Last Call for Harold Innis

In a time when communications media loom very large, and we get what seems to me pretty shabby, shallow interpretations of them, it is nice to go back to Harold Innis. He took a technological approach to the analysis of historical and economic issues, in part to supplement and counter the devotion to sheer statistics and what he called “accountancy,” which seemed to dominate the profession even then. But it seems to me that Innis’ interest in a technological form of explanation grew out of a deeper soil, intellectually and autobiographically. In the preface to his final book, The Bias of Communications, he says all of what follows is by way of a response to a question by his professor of philosophy, James Ten Brooke, when Innis himself was an undergraduate. The question was, “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?”

I consider this question of Ten Brooke’s stunningly subversive. It is enough to interrupt almost anyone’s life at any point if you seriously ask it, and I take Innis’ allusion to it seriously. I propose to treat it as a genuine preface to his thought on the subject of communications. Where was Innis at the point in his life when he posed it to himself, or rather, to what had he been attending all his adult and professional life? To economic history, in short. I take Innis to be looking back on his entire life of effort and achievement and saying, What was that about? Why did I pay such attention to these questions of economic history, along with history in general, and Canadian economic history in particular? The answers he gives are quite sweeping and unexpected, and I do not intend to go through them in detail here. But I can say that he pins the blame for his – and our – concern with history itself on the effects of the biases of the technologies of communications which through time brought us to the current moment. In a sense you can say then that Innis uses his skill as a historian to identify the sources of the concern with history itself. But he also unleashes a critique of the mentality that takes history seriously. I think it is fair to say he regrets that mentality and having spent most of his life inside it. I am saying, in other words, that I do not see Innis’ final phase – his writings on communications – as an extension of the rest of his career; it was not, for example, simply an application of the theory of staples to the area of communications, as Marshall McLuhan proposed in his introduction to the book. In my opinion, Innis’ ideas on communication are a radical undercutting of the kind of thinking that marked the rest of his career. I do not think it would be right to say they are a rejection of his earlier writings; it is more a matter of walking away from the things that concerned him in them. The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, Hegel wrote and Innis quoted; consider that this refers to Innis’ own wisdom coming only at the end of an illustrious and, by all conventional standards, successful intellectual career. There is a deeply existential quality to this turn in Innis’ life.

Take, for instance, his embrace of the Oral Tradition over the Written Tradition, the two main categories in Innis’ theories of communication. We are not talking television versus computers or the Internet: this is the Oral versus Written Tradition. A “tradition” as a medium of communication. And then he opts for oral, the man who had been probably more successful than any other Canadian within the written tradition as it is known in our society. He had written many lauded books; he was part of the tradition, but here he more or less dissociates himself from it and dumps on it. Let me add that what Innis meant by the Oral Tradition was not chit-chat: talks shows would not qualify. He meant an oral discourse that was elitist and intellectual, but an intellectual elitism transmitted and expanded mainly through face-to-face dialogue between intellectual equals and their disciples. Furthermore, he did not exclude a written component from the Oral Tradition; he wrote that “the mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings[!] of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the west.” (One might make the same point about the Talmudic tradition in Judaism which, though eventually written down, managed to preserve in its very layout on the page a sense of ongoing dialogue and a continuing invitation to it.) At any rate, Innis came to the conclusion that “creative thought” was “dependent on the oral tradition.” Writing is too fast, it is too unnuanced compared to the complexity of speech. What it means to be human is to speak and listen, to interact with others – and wisdom and insight emerge in that social context. Writing and individual scholarship are a dilution and “dumbing down” of basic human function; they may be more efficient, in some respects, in creating Intellectual “product,” but at a cost to the human and mental processes involved. This may seem a little hard to take as you make your way through Innis College, attending lectures or reading in the library; all around you people are working in offices, preparing papers and books, and reading the work of others. And, after all, I did sit down and write this paper.
Even in the midst of this hive of written communication, Innis’ argument implies that we should just stop dead and converse. If we did, we would likely not get beyond my first sentence; that is, the nature of the Oral Tradition.
But I believe Innis was serious about these assertions. I think that is why he was in such despair over the university as an institution in his latter years, and why he wrote so much on it, like his “plea for consideration of the role of the oral tradition as a basis for a revival of effective vital discussion and . . . an appreciation on the part of universities of the fact that teachers and students are still human.” Human in this context means a being who thrives on direct oral communication, person-to-person with all the nuance and complexity such a thing involves. This level of despair at the state of the university almost fifty years ago! Before expansion and all the other changes since Innis’ time. The fact that he himself may never have become a model of this kind of teaching, that until the end he may have personified teaching based on writing and conventional scholarship and publication, merely bolsters the point – and the despair. He knew the power of the model in which he was sunk. I think criticism is at its best when it is leveled at something the critic suspects or knows to exist in himself. I also think Innis’ seriousness about the Oral Tradition, as a needed by likely unachievable alternative to the Written one, accounts to some extent for the peculiar, difficult style of his writings on communications, for their almost uncommunicative quality, you might say. They are terse, allusive, disconnected, apothegmatic and hard to follow. Others have said this is because Innis was opening a new field: the history of communications technologies. He created this area of study and had a right to be a little vague as he tried to pin down ideas no one else had thought of or explored. Maybe so, but I also think the style of those writings reflects a certain inner rebellion against the florid, unperturbed surface of a typical text in the Written Tradition. As if Innis was uttering thoughts in Plato’s academy, and hoping for an interruption, so he could defend, refine, or expand the thought, rather than sail along to the end of his discourse in the midst of respectful silence and attention from the unseen scholarly audience.

Take Innis’ emphasis on Time in these later writings, for an indication of how thorough his critique is, how self-critical, even self-lacerating. Innis associated predominantly oral cultures with what he called a sense of control over Time; while written cultures tended to do better in exercising control over Space. This is a difficult area – even for Innis’ later writings, but all I want to stress at the moment is that Innis included a preference for values associated with Time rather than Space in his self-described “bias” in favour of the Oral Tradition – and that what he meant by Time was not the same thing as History. Quite the contrary. Time, in the sense Innis uses it, is the opposite of History. History is what has obliterated the sense of time, of enduring values and underlying verities. History is not about Time, and History as a discipline is based on the breakdown of the sense of Time in an age in which Space, that is, spatial perceptions and space-based values, predominate, in which Time has been distorted into a succession of moments, as it were, “spatialized,” a process which began, according to Innis, with Leibniz (who took Space as a basic category) then Hegel and Marx, who are also not about Time, but about History. Time is about endurance, values that endure and underlie changes and discontinuities. Historicism, which Innis called “almost entirely a product of the 19th century,” marked the victory of “history over philosophy and science.” If this does not count as a repudiation of what Innis had spent his life doing, I don’t know what would.

Finally, let us look directly at his treatment of media. I do not believe the term itself actually appears in Innis’ writing; he deals with one particular medium of communication or another, and its biases. But to put Innis’ sense of media in focus, let me return for a moment to the situation in the present. A striking phenomenon of our time, it seems to me, is the emergence of Noam Chomsky as a formidable media critic, especially among youth and students – that is, those who have grown up with the mass media. To many of them, Chomsky is a kind of cult figure. I know young people who do not bother watching the news; they just wait to read Chomsky on the news. The Canadian film about him, Manufacturing Consent, has become a kind of cult classic akin to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now what I think is really interesting about the emergence of Chomsky as the model of a media critic is that he is almost entirely uninterested in media per se. You get the sense he nearly never watches television or goes to a movie, and when he does he pays close attention to the message and very little to the medium. What he is almost exclusively concerned with is content in media, especially news media. He is doing content analysis – more precisely, analyzing propaganda. That it comes through one medium or another is fairly indifferent to him. Propaganda is propaganda; he could just as well be analyzing the original source of the term, the Catholic church of the late Middle Ages. Now compare to this the mavens of media reality: Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab, Wired magazine, television shows like CITY’s Media TV, Newsworld’s Future World, or CBC’s Undercurrents – what you find is preoccupation with the formal qualities of the medium and little analysis of content. Moses Znaimer, for instance, likes to say television is about flow not show, it is about process, not content. So you get an analysis of the effect of form which yields sheer form, and absolves any content from being of concern to the analysis.
And Innis? In Innis you get the concept of the “bias” of the medium of communication. This is not pure focus on form, and it is not straight analysis of content. The fact that the show is full of flow does not mean there is no show. In his comments on mass media, he pointed to a “sensationalist” bias in print and the electronic media as part of a shift away from the values of Time, associated with the Oral Tradition and its continuities, to those of Space, associated with the Written Tradition. The fewer the continuities apparent in experience, the more attention shifts to “high points” and sensationalism. This bias, especially as it developed in print and the electronic media, conduced to the experience of a series of disconnected events, literally, “the news,” that which is always new.

You see this kind of sensationalizing mentality even in discussions about media and media technology themselves, as in statements by media maven John Perry Barlow about computers or the Internet – or whatever – being the most transforming technological breakthrough since the discovery of fire; or Znaimer’s milder, more Canadian assertion that television is the most important communications development in 500 years. What might have intrigued Innis is not which breakthrough was more stunning, but where does this mentality of sensational breakthroughs come from altogether? One follows another with monotonous predictability. If you take a step back, the whole mindset can seem a little embarrassing; it is not impossible to imagine a society in which sensational breakthroughs and firsts are not constantly being declared. Where does such a need, such a mentality, come from? Innis answers that the technologies of communications themselves have engendered a sort of breakthrough-mongering, which extended even to the attitude toward new technologies. I think that his analysis of the sensationalizing nature of media has stood the test of time since his death. In our time, it is more prominent than ever: wars followed by scandals followed by supermarket openings or the introduction of a new pro-sports franchise, each one covered apocalyptically, ever swifter, ever more unconnected. I do not think Innis and Chomsky are in the same camp on this matter, but I think they both stand apart from the deliberately technical and content-draining approach to media which contemporary media experts tend to practise.
When students have asked why I placed Innis and not McLuhan on the course I teach at University College each spring, I have answered that the far-ranging intent of Innis’ conclusions are clearer. It is clear he felt the media of communication – from speech through data transmission – shape the underlying ground of culture: what a society talks about, sees as important, perceives. In Innis, medium and message are not simply reducible to each other; the content of a culture is what we have to live with without even knowing where it comes from. Innis’ analysis is more profound and clear, if less terse, than McLuhan’s and less likely to land him as patron saint on the masthead of Wired magazine.
I am proposing, then, that we take the late Innis as a philosopher with a social science background, rather than an economic historian who branched into the field of communications technology. One reason it is a little difficult to look at Innis in this light is that he is such a prominent figure in the social sciences. It is not only that it is hard to imagine him undermining himself and his discipline at the end of his career, but that it does not seem the kind of thing someone in social sciences would do. Yet it was precisely because of his immersion in the social sciences, in all the data gathering and analysis, that Innis turned, or got turned, in the direction he did.

An interesting analogue is Michel Foucault, who also immersed himself in empirical data and studies, yet who stands clearly, and intended to, as a figure in the history of philosophy. In Foucault’s own terms, he too was absorbed in the positivity of knowledge, in mastering and then questioning those positivities at their root, using them to ask why we attend to the things we do. And if it seems surprising to turn philosophical and abstruse in the wake of all that data and research, Foucault writes that no one should find it strange that by this route he has come to ask the profound and troubling philosophical questions that matter today, and also is “unable not to ask them.” “Only those who cannot read,” says Foucault, “will be surprised that I have learned such a thing more clearly from Cuvier (biology), Bopp (philology), and Ricardo (economics) than from Kant or Hegel.” Innis might say he learned to ask those questions more clearly by way of his studies of the fur trade and the fisheries than from political science or philosophy – that is, learned which questions matter today, and became unable not to ask them. “All empirical knowledge,” wrote Foucault, “provided it concerns man, can serve as a possible philosophical field in which the foundation of knowledge, the definition of its limits and in fact the truth of all truth must be discoverable.” In this light, you start to find it strange not that researchers like Foucault and Innis come to these questions by this route, but that so many manage not to do the same. It is part of Foucault’s call to awake from what he called “the anthropological sleep” of the past two centuries; that is, as I understand it, the mystifications and ambivalences occasioned by the scientific approaches and disciplines of our time. This is the same sleep from which, I believe, Innis too was trying to awaken himself at the end, by questioning the ground of our experience in the light of the values that underlie it, asking where they came from, and passing judgment on them. It is simultaneously ethical and epistemological. This kind of thing is not easily adaptable to serve the superficial needs of any era or interest group. It does not lend itself to reconciling you to the way things are or celebrating the status quo; it makes you deeply uneasy about how things are and how you are within them; it asks why you attend to the things to which you have attended all your life. It does not screen out the personal, social, or human elements of experience. It is hard to avoid those elements in Innis’ final writings. They arise from a need, an intellectual or even an existential need. They involve a quest for wisdom based on a brave querying of what he had done with his life and to some extent what we, in the sense of our civilization, have done with our lives . . . none of which, by the way, would likely endear you to the computer industry that places its ads in Wired magazine or endows Negroponte’s Media Lab at MIT.

I would like to conclude by raising some questions about the small matters of the relation between thought and action, and between thought and society. I do this partly because I have distinguished between what I see as some shallowly ideological notions and visions of technology and that of Innis, which I admire. I also raise this question because I come from a background – the 1960, Marxism and so forth – which more or less took for granted the ideological/social role of all ideas and systems of thought – “If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem,” etc. If at the end of his career Harold Innis was ready to throw into doubt and re-examine everything to which he had devoted his life as a scholar and historian, as I have maintained, then the rest of us should be willing to entertain some questions about our past assumptions too.

It is clear Innis’ later work is not ideologically motivated. He undertook it for his own reasons. He did not need a career boost; if anything, he took a chance on undermining what he had achieved. His prestige was high; he had no need or desire to become a cult item in pop culture. There is nothing in his work that could have been calculated to take advantage of current trends in media analysis, since he more or less created the field as he wrote about it. For the same reason, there was no one around to seize on his work for ulterior motives and use it to their advantage.
But Innis was not averse to playing a role in policy areas. He sat on royal commissions; he expressed concern over what he saw as the decline of the university; he worked in adult education. And there is his tone of lament and exhortation, pervasive in these later works, about what he explicitly called the collapse of Western civilization. He perceived a sort of technological determinism behind this collapse, and though not sanguine on this subject, he says that if we are aware at least of the effects of the media of communication on us, we can take defensive or evasive action. But this is spoken with deep pessimism, as if the writer feels these forces go so deep that change is hardly to be expected. Now if your insight reveals that change is virtually hopeless, what is the point of revealing it? I have always been perplexed by this question. I have found it to be the problem in any writing I have ever done, including fiction and drama – how to tell the truth about how dire things are without leaving your audience, readers, or students sunk in despair. And if that is the effect, what is the point at all? You are talking about a kind of thought, no matter how insightful, that effectively might engender inaction, or at best despairing action, a mere going through the motions.

Let me turn to a reconsideration of the relation between thought and action in this dim light. Hannah Arendt wrote, especially in her final book, The Life of the Mind, about the relation between thinking and the world. I feel comfortable bringing this up since Arendt was devoted to classical civilization, as was Innis. But perhaps all I am really doing is taking two of the writers from whom I have learned a great deal and looking at them in relation to one another. Arendt described the thinking of even classical Greek philosophy as something that took you not away from the world but into it – though not for the purposes of solving problems to be found there. Thinking came about, she said, as a sort of amazement and wonder in response to mere existence; anyone can experience this, and it has implications for acting because it alters the relation between self and world. If you think even of classical philosophical thinking in this manner, not as something that removes the thinker to a realm of eternal verities but as a way of being more intensely in the world, then the sciences and particularly the social sciences do not require overt practical justifications. I think Innis in his later works was moving to a recovery of thinking in that sense, with his admiration for Greece and its Oral Tradition; in the face of the practicality, knowledge mongering, and problem solving that the “positive” sciences, both natural and social, have been prone to since their rise. “To expect truth to come from thinking,” wrote Arendt, “signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know . . . there is nothing more to be said than that life deprived of thought would be meaningless, even though thought will never make men wise or give them the answers to thought’s own questions.” She is speaking about Socrates here, and she says, “The meaning of what Socrates was doing lay in the activity itself. Or to put it differently: to think and to be fully alive are the same, and this implies that thinking must always begin afresh . . .” And, “the only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive.” The “inability to think (in this sense) is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an ever present possibility for everybody – scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded. …A life without thinking is quite possible; it simply fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.” I think of Innis as a man determined to awake from the anthropological sleep of the human sciences – of which he had become one of the outstanding practitioners – and not to fall back into it, however strong the temptation or maybe just the force of habit.

Thinking in this sense, which Arendt wrote about in her last book and which I believe Innis undertook in his, is a justification in itself, whether it has implications for action, and even policy, or not. In this sense, each person has the opportunity to think uniquely, because of the unique place between past and future that each person occupies. (Once, as a graduate student in philosophy of religion, I told a teacher of mine named Abraham Joshua Heschel that I was thinking of writing a thesis on the neo-Kantian ethics of Hermann Cohen. “It’s been done,” said Heschel. “Not by me,” I said. “I like your answer,” said Heschel.) “For the need to think,” wrote Arendt, “can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of ‘wise men’; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew.” I would like to think the later Innis, in his unique place between past and future, was trying to reoccupy a different, difficult, utterly human space by, as Arendt says, attempting to “reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history’s importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge.” As for the connection between thought and action, Arendt says it was when she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann as a journalist, and noticed the unthinkingness of Eichmann, his ‘banality’ which became the subtitle of her book on him, that she began to wonder about the connection between sheer thinking and the “faculty for telling right from wrong.” She began to consider whether the intellectual (not in a problem solving or academic sense, but in the Socratic sense of the ability to wonder at all things at any time) and the ethical might be related in surprising ways, even whether they might be, in some sense, the same thing. This led to perplexities about a recent book of her own, The Human Condition, in which as a political philosopher she demarcated the vita activa from the vita contemplativa and concentrated solely on the former. She had ended that book in a state of perplexity about the distinction, with a quotation from Cicero, ascribed to Cato, that “never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.” When she attended the Eichmann trial she was still in a quandary about these relations. She rejects Hegel’s straightforward claim that to think is to act, since acting only happens, she says, in concert with others. So it becomes a matter of trying to think through the complex relations between thinking and acting. (Let me digress to a small example of how this can work. Arendt writes, “it is not through acting but through contemplating” that “the meaning of the whole is revealed. The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs.” I cannot help but think in this connection of accounts regarding the massive and exhilarating protest march of 2 November 1996 through Toronto, and the complaint I heard from various people that the speeches at the end were a letdown because at that point they wanted someone to say, on behalf of all those who had experienced the day, what it amounted to, and no one did.)

I do not think these relations are easy to sort out. The real conclusion is that the relation between thought and action is problematical; they are not separate, and they are not the same; nor are they simply related as two distinct activities, one of which can produce or deduce the other. Anyone who tried to reduce these relations to simple formulae deserves the kind of scorn deployed by Foucault, who heaped contempt on the “profound stupidity” of those (particularly leftists like myself at a certain point, I assume) who “assert that there is no philosophy without political choice, that all thought is either ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary.’” “Their foolishness,” he said, “is to believe that all thought ‘expresses’ the ideology of a class,” but reluctantly he had to concede their “involuntary profundity” because even in their thickness and mechanical mind set, “they point directly at the modern mode of being of thought.” This mode of being is that “modern thought, from its inception and in its very density, is a certain mode of action . . . it is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave.” It seems to me this active, influencing, oppressing, liberating, enslaving character of modern thought – certainly in the sense of the sciences but also in a more general sense – tormented Innis and led him to write his final works. Why do we attend to that which we attend? Why do we value or devalue as we do? It is our way of thinking which has led to the collapse of Western civilization and the wars and misery of our age, and there was no easy way out. His investigations of communications and technology were meant at least to illuminate our dilemmas; but there was no assurance mere insight would lead anywhere.

There is something familiar about technological determinism, about technomanias and technophobias, to someone like myself, who felt a connection to Marxism in the 1960s and after. What else are you going to say about a notion like “conditions create consciousness”? In fact, when I first read McLuhan in the 1960s, I quickly assimilated Marxism. “The medium is the message.” Okay, that is the same as “Conditions create consciousness” and – Bob’s your uncle. I would have bridled at being called a technological determinist, “nuanced” it, posited reciprocal action, and so forth, but I think there would have been some truth to it. It is the sort of challenge any kind of historical explanation has to put up with. But what lingers with me from those years is how important it seemed to us at the time that History was on our side, that History would absolve us. Was this just a humanely understandable desire for certain revenge against the brutal forces we were protesting, and which too often seemed to win? If we had known for certain that History would not absolve us, that we would not win out, even after death, would that have been cause to pack it in? I doubt it. You were in the fight because it was right, not because it was a winner. I would say what that belief really did was to shield us from despair, in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary. But at a cost. The cost was that the whole thing was rigged. History was in charge, even if human beings had some role to play; what you were trying to do was figure out your preassigned role and then play it. In the absence of that assurance, in the post-Cold War for example, personally I feel liberated from that sense of it all being rigged. But that too has a cost: we no longer feel confident of the outcome, and in that lurks the danger of
despair. I know people who watch the progress of history or politics – same thing – and go up and down emotionally the way some people do when they watch their favourite team (and some do both). The question becomes: how do you live in a world in which the cause you know is just is not certain to triumph?

Now it seems to me Innis fought his own battles with despair, based on his sense of history, and the determinations of technology, especially what he saw as the biases of communications; though at least he never had to copy with a sense of loss after discovering history was not on his side. In his grappling with the biases of communication he was not just dealing with specific effects of the succession of technologies from oral to written to print to electronic, but with the historical mentality itself, what Arendt called the pseudo-divinity of History, the spatialization of time, the loss of its values, the fracturing of continuity and community; so for him it was not just a matter of emancipating yourself and your society from some particular effects of history but from the historical mentality itself. This was a pretty notable endeavor for a great historian to take on, but then who better than a great historian to undertake it? Nor was Innis alone in the aspiration.

-published in Queen’s Quarterly 104/2 (Summer 1997) 245-5