Finding McLuhan

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Tracy Whalen, Catherine G. Taylor

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780889773851
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1965, Tom Wolfe famously asked of Marshall McLuhan: "Suppose he is the oracle of the modern times--what if he is right?" Fifty years later, McLuhan's biographer Douglas Coupland, McLuhan's sons, and sixteen scholars explore the many ways in which McLuhan's predictions have come true.

CHAPTER 5

SELLING VIA THE
“FIVE SENSE SENSORIUM”:
BERTRAM BROOKER, MARSHALL MCLUHAN, AND
THE SENSORY MEDIA CULTURE OF TORONTO 1921–55

Adam Lauder

The sources of Marshall McLuhan’s aesthetic approach to the study of media have usually been traced to the techniques of New Criticism, which he encountered as a student at Cambridge University during the 1930s (see Katz and Katz 104–05; Marchand 34–35; Marchessault 27; Rhodes 374; Theall 4). The influence of American theorists such as Edward T. Hall has also been explored (see Rogers). Yet investigation of the specifically Canadian origins of McLuhan’s ideas has been restricted, for the most part, to his engagement with the communication studies of fellow University of Toronto professor Harold Adams Innis (Blondheim and Watson; Carey; Kroker; Stamps), with detours through the work of peers Eric Havelock and Northrop Frye (see Siegel). Only Richard Cavell has sketched a more comprehensive picture of the cultural and speculative landscape of early-twentieth-century Canada out of which McLuhan’s media explorations evolved.

In addition to the radical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) and the Canadian-born artist and author Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Cavell identifies the Toronto-based advertising executive and multimedia artist Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) as indigenous sources for McLuhan’s theories (15, 178). But as in the scholarship of Gregory Betts and Glenn Willmott, the relationship between Brooker and McLuhan remains little more than a footnote to Cavell’s text. This chapter fills this gap through a close reading of selected marketing texts in which Brooker developed his groundbreaking analysis of advertising as a multimodal media system. The texts analyzed here were published in the influential Toronto business journal Marketing, which Brooker owned and edited from 1924 to 1927, or appeared in the textbooks Layout Technique in Advertising (1929) and Copy Technique in Advertising . . . (1930): collections of essays originally published in Marketing and other trade papers, including the leading American journal Printers’ Ink. Analysis of these texts uncovers striking parallels with the early writings of McLuhan.

Brooker’s writings represent a significant precedent for the analyses of McLuhan and provide a more nuanced picture of what I term the “sensory media culture” of Toronto that developed in the decades prior to and during the interdisciplinary Communication and Culture Seminar organized by McLuhan with colleagues at the University of Toronto from 1953 to 1955 (see Darroch; Marchand 119, 125). The picture of a proto-McLuhanesque Toronto media culture that emerges from this study of Brooker’s innovative practice and theory amplifies Paul Tiessen’s description of “a pre-McLuhan body of media discourse.” But where Tiessen’s analysis of the interwar situation focuses on links between the Canadians Gerald Noxon (1910–90) and Graham Spry (1900–83) and their British contemporaries John Grierson (1898–1972) and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)—both of whom spent sojourns in Canada during the 1940s—with an emphasis on British media initiatives and policy, this chapter posits an indigenous tradition exemplified by the advertising writings and commercial designs of Brooker. The Toronto artist-advertiser’s multidisciplinary output evinces a sensory and time-based paradigm derived from his reading of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) as well as representations of transpersonal affect and the “ratio” of the senses as a form of visionary cognition found in the poetry of William Blake (1757–1827) (see Grace 8; Lauder; Luff; Zemans 30).

The Canadian media culture sketched here nonetheless intersects with the transatlantic discourse network traced by Tiessen at several junctures. Although Brooker directly cites Bergson several times in his published writings beginning in 1924 (“Are Statistics”; Copy Technique 217; “Make Advertising Believable”; “Making Orders Flow Downhill”), it is clear that his aesthetics of flux largely developed out of a reading of former Bergsonists from Britain such as Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) (Lauder 92). Wyndham Lewis also served as a touchstone for Brooker, beginning in at least 1927, albeit as a source of information on the very Bergsonian time-based paradigm that Lewis critiqued—much as he later did, according to Tiessen, for McLuhan and Spry (Brooker, “Blake”). It must be stressed that Lewis was a highly ambivalent reference for Brooker, who—like later McLuhan—read the British author’s “spatial” paradigm against the grain (Marchessault 214–16).

Cavell and Willmott have persuasively argued that Brooker’s application of the tools of literary criticism in his influential textbooks on advertising provided a model for McLuhan’s interdisciplinary approach in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) (Cavell 15; Willmott xii). I want to propose that Brooker’s conception of advertising as a multisensory media system addressed to an active and synesthetic consumer set the stage for McLuhan’s mature interest in shifting sensory “ratios” under the impact of electronic media and an associated return to participatory—oral and tactile—forms of communication (see McLuhan, “Age of Advertising”; “Notes on the Media”; “Radio and Television”). Earlier studies interpreted Brooker’s synesthetic concerns as either evidence of the artist’s alleged mysticism (see Betts, “Destroyer”; Davis; Reid) or as an expression of his musical interests (see Williams). However, Joyce Zemans has definitively demonstrated that the textual evidence does not support a mystical reading of Brooker’s production (21). And, while Brooker’s marketing texts repeatedly discuss the auditory and musical orientation of his synesthetic experiments, to date commentary on synesthesia in his practice has neglected the critical function of the multimodal strategies deployed by the artist’s commercial designs and writings on advertising as a sound-based alternative to hegemonic print media. This chapter investigates the sources of the sensory and time-based paradigm put forward by Brooker during the 1920s in the writings of Bergson and Blake—shared points of departure for McLuhan. This study thus answers Janine Marchessault’s call for a more contextualist reading of McLuhan that would situate his media studies within their immediate Toronto milieu: “McLuhan’s work needs to be understood as arising out of collective engagement, conversations, letters and dialogue. Just as The Mechanical Bride grew out of courses he taught at St Louis University, so too did The Gutenberg Galaxy grow out of an interdisciplinary confluence of students, scholars, scientists, artists and journalists in Toronto” (77). Despite this rallying cry, this chapter represents one of the first attempts to excavate the Canadian media culture that thrived beyond the boundaries of the University of Toronto campus in the period that nourished McLuhan’s discoveries.

Biography

Brooker was born in Croydon, England, in 1888 (Reid 9). He immigrated to Canada in 1905 (Lee 287), settling in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. After relocating to Neepawa in 1912, Brooker purchased a movie theatre—the Neepawa Opera House—that he operated with his brother prior to moving to Winnipeg in 1915 (Betts, “Introduction” xv–xvi). It is from this Neepawa period that some of his earliest surviving experiments in visual art and commercial design probably date (Zemans 18). They include studies with overtly biological themes that reveal an awareness of modernist art and possibly of Bergson’s influential notion of “creative evolution,” such as the drawing Ultrahomo, the Prophet (ca. 1912). Other works consist of all-over compositions based on corporate logotypes such as The Romance of Trademarks and Reznor (both ca. 1912–15), pointing to the influence of his contemporaneous career as a commercial illustrator (see Wagner 46; Zemans 23...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• MARSHALL MCLUHAN:TRANSFORMATIONS / ADAPTATIONS
• WORK / WORD / PLAY
• TEACHING MCLUHAN
• MARSHALL MCLUHAN IN AN AGE OF LABELS:THE DESCRIPTIVE VALUE OF ANTIMODERNISM
• EXCEEDING OUR GRASP: McLUHAN’S ALL-METAPHORICAL OUTLOOK
• IMAGE / FIGURE / GROUND
• SPACE ON THE EDGE: MARSHALL McLUHAN’S MARGINALIA AND ANNOTATIONS OF SIGFRIED GIEDION AND ERNST GOMBRICH
• SELLING VIA THE “FIVE SENSE SENSORIUM”:BERTRAM BROOKER, MARSHALL MCLUHAN, AND THE SENSORY MEDIA CULTURE OF TORONTO 1921–55
• BUFFALO TRACKS AND CANOE CODES: MARSHALL McLUHAN AND ABORIGINAL MEDIA’S DISSIDENT GENEALOGY IN CANADA
• SPACE / PLACE / TOOLS
• MCLUHAN AND THE CITY
• THE LIBRARY AS PLACE: NEW MEDIA AND NEW DESIGNS FOR CREATING COMMUNITY
• THE MESSAGE IN MEDICAL IMAGING MEDIA:AN ANALYSIS OF GE HEALTHCARE’S VSCAN™
• POLITICS / SEX / RELIGION
• McLUHAN’S POLITICS
• McLUHAN’S PLAYBOY—PLAYBOY’S McLUHAN
• RECOVERING RELIGION FOR THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF RHETORIC:LESSONS FROM MARSHALL MclUHAN
• LEGACY / MEMORY / IMAGINATION
• CONDUCTING THE INTERVIEWS:LEGACY / MEMORY / IMAGINATION
• MICHAEL McLUHAN:PROTECTING THE LEGACY
• ERIC McLUHAN: LIVING THE LEGACY
• DOUGLAS COUPLAND:WRITING McLUHAN
• CONTRIBUTORS