Page 181 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

170 Chapter Seven

connections, that knowledge of proportions, and hence analogies stem. It is
worth quoting McLuhan on this important insight:

Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the
analogy of proper proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight and per-
haps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is
constituted of a perpetual play of ratios: A is to B what C is to D, which is to say
that the ratio between A and B is proportioned to the ratio between C and D,
there being a ratio between these ratios as well. This lively awareness of the
most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatever be-
tween the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take
the place of analogical perception. 27

In important ways, however, McLuhan departed from Innis. From his
perspective as literary critic, McLuhan viewed media technologies as man-
ifesting in the material world the same operations as those in the linguistic
world described by the rhetorical term, chiasmus. McLuhan proposed that
at high intensity, there is a reversal in a medium’s effects. Innis, to the con-
trary, never argued that a space-binding medium pushed to the limit be-
comes time-binding!
McLuhan claimed that other rhetorical operations, too (metaphor, cliché,
and archetype) have wide applicability in the nonverbal world. His justifi-
28
cation for adopting this literary approach to media analysis was that language
is a technology (i.e., an applied artifact), and hence it can properly be com-
pared to other artifacts or technologies. “Anything that can be observed about
the behavior of linguistic cliché or archetype,” he wrote, “can be found plen-
29
tifully in the nonlinguistic world.” McLuhan was fond of invoking the fol-
lowing lines by the poet William Butler Yeats, to emphasize that poets and in-
ventors (wordsmiths and technologists) are alike in recycling refuse to forge
new creations:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. 30

Here, McLuhan’s position would seem to be not all that different from the
poststructuralist notion of articulation. Hence, some might regard McLuhan
as potentially a bridge between Innis and poststructuralism. To make that