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The following posts are extractions from Laurie Petrou's 2006 article McLuhan and Concrete Poetry: Sound, Language and Retribalization.

1. APA: Petrou, L. (2006). McLuhan and Concrete Poetry: Sound, Language and Retribalization. Canadian journal of Media Studies, 1(1), 1-25.
2. Chicago: Laurie Petrou. "McLuhan and Concrete Poetry: Sound, Language and Retribalization." Canadian journal of Media Studies 1, no. 1 (2006): 1-25.

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McLuhan is an ‘ear man’: his cultural analysis is deeply related to an ear-oriented preoccupation. In fact, his analysis of technology in general is richly influenced by his interest in a sensory experience. And while his claims have broader social consequences the effects of technology on the senses and vice versa, the common sensory and artistic thread is certainly evident.

"We are back in an acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us." (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 63)

McLuhan’s interest in acoustic space, tribal community, language, sound and orality have strong ties not only to a personal and cultural recognition of art and technology, but to a specific movement of the arts that focused on the senses: concrete poetry. Sound poetry and visual poetry that reached its peak between the 60’s and 80’s had as its aims some of the very issues with which McLuhan was grappling. I argue that language poetry, sound poetry, visual poetry - what for brevity’s sake I will call concrete poetry - is an artistic manifestation of McLuhan’s expectation and exploration of a re-tribalization or new tribalization based on orality, sound and the visual within the post-print age. The visual and sound poets of the 60's were making and creating work that relates to McLuhan's prediction that in a post-print world we return to a balanced, simultaneous, tribal space.

Concrete poetry is essentially poetry that does not privilege meaning above all, but does privilege sound and the visual, using language not as a conduit but as the content itself: thus the medium is the message, to borrow McLuhan’s phrase. That is not to deny that there is meaning in form, but that meaning is not presented in a linear or narrative fashion typical of structured sound and language. There seems to be some debate as to whether concrete poetry includes sound poetry because some concrete poetry is more effective read aloud (sound poetry) and some less effective read aloud (visual poetry).

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McLuhan’s appreciation of oral cultures and the sensory experience, and thus the thrust of the connection between concrete poetry and the theorist’s work is possibly most evident in the Gutenburg Galaxy. In the introduction to Galaxy, McLuhan delineates the differences between traditional, pre-literate oral cultures and a post-print culture as well as the changes occurring at the onset of an overloaded electric culture. He begins with a focus on Elizabethan poets and culture:

"We are today as far into the electric culture as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographic and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience."  (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995, 97)

He insists that the some senses are extended and privileged by technologies at the detriment of other senses. He calls this an ‘outering’ or ‘uttering’ of sense, which creates ‘closed systems’: meaning that a simultaneous experience of senses is knocked off balance. (101)

In the case of literacy, the eye became the privileged sense, creating a linear rather than simultaneous sensory experience, canceling out the opportunity of sensory interplay. But while McLuhan laments the onset of an eye-dominance, contradictorily he also states: “no other kind of writing save the phonetic has ever translated man out of the possessive world of total interdependence and interrelation that is the auditory network.” (117) While the tribal man experiences sensory simultaneity and community, McLuhan concludes that the phonetic alphabet offered individualism, but at the cost of confusion and sensory imbalance. The ‘freedom’ which literacy offered came with individualism, a product of writing and the mechanization of writing.

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The power and mysticism associated with sound is discussed by Ong in Orality and Literacy (1982). He suggests that ‘oral peoples’ ‘universally’ (Ong also works within the framework of broad generalizations: he too discusses oral communities from Ancient Greece to more contemporary African communities) consider sound to be magical, and thus powerful: “Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power. [...] In this sense, all sound, and especially oral utterance, which comes from inside living organisms, is dynamic.” (Ong, 32)

Ong examines the thought processes of the oral culture and dismisses the ability or practicality of forming thoughts as one would in a print culture: In an oral culture, to think through something in non-formulaic, non-patterned, non-mneumonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing. It would not be abiding knowledge but simply passing thought, however complex (3) In fact, Ong has an entire section devoted to the characteristics of orally based thought, citing non-expression, organization and redundancy within texts thought to be transcribed from oral cultures. (38) He also approaches poetry within oral cultures, claiming that the formulaic poetic techniques in the ancient world are evidence of a kind of written thought pattern that marks not only poetry “but more or less all thought and expression in primary oral culture.” (26)

McLuhan’s analysis of oral cultures as simultaneous and balanced is the backbone of his optimistic predictions about the electric age: that with the departure from a strictly print-based or eye-based culture, the possibility for a “seamless web of tribal kinship” exists. (McLuhan and Zingrone 239)

This is naturally related to his medium is the message theory, and relates to Ong’s ideas about technology or communication technologies changing the way we think and the way our senses react. McLuhan and the concrete poets shared this techno-materialist approach to sensory perception. Both recognized the body’s relationship with language and print, and specifically, the binding and linear nature of a society dependant on narratives and meanings put forth by a monopolized medium, its effects on our senses and our lives largely ignored. McLuhan’s preoccupation with the medium and our sensory relationship to media (meaning technology: print, type and ink as well as things like TV and radio) as a cultural concern is reflected in the artistic practice of the concrete poets.

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Steve McCaffery demonstrates McLuhan’s notion that technology acts as an extension of the senses. The tape recorder, as McCaffery notes, allowed for a sensory extension hitherto experienced in sound poetry in its historical manifestations – during the rise of what he calls the third phase of sound poetry (1950s onward), when sound poetry was not bound to the word or meaning. It is at this time, conceivably, that sound poetry joins what is known as concrete poetry and gives rise to the sensory perceptions and ambiguities with which McLuhan was wrestling in his exploration of oral and print-based cultures.

McCaffery outlines the history of sound poetry itself: while concrete poetry, he explains, emerged more towards the 1960’s, sound poetry as it has been explored by international artists and writers has been the focus of poetic and artistic experimentation for some time. The third phase, as McCaffery notes, was heralded by the tape recorder and offered the possibility of executing experiments in language and sound that were hitherto impossible. While it could be argued that the tape recorder represented a detachment of the senses, I am building on McCaffery’s contention and suggesting that it in fact extended them in offering the opportunity for additional experimentation and building on the relationship between senses and technology.

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Christian Bök responds to the question posed by OEI (2001) on the future of poetry after language poetry. He expresses the anxiety that the electronic age brings to poetry, as well as evoking McLuhan’s expectation of a blurring of boundaries within not only senses but creative expression: artistic and romantic strongholds such as ‘inspiration’ have been affected by the electronic medium and environment:

"Poets may have to become advanced typesetters and computer programmers - technicians, polyglot in a variety of machinic [sic] dialects. Poets may have to learn the exotic jargon of scientific discourses just to make use of a socially relevant lexicon, and now that cybernetics has effectively discredited the romantic paradigm of inspiration, poets may have to take refuge in a new set of aesthetic metaphors for the unconscious, adapting themselves to the mechanical procedures of automatic writing, aleatoric [sic] writing, and mannerist writing - poetry that no longer expresses our attitudes so much as it processes our databanks." (Bök, 2001)

This posits the question as to whether the electronic age, with its cross-sensory perceptions has allowed for the kind of unity that McLuhan anticipated. In Counterblast (1969), McLuhan commented that, “By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man.” I would argue that the concrete poetry between the 60’s and 80’s offered something close to this goal of sensorial wholeness of the sub-primitive man, but that with the Internet age, for poetry at least, there exists an anxiety - which perhaps is simply characteristic of its newness – with regards to the sensorial simultaneity.

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Christopher Horrocks states that McLuhan reaches beyond posthumanism and simultationism because his claims of sensory harmony and immediacy are linked directly to ‘a myth of return’ via technology. (Horrocks, 40) McLuhan claimed that with the electronic age "we are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions (from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us) of a culture that preceded the invention of writing and printing." (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 63)
The concrete poets writing (and performing, recording, speaking) at the time of McLuhan’s writings were exploring a tribalization that exploded the sensory dependence of print and meaning. While poets online are struggling with how to continue with a creative and sensory revolution, they are admittedly dealing with issues of non-linear temporality and spatiality, despite the medium’s connection and historical relationship (via language and readership) with print.

But what is the ‘acoustic space’ and how does it relate to the concrete poets – including in their media sound, visual, language and otherwise? The notion of space, be it acoustic, typographic or virtual, have implications that are deeply tied to McLuhan’s sensory perceptions and observations on the oral and literary experience. Visual experimental poetry depended on the very ink and paper as the meanings rather than as a conduit.

In exploring concrete poetry and McLuhan’s notion of both the multi-sensory electric culture and the medium as the message, one might ask, what of the materiality of language? Or put another way, what of the visual nature of language?

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In his atypically structured essay “Artiface and Absorption”, poet Charles Bernstein poses the question of whether the structure or content of the poem ‘mean’ anything, whether they are mutually exclusive and how meaning is ‘absorbed’ by the viewer/reader. Poems where the structure requires further reading (beyond the structure) to find the meaning, he calls Artiface, opposed to Realism, which involves an unmediated and direct meaning.

Just as McLuhan demands that the content is not priority and that the medium must be considered, Bernstein states that the structure must be considered, lest all that remains is content and content does not automatically equal meaning. He states that if the structure or materiality is foregrounded, there is a tendency to assume that there is no meaning at all, as though the poem is an experiment in the mechanics of the language. This is interesting in light of the concrete poets for whom the mechanics of the language were often (or often appeared to be) the priority.

In describing the submeanings of a poem structured in what Bernstein calls Artiface, McCaffery uses economic terms first outlined by Georges Bataille. Bataille took Marx’s notion of a restricted economy based in market value, and applied it to aesthetics, ritual and transgression. General economy, as opposed to the restricted economy according to Bataille, is excess value, or runoff. In McCaffery’s paper on writing as a general economy, he takes this notion of excess and applies it to structurally-based poetry. In this model, in a restrictive economy, the content is privileged at the expense of the structure (wherein the structure of the language/poem is ignored); in the general economy, the structure is privileged at the expense of the content: the medium is the message.

Bernstein makes note of a young theorist of the 60s, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who developed the notion of the total image complex. For Forrest-Thompson, the image-complex is the node that encapsulates the rhythm, structure, sound, materiality and semiotics of a poem outside the critical reading. She felt that the viewer/reader should reserve judgment on the critical reading in order to experience the image-complex. Again, this is a McLuhanesque notion; that the entire –rounded, rather than eye-dominant -sensory experience be observed outside of the content, or the message.

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On typographic space, Ong dedicates a section in Orality and Literacy. He discusses the relationship between words, or more specifically type and the white space of paper – what artists call ‘negative space,’ meaning the space or shapes defined by what is leftover after a ‘real’ medium has carved out its shape. Ong makes reference to poetry by e.e.cummings:

"White space is so integral to cumming’s poem [Poem No. 276 (1968)] that it is utterly impossible to read the poem aloud. The sounds cued in by the letters have to be present in the imagination but their presence is not simply auditory: it interacts with the visually and kinesthetically perceived space around them." (Ong, 129)

Ong continues on the topic of concrete poetry claiming that it "climaxes in a certain way the interaction of sounded words and typographic space.” (Ong, 129) demonstrating an inter-sensory play that does not depend on or privilege a particular sense, but ‘via technology’ extends the senses.

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McCaffery notes that experimentation with sound and language occurred long before the ‘third phase’ of the concrete poets in sound and language experimentations explored by the Italian and Russian Futurists (Marietti, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh), stating that the “first decisive break with language’s symbolic relationship with an object” came with the Russian Futurist manifesto Words As Such of 1910. Also experimenting with sound and language were Lewis Caroll with Jaberwocky (1912) and Kruchenykh with the chant-like zaum poems (ca. 1910). While these earlier poets dealt with language and sound, the approach to tribalism, simultaneous sensory perception and spontaneity certainly appeared to have arrived with the concrete poets of the 50’s and 60’s.

For McLuhan, sound and language could both be afforded a simultaneous experience in non-linear space, unbound to meaning and narrative, unbound to time and a dominant sense. He wrote to his mentor Wyndham Lewis in 1954 what sounds as though it could be a sound poet’s manifesto,

"Acoustic space is spherical. It is without bounds or vanishing points. It is structured by pitch separation and kinesthesia. It is not a container. It is not hollowed out. It is the space in which men live beore the invention of writing – that translation of the acoustic into the visual. With writing men began to trust their eyes and to structure space visually. Pre-literate man does not trust his eyes very much. The magic is in sound for him, with its powers to evoke the absent." (Theall, 145)

Similarly, as Cavell states with regard to the ideogram,

"Here, alphabetic letters are turned into ideogrammatical constructions that constitute a rejection of the alphabet and a recovery of the simultaneity and sensory interrelatedness of speech – an interrelatedness that includes the interrelations of the visual and the auditory as spatial constructions." (Cavell, 145)

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Theall notes of McLuhan’s relationship with acoustic space throughout the years with explorations into poetry, art and culture:

"The initial phrase “acoustic space, “ probed and played with through three decades, becomes itself an artifact (or “medium”), suggestively exploring the metamorphoses achieved through the transformations affected by electric technologies of production, reproduction, and dissemination on the pre-electric technologies of print and visual prints, writing, and visual art." (Theall, 146)

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McLuhan’s texts and treatments, as well as his forays into non-linear visual speech and space demonstrate his close link to the concrete poets. What his tetrads in particular in their visual formation recall, as does the work of the concrete poets, is a formulaic approach to language, sound and the visual that in its very process are a technique similar to that used in oral cultures.

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As Ong acknowledges, “concrete poetry is [...] often merely gimmicky – a fact that makes it all the more necessary to explain the drive to produce it.” (Ong, 129)

McLuhan, while he appeared to have an eclectic approach to scholarship and never claimed to be a theorist, recognized the importance of, or our inability to extricate ourselves from meaning.

And Steve McCaffery says while exploring the relationship between ink and words, language and meaning, "as its material support, sound and ink are separable from the signifying process, but at the same time the process is unsupportable without it. In light of this one could consider language’s materiality as meaning’s heterological object, as that area inevitably involved within the semantic apparatus that meaning casts out and rejects." (McCaffrey, 203)

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For McLuhan, technological change offers a revolution of the senses. Concrete poetry of the 60’s to 80’s exemplified an exploration in the ink, the sound and the visual – essentially McLuhan’s Medium as the Message. But as even McLuhan stated on this front, “By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, I’m not suggesting that the content plays no role – merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role.” (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995, 247) The sensory overload that McLuhan would have witnessed at the explosion of the Internet doesn’t seem to provide the kinship,  the complete balance and outering that McLuhan had speculated about; it instead harbors a more self-conscious anxiety that McLuhan may say is a good thing. Nevertheless, for a time during the peak of the concrete poets, a recognition of a desire for balanced sensory experience and perception – a self-aware return to the tribal ear culture - was executed alongside McLuhan’s work.

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Bernstein, Charles. “A Poetics” from A Poetics. 1992, pp. 9 – 89

Bök, Christian., OEI 7-8 2001: AFTER LANGUAGE POETRY, 2001, p. 2

Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press Inc, 2002), p. 145

Horrocks, Christopher., Baurillard and the New Millenium, (Duxford, Cambridge, U.K, 1999), p. 40

McCaffery, Steve. “Sound Poetry – A Survey”. From Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978, http://www.ubu.com/papers/mccaffery.html

McCaffery, Steve. “Writing as a General Economy” in Artiface and Indeterminacy:  An Anthology of New Poetics, University of Alabama Press, 1998, pp. 201 – 221, 203

McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. (NY, London, Toronto: Bantam, 1967). p. 63

McLuhan, Eric and Frank Zingrone. Essential McLuhan. (Toronto: House of Anasi Press), 1995, p. 97, 101, 117, 247.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1982), p. 32, 3, 38, 26, 129

Theall, Donald. The Virtual McLuhan. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. p. 145, 146