Crises Then as Now

Introduction: Meeting Crises, Then as Now

This book focuses on Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), public intellectual and media and communications scholar, reading him in connection to two distinguished contemporaries: urban planner and professor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) and artist and art theorist György Kepes (1906–2001). All were prolific and influential (from about 1950 to 1975) and, despite different disciplinary affiliations, shared an understanding of the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of knowledge and the need for integrated science and humanities work. They were acquainted with each other on a personal level, familiar with each other’s work, and professionally affiliated in a collaborative knowledge culture. Reading them together sharpens our appreciation of their intellectual environment. Aligning them in a “diffractive” approach enables identifying unexpected resonances without dismissing contextual and theoretical differences (Barad, Meeting, 2007, p. 30). Each addressed conflict and crises—arising from swift and sweeping technological change, legacy and ongoing military violence, increasingly visible social inequities, and evidence of environmental degradation. We may be bolstered by considering their determination to meet change and find hope amidst threat as they faced world crises that resemble ours today. Although crises is now accelerant on some fronts, finding transfer power in their concerns and programs—particularly their advocacy of structuring environments and experiences to foster citizen engagement and of amalgamating art and science knowledge and practice—provides context and intelligence for what we are facing.

McLuhan and contemporaries Tyrwhitt and Kepes addressed social and civic problems manifest in North America where all spent productive career years—problems contributing to global tensions. Communication theorist Michel A. Moos characterizes the mid-twentieth century as “chaotic”, and the 60s—a decade of significant interaction amongst the three—as “exuberant and savage days of cultural and social revolution” (1997, p. xv). Moos suggests the atom bomb also contributed to the sense of fragility and turbulence—radiating “nuclear consciousness” through the collective awareness that destruction was siloed in-the-ready, that radar blanketed the hemispheres awaiting incoming warheads, and that “a nerve-like constellation of wires[encircled] the Earth” (p. 165). There were civil rights protests, public outrage against poverty, racism and police brutality, and anger over the war and mounting casualties in Vietnam. While actual events fanned the flames of unrest, so did the non-stop home delivery of media coverage of carnage and confrontation, shorn of gravitas by being collaged with commercials and comedies. Writing of the zeitgeist in 1965, Susan Sontag referred to an oppressive “Imagination of Disaster,” fueled by “unremitting banality” in tension with “inconceivable terror” (para. 1). Whether exercised in memory or as futuristic foreboding, or experienced as actual events or mediated reproductions, trauma abounded in end-of-the world anxiety.

Along with fearing overt human-against-human acts of aggression and war, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt and Kepes were also aware that human-made industry and devices were damaging planetary ecologies. All three understood the impacts of media and innovation as intersectional, with each new development affecting human lives, creatures, and environments. While they often depoliticized technology by linking it to advances in science—deemphasizing its links to industry and capital¹—they otherwise anticipated Guittari’s summation in The Three Ecologies (2000) that human activities and products reshape—often deform—human subjectivity, social relations, and the environment.

While McLuhan did not have the term “Anthropocene” at hand, he anticipated what we have now learned to call the “Anthropocene”² in frequent references to the transformative effects of human industry on both human and planetary nature. In dialogue with Norman Mailer (1968), for example, he said, “The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.” It would be inaccurate to hear this as sanguine observation or happy talk of the progress of human creativity. Instead, it expresses his sense of the urgent need for widespread public recognition of presenting and impending dangers and, with this, for a public undertaking of responsibility and involvement in collaborative and creative responses. He offered few details to pave a definitive path and no reassurance of resolution, but emphasized the urgency of making an effort, of waking up, believing, similar to Donna Haraway (2016), that doing nothing is the worst response; believing, similar to N. Katherine Hayles (2017), that more mindful practices of perception, cognition and consciousness offer “intelligent beings” a “deeper appreciation” of patterns and multilevel “total engagement” of intellect, senses and emotions (2017, 1: 49).

In The Democratic Surround (2013), Fred Turner makes the case that 60s radicalism did not spring out of nowhere but was an extension of Post World War II intellectual movements to denounce fascism and control and to support democratic ideals of freedom and individuality. Sixties “counterculture,” while reacting against dominant cultural values, was also a culmination of “the deeply democratic vision. . . across the 1950s and into the 1960s” (2013, p. 11). Like Turner, I am revisiting historical intellectual connections: while he spoke the link from the 40s to the 60s, I am considering how key figures and ideas from the 60s and 70s inform our present. Identifying McLuhan, Kepes, and Tyrwhitt as early allies in recognizing the intersectional damage arising from “human activity” gone rogue advances a conception of shared generational logics. By this reading, the past was not entirely saturated by colonial vision and energy, gifting only burdens to be overcome; by this reading, some eyes and minds were open pre-twenty-first century to social and planetary ills. While establishing a line of positive kinship between then and now does not improve material conditions—does not decrease strife, deterioration, and threat—it does provide a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of intellectual lineage and avoid generational blaming.

There’s no question that current crises is plural, complex, and entangled—for many, it is irreversible, still accelerant and, to some, unprecedented. For Latour, for example, we are entering a crisis like none before, for “there is quite simply no precedent for the current situation” in which humans have damaged earth systems (Down, 2018, p. 42), affecting human and non-human actors and networks. Others establish precedent by going to science and evidence of prior extinctions (Grusin, 2016; Baker & McPherson, 2014). Precedented or not, no path leads to safety. Isabelle Stengers agrees with Latour that there is no easy answer to the question “What is to be done?” (Catastrophic, 2015, p. 24), yet warns against inaction saying that “the catastrophic could well become cataclysmic should we carry on as if nothing were happening, other than making a few cosmetic adjustments” (Another Science, 2018, p. 21). For Stengers who understands history as entangled and diffractive, the value of looking at the past is to identify sources that provoked current maladies as well as those modelling correctives and opening channels of intra-action. Calling for “reclaiming efforts” to meet current struggles, Stengers says the past offers models of positive resistance, such as in what the “resistance movements on the ground learned to do during the Second World War in Europe” (Another Science, p. 132). Closer to “home” and closer in time, I’m suggesting looking at some of the resistance strategies developed and tried in the 60s and 70s to see if there is transfer power in their models for responding to storm.