Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads:  McLuhan’s Hyper-Language as a (Digital) Tool for (Old and New) Storytelling
10.13125/2039-6597/1362
Marshall McLuhan è conosciuto soprattutto come studioso dei media, ora recuperato anche nell’ambito degli studi letterari che indagano il divenire di nuove forme di narrazione ‘digitale’. Questo contributo intende, però, recuperare Marshall McLuhan e la sua scrittura a mosaico come ‘soggetti letterari’, suggerendo come le radici della comunicazione del critico canadese (e, di conseguenza, di tutte le sue esplorazioni nel campo dei media e della tecnologia) risiedano nel suo essere stato, prima di tutto, Professore di Letteratura. La formazione umanistica tradizionale acquisita negli anni Trenta del secolo scorso durante il dottorato all’Università di Cambridge, UK, è il terreno sul quale McLuhan innesta le sperimentazioni degli autori modernisti a lui cari: Joyce, Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Ford suggeriranno a McLuhan nuove euristiche capaci anche di illuminare sui nuovi processi culturali a lui coevi. Il ‘mosaico’ di McLuhan si configura così come scrittura ‘digitale’ ante litteram, suscitando l’interesse di autori e artisti delle nuove avanguardie di metà secolo: da Harley Parker, a Wilfred Watson, a Sorel Etrog. La forma interattiva e performativa della scrittura mcluhaniana, sviluppata  a partire da sonde verbali paratattiche, sollecita una partecipazione attiva del lettore attraverso dinamiche multisensoriali e sinestetiche. Recuperare McLuhan e il suo ‘mosaico’ quali soggetti letterari aiuta a cogliere il potenziale che la ricerca umanistica può e deve continuare ad avere in epoca di grandi trasformazioni tecnologiche e sociali.
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Elena Lamberti
Between
Hyper-Language
Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads:  McLuhan’s Hyper-Language as a (Digital) Tool for (Old and New) Storytelling
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Theoretical Frameworks: Orality, Media, Digital Memory
2014-12-14
2014-11-30
2015-01-13
1
Elena Lamberti
2014
10.13125/2039-6597/1362
Università di Bologna
2039-6597
8
Hyper-Language
en
Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads:  McLuhan’s Hyper-Language as a (Digital) Tool for (Old and New) Storytelling
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1362/1149
4
         Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads: !
      McLuhan’s Hyper-Language as a
      (Digital) Tool for (Old and New)
                 Storytelling1!
                               Elena Lamberti!

                                              Literature is not a subject but a
                                              function – a function inseparable
                                              to communal existence.!
                                           Marshall McLuhan, Letter to W.J. Ong,
                                                                            1946 !


     Redefining McLuhan and his ‘hyper-language’ as
                   ‘literary subjects’!
       In the western world, Marshall McLuhan has been defined in
many ways, depending on local scholarly traditions, as well as on
lasting biases associated to the reception of his provocative
‘slogans’ (the medium is the message; the global village). Wikipedia is there
to prove it. For instance, the English pages of the online “free
Encyclopaedia” label him as ‘a Canadian Philosopher of communication
theory’, while the Italian ones simply frame him as a “Canadian
sociologist”. The too limited synthesis of the Italian introduction is,


     1 This essay retrieves and further expands some of the ideas expressed
in Elena Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic. Probing the Literary Origins
of Media, Studies, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2012 (Shortlisted, Ca-
nada Prize in the Humanities awarded by the Federation for the Humanities
and Social Sciences, 2013).


Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/ November 2014)
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



nonetheless, compensated by the generosity of the Wikipedia German
entry: “Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian Philosopher, a
Humanist [or, better, a Geisteswissenschaftler, literally a ‘scientist of the
human spirit’], a Professor of English Literature, a Rhetorician and a
Communication Theorist”. The only missing variable is here ‘artist’, a
term for which Marshall McLuhan gave a clear definition in his by now
classic book Understanding Media: !
        !
       The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who
       grasps the implications of his action and of new knowledge in his
       own time. He is the man of integral awareness.(McLuhan 2003: 95)!
!
According to McLuhan, integral awareness, embedded in the artist
image, is an attitude profitable for all scholars, all people, men and
women, in any field. Consistently with his passion for language and
etymology, each term in the quotation is carefully chosen in order to
convey the potentialities embodied by such an image: Integral, that is,
unifying forma and substancia, form and substance, ground and figure,
at once connecting all things and being all things; but also, at a deeper
level, ‘integral’ means untouched, pure, entire, intact, as to suggest an
unbiased, childlike attitude of approaching knowledge, displaying
both curiosity and playfulness. Awareness, that is, the alert condition
which should be shared by anyone engaged in any form of
investigation. Finally, the artist image, itself the symbol of a new forma
mentis, based also on the use of imagination as a passe-partout attitude
opening all doors leading to the discovery of the new environmental
dynamics. All these expressions could, in fact, be employed to
introduce McLuhan’s poetics; something that might encourage critics
in the humanities to overcome the by now biased interpretation of
McLuhan merely as a media guru, and study him and his discourse,
instead, as literary subjects. By including the reference to McLuhan’s
interest in rhetoric, literature and humanistic philosophy prior to his
interest in communication studies, the Wikipedia German entry not
only stands as one among the most articulated, but it also contributes



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                                       Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



to fully retrieve the scholarly background that made the writing of all
McLuhan’s ‘media volumes’ possible.!
!      In 2014, the world celebrates fifty years from the publication of
Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.
Published two years after another of his media classic, The Gutenberg
Galaxy (1962), that book consolidated McLuhan’s fame as a ‘media
guru’ and launched him, as such, on the international scenario.
Certainly, Understanding Media introduced a new approach to the study
of media and changed (or perhaps made) the history of that discipline,
at least in North America; promptly, McLuhan’s visionary ideas on old
and new forms of communication became both popular and
controversial among a varied set of international audiences all through
the following decade. Then, the ‘phenomenon’ McLuhan faded from
the mid-seventies but it resurrected from the nineties, when the
evolving techno-scenarios seemed to turn his ‘predictions’ into visible
realities:2 new e-tribes materialised through open source media, the
world reconfigured in the image of a complex ‘global village’ and new
technological extensions of the human body made the prosthetic of Sci-
Fi cyborgs a tangible phenomenon of our everyday lives. !
       Consistently, in the same period, the emergence of new artistic,
creative and literary forms deeply connected to the electronic and the
digital world started to make the name of Marshall McLuhan quite
popular also among a growing number of literary scholars: references
to McLuhan are now easy to be found in literary essays exploring
knowledge in relation to digital practices, and his ideas are often used
to navigate the uncanny creative psychodynamics of the web 2.0.
However, in most cases, the focus remains more on his media
explorations and less on himself as a ‘literary subject’. Something
which is somehow ironic: literary critics still miss the fact that


     2 In 1991, that resurrection was officialised by Wired magazine, that se-
lected McLuhan as its ‘Patron Saint’. Once again, he was brought to life as a
‘media guru’, and his literary studies remained either neglected, or mentio-
ned en passant, for at least another decade.


                                                                                    3
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



McLuhan’s ‘media explorations’ were but the result of his experience
as a Professor of Literature. When studying, in the Thirties, at
Cambridge University UK, when teaching literature in American and
Canadian Universities from the Forties, when progressing into a media
thinker (as well as a media icon), McLuhan’s always relied on his
literary heroes: Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce,
J.K. Chesterton, as well as Pre-Socratic Philosophers, English
Renaissance writers, Dante, Petrarca, and even the Italian Futurists, to
name but a few. The irony is more marked if we consider that
McLuhan’s life-long passion for literature and literary studies is
acknowledged and even celebrated by scholars in other areas of
studies, so much so, that, today, it is possible to map out a sort of
‘McLuhan’s literary rhetorical alphabet’. For instance, most sociologists
and media theorists inevitably quote McLuhan’s reading of Edgar
Allan Poe’s short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom”, or his passion
for Joyce when discussing his original approach to either society or
media. Certainly, such an appreciation of McLuhan’s literary roots
outside of literary studies must be treasured; however, it does not
necessarily conduce to a full appreciation of McLuhan as a ‘literary
subject’ per se. On the contrary, it even risks to frame McLuhan’s
articulated discourse inside some literary interpretive clichés which
might prevent further explorations in that direction. Instead, it is time
for literary scholars to reclaim Marshall McLuhan and learn from him
how to reenergise the role of creative writing and literary heuristics -
and the role of storytelling - at a time of technological transformations.!
       McLuhan’s personal library has recently been acquired by the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, at the University of Toronto: the
McLuhan Library Collection comprises more than 6000 volumes,
among which the literary ones are the majority and most of them duly
annotated. McLuhan’s marginalia are a literary treasure and constitute
an underpinning text to both McLuhan’s ideas on old and new media,
as well as a treasure island to fully appreciate the idea of ‘literature as a
function’, so dear to Marshall McLuhan. Accordingly, literature (and
especially modernist North American literature) plays a crucial role in


4
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



the making of McLuhan’s media works, not only in terms of ‘exempla’,
or ‘study attitude’, or merely as ‘decorative, rhetorical’ strategy:
literature constitutes the epistemological root of McLuhan’s discourse,
it guides him across the new media and societal wilderness of his time
and leads him to develop a form of writing capable to grasp ‘the
implications of his action and of new knowledge in his own time.’ McLuhan’s
fragmented and juxtapositive language is, in fact, a powerful tool he
consciously developed juxtaposing traditional paratactic forms of
writing (he applied Bacon’s lesson on aphorism) and modernist avant-
garde experiments (he met and corresponded with Ezra Pound and
Wyndham Lewis, knew Joyce’s work almost by heart, and studied
many Modernists in depth). McLuhan’s form of writing is therefore to
be read as a hyper-text ante litteram or, better, as a hyper-language, as
convincingly proven by Michael A. Moos in his ground-breaking essay,
(Moose 2005) precisely because of its firm humanistic humus;
something which should intrigue literary critics exploring new digital
creative practices, and something which should explain the
controversial reactions that many readers initially had to McLuhan’s
formal novelty.!
        As a matter of fact, when first published McLuhan’s books
puzzled more than one critic who found the content interesting and
thought provocative, but the language foggy, uncanny or even
nonsensical. Undeniably, those critics were right; yet, what was
originally meant as a sharp criticism cannot but be read, instead, as
(perhaps unconscious) praise if filtered through more alerted literary
ears. Because words matter, it all depends on the meaning critics
convey to the word ‘nonsense’3. McLuhan’s language is, in fact,
nonsensical if approached through the scholarly paradigms of reading
and writing consolidated at his time (as well as today), something that
would dismiss his witty formal novelty as gibberish; or, at least, as not
appropriate for the ‘academic discourse’ tout court, even though
accepted within other domain (i.e.: creative writing and artistic

     3   See: Finkelstein 1968


                                                                                  5
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



explorations). Perhaps you would get the same kind of response if you
approached Joyce’s Finnegans Wake assuming it was George Eliot’s
Middlemarch. However, if we read McLuhan’s language through his
knowledge of literary traditions, the ‘nonsense’ will immediately
appear under a different light: like the Shakespearian Fool, McLuhan
speaks ‘the truth the next way’4, as he was “wise enough to play the
fool” and could display “a practice / as full of labour as a wise man’s
act”.5 His formal medium was, in fact, an original message, the core
element of McLuhan’s poetics clearly stated from his first published
book, The Mechanical Bride: because McLuhan spent all his life to ‘apply
the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of
society.’ (McLuhan 2002: 7) !
       As in the case of many Modernist works, McLuhan’s non-linear
language requires cooperation and will to participate in the process of
discovery, not mere apprehension of concepts; this is, in fact, the key idea
that, in McLuhan’s writing, brings together the humanistic tradition,
the study of new forms of communication, new technologies/media, as
well as a series of avant-garde literary experiments. As Glenn Willmott
has rightly pointed out: “McLuhan developed a critical theory in the
1940s and 1950s which negotiated between higher modernism and
American consumer society and which found its model in
[Eisenstein’s] theory of cinema’6 among others. The underpinning idea
is that our artificial (man-made) world can be better perceived through
a montage that suggests complex articulations embedded in the formal
frame. Henceforth, McLuhan’s uncanny prose is his key to pattern
recognition, a process that starts with a poetic approach – that is with




       4   W. Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 1.5.29-33
       5   W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 3.1.59-679

       Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse, Toronto: University
       6

of Toronto Press, 37


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                                         Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



our acceptance of emotive utterances7 – to be cognitively analysed
afterwards. McLuhan’s suggested that, as new media-induced
environments reshape human beings, affecting their sociological and
anthropological constructs, people must, in turn, start to rethink
traditional ways of perceiving and rendering linear and sequential
categories into simultaneous and discontinuous ones. At the same
time, he developed a strategy to recompose bits of information into a
complex yet intelligible pattern: McLuhan’s mosaic-like form of writing
aims precisely at that. It is conceived as ‘the only practical means of
revealing causal operations in history’, (McLuhan 2011: lxii) and
McLuhan uses it to question preconceived ideas of/on knowledge and
to move his readers from a linear (logical, ordered, exclusive) to an
acoustic (non-logical, simultaneous, inclusive) perspective. A
perspective which, though different, still resounds within digital
environments.!
       McLuhan’s mosaic is primarily a tool enhancing our capability to
learn and apprehend through the interplay of ancient wisdom and
cognitive stimulation; it is not simply a way to convey simultaneity
and dress knowledge in a format employing different media models so
to offer a more lively, real, and immediate experience. It is not the



     7 “It will be admitted – by those who distinguish between scientific sta-
tements, where truth is ultimately a matter of verification as this is under-
stood in the laboratory, and emotive utterance, where ‘truth’ is primarily ac-
ceptability by some attitude, and more remotely is the acceptability of this
attitude itself – that it is not the poet’s business to make scientific statements.
Yet poetry has constantly the air of making statements, and important ones;
which is one reason why some mathematicians cannot read it. They find the
alleged statements to be false. It will be agreed that their approach to poetry
and their expectations from it are mistaken.”, Richards I.A., Science and Poe-
try, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1970, 56. When at Cambrid-
ge, McLuhan took classes on ‘practical criticism’ with Richards, a method
which he always treasured as both a Professor of Literature and a Media ‘ex-
plorer’.


                                                                                      7
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



embodiment of the media fan, but rather of the media grammarian. 8 The
mosaic relies on the witty power of puns and words to perceive
analogies between apparently unrelated things. It opens windows to
unpack all the compressed learning: quoting Bacon and his nineteenth-
century commentators, Michael Moos rightly recalls the founding
concept of portability of thought based on ‘an internal mobility of
language through which thought itself advances.’ (Moos 2005: 301-11)
Such a concept is also assessed in relation to McLuhan’s study of H.A.
Innis’s language,9 where McLuhan defines each of Innis’s sentences as
a compressed monograph: ‘He includes a small library on each page,
and often incorporates a small library of references on the same page in
addition.’ (McLuhan 1970: ix) Consequently, reading becomes an active
process not simply because it enables us to understand what is written
in the book and to participate in the creation of meaning, but mostly
because it encourages us to continue exploring: if we fully engage in
that form, it will further foster knowledge. As Moos insightfully
suggests, McLuhan’s writing does not anticipate hypertext as a
database that we can access, but as ‘a mode of thinking that reaches
back into your own “headset” and accesses you.’ The mosaic taps ‘into


       Many (naive) critics assume that Marshall McLuhan was a fan of tech-
       8

nology because he discussed new media all through his books. Instead, as his
family and his closest friends have often repeated, he was not in love with
technology. Also, he was not a media ‘geek’, he was lost in technological spa-
ce. Precisely because he was lost, he started to question and explore it; but all
his explorations where meant to dig out the hidden grammar. Consistently
he acted as a grammarian of the new media environment, pursuing the sear-
ch for knowledge through his the ancient paideia.
       9Harold Adam Innis (1894 – 1952) was a Canadian Professor of Political
Economy at the University of Toronto, author of famous books such as: A Hi-
story of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923); The Fur Trade in Canada: An Intro-
duction to Canadian Economic History (1930); Empire and Communications (1950).
McLuhan, who knew and admired Innis’s work, wrote a famous ‘Introduc-
tion’ to the 1970 edition of Innis’s The Bias of Communication, originally publi-
shed in 1951, where he praised his aphoristic and condensed prose.


8
                                      Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



the reader, to access and activate his inner storehouse: The effect is to
enable those very functions computer hypertext regards as a
constitutive yet still strives to define, namely, integration of the reader
into the writing process and real-time access to the archive … Thus
[McLuhan, as Innis] expects the reader to make discovery after
discovery that he himself had missed.’ (Moos 2005: 311) The act of
reading the mosaic, then, is envisaged as an experience which
enhances the process of construction of knowledge, as well as a process
of actualization of a knowledge elaborated through time and space. It
is that very process of actualization which awakens readers from the
Narcissus-narcosis.10 The mosaic, as the form which embeds and
allows such an experience, is a cold medium or a truly tactile one
because it forces the reader to compensate for what is not obvious in
the text but which is, nevertheless, present and compressed in a verbal
fragment or in a pun. The portability of thought so translated is what
makes the mosaic a hyper-language more than a hyper-text. After all,
language is an oral/acoustic concept and text is a more linear (or at
least framed) one, with all it implies in terms of sensorial awareness
and active participation. !
       The hybridization of literacy with other media is fundamental to
its own survival; what is fascinating to note is that this hybridization is
not only preserved by McLuhan, but he also re-energizes it. He turned
his mosaic into a probe while relying on ancient educational dicta. If
critics appreciate that, then they cannot but be electrified by the
energizing force of the mosaic. And as an electrifying/electrified hybrid,
McLuhan’s mosaic could be provocatively defined as the LSD of post-




     10 “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for ano-
ther person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions un-
til he became he servomechanism of his own extended repeated image. […]
He was numb. He had adjusted to his extension of himself and had become a
closed system”. (McLuhan 2003: 63)


                                                                                   9
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



secondary-orality readers:11 it triggers inner trips which, in fact,
enlighten on cultural and media processes; also, it forces readers to
enquire farther, to explore old and new knowledge, old and new
books, ideas, visions. To hazard a parallel which might irritate most
fans of hypertexts, the mosaic retrieves an encyclopaedic learning,
while hypertext relies more on a Reader’s Digest approach to
knowledge , especially in its fruition. This is not a way to bless one
form and blast another, but simply a way to point out that they express
a different type of authorship, imply a different type of audience, and,
even though they share similar reading techniques, they nevertheless
induce a different form of participation and involvement. The way one
tends to read hypertext is perhaps more comparable to zapping,
whereby one can still acquire a sense of progressing in mapping
actuality or a given field of investigation. If readers apply the same
zapping technique to McLuhan’s mosaic, they can certainly have fun,
but they do not have the same sense of accumulating knowledge. In
order to fully appreciate what is hidden in McLuhan’s verbo-voco-
visual language, reader have to act as an interface themselves. They are
the effective terminal of the communicative process. An even bolder
parallel would be the one between the way data are electronically
moved and the way McLuhan’s verbal probes move inside the readers’
heads. A message sent through the World Wide Web is decomposed
into small units and bits which move independently across the various
‘channels’ of the net, and once at their destination, they are
recomposed on the receiver’s screen and form a readable message. In a
similar way, McLuhan’s mosaic is received as a discontinuous and
fragmented form whose smaller units or bits of a deeper train of
thought continue to move inside the reader’s brain; in time, they


         I’m paraphrasing here McLuhan’s metaphorical use the word ‘LSD’,
        11

as in one of his famous quote: ‘Computers are the LSD of the corporate word’, a
probe that he coined to epitomize what stood beyond the new techno-holism
of the ‘electric era’, something that he defined as the depth-involving newness
of his time.


10
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



combine with new ones until they enlighten each other and spark
knowledge. It is an effect linked to the traditional idea of portability of
thought and which, at the same time, recalls the one suggested by T.S.
Eliot when discussing the real use or meaning of poetry: while
diverting attention through content, the poem works upon readers
through form.12 Reading and writing are therefore juxtaposed in a
dynamic interplay, which could be understood as a crucial element
capable of overcoming the finiteness of the printed page, of books,
because – as many critics have shown –              discontinuous writing
acquires new meaning with each act of reading, depending on the
reader.!
       Hence, with McLuhan’s mosaic - that is his literate and literary
form - the medium is, at once, the message, the massage, the mass-age, the
mess-age, as it works on its readers while diverting their attention
through its pretty intense content. It is therefore important to re-read
McLuhan’s explorations in communication in relation to his
humanistic and literary knowledge because the latter is both a means
and an end to the former; it is even more important to re-read
McLuhan as an experimental writer who developed a new form of
‘digital’ writing ante litteram, by combining literary and media studies.
That change of approach would be particularly worthy for literary
scholars and literary studies at large, as it could help to consciously re-
energise the humanities, showing new potentialities at a time of
change. !
       Given the above, literary critics should face and overcome what
remains as an uncomfortable paradox: instead than investigating how
humanistic knowledge enabled McLuhan to anticipate and map some
evolving media phenomena through the elaboration of a new form of
performative writing (McLuhan’s mosaic) - and therefore reaffirm the
need to invest on humanistic studies at a time of ‘chaos’ - most literary
scholars still focus on what he said on technology and society that
might be of interest to their more specifically literally framed discourse.

     12   See: T.S. Eliot 1955


                                                                                 11
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



In other words: when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at the
finger. The moon that a different approach to McLuhan’s work would
makes his readers see, in fact, might become a new shining set of
opportunities for the humanities: to apply McLuhan’s heuristic to the
world of web 2.0 implies to position the humanities at the forefront of
new complex, digital explorations, also including new uses of creative
practices, the developing of new genres and of new forms of aesthetic
convergence. Certainly, McLuhan’s ideas on media remain of interest
when investigating new digital literary practices, or collateral literary
phenomena; but they are not as interesting as his lesson on form and
on writing technique. As he used to repeat quoting a renown adagio:
water is unknown to a fish until it discovers air. Literary scholars lose if
they continue to rely upon McLuhan merely as a media guru; it is
better to leave that aspect to all those in communication or media
studies (or sociology, or cultural studies) who are still quarrelling to
resolve if he was right or wrong. Within literary studies, it does not
really matter; the ‘how’ is more important than the ‘what’. Literary
critics would benefit more by approaching him as a Professor of
Literature who developed a new form of writing at once ‘interactive’,
‘acoustic’ and ‘transdisciplinary’ – that is potentially digital – through a
different understanding of old and new poetics. No matter what he
said, it is a fact that his writing technique was meant as a strategy to
help his readers adjust to the new ‘electric environment’; it was a way
to “render not narrate”, as per Ford Madox Ford’s – a writer that
McLuhan discovered thanks to Ezra Pound’s mediation – impressionist
poetics.!
!
!
         From the Ancient Tradition to Avant-Garde
                       Experiments!
      Consistently with his humanistic education, McLuhan started
and ended his academic career as a Professor of Literature: in the 1930s,
while at Cambridge University, he wrote his PhD dissertation on the


12
                                       Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



English Renaissance, offering a deep analysis of the liberal arts of the
trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics); in later years, he retrieved that
ancient learning as a key to understand the new media grammar of his
own actuality, what critics would define as the ‘mass society’ or even
‘the mass-media society’. As a witty grammarian, McLuhan developed
an interest in media which derived from the need to fully understand
the impact that evolving technological, cultural, and sociological
processes were having on humans. Freedom, independence, and free
will result from knowledge and understanding of what is really going
on around us, as he clearly assumes in the introduction to his first
published book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), where he writes: !
      !
     Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained
     individual minds have made it a full time business to get inside
     the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate,
     exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is
     the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered
     by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much
     entertainment alike. (McLuhan 2002: v-vi)!
!
As an engaged humanist, McLuhan decided to plunge into the new
environmental vortex and navigate change; he wrote his first book to
reverse the numbing process and awaken his readers by revealing the
uncanny effects of new forms of communication. He combined literary
texts with the pop imagery of his time, and especially with images
coming from the world of advertisement, to elaborate his original
storytelling as a cultural antidote:!
!
     A film expert, speaking of the value of the movie medium for
     selling North to South America, noted that: “the propaganda
     value of simultaneous audiovisual impression is very high, for it
     standardises thought by supplying the spectator with a ready-
     made visual image before he has time to conjure up an
     interpretation of his own. […]!




                                                                                   13
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



        This book reverses that process by providing typical visual
        imagery of our environment and dislocating it into meaning by
        inspection. Where visual symbols have been employed in an effort
        to paralyze the mind, they are here used as a means of energising
        it. (Ibid.)!
 !
The new investigative technique employed by McLuhan in The
Mechanical Bride originated in his passion and interest for language and
especially for literary language. Already at Cambridge, the study of
contemporary English and American literature allowed McLuhan to
understand and work out the probing potentialities of innovative
poetic strategies; it changed once and forever not only his approach to
literature and the arts, but also his understanding of his own
responsibilities as a man of letters now inhabiting an evolving
technological world. In this sense, Cambridge was a shock: !
            !
        After a conventional and devoted initiation to poetry as a
        romantic rebellion against mechanical industry and bureaucratic
        stupidity, Cambridge was a shock. Richards, Leavis, Eliot and
        Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception
        on the poetic process, and its role in adjusting the reader to the
        contemporary world.!
        My study of media began and remains rooted in the work of these
        men. (McLuhan 1969: xiii-xiv)!
        !
The poetic process – literature, the arts, creative thinking – is McLuhan’s
preferred strategy for ‘adjusting the reader to the contemporary world’.
It is therefore not by chance that in 1963, he called his new research
centre at the University of Toronto ‘Centre for Culture and Technology’,
unequivocally linking the two cultures, the humanistic and the
scientific, into a unique educational project; the ‘poetic process’ was his
corpus callosum. !
      That came about thirty years after Cambridge; it was the
fulfilment of McLuhan’s life-long project as a new type of scholar. In
fact, as a Professor of Literature and a Modernist scholar, he was



14
                                        Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



among the first to investigate the link existing between avant-garde
explorations and new media environments, by so doing irritating many
high-brow academics. But he could not but be passionate about the
Modernists as they were probing change through their works:13 these
artists dismissed the mechanical line for the electric circle, moving
from Gutenberg to Marconi, from linear to acoustic space. He realised
that their formal experiments mirrored the new mediascapes of their
time: !
             !
     It is strange that the popular press as an art form has often
     attracted the enthusiastic attention of poets and aesthetes while
     rousing the gloomiest apprehension in the academic mind. (Ibid.
     5)!
!
McLuhan acted in their wake. Since his years at Cambridge, McLuhan
was on a mission; by his own admission, he was ready to overthrow
his time ‘debased scholasticism […] with the maximum amount of
noise’. (McLuhan 1987: 187) It was his declaration of war to an old
educational dictum, to an old educational environment. From that
moment, for McLuhan the whole world and not the classroom was the
place where to go to learn what was going on. The jumping off
hypothesis was the following: there was much more information and
knowledge outside the classroom than inside, an idea that McLuhan
retrieved years later, when writing his most explicit ‘educational book’,
City As Classroom, in collaboration with his son Eric and Kathy
Hutchon. Consistently, McLuhan, too, went out and challenged the


     13 In his book of literary criticism, The Interior Landscape (McLuhan 1969)
McLuhan turns some literary modernist literary masterpieces into cognitive
tools to better understand ne environmental processes. Philip Marchand was
among the first to opint out that mcLuhan’s approach to modernism was, in
fact, an original one which anticipated later discussion. In particular, Mar-
chand recalls the role that modernist poetics played in helping McLuhan to
start understand the importance of sensorial perception in the rendering of
one’s own time. (Philip Marchand 1989).


                                                                                    15
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



world employing literary studies as his probing tool. Hence,
McLuhan’s real revolution as a scholar came not simply through his
observations on media, but mostly through the methodology of
investigation that he created through his innovative scholarly form of
writing and that, paradoxically, retrieved an ancient tradition to probe
the new world of media and high tech. The avant-garde movements
helped him to bridge those two realities.!
       After The Mechanical Bride, Counterblast 1954 was, in fact,
McLuhan’s war manifesto, blasting and blessing cultural and
environmental situations, offering a first rendering of ‘Media Log’,
making use of poetry and art as underpinning texts to critically
approach society. Counterblast 1954 is more than a witty mimicking of
Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist style; it shows us the making of McLuhan’s
new form, the mosaic, capable to arrest the media vortex and render it
visible. A form that became an accomplished fact a few years later, as
McLuhan introduces it as the objective correlative to his operative
approach at the very beginning of his 1962 volume, The Gutenberg
Galaxy. Through that mosaic, McLuhan consolidated his form to apply
“the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society.” As an
original form of writing, the mosaic mirrors McLuhan’s unique frame
of mind as a media explorer. The mosaic is a juxtaposing form merging
literature, the arts and media, retrieving Francis Bacon’s use of
‘aphorisms’ and anticipating the (inclusive and juxtaposing) semantic of
the electric age. !
       Acting at the forefront of new technological revolutions,
McLuhan’s mosaic develops from a precise metaphor borrowed from
the electric world: the probe, a flexible object through which people can
carry out explorations not only outside but also inside different bodies.
‘Probe’ is the term he used to define both his method (probing), and the
core element of his discourse (also defined as a ‘gloss’, that is as a
condensed aphorism, often read and trivialised as a slogan). Pages
written around probes incorporate readers into the text’s landscape:
readers of the mosaic are no longer external observers; they are inside the
evolving picture. This means that readers do not have to approach


16
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



McLuhan’s printed page as a thing, but rather as an event in which the
act of reading is integral to a participation in the process of discovery.
From the late 1960s, the hippie movement understood and celebrated
McLuhan’s form of communication better than other audiences, the
idea of happening being at the core of its life philosophy. Needless to
say, the appreciation coming from the countercultures of the young
rebels did not contribute to the appreciation of McLuhan’s scholarly
work. Yet, the probe is an element which leads to a more complex
interaction, as it is through the probe that readers are invited to enter
the text: it is the interface between them and the broken knowledge in
the text.!
!      McLuhan continued to elaborate on the probe as the core
element of his mosaic, as well as of his form of communication all
through his life. In some of his books, the probe is formally conceived
as a pun or a witty caption challenging and provoking his readers, as in
The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy or a less known volume such
as Take Today: The Executive as a Dropout. In other volumes, the
paratactic juxtaposition of the various probes is developed not only
through a witty use of language, but also through drawings, images,
headlines and photographs; as a matter of fact, McLuhan’s mosaic not
only combines different registers, but also borrows from different
communicative modes. The multimedia visual effect reminds us of either
a cubist or a Dadaist montage which turns the reader on to a
simultaneous awareness of various vanishing points; a situation which
we can find also in new forms of digital narratives. It was McLuhan’s
antidote to the ‘rear view mirror’ syndrome: we look at the present
through the past because an environment becomes fully visible only
when a new one is already blooming. McLuhan’s mosaic aims at
awakening our perception so to look forward not backward. !
!      The mosaic is therefore a dynamic form translating McLuhan’s
mobile point of view which shocked the academy but, as it is often the
case, pleased the artistic scene. McLuhan’s verbal discontinuity and
acoustic writing attracted the attention of new artists of his time; in
turn, as said, its mosaic owned a great deal to previous artistic


                                                                                 17
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



experiments. One could in fact say that the mosaic acted as a shuttle
shifting old avant-garde experiments into new artistic, as well as into
new scholarly, forms of exploration: from Wyndham Lewis to Quentin
Fiore, from Dada to Sorel Etrog, from an academic linear discourse to
an academic acoustic and digital one. !
!
!
 From Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism to Sorel Etrog’s New
                    Dadaism !
       Within the visual arts, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism attracted
McLuhan’s curiosity during his time at Cambridge; a curiosity that he
could further explore in his conversations and correspondence with the
Canadian born artist, after they met in 1943. Lewis’s linguistic and
visual vortexes, his spatial philosophy, which considers art as “that
experience of arrest in which we pause before a particular thing”,
(Lewis 1931: 392) offered McLuhan a conceptual form of expression,
anticipating his mosaic: it was, in fact, conceived as a juxtaposition of
pauses or intervals in turn blasting the numbing acceptance of
actuality. !
       As a matter of fact, in Time and Western Man, Lewis introduces
his original aesthetic in terms of a new spatial philosophy. A ‘philosophy
of the eye’ which ‘attaches itself to that concrete and radiant reality of
the optic sense’ (Ibid.) but which is not conceived as a return to
previous mechanical approaches to space; instead it is conceived in an
effort to retrieve a lost sensory balance induced by an excessive
emphasis over time. Lewis blasted Bergsonism as the main cause for
corporate hypnosis. By privileging intensity over extension, Bergson’s
time philosophy relied exclusively on the sensa world which Lewis
defines as the ‘world of the Unconscious or automatic in the sense’.
(Ibid. 416-7) Therefore, Lewis’s vortex is not conceived as a Flux, but as
a dynamic, progressive, moving image related to time but also
containing a stable point, the spatial element from which its energy
spirals originate. In Lewis’s aesthetic principle, it is the grotesque


18
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



rendering that triggers the revelation simply by overthrowing ground
and figure relations; similarly, in McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride it is
the distorted perspective that recreates reality and offers new insight
on and through ‘typical visual imagery of our environment’. !
      Vorticist art retrieves extension over intensity and recreates the
ground that reassesses all figures. Once he adventured out of the
classroom, McLuhan borrowed that concept to explore his own planet
that he presented as a man-made artefact. As said, he tested it in his
first books, The Mechanical Bride, as well as Counterblasts 1954; his
strategy there is to arrest the numbing flux by pausing before a series
of specific mass icons and mass experiences that represent either the
“Folklore of Industrial Man” or the “Media Log” of his time, and
which McLuhan vivisects and juxtaposes in his mosaic-like form of
writing. Contrary to Lewis, though, McLuhan did not wear the mask of
the enemy; instead, he considered humor and not bitter sarcasm as a
more appropriate strategy to pursue his operative project. He played
with his material and did not condemn, nor did he take side, because
he resisted putting moral biases on new media situations. In addition, a
playful attitude brought him to see more because, as he used to repeat:
“at play man uses all his faculties, at work he specializes”. (McLuhan
1994: 34) !
       Following some Modernist avant-garde aesthetic, McLuhan’s
mosaic is therefore developed as an open and witty form of writing
where space and time are collapsed, chronology is obsolete and the
whole world can be rendered at once. Inevitably, his mode of exploration
attracted the attention of a series of visual artists of his time. Quentin
Fiore (co-author or The Medium is the Massage, 1968), Harley Parker (co-
author of Counterblast, 1969; Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry
and Paining, 1969) are perhaps the most famous among those who
collaborated with him. However, of particular interest is his
collaboration with a less known visual artist named Sorel Etrog, a
European emigrated to Canada who in 1975 produced his film ‘Spiral’
where, in McLuhan’s words, “the ubiquitous and moving centre
intensifies awareness of the fragility and transience of existence. […]


                                                                                 19
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



Spiral presents many labyrinths and portrait of the human cognitive
processes. […] Everywhere in Spiral there is visually portrait the
labyrinth of the creative process.” (McLuhan 1987: 126-27) As an artist,
Etrog grew in the wake of “The Dada Circus” (his definition); his work
stands between historical avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the
artistic trends of the late 1960s. As Tzara recalled: “The beginning of
Dada were not the beginning of art but of disgust”. (Rubin 1968: 12)
Consistently, Etrog embraced Dada’s so called ‘anti-art principle’ as a
key to rebel against “the inconsistency of conventional beliefs”. Just
like Dada before, Etrog, too, ‘assailed the artistic and intellectual habits
of mind of the public and in the process altered consciousness”. (Ibid.)
This is something that also McLuhan did. His task as an ‘artist’ and an
intellectual was to alert his audience to the on-going environmental
change, to enlighten on the long term side effects that change could
have on the human sensorium: to enlighten on the passage from
mechanical to electric age (the latter being the dawn of the digital
world, as digital technology relies upon electricity as a source-
medium). Therefore, McLuhan found Etrog’s explorations interesting
for many reasons: they were rooted in the modernist avant-garde he
loved so much; they explored different perceptive modes; they
investigated form in a Conradian way, that is as a tool to make you see,
hear and feel in a renewed way. !
       The two men met in Toronto, where McLuhan accepted to screen
Etrog’s film Spiral at the Centre of Culture and Technology, in 1975. It
was McLuhan who suggested that Etrog selected “stills from the film
so that he could provide an annotation to those images – a free form
text of quotations from various writers – as well as a commentary”.
(Etrog 1987: 130) The book was published posthumously, but it stays as
a memento to a unique collaboration between two lucid visionaries. In
that book, McLuhan embraced Sorel definition of ‘spiral’ as a key to his
own work and as a strategy to dive into a multidimensional perceptive
breadth: “The Spiral is a single continuous line that creates within itself
the parallel that exists conventionally between two lines. Therefore,
you can have on this single line moments in time and space that signify


20
                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



the past, the present, and the future – and these moments occur in this
unique situation as parallel. Time and space are collapsed. Chronology
is obsolete.” (Ibid. 123) !
      Also McLuhan’s own artistic-like explorations as a man of letter
and a humanist made chronology obsolete and merged time and space,
as well as past, present and future. By so doing, they became a
threshold bridging old and new artistic poetics and images: from
vortexes to spirals, but always with the will to set the reader at the
centre of the revolving picture created by the mechanical agencies
dominating modern times and numbing individual’s free will. !
      !
!
          Applying McLuhan: Tetrading Storytelling !
        Given the above, to retrieve the literary roots of McLuhan’s
discourse becomes important not simply to celebrate his work tout
court, but to prove that literature matters and that humanistic thinking
and practices cannot but play a pivotal role wherein our multimedia
environments. At a time of accelerated environmental change, more
traditional forms of knowledge can still help us to navigate that very
change.!
     At his core, McLuhan was a humanist who disclosed new
cognitive spaces through the retrieval of ancient educational dicta now
applied to the magic world of electricity. 14 Therefore, to retrieve
McLuhan’s how legacy – that is how he expressed his ideas and how he
came to elaborate his original form of communication – also means to
retrieve the heuristic potentialities embedded in his Laws of Media: The
New Science, a book posthumously published and co-authored with his
son Eric. For some reasons, even though McLuhan often repeated that
his laws of media form a navigational tool to approach all media
environments, these ‘Laws’ have not been successful among media
theoreticians and sociologists alike. A fact that might not come as a


    14   See: Granata 2014


                                                                                21
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



surprise to literary critics: Laws of Media is more a book about
storytelling than media studies, or sociological investigations tout court.
The essence of that book is, in fact, consistent with McLuhan’s
humanistic origins, so much so, that McLuhan’s media studies end
where in fact they had begun: with literature, language and the ancient
humanistic tradition. It is an ancient new learning offered as a passe-
partout to access old and new media environments at once.!
     The tetrad - the operative model discussed in Laws of Media, which
Marshall and Eric McLuhan elaborated during their lasting
collaboration - combines literacy and orality, knowledge and art, turns
readers into explorers, and encourages a mode of exploration which is
participative and based on the human medium par excellence, that is,
language. McLuhan’s tetrad enhances both interactivity and, as said,
storytelling. Through it readers can get in touch with a sort of space-
time knowledge, enacted and experienced through verbal
communication and social interplay. McLuhan’s ‘New Science’ is
nothing but the retrieval of a much older science, of the original idea of
the logos: the tetrad considers words as boxes of knowledge and
amplifies their metaphorical value through a continuous juxtaposition
of old and new meanings, usages, and understanding. No other
previously conceived theory is implied; each observer – anyone – can
participate in the exploration on the basis of his or her knowledge and
experience. !
     The tetrad is presented as a verbal heuristic device built upon four
questions:!
!
        The tetrad was found by asking, ‘What general, verifiable, (that is,
        testable) statements can be made about media?’ We were
        surprised to find only four; here posed as questions:!
        What does it enhance or intensify?!
        What does it render obsolete or displace?!
        What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?!
        What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?
        (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 7)!
!
22
                                      Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Bacon’s and Vico’s names are both mentioned in Laws of Media,
together with the names of Joyce and other modernist writers: ‘Such
men are not isolate eccentrics but links in a continuous tradition that
extends from the present work back to the schools of manifold
interpretation of the preliterate poets, including Homer and
Hesiod.’ (ibd. 216) Consistently, as an exegetical tool, the tetrad leads to
the creation of new verbo-voco-visual mosaics which translate various
levels of understanding. As a matter of fact, on the written page the
tetrad visually leads to a cubist montage, as questions and answers are
rendered not through a line, but simultaneously, through a narrative
continuum which keeps the tetrad investigative model at its core: !
!
            (…)                                          (…)!
                  ENHANCES                    REVERSES TO!
                                 medium!
                  RETRIEVES                   OBSOLESCES!
            (…)                                                  (…)!
!
                                     !
Each reader/observer is asked to fill in the gaps and answer all
questions simultaneously; different readers can answer in different
ways, therefore introducing different ‘stories’ and triggering a
crossroads of tetradic storytelling. Inevitably, the tetrad confirms that
communication is not simply the passage of data from one point to the
next one; communication is also a creative process which affects all its
actors (senders, receivers, data, and the environment which contains
them all). Communication is what creates, through storytelling, a
network of correspondences which are all valid at the same time: !
!
     There is no ‘right way’ to ‘read’ a tetrad, as the parts are
     simultaneous. But when ‘read’ either left-right or top-bottom
     (Enhance is to Retrieve as Reverse is to Obsolesce, etc.), or the
     reverse, the proportions and metaphor – or word – structure
     should appear. (Ibid.129-30)!
!
                                                                                  23
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



The tetrad operates like a verbal equation which contributes to map the
complexity of a given ground (environment, context) through the
interplay of its various figures (actors, texts, media, etc.); it combines
physics and metaphysics because language can contain both reality
and all human artefacts and artifices. By retrieving the metaphorical
structure of words, McLuhan invites his readers to perceive each term
as an arché, an archetype embedding experience. In From Cliché to
Archetype, he wrote that the essence of an archetype is its awareness of
retrieved knowledge. As such, the archetype is extremely cohesive; it
attracts other archetypes. The archetype becomes therefore something
more than just a literary concept: it can be employed as a key to read
and explore the world. Consistently, the tetrad is modulated upon the
search for the archetypes, a cognitive journey which we can share
through language and its metaphorical uses.!
!       Inevitably, McLuhan’s laws of media have not only puzzled but
also irritated many scholars - and they still do -, especially among
sociologists. As Richards once wrote, ‘scientific truth or statement’ and
‘poetical truth or pseudo-statement’ require different attitudes in the
listener. To literary ears, the tetrad is a good tool not only for
approaching reality, but also for approaching fictional and imaginative
renderings of reality. In addition, it is a good pedagogical tool, as it not
only trains to be active players: it also encourages to take responsibility
and to participate in the process of discovery. In addition, it stimulates
all listening of other points of view. It connects situations, experiences,
traditions. It contributes to revealing a bigger ground, while probing
some of its figures.!
        Its potentialities are, in fact, already embedded in the
provocative title of Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s book: Laws of Media:
The New Science. It sounds like an ambiguous paradox if we recall that
McLuhan always claimed he did not have a clear-cut point of view on
anything. But a paradox ‘makes you see’ precisely because it
juxtaposes previous knowledge in an unexpected way. In the book, Eric
McLuhan’s introduction contributes to revealing the paradox and the
amusing challenges it postulates: he tells readers that, searching for a


24
                                      Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



good definition of what constitutes a scientific statement, his father
‘found an answer in Sir Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge – that it
was something stated in such a manner that it could be disproved.’15
As Ted Carpenter would confirm a few years later, ‘To Marshall,
scientific laws, too, worked equally well in reverse.’16 The paradox
frames the use of the term ‘laws’ in the title as being consistent with
McLuhan’s idea that he was an explorer and not an explainer. That
paradox playfully embeds his own mobile point of view on the very
idea of ‘law’ as a point of departure for a better understanding of his
tetrad; it also suggests how to truly apply McLuhan to other fields of
study. !
       There is a reason why Eric and Marshall McLuhan discovered
and tested four and not three or more questions. They were acting
inside the tradition of the translatio studii; they were employing words
to investigate the rerum natura. !
      !
     The tetrad is exegesis on four levels, showing not the mythic, but
     the logos structure of each artefact, and giving its four parts as
     metaphor or word. The laws of media in tetrad form belong
     properly to rhetoric and grammar, not philosophy. Our concern is
     etymology and exegesis. This is to place the modern study of
     technology and artefacts on a humanistic and linguistic basis for
     the first time. (Ibid. 128)!
!
McLuhan’s observations are in the wake of Giambattista Vico, the
author of La Scienza Nuova (The New Science), and of Sir Francis Bacon,
two grammarians whose explorations had overcome the
epistemological model postulated by coeval modern dialecticians. To
the logic of the triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), McLuhan too prefers



     15   Ibidem, viii
     16Edmund Carpenter, “Remembering Explorations”, in Canadian Notes
and Queries 46 (Spring 1992), 7


                                                                                  25
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



the rhetoric of the tetrad, which relates to the four levels of
interpretation of texts as per the!
patristic doctrine: the literal sense (the story); the allegorical
interpretation; the moral interpretation; the mystical or anagogical
interpretation (eschatology). !
!      Etymology and Exegesis stand at the basis of McLuhan’s tetrad
and of his mosaic; the ancient tradition is there galvanised through
Joyce’s ‘vivisective’ prose, Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist poetics or Ford
Madox Ford’s impressionist tenets, among others. McLuhan’s ‘New
Science’ encourages to playfully explore chaos through language and
offers as objective correlative a tool for storytelling which is, in its
essence, digital: it works through data convergence, redefines space/
time categories, questions the idea of authorships, linearity, etc. From
the mid-twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan worked on a linguistic
warning system alerting on changes as society moved from literacy to
post-literacy, from mechanical specialization to electric wholeness.
Consistently, all investigations that approach McLuhan’s world of
discovery cannot but start from a renewed consciousness of his interior
landscape: at core, McLuhan always remained a Professor of Literature.
Through his mosaic and his tetrads, he reminded us that storytelling is
a powerful strategy for exploring and rendering a world in progress,
that pen and words are mightier than the sword. !
     The above is not a worn-out cliché; it is, instead, the core of a
universal archetype because: !
        !
        Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that
        translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a
        technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate
        sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be
        evoked and retrieved at any instant. (McLuhan 2003: 85)!
        !
That’s why literary studies are needed at a time of technological
change They can trigger awareness of the accelerated dynamics of
complex an inter-connected environments, unveil the making of



26
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subliminal processes and, therefore, preserve our free will. As literary
subjects, McLuhan and his discourse confirm that: as a Professor of
Literature, McLuhan was a witness to the growing gap between the
world of his students were inhabiting, their language and culture, and
the scholarly world of his time. He spent his life to bridge that gap
through his own scholarly and literary knowledge. He navigated
change in spite of his lack of enthusiasm for it; he was convinced that
the only way to master change was to look at it and to look through it.
He also knew, as Ford Madox Ford and all his literary masters knew,
that ‘nothing is more trouble than to look things in the face”.17 Yet, he
did not hesitate and pursued his search all through his life. His verbal
probes are his way of wittily invading his readers’ and listeners’ inner
sensibilities, and troubling them. After all, Ford’s lesson was clear:
“The word author means someone who adds to your consciousness.”18
If McLuhan’s mosaic encourages us to be active readers, his tetradic
storytelling encourages us to turn that attitude into a creative act; it
encourages everyone to become the author of his/her own narratives,
the author of his/her own original and free discourse. All revolutions,
even the digital ones, start from that.!



                                         !




     17   Ford Madox Ford, The Critical Attitude, 8
     18Ford Madox Ford, “Introduction” to, Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to
Arms, in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, Edited by Frank MacShane, Lin-
coln, University of Nebraska Press, 1964, 134


                                                                                     27
Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads




                                      Works cited!
Barilli, Renato, ‘Re-Thinking Modernity’, McLuhan Studies 1 (Spring
        1991): 117–40.!
Id., ‘L’estetica tecnologica di Marshall McLuhan.’ Tra presenza e assenza,
        Milano, Bompiani, 1974.!
Id., ‘Estetica e società tecnologica: Marshall McLuhan’, Il Mulino 126
        (March-April 1973): 264–340.!
Carpenter, Edmund, ‘Remembering Explorations’, Canadian Notes &
        Queries 46 (Spring 1992): 3–14.!
Cavell, Richard, McLuhan in Space: Cultural Geography, Toronto, U of
        Toronto P, 2003.!
Cork, Richard, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age,
        Berkeley and Los Angles: U of California P, 1976.!
Czitrom, D.J., Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan,
        Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1982.!
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and
        Wyndham Lewis, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.!
de Kerckhove, Derrick- Iannucci, Amicare (eds.), McLuhan e la
        metamorfosi dell’uomo, Roma, Bulzoni Editore, 1984.!
Eliot, T.S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London, Faber &
        Faber, 1955.!
Etrog, Sorel-J. Cage, Joyce and the Dada Circus: A Collage / An Irish Circus
        on Finnegans Wake, Toronto/Dublin, The Black P/The Dolmen P,
        1982.!
Finkelstein, Sidney, Sense and Nonsense in McLuhan, New York,
        International Publishers, 1968.!
Ford, Ford Madox, The Critical Attitude, London, Duckworth, 1911.!
Innis, Harold A., The Bias of Communication, Toronto, U of Toronto P,
        1951.!
Gamaleri, Gianpiero, La Galassia McLuhan: Il mondo plasmato dai media,
        Roma, Armando, 1976.!
Genosko, Gary, McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion,
        London and New York, Routledge, 1999.!


28
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



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!

                            The author !
Elena Lamberti!
!
Elena Lamberti teaches North American Literature and Media Studies
at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her areas of research include:
Anglo-American Modernism, Literature and Technology, Cultural
Memory, War Literature. She has published several essays on English
and Anglo-American Modernism (Ford, Joyce, Pound, Hemingway), as
well as Anglo-Canadian culture of the late 20th Century (Coupland,
Cronenberg, McLuhan). She is the author of the award winning


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Elena Lamberti Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads



volume Marshall McLuhan: Tra letteratura, arti e media (Mondadori,
2000); author of “the transatlantic review”: Note sulla rivista che traghettò
gli Yankees in Europa (Asterisco, 2012). She has co-edited various
volumes including Memories and Representations of War in Europe (with
V. Fortunat, Rodopi, 2009). Her volume Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic.
Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies (U of T Press, 2012) was a
finalist for the 2013 Canada Prizes. She coordinates the EU/Canada
Cultural Project: “PERFORMIGRATIONS: People Are the Territory”.!
!
!       Email: elena.lamberti@unibo.it!



                                       The paper!
Date sent: 30/08/2014 !
Date accepted: 30/10/2014!
Date published: 30/11/2014!



                           How to quote this paper!
Elena, Lamberti, “Vortexes, Spirals, Tetrads: McLuhan’s Hyper-
Language as a (Digital) Tool for (Old and New) Storytelling”,
Tecnologia, immaginazione e forme del narrare, Ed. L. Esposito, E. Piga, A.
Ruggiero, Between, Vol. IV N. 8 (2014), http://www.Betweenjournal.it/




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