ramp speed

THE MEDIA MAELSTROM

Edgar Allan Poe's short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” provided McLuhan with an important metaphor for describing contemporary culture and technology. How is culture like an inescapable vortex? In what sense are we swept away by the effects of technological innovations? How does the maelstrom metaphor relate to recent theories concerning chaos and complexity?



ESCAPING THE MAELSTROM

We often ignore our environments, allowing them to fade into the background and become invisible. How did McLuhan learn to pay attention to the invisible environment of communication, culture and technology? How successful was he in teaching others to be aware of their media environment? The sailor in Poe’s story escapes from the maelstrom by using his powers of observation, recognizing an orderly pattern emerging from the turmoil of the whirlpool. Can we do the same? McLuhan developed his new science of media ecology to escape the maelstrom. His four Laws of Media are tools to recognize the pattern within the vortex. He argued that this tetrad could be used to analyze any technology or artifact, and could also be applied to ideas, institutions, social movements or any other product of the human mind. McLuhan's Laws of Media are the four questions that must be asked to understand the effects that will inevitably result from a new medium. They are:

1. What human trait or experience does the medium enhance? What is the intended function of the medium or technology? What does it improve or make more efficient? Does it extend part of the human body? One or more of the senses? Does it extend an aspect of the human mind, such as memory? Does it amplify some human capability or augment some form of human action? Does it extend the individual, the group or society?

2. What pre-existing technology, method, system, or medium does this medium obsolesce? What older technology does the new medium replace? What does it render unnecessary? What procedures does it short-circuit or bypass? What happens to the old medium that is rendered obsolescent? Does it disappear entirely, become an art object, or find a new niche?

3. What technology, method, system or medium that was previously obsolesced or abandoned does this medium retrieve? What archaic elements are made relevant again? What previously marginalized or repressed ideas, practices or artifacts are brought to the fore? What aspects of the prehistoric, ancient, medieval or early modern world are revived?

4. When fully utilized or pushed to its extreme, what will the medium reverse into? What effects will the medium create that are opposite to what was originally intended? What are the contradictions inherent in the technology? What is the ecological impact?

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EDGAR POE'S TRADITION

Poe is much in need of an evaluation which will relate him to the
American culture and politics of his day, for Poe was the only
American man of letters in the nineteenth century who displayed,
unequivocally, a mode of awareness at once American and cosmopolitan.
That is to say, Poe felt his time, but none the less wrote with a
sense of the past in his bones. He objectified the pathetic cleavages
and pressures of the age in a wholly unprovincial way. When he died in
1849 there was no writer in England or America who was not, in
comparison with him, exploiting a merely local awareness and a merely
local response to the psychological tensions of the time. However, the
organization of his sensibility, with its dislocations and
inadequacies, is never derivative but authentic and first-hand. Thus
he and Byron are in the same tradition, but he is not Byronic.

The problem here is not to evalue Poe's work in relation to the often
vital, but always provincial, New England products. But it is evident
that Poe's writing had a fitness, an immediacy of impact, and a
relevance to European consciousness wholly unlike that of Emerson,
Hawthorne, or even Henry James. Indeed, everything about Poe
(including his strikingly symbolic private life) was strictly relevant
to the problems of his age. And this faculty for relevance confers on
him that air of infallible esthetic efficiency which makes integral
the man and the writer. He has no loose ends. He left no unfinished
experiments. He uttered himself.

The erudition of Lowell and Longfellow was not his, but neither did he
partake of their vagueness and uneasy professorial eclecticism. They
read and ruminated while he was seizing with the gusto of pre-ordained
certitude on facts, symbols, images, and ideas which became the
vehicles of his sensibility. However, Poe's equipment was far from
flimsy. He read widely, and with the intensity of the craftsman.
Moreover, he had the craftsman's contempt for verbiage masquerading as
expression. Poe's literary criticism was the best of his time in
America, simply because his own artistic discipline had given him an
infallible eye and ear for whatever had been born of a sincere and
vital sensibility in immediate contact with its own age. Mr. Hervey
Allen says that time has confirmed all of Poe's judgements save his
condemnation of Carlyle. Nothing, however, could be more to Poe's
credit (and in this one can see the nature of the superiority he
enjoyed over Emerson) than his easy penetration into the provincial
confusions and over-emphasis of the great Calvinistic mystagogue.

Beside Poe, Emerson is in many ways a mere local sage. For Poe's tones
and accents are those of a man conscious of possessing a European and
cosmopolitan heritage. Poe cannot be understood apart from the great
Byronic tradition (which extends at least back to Cervantes) of the
aristocratic rebel fighting for human values in a sub-human chaos of
indiscriminate appetite. It is no mere accident that Poe, like Byron,
won a European recognition denied to such a great but autochthonous
sensibility as Wordsworth's.

I propose here to suggest how Poe's achievements are to be understood
in the light of a great tradition of life and letters which he derived
from the South of his day. This tradition has been a continuous force
in European law, letters, and politics from the time of the Greek
sophists. It is most conveniently referred to as the Ciceronian ideal,
since Cicero gave it to St. Augustine and St. Jerome, who in turn saw
to it that it has never ceased to influence Western society. The
Ciceronian ideal as expressed in the DE ORATORE or in St. Augustine's
DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA is the ideal of rational man reaching his
noblest attainment in the expression of an eloquent wisdom. Necessary
steps in the attainment of this ideal are careful drill in the poets
followed by a program of encyclopedic scope directed to the forensic
end of political power. Thus, the DOCTUS ORATOR is, explicitly,
Cicero's sophistic version of Plato's philosopher-king. This ideal
became the basis for hundreds of manuals written by eloquent scholars
for the education of monarchs from the fifth century, through John of
Salisbury and Vincent of Beauvais, to the famous treatises of Erasmus
and Castiglione. (THE PRINCE of Machiavelli stems from a totally
distinct tradition of scholastic speculation, though it still tends to
be confused with the Ciceronian tradition.)

The encyclopedic ideal of "Renaissance man" was consciously and
explicitly that of Cicero's orator, whether exemplified in a
fourteenth-century Italian humanist, or a sixteenth-century Spenser,
Sidney, or in Shakespeare's HAMLET or HENRY V. This meant that the new
gentry were educated along the aristocratic-forensic lines of Cicero's
DE ORATORE, as anybody can determine from considering the ingredients
of gentlemanly education in any European country of the sixteenth
century. So far as America is concerned, this was a fact of decisive
importance, since Virginia, and the South in general, was to receive
the permanent stamp of this Ciceronian ideal. This is the highly
practical and gentlemanly ideal in which knowledge and action are
subordinated to a political good. It is thus no accident that the
creative political figures of American life have been moulded in the
South. Whether one considers Jefferson or Lincoln, one is confronted
with a mind aristocratic, legalistic, encyclopedic, forensic,
habitually expressing itself in the mode of an eloquent wisdom. This
is a fact of the utmost relevance to the understanding of Poe, as we
shall see.

To focus the facts about Poe, it is necessary to understand a
tradition wholly alien and repugnant to him, namely that of New
England. The reader of Mr. Perry Miller's THE NEW ENGLAND MIND will
know what is meant when it is said that New England is in the
scholastic tradition, and profoundly opposed to "humanism." Briefly,
the theocratic founders of Harvard and rulers of New England were
Calvinist divines, fully trained in the speculative theology which had
arisen for the first time in the twelfth century - the product of that
dialectical method in theology which is rightly associated with Peter
Abelard. Unlike Luther and many English Protestants, Calvin and his
followers were schoolmen, opposed to the old theology of the Fathers
which Erasmus and the humanist-Ciceronians had brought back to general
attention after the continuous predominance of scholastic theology
since the twelfth century. To the humanists nobody could be a true
interpreter of Scripture, a true exponent of the PHILOSOPHI CHRISTI,
who had not had a full classical training. So Catholic and Protestant
schoolmen alike, were, for these men, the “barbarians,” the "Goths of
the Sorbonne," corrupting with “modernistic" trash (the schoolmen were
called MODERNI from the first) the eloquent piety and wisdom of the
Fathers. (The Fathers were called the "ancients" or ANTIQUI THEOLOGI.)
[1]

It need hardly be said that this alignment of traditions throws a
startlingly vivid light on the relations between learning and religion
in the sixteenth century, which subsequent stages of the original
quarrel have obscured. In fact, it means nothing less than this: that
from Petrarch to Ramus the violent quarrels about the relative claim
of different sorts of learning originated in the conflicting claims of
grammar and dialectics to be the exclusive method in theology. The
sectarian fogs which, from the beginning, involved the basic
intellectual struggles of the Renaissance, have likewise prevented
American historians from seeing clearly the most important
intellectual fact about America - the fact that, geographically
separated for the first time in their age-old struggle, there exist,
profoundly entrenched in this country, the two radically opposed
intellectual traditions which have been warring since Socrates turned
dialectics against the rhetoric of his Sophist teachers. Socrates
turned from rhetoric to dialectics, from forensics to speculation and
definition, raising the issue which pitted Plato and Aristotle against
their formidable rival Isocrates, and which pitted the forensic Cicero
against Carneades and the Stoics. The same quarrel as to whether
grammar and rhetoric, on the one hand, or dialectics, on the other,
should have precedence in organizing the hierarchy of knowledge, is
the key to an understanding of the Renaissance from the twelfth to the
seventeenth centuries. Just when the quarrel, both within the Catholic
Church and outside it, was reaching its term, representatives of both
parties in the quarrel migrated to America. The schoolmen went to New
England, the quasi-humanist gentry to Virginia. (At this time,
moreover, the Anglican Church had, with the accession of the patristic
and Ciceronian James I, suddenly thrown its weight against the
Calvinist party, in favor of the eloquent divines of humanist bent.
That is why Andrewes and Donne were able to get royal approval for
their patristic rhetoric and grammatical theology. Anyhow, this fact
contributed indirectly to directing Southern education along classical-
Ciceronian lines.)

Harvard, then, originated as a little Sorbonne, where in 1650 the
scholastic methods of Ockham and Calvin, as streamlined by Petrus
Ramus, were the staple of education. Logic and dialectics were the
basis of theological method, as of everything else at Harvard. Here
rhetoric was taught, not for eloquence, but in order to teach the
young seminarian how to rub off the cosmetic tropes of Scripture
before going to work on the doctrine with dialectical dichotomies.
Ramus taught a utilitarian logic for which he made the same claims as
pragmatists do for "scientific method." In fact, Peirce, James, and
Dewey could never have been heard of had they not been nurtured in the
Speculative tradition of the scholastic theologians Calvin and Ramus.
[2]

This helps greatly to explain a most puzzling fact - namely, that New
Englanders have felt a perennial congeniality for one strand of French
culture. (This is also true of Scotsmen, and for the same reasons.)
French universities, that is to say, saw to it that part of France
remained scholastic. And Descartes is unthinkable without the
Schoolmen (especially the Ockhamists), as Pierre Duhem and Etienne
Gilson have demonstrated. Thus, not in spite of Calvinism but because
of it, the New Englander finds himself able to communicate with part
of European culture. It is not otherwise that we can account for that
rich cross-fertilization of seemingly distinct cultures, which
occurred when Henry James and T. S. Eliot came into contact with
France. Superficially, however, there could be no greater anomaly than
that of two provincial Puritans returning English letters to the main
channels of European culture.

But what of Poe's affinities with France? If the Calvinistic,
scholastic, and academic New Englander has natural roots in the
Cartesian traditions of academic France, so has the Ciceronian South
maintained relations with Ciceronian and encyclopedist France. For one
main current of French letters in the seventeenth century is that of
Cicero - an eloquent wisdom politically inspired, and based on
universal learning. Whether it is Bossuet and Corneille or Voltaire
and Diderot, one has to deal with the forensic, political eloquence of
a great tradition whose well-defined roots can easily be examined in
the schools of that age. Thus, the American South naturally finds a
congenial milieu in France of the eighteenth century - the France of
the encyclopedists who rebelled against Descartes. These men
proclaimed the Ciceronian origins of their aristocratic republicanism
in the very name they bear. And Erasmus, More, Bacon, Swift,
Bolingbroke, Burke, or Voltaire would have alike approved the
linguistic and forensic program which Jefferson drew up for his
university.

Poe must now be focussed in relation to this dichotomy of European and
American culture. Thus, merely to mention THE AUTOCRAT AT THE
BREAKFAST TABLE is to summon up a type of man and a type of writing
which are antithetical to Poe's mode of being. The New England ETHOS
naturally finds its highest level of expression in the scholastic man,
and the result is that the New England professor is autocratic. There
is no social life co-extensive with him, nor one able to embody and
criticise his thought and actions. Brought up amidst this social
nudity and pedagogical earnestness, T. S. Eliot confronted the
situation directly in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Here it
was that he exploded the heresy of "self-expression," of "message,"
and of artistic isolation and futility, which had found such congenial
soil in New England. On the other hand, vividly aware of the defects
of his immediate social environment, Poe is yet naturally and
unaffectedly cosmopolitan. Because he understood profoundly the nature
of his artistic dependence on that society, he was its vigorous and
unremitting critic, scrutinizing its dress, its manners, its reading,
its furniture and science; and he utilized these things as the basic
materials of his prose. For he is the master of a prose whose lucidity
and resilience are unmistakably owing to a society in which good talk
is common.

All his life Poe fought with eloquence and versatility of learning to
maintain serious standards in current literature, to extend the scope
of American letters, and to banish parochial habits of mind. To the
end he maintained the need and practicality of a critical review which
would transform the taste of society at large. Thus, unlike the New
England academicians and recluses, Poe was the man of letters in
society. He was not professorial but professional - in the forensic
tradition of Dr. Johnson and Macaulay.

This is not the place in which to proceed to a careful study of Poe's
writings in relation to his tradition. However, the kind of importance
which essentially social and political problems have in an
understanding of his work must be indicated briefly. For it was from
the experience of the Virginia of his day that Poe was able to project
those symbols of alienation and inner conflict which won the immediate
assent of Baudelaire himself. (Baudelaire was also an aristocratic
dandy, and his devotion to Silver age and patristic rhetoric has
implications which relate him decisively to the Ciceronian tradition
which has been described.) That Baudelaire should have hailed Poe as
he did has a meaning totally unlike that which belongs to the
recognition of Emerson by Carlyle. To appreciate the full significance
of this event remained for us to discover today; for English poetry
had to wait another seventy years for T. S. Eliot finally to
incorporate Baudelaire's sensibility and eloquence. No more striking
testimony could be asked for Poe's central location in European
tradition. And yet he won that place by the uncompromising integrity
with which he dealt with his local American experience. While the New
England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-
cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog
for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the
terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before
Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.

Within this perspective of deep-lying cultural dichotomy it becomes
possible for the critic to show that "the heart of darkness" for
Byron, Baudelaire, and Poe is quite distinct from what it is for
Hawthorne and Melville. Evil is a fact, perhaps the most important
fact, in the New England consciousness. But the evil which Poe and
Baudelaire experienced had very different roots from that of the
North. It is the evil which led Byron to evoke endless Satanic heroes
as objective correlatives in his poems, the evil, not of Calvinistic
depravity, but of the split-man and the split-civilization. The
psychological exploration of uneasy conscience as carried on by
Hawthorne or Melville could only regain contact with European
consciousness after James and Eliot had visited the founts of French
culture. But Poe lived in a community which had never breached its
relations with the original traditions of its culture. And let us
remember that these traditions were, long before the sixteenth
century, strongly antipathetic to those which were brought to New
England.

Considering this cultural dichotomy now in a new perspective, it is
possible to approach even closer to a solution of a major Poe problem:
Why is Poe essentially preoccupied with symbols and situations of
horror and alienation? Or it can be put this way: Why did the split
consciousness of an aristocratic-seigneurial society express itself in
symbols of Satanism, sadistic horror, of fear, violence and
desolation? Byron, Baudelaire, and Poe are here together in a literary
tradition which stretches back at least to Cervantes, and which is
much alive today, even in such degenerate forms as crime fiction with
its, significantly, dandified sleuths.

Without considering Corneille and Racine, the matter is obvious enough
in Milton's Satan, and even more in the cult of literary diabolism
associated with that Satan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The issues are strikingly defined by Marvell in his HORATIAN ODE,
where he explains how the aristocratic ideals of noble being have been
swept aside by the vulgar Cromwell, whose genius is for destructive
action rather than for harmony of thought and feeling. Tradesman
Richardson offers an obvious incarnation of the same conflict in his
CLARISSA HARLOWE. This time it is from the "Cromwellian" point of
view. Thus Lovelace, the prototype of the aristocratic villain,
provides us with the pattern of the Byronic hero and the villain of
Victorian melodrama, to say nothing of Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Lord
Peter Wimsey, Rhett Butler, and the Hollywood pantheon. The
characteristic pose is that of the man "beautiful but damned," the man
who scorns the ignoble conventions and petty, calculating bustle of
commercial society. This man is wholly alienated from society, on one
hand, and feared and admired by the commercial members of society, on
the other hand. The entire conflict is perfectly dramatized in the
relations between Edgar Poe and his guardian, John Allan. John Allan
secretly admired Poe quite as much as Richardson revered Lovelace.
Allan despised himself in the presence of Poe, and Poe in turn pitied
and scorned him.

A figure of great interest, who can best be seen in relation to what
has here been said of Poe, is Whitman. Many people have mistaken him
for another variety of Thoreau or the noble savage of the frontier.
Actually, as Sidney Lanier very clearly saw and explained long ago,
Whitman is an inverted Byronic dandy. His tradition is that of the
aristocratic and political South. He has nothing in common with the
dons of New England. The inverted Byronic dandyism of Whitman is
evident enough as soon as one applies the cipher of reversal. Put
uncritical embrace of all social facts in place of fastidious scorn
and withdrawal. Put pose of noble and omnivorous yokel for pose of
satiated estheticism of the worldling. Put tones of "barbaric yawp
over the roofs of the world" for the elegant scorn of a Byronic hero
excoriating mankind from a midnight crag. Put boisterous adolescent
athleticism for the world-weary FLANEUR, and the pattern is complete.
That is why Whitman was so eagerly accepted by the esthetes who had
only to make one simple adjustment - that of reversal - in order to
fraternize with him. Perhaps this also explains his very considerable
failure to convince us of his own sincerity. He is FAUX NAIF. He is
often like a man flapping his arms and stamping his feet to restore
circulation. More important than this implied valuation is the fact
that America's political poet belongs to the aristocratic Southern
tradition, a representative of the Ciceronian and forensic ideal of an
eloquent wisdom.

Without at present pursuing this theme further, it can be maintained
that whereas Poe's art is political, in that its vehicle and dramatic
organization concern those symbols which express a basic split in
society and personality, the art of Hawthorne, Melville, and James is
wholly non-political in its concern with the lacerations of the merely
individual conscience - even when this conscience is typical of a
certain type of community. For the fact which confronts this
individual conscience is, finally, not political dislocation but the
theological problem of moral deprivation. Distinct from this type, and
within the coordinates of a thoroughly rational sensibility, Poe
brought morbidity into focus, gave it manageable proportions, held it
up, not for emulation, but for contemplation.

In his own fashion, then, Poe had as great a working faith in
civilization as Jefferson himself, and by defining and projecting the
inner emotional drama of his time he probably did as much as Jefferson
to energize American life. For there is intense vitality in his
"morbidity."

[1] The best published account of the ancient quarrel between the
grammatical and dialectical methods in theology is in R. P. McKeon’s
paper, “Renaissance and Method,” STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS,
Vol.III.

[2] R. M. Weaver ("The Older Religiousness in the South," SEWANEE
REVIEW, Spring, 1943) provides a good deal of incidental documentation
for the present paper. He contrasts the speculative, New England
theology with the practical, "political" piety of the South. The work
of Werner Sombart, on the economic plane, makes the same point:
Scholastic philosophy and theology provided the indispensable
viewpoint and technological abstraction which brought about the rise
of industrial capitalism. The Southern resistance to technology and
industry is inherent, just as the Northern passion for machinery and
bureaucracy is inherent in age-old but divergent intellectual
traditions. H. J. Ford (RISE AND GROWTH OF AMERICAN POLITICS, pp.
141-142) makes the same contrast between political views of North and
South.

- Herbert Marshall McLuhan, EDGAR POE'S TRADITION, Sewanee Review,
Volume 52, #1, January, 1944, pp.24-33