Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

First, a few words on definition in general. Let’s admit it: I see in a definition the critic’s equivalent of a lyric, or of an aria in opera. Also, we might note that, when used in an essay, as with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in his Poetics, a definition so sums things up that all the properties attributed to the thing defined can be though “derived” from the definition. In actual development, the definition may be the last thing a writer hits upon. Or it may be formulated somewhere along the line. But logically it is prior to the observations that it summarizes. Thus, insofar as all the attributes of the thing defined fir the definition, the definition should be viewed as “prior” in this purely nontemporal sense of priority. (3)

Definitions are also the critic’s equivalent of lyric (though a poet might not think so!) in that the writer usually “hits on them.” They are “breakthroughs,” and thus are somewhat hard to come by. We should always keep trying for them – but they don’t always seem to “click.” (3)

A definition should have just enough clauses, no more. However, each clause should be like a chapter head, under which appropriate observations might be assembled, as though derived from it. (3)

I am offering my Definition of Man in the hope of either persuading the reader that it fills the bill, or of prompting him to decide what should be added, or subtracted, or in some way modified. (3)

Man is the symbol-using animal.

Granted, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But our definition is being offered not for any possible paradoxical value. The aim is to get as essential a set of clauses as possible, and to mediate on each of them. (3)

The “symbol-using animal,” yes, obviously. But can we bring ourselves to realize just what we mean by “reality” has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our “reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? (5)

A road map that helps us easily find our way from one side of the continent to the other owes its great utility to its exceptional existential poverty. It tells us absurdly little about the trip that is to be experienced in a welter of detail. Indeed, its value for us is in the very fact that it is so essentially inane. (5)

Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about things in terms of what they are not – and in this sense we start out beset by a paradox. Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about. Indeed, they can even be so useful that they help us to invent ingenious ways of threatening to destroy ourselves. But even accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared with the substance of the things they name. (5-6)

When a bit of talking takes place, just what is doing the talking? Just where are the words coming from? Some of the motivation must derive from our animality, and some from our symbolicity. (6)

An “ideology” is like a good coming down to earth, where it will inhabit a place pervaded by its presence. An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (6)

So, in defining man as the symbol-using animal, we thereby set the conditions for asking: Which motives derive from man’s animality, which from his symbolicity, and which from the combination of the two? Physicality, is of course, subsumed by animality. (7)

A fundamental resource “natural” to symbolism is substitution. (7)

Substitution sets the condition for “transcendence,” since there is a technical sense in which the name for a thing can be said to “transcend” the thing named (by making for a kind of “ascent” from the realm of motion and matter to the realm of essence and spirit). (8)

The designation of man as the symbol-using animal parallels the traditional formulas, “rational animal” and Homo sapiens – but with one notable difference. These earlier versions are honorific, whereas the idea of symbolicity implies no such temptation to self-flattery, and to this extent is more admonitory. (9)

The second clause is: Inventor of the negative. I am not wholly happy with the word, “inventor.” For could we not properly say that man “invented” the negative unless we can also say that man is the “inventor” of language itself. So far as sheerly empirical development is concerned, it might be more accurate to say that language and the negative “invented” man. In any case, we are concerned with the fact that there are no negatives in nature, and that this ingenious addition to the universe is solely a product of human symbol systems. (9)

The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. “It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square,” etc., etc. (9)

One of the negative’s prime uses, as Bergson points out, involves its role with regard to unfilled expectations. (9)

What a notable irony we here confront! For some of man’s greatest acts of genius are in danger of transforming millions and millions of human agents into positive particles of sheer motion that go on somehow, but that are negative indeed as regards event he minimum expectations to which we might feel entitled. (12)

And what is this new astounding irony? Precisely the fact that all these new positive powers developed by the new technology have introduced a vast new era of negativity. For they are deadly indeed, unless we make haste to develop the controls (the negatives, the thou-shalt-not’s) that become necessary, if these great powers are to be kept from getting out of hand. (12-13)

Somewhat ironically, even as the possibilities of ultimate man-made suicide beset us, we also face an opposite kind of positive technologic threat to the resources of our moral negativity. I refer to the current “population explosion.” In earlier days, the problem was solved automatically by plagues, famines, high rate of infant mortality, and such. But now the positive resources of technology have undone much of those natural “adjustments,” so that new burdens are placed upon the Muscles of Negativity as the need arises for greater deliberate limitation of offspring. (13)

However, ironically again, we should not end our discussion of this clause until we have reminded ourselves: There is a kind of aesthetic negativity hereby any moralistic thou-shalt-not provides material for our entertainment, as we pay to follow imaginary accounts of “deviants” who, in all sorts of ingenious ways, are represented as violating these very Don’ts. (13)

Third clause: Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making. It concerns the fact that event he most primitive of tribes are led by inventions ot depart somewhat from the needs of food, shelter, sex as defined by the survival standards of sheer animality. The implements of hunting and husbandry, with corresponding implements of war, make for a set of habits that become a kind of “second nature,” as a special set of expectations, shaped by custom, comes to seem “natural.” (13)

This clause is designed to take care of those who would define as the “tool-using animal” (homo faber, homo economicus, and such). In adding this clause, we are immediately reminded of the close tie-up between tools and language. Imagine trying to run a modern factory, for instance, without the vast and often ungainly nomenclatures of the various technological specialties, without instructions, education, specifications, filing systems, accountancy (including mathematics and money or some similar counters). (13)

Animals do not use words about words (as with definitions of a dictionary) – and though an ape may even learn to put two sticks together as a way of extending his reach in case the sticks are so made that one can be fitted into the other, he would not take a knife and deliberately hollow out the end of one stick to make possible the insertion of the other stick. (14)

Language is a species of action, symbolic action – and its nature is such that it can be used as a tool. (15)

Fourth clause: Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy. But if that sounds too weighted, we could settle for, “Moved by a sense of order.” Under this clause, of course, would fall the incentives of organization and status. (15)

In my Rhetoric of Motives, I tried to trace the relation between social hierarchy and mystery, or guilt. And I carried such speculations further in my Rhetoric of Religion. Here we encounter secular analogues of “original sin.” For, despite any cult of good manners and humility, to the extent that a social structure becomes differentiated, with privileges to some that are denied to others, there are conditions for a kind of “built in” pride. King and peasants are “mysteries” to each other. Those “Up” are guilty of not being “Down,” those “Down” are certainly guilty of not being “Up.” (15)

Here man’s skill with symbols combines with his negativity and with the tendencies towards different modes of livelihood implicit in the inventions that make for division of labor, the result being definitions and differentiations and allocations of property protected by the negativities of the law. (15)

By now we should also have taken care of such definitions as man the “political animal” or “culture-bearing animal” And for a while, I felt that these clauses sufficiently covered the ground. However, for reasons yet to be explained, I decided that a final codicil was still needed, thus making it all:

Man is

the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal

inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)

separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making

goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)

and rotten with perfection. (16)

The principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to name something by its “proper” name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically “perfectionist.” What is more “perfectionist” in essence than the impulse, when one is in dire need of something, to so state this need that one in effect “defines” the situation? And even a poet who works out cunning ways of distoring language does so with perfectionist principles in mind, though his ideas of improvement involve recondite stylistic twists that may not disclose their true nature as judged by less perverse tests. (16)

To get the point, we need simply widen the concept of perfection to the point where we can also use the term ironically, as when we speak of a “perfect fool” or a “perfect villain.” And, of course, I had precisely such possibilities in mind when in my codicil I refer to man as being “rotten” with perfection. (18)

The ironic aspect of the principle is itself revealed most perfectly in our tendency to conceive of a “perfect” enemy. The Nazi version of the Jew, as developed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, is the most thoroughgoing instance of such ironic “perfection” in recent times, though strongly similar trends keep manifesting themselves in current controversies between “East” and :West.” (18)

The principle of perfection in this dangerous sense derives sustenance from other primary aspects of symbolicity. Thus, the principle of drama is implicit in the idea of action, and the principle of victimage is implicit in the nature of drama. The negative helps radically to define the elements to be victimized. And inasmuch as substitution is a prime resource of symbol systems, the conditions are set for catharsis by scapegoat (including the “natural” invitation to “project” upon the enemy any troublesome traits of our own that we would negate). (18)

And the undresolved problems of “pride” that are intrinsic to privilege also bring the motive of hierarchy to bear here; for many kinds of guilt, resentment, and fear tend to cluster about the hierarchal psychosis, with its corresponding search for a sacrificial principle such as can become embodied in a political scapegoat. (18-19)

The principle of perfection (the “entelechial” principle) figures in other notable ways as regards the genius of symbolism. A given terminology contains various implications, and there is a corresponding “perfectionist” tendency for men to attempt carrying out those implications. Thus, each of our scientific nomenclatures suggests its own special range of possible developments, with specialists vowed to carry out these terministic possibilities to the extent of their personal ability and technical resources. Each such specialty is like the situation of an author who has an idea for a novel, and who will never rest until he has completely embodied it in a book. Insofar as any of these terminologies happen also to contain the risks of destroying the world, that’s juts too bad; but the fact remains that, so far as the sheer principles of the investigations are concerned, they are no different from those of the writer who strives to complete his novel. (19)

Whereas there seems to be no principle of control intrinsic to the ideal of carrying out any such set of possibilities to “perfect” conclusion, and whereas all sorts of people are variously goaded to track down their particular sets of terministically directed insights, there is at least the fact that the schemes get in one another’s way, thus being to some extent checked by rivalry with one another. And such is especially the case where allocation of funds is concerned. (19-20)

Chapter Three: Terministic Screens (44)

We might begin by stressing the distinction between a “scientistic” and a “dramatistic” approach to the nature of language. A “scientistic” approach begins with questions of naming, or definition. Or the power of language to define and describe may be viewed as derivative; and its essential function may be treated as attitudinal or hortatory: attitudinal as with expressions of complaint, fear, gratitude, and such; hortatory as with commands or requests, or, in general, an instrument developed through its use in the social processes of cooperation and competition. I say “developed”; I do not say “originating.” Thus ultimate origins of language seem to me as mysterious as the origins of the universe itself. One must view it, I feel, simply as the “given.” But once an animal comes into being that does happen to have this particular aptitude, the various tribal idioms are unquestionably developed by their use as instruments in the tribe’s way of living (the practical role of symbolism in what the anthropologist, Malinowski, has called “context of situation”.) Such considerations are involved in what I mean by the “dramatistic,” stressing language as an aspect of “action,” that is, as “symbolic action.” (44)

The two approaches, the “scientistic” and the “dramatistic” (language as definition, and language as act) are by no means mutually exclusive. Since both approaches have their proper uses, the distinction is not being introduced invidiously. Definition itself is a symbolic act, just as my proposing of this very distinction is a symbolic act. But though at this moment of beginning, the overlap is considerable, later the two roads diverge considerably, and direct our attention to quite different kinds of observation. (44)

The quickest way to indicate the differences of direction might be by this formula: The “scientistic” approach builds the edifice of language with primary stress upon a proposition such as “It is, or it is not.” The “dramatistic” approach puts the primary stress upon such hortatory expressions as “thou shalt, or thou shalt not.” (44)

And at the other extreme the distinction becomes quite obvious, since the scientisitc approach culminates in the kinds of speculation we associate with symbolic logic, while the dramatistic culminates in the kinds of speculation that find their handiest material in stories, plays, poems, the rhetoric of oratory and advertising, mythologies, theologies, and philosophies after the classic model. (45)

The dramatistic view of language, in terms of “symbolic action,” is exercised about the necessarily suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures. (45)

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality. (45)

[discussing terministic screens] Here the kind of deflection I have in mind concerns simply the fact that any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others. In one sense, this likelihood is painfully obvious. A textbook on physics, for instance, turns the attention in a different direction from a textbook on law or psychology. But some implications of this terministic incentive are not so obvious. (45)

When I speak of “terministic screens,” I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were made with different color filters. Here something so “factual” as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even in form, depending upon which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded. (45)

Not only does the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than to another. Also, many of the “observations” are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made. In brief, much that we take as observations about “reality” may be the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms. (46)

The Bible starts with God’s act, by creative fiat. Contemporary sociological theories of “role-taking” fit into the same general scheme. Terms like “transactions,” “exchange,” “competition,” “cooperation,” are but more specific terms for “action.” And there are countless words for specific acts: give, take, run, think, etc. The contemporary concern with “game theories” is obviously a subdivision of the same term. Add the gloomy thought that such speculative playfulness now is usually concerned with “war games.” But in any case, the concept of such games must involve, in however fragmentary a fashion, the picture of persons acting under stress. And even when the “game” hypothetically reduces most of the players to terms of mere pawns, we can feel sure in advance that, if the “game” does not make proper allowance for the “human equate,” the conclusions when tested will prove wrong. (54)

But the thought should admonish us. Often it is true that people can be feasibly reduced to terms of sheer motion. About fifty years ago, I was suddenly startled into thinking when (encountering experience purely “symbolwise,” purely via the news) I read of the first German attacks against a Belgian fortress in World War I. The point was simply this: The approach to the fortress was known to be mined. And the mines had to be exploded. So wave after wave of human flesh was sent forward, conditioned cattle, to get blown up, until all the mines had been touched off. Then the next wave, or the next two or three waves thereafter, could take the fort. Granted, that comes pretty close to sheer motion, doubtless conceived in the best war-game tradition. (54)

Basically, the Dramatistic screen involves a methodic tracking down of all the implications in the idea of symbolic action, and of man as the kind of being that is particularly distinguished by an aptitude for such action. (54)

There is a gloomy route, of this sort: If action is to be our key term, then drama; for drama is the culminative form of action. But if drama, then conflict. And if conflict, then victimage. Dramatism is always on the edge of this vexing problem, that comes to a culmination in tragedy, the song of the scapegoat. (54-55)

There is also a happy route, along the lines of a Platonic dialectic. For the present, I would close on some lines that proclaim this happier route, in a style that, I must admit, states the problem in the accents of an ideal solution. (55)

This “idealization” ends on two weighty words. One, “synechdoche,” is used in the sense of “part for the whole.” The other, “tautology,” refers to the fact that, insofar as an entire structure is infused by a single generating principle, this principle will be tautologically or repetitively implicit in all the parts. The lines are meant to suggest that, insofar as man is the symbol-using animal, his world is necessarily inspirited with the quality of the Symbol, the Word, the Logos, through which he conceives it. (55)

Dialectician’s Hymn

Hail to Thee, Logos,

Thou Vast Almighty Title,

In Whose name we conjure-

Our acts the partial representatives

Of Thy whole act.

May we be Thy delegates

In parliament assembled

Parts of Thy wholeness.

And in our conflicts

Correcting one another.

By study of our errors

Gaining Revelation.

May we give true voice

To the statements of Thy creatures.

May our spoken words speak for them,

With accuracy,

That we know precisely their rejoinders

To our utterances,

And so may correct our utterances

In the light of those rejoinders.

Thus may we help Thine objects To say their say –

Not suppressing by dictatorial lie,

Not giving false reports

That misrepresent their saying.

(55)

If the soil is carried off by flood,

May we help the soil to say so.

If our ways of living

Violate the needs of nerve and muscle,

May we find speech for nerve and muscle,

To frame objections

Whereat we, listening,

Can remake our habits.

May we not bear false witness to ourselves

About our neighbors-,

Prophesying falsely

Why they did as they did.

May we compete with one another,

To speak for Thy Creation with more justice –

Cooperating in this competition

Until our naming

Gives voice correctly,

And how things are

And how we say things are

Are one.

Let the Word be dialectic with the Way –

Whichever the print

The other the imprint.

Above the single speeches

Of things,

Of animals,

Of people

Ericeting a speech-of-speeches-

And above this

A Speech-of-speech-of-speeches,

And so on,

Comprehensively,

Until all is headed

In Thy Vast Almighty Title,

Containing implicitly

What in Thy work is drawn out explicitly-

In its plentitude.

(56)

And may we have neither the mania of the One

Nor the delirium of the Many-

But both the Union and the Diversity-

The Title and the manifold details that arise

As that Title is restated

In the narrative of History.

Not forgetting that the Title represents the story’s Sequence,

And that the Sequence represents the Power entitled. (56-57)

For us

Thy name a Great Synechdoche

Thy works a Grand Tautology. (57)

>>

Comments

As regards philosophic formulas defining the nature of man in general, poems symbolically acting or “attitudinizing,” and scientific tracts: Whatever their differences they all are classifiable together in one critical respect: They all operate by the use of symbol systems; thus all in their various ways manifest the resources and limitations of symbol systems. (57)

But though any symbol system explicitly and implicitly turns our attention in one direction rather than in other directions, there is a striking difference within symbol systems. True, poets feud with philosophers, and many modern philosophers except the rare ones like Santayana feud with poets. But we are here concerned with a distinction that puts poetry quite close to philosophy. (57)

Mind, Body, and the Unconscious (63)

The issue: If man is the symbol-using animal, some motives must derive from his animality, some from his symbolicity, and some from mixtures of the two. The computer can’t serve as our model (or “terminisitic screen”). For it is not an animal, but an artifact. And it can’t truly be said to “act.” Its operations are but a complex set of sheerly physical motions. Thus, we must if possible distinguish between the symbolic action of a person and the behavior of such a mere thing. (63)

By “symbolic action” in the Dramatistic sense is meant any use of symbol systems in general; I am acting symbolically, in the Dramatistic sense, when I speak these sentences to you, and you are acting symbolically insofar as you “follow” them, and thus size up their “drift” or “meaning.” (63)

A Dramatistic terminology (built around a definition of man as the symbol-using, symbol-misusing, symbol-making, and symbol-made animal) must steer midway between the computer on one side (when taken as a model of the mind) and the neurotic on the other. (63)

In brief, man differs qualitatively from other animals since they are too poor in symbolicity, just as man differs qualitatively from his machines, since these man-made caricatures of man are too poor in animality. (64)

Otherwise put: If man is the symbol-using animal, and his animality is by definition categorically distinguishable from symbolicity (as our bodies differ in essence from the words we utter, or as nobody can live by the sheer words for “bread” alone), and as we build around the distinction between “motion” and “action” (which is motion-plus), then how about this realm of the “Unconscious”? How many categories might we need, when discussing the problem of the relation between our bodies, as sheer physical objects, and their emergence into articulacy (that is, symbolicity)? (67)

Medium as “Message”

Some thoughts on Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

There are many loci of motives. For instance, an act may be attributed to the nature of the agent; Marxists lay major stress upon the motivating force of the “objective situation” (the Dramatistic nomenclature would call it “scene”); McLuhan’s book on “media” necessarily puts the main emphasis upon the role of instruments (means, agencies) in shaping human dispositions, or attitudes and habits. And though men’s technical innovations are but a fraction of the “human condition” in general, the great clutter of such things that characterize modern life adds up to a formative background. (410)

Thus, we confront the pragmatistic trend I discussed in my Grammar of Motives, whereby the accumulation of agencies becomes viewed as the major aspect of man’s motivating scenes (or, as I put it in my Definition, man is “separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making”). (410)

Obviously, when man’s “extensions” are viewed thus narrowly, insofar as most of the instruments considered are physical (things in the realm of sheer motion), they will be viewed as extensions of human physiology. But this pattern is impaired somewhat, and for the better, in the chapters on language and games, which impinge upon the Dramatistic in the full tense of the term. (Basically, I am contending that since Agency is one member of the Dramatistic pentad, McLuhan’s bright book is at least inconsistent enough to keep straying beyond the realm of motion into the realm of action – and, of course, this step shows up most clearly when he turns from such mere technical mechanisms as the wheel to such media as newspapers printed on a rotary press). (411)

The word “dramatic” keeps turning up at many points in the text, and at lest once there is a shallow reference to the “cathartic.” But drama and its motives get head-on treatment in only about three pages of the chapter on games. This omission is particularly important because the stress upon the media in the narrower sense reduces to a minimum such considerations as we find in The Gutenberg Galaxy (with regard to the dialectical nature of the medieval manuscript). Fundamentally, the term “extensions” is used along these lines: Instruments prior to the “electric” age are said to have been extensions of particular bodily parts (such as eye, hand, or foot), but the inventions of the new “electric age” differ from those to the extent that electricity is viewed as an extension of the “central nervous system in general) will eliminate tendencies toward specialization characteristic of the earlier “mechanical” inventions that were extensions of particular bodily parts. (411)

We should introduce two admonitions here. First, we should not that man’s symbolic prowess in general is not derived from particular bodily parts, but in its own way reflects the central nervous system as source. Hence, throughout the whole era of “mechanical” specialization, there has been a realm of motives grounded (by his scheme) in physiological beginnings that naturally transcend such specialization, even though it may include specialized terminologies. (I would contend, of course, that McLuhan’s great skimping on drama as a “medium” necessarily leads to an overly simplified view of media in general and their role in our culture.) I would also call it to your attention that although many human inventions conceivably might not be “extensions” of the human body, the whole subject is sufficiently vague to allow for McLuhan’s mediumistic genealogy. I mean: Maybe the sight of birds flying is what induced man to try and invent flying machines. Nevertheless, by McLuhan’s derivation the airplane would be an “extension” of the human body. A club could be thought of as a kind of “extended” arm and fist; but when McLuhan puts major emphasis upon the notion that the wheel is an extension of the feet, I can’t help recalling a newspaper dispatch that observed: “Your body contains virtually every engineering device except the wheel.” And it gave this list: “The cylinder, ball joint, dome, tripod, hinge and reinforcing beam.” But no matter. What is really involve here, as viewed from the standpoint of sheerly terministic resources, is: If, instead of saying that certain media are analogous to parts of the body, you say that they are “extensions” of such parts, and if you allow for great latitude in the use of analogy, anything will fit in somewhere. In fact, since the body is itself an aspect of nature, and thus embodies the same kinds of goings-on that we can observe in other parts of nature, even if an invention did happen to arise from observation of nature rather than by “extension” of the inventor’s body, lax rules for the application of analogy here would allow you to find some analogical process in the body itself – whereupon, in keeping with the prime resources of the McLuhan nomenclature, you could call such an analogy with the body an “extension of” the body, that is to say a derivation from the body. The wheel could conceivably have been derived from looking at a disk like the sun or the moon; or it might conceivably have been derived by slicing a log, or whatever. (412)

To haggle with McLuhan on this point is a waste of time. All we should do is recognize what’s going on here. And what is going on? Simply this: Any analogy, however lax, between an invented medium and some part of the human body can be presented as an “extension” of that part, whether or not it actually is so. We here confront a mere matter of terministic policy. And since the body does, beyond question, affect our thinking by providing us with analogies, to that extent the policy can serve. We’d go along with him, just for the ride, were it not that he later uses this terministic device to the ends of faulty interpretation as regards our current quandaries. (412)

But to the key formula, “The medium is the message.” And we should keep to it, not allowing the book to dodge it, even though I heard McLuhan over the air engagingly suggest that maybe one had better change “message” to “massage.” If he wants to rewrite his book by revising all his chapters in keeping with this pun, and thus showing that all media, or “extensions of man,” are best understood as variations on the art of massage, I’ll gladly read it. Indeed, I can even glimpse some ribald fun here, based on lewd conceits about a man’s extension. But in the meantime, let’s cling to the formula as given in the book now before us. The first implication of the formula is obvious enough, and McLuhan recognizes it when he summarily dismisses any and all who would approach a message in terms of “content analysis.” If the medium is the message, obviously the important thing is not what somebody says in a given medium, but what medium he uses, regardless of what he says. Since this oversimplification is the very soul of his message, we must never let it get out of sight when considering his book. Though we all may disagree as to just what the effects of men’s accumulated media are, anyone of intelligence recognizes that media must have had great effects of some kind upon our thinking, so that they have become a kind of “second nature” with us. McLuhan here profits considerably by a recent increase in the ambiguity of the words “information” and “communication.” If you give someone a hard blow on the head, this “happening” can bow be classed as a kind of “information” that is physically “communicated” to the nervous centers of the victim’s brain. Hence, whatever the difference between an electric light and a comic book, or between a chemical and the “iconic” image on a television screen, all can be classed as media in McLuhan’s nomenclature. And he keeps incidentally talking about “forms” in ways that would cover the same range. And, of course, stress upon media as such fits in well with current hankerings after various kinds of “nonobjective” or “nonrepresentational” art (trends that are justifiable responses to the many new textures and materials supplied by modern technology). (413)

The medium is the message. Hence, down with content analysis. We should at least pause en route to note that the formula lends itself readily to caricature. Primus rushes up breathlessly to his friend Secundus, shouting,” “I have a drastic message for you. It’s about your worst enemy. He is armed and raging and is –” whereupon Secundus interrupts: “Please! Let’s get down to business. Who cares about the contents of a message? My lad, hasn’t McLuhan made it clear to you? The medium is the message. So quick, tell me the really crucial point. I don’t care what the news is. What I want to know is: Did it come by telegraph, telephone, wireless, radio, TV, semaphore signals, or word of mouth?” (414)

The moral of my tale is simple. Though McLuhan’s quixotic formula serves well as a slogan, any such oversimplification is likely to show up, sooner or later, as a flat contradiction. Hence, after outlawing “content analysis” as an approach to the effects of media, toward the end of his book he comes close to a terministic orgy in his enthusiasm for “information-gathering.” But if the “information” that is fed into an electric computer isn’t “content,” what is it? The issue always keeps turning up in the most amusing fashion when McLuhan is being questioned. For, inevitably, he is questioned about the contents of his position, whether these contents are being considered in his book, or in classroom discussion, or on radio or television. And it’s fun to watch how he somehow manages to dodge his questioners. For he uses question periods not as opportunities to make his position more precise, but rather as challenges that he must deflect and confuse to the best of his ability (which along these lines is considerable). (414)

Looked at most broadly, I think his terministic lineup can be seen to operate thus: Viewing technological development in terms of a continuum, one might note how invention has progressed pari passu with the increase of specialization. And one might conclude that the growth of specialization will continue, though modern trends (in automation and computers) might greatly modify its nature. Or one might use a terminology that introduces a principle of discontinuity. Thus instead of discussing the “overall situation” in terms of technology in general, one might propose a distinction between two kinds of eras of technology. McLuhan’s terms opt for this latter policy. He builds everything around a radical distinction between an earlier “mechanical” stage of technology and a presently emergent “electric age.” And whereas the “mechanical” stage led to extreme division of labor, he promises that in the “electric age” this tendency toward “specialism” will be reversed. The earlier “explosion” becomes an “implosion,” which is somehow something quite different, despite the great expansion of markets for the new electric devices (and I leave it for the reader to decide whether we might compromise on simple “plosion”). (414)

By talk of the new electric age’s penchant for “information-gathering” (of data to be fed into computers) he uses this overall titular term to suggest that all specialization dissolves in this single common task. True, information gathered from many diverse sources can be fed into a computer; and the results will transcend the limits of any specialized pursuit (except, of course, the highly specialized pursuits that have to do with programming and perfecting computers). But what of information itself? Would not chemical data require specialized knowledge of chemistry; biological data, specialists in biology; etc.? Though the computer may “process” such material in ways hitherto impossible, the treatment of the data does not at all eliminate the need for specialists to gather it. Now that any and every animate and inanimate process in the world can be classed as a kind of “information,” we must not let McLuhan use the term to suggest that merely because it can be applied to all “information-gathering,” all information-gatherers would be engaged in an identical enterprise. (414-415)

McLuhan rightly becomes zestful in his use of the term; for high among its “subliminal” effects (if we may adapt a favorite word of his for a different purpose) is its ability to deflect the reader’s attention away from the question: Insofar as technology, under any form, produces a great diversity of media, must there not be a corresponding diversity of occupations concerned with the production, distribution, and servicing of such varied devices (whether they are in the realm of communication specifically or are to be classed as economic commodities in general)? In sum: The highly generalized nature of his sheer term, “information-gathering,” conceals the fact that a whole army of specialists will be needed to supply the analytic material that the computers presumably will synthesize after their fashion (and within their limits). (415)

Though, as with “dramatic,” the book contains many passing references to language, here again it skimps, as regards the full range of the Dramatistic nomenclature. For instance, by linking perspective with “point of view” in the literal sense, McLuhan can persuasively advance the notion that certain new media present a kind of “mosaic” not characterized by “point of view.” Hence he can treat “point of view” as obsolescent, along with the kinds of individualism and specialism that marked its rise (in connection with the developments of printing). But tactics of that sort “subliminally” conceal from us the strictly terministic fact that any particular nomenclature (such as the one used in McLuhan’s book) functions as a “perspective,” or “point of view” and to idealize a problem in its particular terms is to consider the problem from that special angle of approach. McLuhan’s own book is, of course, a case in point – just as, similarly, while writing a monologue, he asks for the kinds of tolerance that would belong to a dialogue. (415)

Similarly, he will talk about “repeatability” as though it were simply a matter of mass production by machines. But a more methodically terministic approach to his thesis would remind him that there is also a prior kind of “repeatability” intrinsic to the very nature of terministic generalization. Give me the word “wheel,” for instance, and I thereby have a principle of repeatability much more extensive than the mass productions of any printing press or assembly line. For the word applies to every wheel-like thing that ever has been, will be, or could be – and all the more so, if you will add to the rules for McLuhan’s nomenclature a “variance” whereby even reciprocating motion can be classed as “rotary.” Yet surely not a machine, but the broad relevance of such generalized terms in his nomenclature is what induces McLuhan so often to repeat the word “repeatable” when he is promising that in his “electric age” this touchstone of the “mechanical” will cease to prevail. (415-416)

Since practically any artifact can be classed as a medium, and the current widened use of the term “communication” allows McLuhan to treat any such invention as a medium of communication, we might here propose a working distinction, for present purposes. We might speak of directly communicative media (such as telephones or television) and indirectly communicative media (in the broad sense that cars, refrigerators, foods, clothing, and guns could be called communicative). “Forms” would extend things further (as with the difference between television as a medium of communication and soap opera as a medium of communication). (416)

McLuhan is prominent among current idea-men whose thought-style might be summed up as: “Down with the political, up with the apocalyptic.” And there’s no denying: It’s much more pleasant to speculate about the possible subliminal magic of “participation in depth” when looking at the iconic image (any image) on a television screen than to suffer the burden of an explicit analysis concerned with the miseducation clearly implicit in the contents of particular programs that line people up by exploiting one set of “topics” rather than another in the concocting of their motivational recipes. (416-417)

Incidentally, there’s a news program that I regularly follow with some confidence; yet II can’t help worrying about the fact that it is sponsored by the damnedest batch of poisons and quack drugs, so I keep fearing that the shows is somehow being built up for a sellout, come the strategic moment. In any case, whether you like it or not, we are here concerned with the contents of the programs and the ads, and not just the nature of the medium, in the sense of the “mosaic” screen on which they are shown, whatever its “subliminal” effects may be. (417)

One could go on and on. But two more points should be enough for now. First, there’s the problem of the “visual,” and its corresponding effects in promoting a “lineal” point of view. I question whether most readers have got that matter clear. Or maybe I’m the one that has it wrong. I see it thus: One could hardly say with conviction that “lineal” thinking is essentially due to the lineal nature of phonetic writing. Other kinds of writing follow in a sequence, too, since sentences (like melody) are sequential, in contrast with a picture or piece of sculpture (which is “all there at once”). Codes of literacy and musical notation allow us to approach the overall form of a work step-by-step, but the relation among the parts “just is,” nontemporally. On the other hand, works such as painting and sculpture first confront us in their totality, then we impart a kind of temporal order to them by letting the eye rove over them analytically, thus endowing them with many tiny “histories” as we go from one part to another, feeling the developments and the relationships among the parts. But although no work can come to life as an artistic medium unless we, by our modes of interpretation, sympathetically and “empathetically” (or “imaginatively”) endow its positions and motions with the quality of action, there is a notable difference between paintings or sculpture on one side and notations for words or music on the other. The colors and forms of the “static” media (painting and sculpture) appeal to us directly, sensuously, as they are, right there in front of us. But codes of literacy or musical notation do not, thus directly appeal. Rather, they are but instructions for performing, whereas painting and sculpture are themselves performances, as a drama is, not when read, but when actually witnessed in a theater. In this sense, such “instructions” need not have the “tacticility” of painting and sculpture. True, insofar as type is actually designed for its visual appeal, to this extent it is “tactile.” And, ironically enough, it is the sheer data fed into computers (without either visual beauty or appeal as language and melody) that lack “tactility,” though McLuhan tries to make up the difference by hailing electricity as a “biological form,” and talking about the electronic “scanning finger” of a digital computer in terms of “forms” that “caress the contours of every kind of being.” (417-418)

(The basic trick about McLuhan’s “extensions” of man resides in the fact that his rhetoric induces you to forget their wholly nonhuman nature, albeit that humans can make their human inventions be “as though” human. To grasp this issue clearly, consider the notable difference between an “extension” of man in the sense of the wheel, and an “extension” in the sense of human offspring, or less immediately, such complexly developed artistic forms as drama, dance, song.) (418)

And the final point: There is a sense in which I have been most unfair to our author and his in many ways admirable volumes. For though I would contend that his skimping as regards the Dramatistic perspective in its fullness greatly misrepresents the scope and center of our necessary major worries, and though I would particularly protest if such a truncated scheme is allowed to look as though it really could cover the ground, I must concede that his books (particularly as modified by the many borrowings in The Gutenberg Galaxy which he seems to forget in Understanding Media) are often incidentally incisive and delightful. Though I seriously question whether his basic slogan would ever allow you to put that puzzle together, McLuhan’s admirers have already demonstrated that one can make pretty playthings of the bits. (418)

A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language

If sensation is the realm of motion, idea is the realm of action. And action is possible only insofar as the rational agent transcends the realm of sheer motion – sensory image. He does so, however, by forming adequate ideas of the limitations defining this sensory realm. And insofar as his understanding of the world’s necessities approaches perfection, he is correspondingly free; he can act, rather than merely being moved, or “affected.” But just as one cannot keep the sensory and the rational kinds of classification distinct, so the essential nolessness of image becomes confused with the essential no of the rational-tribal idea. Hence, though the injunction, “Thou shalt not kill” is in essence an idea, in its role as imagery it can but strike the resonant gong: “Kill!” (430-431)

Reason is the ability to use the negative qua negative, the moralistic equivalent being “the ability to distinguish between right and wrong”; and it either is or is not – there is a difference in kind between the presence or absence of reason. But imagination, having no negative, induces or deters by changes of intensity; its presence or absince (spelling incorrect in original) are thus a matter of degree. (431)

Fancy in poetry is to understanding in philosophy as imagination in poetry is to reason in philosophy as imagination in poetry is to reason in philosophy or theology. (431)

Since arts such as painting, music, and the dance are so obviously mediums for reaching us through the senses, the reader might conclude that the Idea of No is not important here, or does not figure as a motive. On the contrary! Insofar as an artist rigorously develops a method, his selectivity is but the obverse of his exclusions, exclusions that implitly 9and often explicitly) follow his code of thou-shalt-not’s. Or, think of the many times in the history of art when a new development was made possible by the deliberate rejection of some canon previously accepted. (448)

True, in a painting, the forms and colors are positively what they are. In that sense, a painting is “nothing but” an imagery, and so by our test can have no negatives. The genius of the negative is present, however, in the fact that the work’s principles of organization and selectivity follow what Kant would have called the “aesthetic idea” – and the force of the negative figures in this aspect of painting s a symbol system, a “terminology.” (448)

First, the sublime itself has a strongly moralistic element. Second, it is in the realm of the fearsome. Third, even where it is not directly explainable as a quasi-secularized variant of its theological forebears, implicit in its norms of style there are the promises rightly or wrongly associated with such style in the given social order (promises that are threats in disguise inasmuch as they can be withheld). (453)

Let us sum up by saying that, however “positive” a style, or moral injunction, may contrive to be in its wording, behind it always lurks the basic Negative, the Great, Tragic, Feudlike lex Talionis, itself a universal principle of Justice and one without which the art of an Aeschylus would be meaningless. And we hope to have so treated the distinction between “the senses” and “the law” that the reader both sees how it looks when reduced to the distinction between nonlinguistic and linguistic motives, and sees that such reduction by no means imposes impoverishment or distortion upon the analysis of human motives. (453)

The essential distinction between the verbal and the nonverbal is in the fact that language adds the peculiar possibility of the Negative. (454)

In sum: Once you have a word-using animal, you can properly look for the linguistic motive as a possible strand of motivation in all its behavior, even in such actions as could be accounted for without this motive in the corresponding motions of a nonlinguistic species. (456)

Thus, by a “scene-act ratio” we designate a substantial relationship between scene and act whereby some ingredient of the scene is analogically present in the act; hence, with regard to this ingredient, the act can be called a derivative or function of the scene. (464)