affective ambience of comiccritique.

The Toronto Schools influence continued in four ways. First, direct participantsin the early activities of the group went on to found programs of teaching and researchthat reflected the directions of the School examples are the post-McLuhancontinuation of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto by Derek deKerckehove and the creation of programs in communication studies at York Universityand at McGill by Donald Theall. Second, the influence of McLuhan in the United Statesand In France produced individuals committed to furthering the percepts of McLuhan,such as Baudrillard and Virilio, in France (with earlier interest by Roland Barthes) and inthe U.S. the media ecology programs and strains of communication studies associatedwith speech communication and history of communications for example, in the work ofJohn Peters. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, it launched a multitude ofmcluhanisms as well as mcluhanisme keeping the attention, the sensitization and thereaction going such as Neil Postman and Thomas Wolfe in the U.S. and ArthurKroker, David Cook and Bob Dobbs in Canada. Fourth, and finally, it encouraged agroup of artists and writers John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Gerd Stern in the UnitedStates and Jacques Languirand and Denys Arcand in Canada to intensify the critique.The epitome of the latter being in a way the introduction of McLuhan himself in theWoody Allen film, Annie Hall.

So this is the future of a vision that began in a relative international backwater in1950 where the accidental presence of several remarkable people and a smalldedicated group of faculty and students sparked the launching of an adventure, whichwas to come to fruition half a century later. That adventure contributed to otheracademic futures as well by being one of the first major interdisciplinary projects in thehumanities and human sciences with a long term impact that eventually led to theemergence of a wide variety of research and academic programs in communication, aswell as the beginnings of media ecology.


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NOTES

_Students at the University of Toronto1950 14,840

1980 49,132

Sources: For 1950, University of Toronto President's Report.For 1980, Office of Convocation, Student Records.

Population of Metropolitan Toronto1951 1,117,4701981 2,998,947

Sources: Canada Census 1951 and 1981

_ To understand what is involved here it is necessary to think of a school in terms of itsdefinition in article 5a of the Oxford English Dictionary:

5. a. The body of persons that are or have been taught by a particular master (inphilosophy, science, art, etc.); hence, in wider sense, a body or succession ofpersons who in some department of speculation or practice are disciples of thesame master, or who are united by a general similarity of principles and methods

_ I use the term mcluhanism deliberately to dissociate it from the full range of thevision of Marshall McLuhan. For an explanation see Donald F. Theall, The VirtualMarshall McLuhan, 7, 24 -33 and passim

_ There has been extended discussion of the source of this term. Havelock, whowished to dissociate himself from the Toronto school mused that he might be thesource. But it certainly was not recognized by anyone as a serious denomination.Jack Goody denied thinking of a Toronto School when he wrote some remarks usingthe phrase in a 1967 footnote. I was unaware of his footnote when I introduced it asthe title of a paper at an international McLuhan symposium held in Paris in 1983. whichwas published by UNESCO and later reprinted in the Canadian Journal of Political andSocial Theory 10 no. 1-2, 79-88. See also Derek DeKerckehove, McLuhan and theToronto School of Communication in the Canadian Journal of Communication, 14, no.4-5 (December 1989) 73-9 ; who failed to note that I had introduced the term at theUNESCO conference that he had helped organize and which he attended.

_ See H.A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 61-91, 190-8._ See Irving Hallowell, Culture, Personality and Society in Anthropology Today, ed.Kroeber et al, 597-619.

_ Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 238_ See the section on Innis in Edmund Carpenters Appendix B in Theall, The VirtualMarshall McLuhan, pp. 248-50.

_ Edmund Carpenter, The New Languages in Explorations in Communication, ed.Edmund carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). 162.


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_ Edmund Carpenter, Appendix B in Donald Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan,240.

_ Ibid._ Ibid, 251._ See Finnegans Wake, 341.19.

_ Raymond williams, Keywords (London: Flamingo, 1983), 203._ McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 98._McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, opposite p. 1._ Ibid._ Ibid, 35._ See Appendix B of Theall,The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 241-2.

_ This is cited in the CD Understanding McLuhan in the section McLuhan On:Telecommunications, p.2 where they cite the passage from an interview of McLuhan byG.E. Stearn in McLuhan Hot & Cool, ed. G.H. Stearn, 265. The problem is that it is noton p. 265 which is a title page for Chapter 6 and I have not been able to find it in that

Interview. But I am reasonably certain it occurred in an interview with Stearn sinceMcluhan frequently mentioned Sputnik in the 1960s and that the citation onUnderstanding McLuhan is valid. It should be noted, however, that there is anothererror in the CD in that it quotes McLuhan as citing the date October 17th, 1957. Hecertainly knew better, because in other interviews he mentions the date as October 4th..

_ McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today, 232._Giles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 33, 148, 164-99_ For example, Marshall McLuhan Francis Bacons Patristic Inheritance, McLuhanStudies I (1991), 7-26. An expanded version of a paper presented to the ModernLanguage Association in 1942.

_ McLuhan, Letters, 517, To Michael Hornyansky, Feb. 3, 1976. For a full discussion ofMcLuhan and satire, see the penultimate chapter McLuhan as a Modern Satirist ofD.F. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 187-201.


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BibliographyCarpenter, Edmund S. 1959. Eskimo (sketches and paintings by Frederick Varrley;sketches and photographs of Robert Flahertys collection of Eskimo carvings)(Explorations 9). Toronto: University of Toronto Press

_ 1970. They Became What They Beheld. Photographed by Ken Heyman. New

York: Ballantine Books, Inc._ 1972. Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me!. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston

_ Ed. 1953. Explorations; Studies in Culture and Communication. Number 1(December)

_ 1954. Two (April)_ 1954. Three (August)_ 1955 Four (February)_ 1955 Five (June)Carpenter, Edmund, and Marshall McLuhan. 1957. Eds., Explorations 8: Verbi - Voco -Visual (October)

_ 1960. Explorations in Communication: An Anthology. Fourth printing, Boston:Beacon Press 1968Havelock, Eric Alfred. 1950. The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, Incorporating a freshtranslation into English verse of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Boston: BeaconPress

_ 1963. Preface to Plato. Oxford: B. Blackwell_ 1986. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on orality and literacy from antiquityto the present. New Haven: Yale UPInnis, Harold A. 1950. Empire and Communications. Revised by Mary Q. Innis. Forwardby Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972

_ 1951. The Bias of Communication. Introduction Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: UTP_ 1952. Changing Concepts of Time. Toronto: UTP_autonum_ 1954. Monopoly and Civilization. Explorations Three (August), 89-95Lee, Dorothy. 1954. The Self Among the Wintu. Explorations Three (August), 49-58McLuhan, Marshall. 1943. The Place of Thomas Nash in the Learning of His

Time. Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University_ 1951. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press_ 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man. Toronto: UTP_ 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-HillBook Company

_ 1987. The Letters of Marshall McLuhan Ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan,William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UPMcLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. 1988. Laws of Media: The New Science.Toronto: UTPPatterson, Graeme. 1990. History and Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall

McLuhan, the Interpretation of History. Toronto: UTPSchuster, Carl & Edmund Carpenter. 1996. Patterns That Connect:: Social Symbolism

in Ancient & Tribal Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, IncTheall, Donald. 1954. Here Comes Everybody. Explorations 2 (April): 66-77

_ 1971. The Medium is the Rear View Mirror. Montreal: MscGill-Queens UP


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_ 1986. McLuhan, Telematics and the Toronto School of Communication.Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10, no. 1-2: 79-88

_ 2001. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queens UPWilliams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London:Fontana Paperbacks, Eighth impression 1981

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