Marshall McLuhan: The First Second-Order Cybernetician

Between The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan wrote a short piece on education which was, as usual, a vehicle for him to demonstrate novel linguistic forms to perturb and unsettle the settled modes of thought of readers.

Give this introductory paragraph a quick go, and see if you can parse his meaning:

I wonder whether Jerome Bruner, during the writing of his fine book on The Process of Education, ever asked himself why there has come the sudden acceptance of the “structural” approach in all fields today. Am I really asking him whether he had any structural awareness of the new relevance of the structural approach? Had he also asked himself the causes and origins of the nonstructural approach to life and learning which had dominated the Western world in recent centuries? Since American institutions of law, politics and education had mostly originated in the heyday of the nonstructural idea of perception and learning and organization, it would follow, surely, that the transfer of these modes and skills into the forms of structural or “field” awareness and procedure would entail a considerable trauma in national life.

The first time I read this, last night, I found this question about (or to?) developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner rather hard to figure out. McLuhan was using all his familiar lingo from his books of this period, but I was struggling to figure out what he was getting at.

Reading ahead, the same language cropped up again:

Is it possible that Professor Bruner’s acceptance of the new structural approach is as unconsciously structured as his assumptions about the prestructural approach? Perhaps it will repay us to examine the prestructural approach to life and learning as a preliminary to appraising the current structural approach.

McLuhan often called things “structural” around this time of his career. Talk of structures recurs again and again in The Gutenberg Galaxy, as in the section heading: “The same clash between written and oral structures of knowledge occurs in medieval social life.”

But, as I’ll demonstrate now, the formal meaning of the term “structural” is a red herring for anyone trying to decipher his McLuhan use of it.

Structuralism, formally, was an approach to anthropology and psychology and linguistics during the late 50’s and early ’60s. It was followed, naturally, by post-structuralism and post-modernism. Structuralism was built on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, who demonstrated how the meaning of something could be found within the larger structure, or context within-which it was placed. 

And while that one-sentence summary also describes what McLuhan is doing here, that’s about where the similarities end. I swallowed this red-herring a few years ago and spent months reading structuralist texts trying to figure out the connection to McLuhan. Eventually I just gave up, frustrated, because there really isn’t any connection except at the most superficial level.

When McLuhan says something is “structural”, he is saying something much different than other structuralists, as an August 1st, 1974 letter to historian Marshall Fishwick demonstrates:

The reason that I am admired in Paris and in some of the Latin countries is that my approach is rightly regarded as “structuralist”. I have acquired that approach through Joyce and Eliot and the Symbolists, and used it in The Mechanical Bride [(1951)]. Nobody except myself in the media field has ventured to use the structuralist or “existential” approach. It is a highbrow approach, and the schools of communication are uniformly hardware and flatfoot in their training and activities.

I don’t think any other so-called “structuralist” would claim 19th century French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire or Stéphane Mallarmé as their most-direct intellectual lineage, who themselves derived much from Edgar Allen Poe!

Returning to this article on education, let’s gather some more clues as to how we might decipher just what McLuhan says about structure.

Of course, I accept Professor Bruner’s account of the structural approach as one involving depth awareness of a simultaneous field of relations. This in turn supposes dialogue, rather than description, in teaching and learning, and insight in place of a mere point of view. The structural approach substitutes team for specialism, and pursues causes and effects, in all situations, rather than aiming at a visual chart of data and organization. The structural approach is not an affair of “views” nor single planes nor analytic isolation of functions.

Here’s some more terms familiar to any frequent reader of McLuhan which provide some clues. A structuralist needs depth awareness, rather than conceptualizing things in visual charts or single planes. It’s not about linear cause and effect, but a simultaneous field of relations. It eschews visual space, which is to say “views” or “mere” points of view. One plays with structure, or probes structure, or gets involved with structure in dialogue rather than attempt to stand back and describe it. No part of it can be isolated for discrete analysis.

Pushing on one more paragraph:

It was about 1870 that Claude Bernard instituted the structural approach in experimental medicine, showing that the knowledge of separate organs could be advanced by their ablation or suppression. Then by observing the overall effect of this ablation on the changed relations among all the other organs, the properties of the suppressed organ became automatically manifest. This total or structural approach to the interplay of functions and properties is called “closure” or “completion” in current psychology. “Closure,” in fact, is new balance or recovery after the shock of ablation or suppression of some organ or function. It is a kind of study that has developed very rapidly in brain physiology at the present time.

Aha! Here we go. A new lead for the origins of the McLuhan’s supposed “structural” approach, coming from 19th-century medicine of all places! The best way to see what an organ does is to cut it out and see how the rest of the organism adapts! To study the relation of part of an animal to the whole animal, one should witness its “closure” about its new circumstances.

In this instance, a flash-bulb went off in my mind: McLuhan in this paragraph is describing equilibrium in a complex system. It was not only cybernetics, but what would later be called second-order cybernetics. According to Wikipedia,

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where “the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science”. Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as “the control of control and the communication of communication” and differentiated first-order cybernetics as “the cybernetics of observed systems” and second-order cybernetics as “the cybernetics of observing systems”.

Now, the fact that McLuhan had employed ideas from cybernetics is not new to me or anyone else studying him. He’d been studying it for a decade by this point:  here is a letter McLuhan wrote to Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, in 1951 explaining Mallarmé’s poetry as a form of cybernetic governance over French culture. He will use the term “equilibrium” repeatedly in Understanding Media, a year later, when discussing amputation of organs as above.

Two summers ago I spent a day in Toronto reading McLuhan’s margin-notes in all of his books on the subject of cybernetics, and can attest that he understood the subject matter very well.

But, this morning, reading him discuss closure as a “structural approach” ignited a great deal of dormant combustibles strewn about my mind.

I jumped back to the beginning of the article and started matching terms from second-order cybernetics for the strange words McLuhan was using. I rewrote it all in my head, and here is a reproduction of what I was actually reading him say:

I wonder whether Jerome Bruner, during the writing of his fine book on The Process of Education, ever asked himself why there has come the sudden acceptance of the “systems thinking” in all fields today. Am I really asking him whether he had any awareness of the systemic reasons for the new relevance of systems thinking? Had he also asked himself the causes and origins of the linear, non-recursive and simple-hierarchy approach to life and learning which had dominated the Western world in recent centuries? Since American institutions of law, politics and education had mostly originated in the heyday of perception and learning and organization understood as neatly-nested concepts of downward, linear cause and effect, it would follow, surely, that the transfer of these modes and skills into the forms of structural or complex-systems awareness and procedure would entail a considerable trauma in national life…

Of course, I accept Professor Bruner’s account of the cybernetic approach as one involving the participation of the observer within a simultaneous field of relations. This in turn supposes recursion, rather than simple direction from above, in teaching and learning. It supposes a reflexive self-awareness, situated within the larger systems in which one is embedded, in place of the mere point of view of someone from outside or above of the situation being observed. The complex-systems approach substitutes team for specialism, and models dense and recursive networks of causes and effects, in all  messy situations, rather than reducing a system to any single visual chart of data and organization. The complex-systems approach is not an affair of rigid frameworks nor single planes nor analytic isolation of parts in neglect of their wholes…

It was about 1870 that Claude Bernard instituted the cybernetic approach in experimental medicine, showing that the knowledge of separate organs could be advanced by their removal from the total system. Then by observing  how all the other organs compensate for its removal, the properties of that single organ became automatically manifest. This systems-based approach to the interplay of functions and properties is based on the principle of equilibration in cybernetics. Homeostasis, in fact, is new balance or recovery after the shock of removal or change of any one or more organs or functions. It is a kind of study that has developed very rapidly in brain physiology at the present time.

Now this is some pretty crude substitution on my part. McLuhan often said that perception is an act of making, not matching. I’m not making anything here, I’m matching in the rawest form.

Nevertheless, the ease with which McLuhan’s language of the early ’60s can be plainly-restated into the terms of second-order cybernetics—a field five which was only inaugurated years later—should prove to anyone how ahead-of-the-game crypto-cybernetician Marshall McLuhan really was.

One key insight to glean from this is the neat understanding of “amputation”, by media, within this cybernetic framing. Take this paragraph from the Gadget Lover chapter of Understanding Media:

Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. There is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with  the new sense ratios or sense “closure” evoked by the TV image.

The effects of media, the real message they deliver to us, is the total effect on our bodies and minds as they compensate for the loss of some faculty which is now externalized from us. What happens to a human who has some regular function removed? How does their gait, their routine, their facility for speech, their gestures, their awareness change once a part of them is gone? As though surgically removed? To use a new technology, or to move into a new environment, requires our adaptation. McLuhan sees that not as an addition, but as a subtraction from the former homeostatic human taken alone. Because we are not just bodies in some neutral environment; we exist with that environment, and who we are is extended into it. Without your home and all the stuff you get along with day by day, you are not yourself. You can’t do the things you do which make you you. You are a complex system of all the stuff around you, with your embodied self in the middle, giving and taking, gaining and losing.

As far as I know, no structuralist ever said that! But second-order cyberneticians ought to have noticed what McLuhan was trying to say here. It’s a shame they didn’t.

I’ve plenty more to say, but for now I’ll leave you with some open questions I’ll be musing on:

• Was McLuhan’s public application cybernetics within the borrowed language of structuralism some kind of ploy? A bait and switch?
• A synthesis?
• An attempt to ride structuralisms popularity, by fitting his own ideas into its larger intellectual vogue?
• Or did he think he could steer the discourse of structuralism, like Mallarmé steered French culture?

To me, it seems like he was angling to converge on some coming cross-disciplinary new science by anticipation; all the more shame that so-few systems thinkers, cognitive scientists, or many other inheritors of the cybernetic legacy give McLuhan any attention (with Bob Logan being a notable exception).