PEIRCE, MCLUHAN AND COMPANY: THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS Aquiles Est

Universidad Central de Venezuela Counterblast: The e-Journal of Culture and Communication, v.1, n.1 (November 2001)
Copyright 2000, Aquiles Est, all rights reserved

The following reflectionspart of a larger research projectare intended to intertwine the ideas of the two thinkers who have had the greatest influence on my intellectual lifeor, better yet, on my life, period. But this is an arbitrary and secondary issue. Charles Sanders Peirce and Marshall McLuhan are, it is my strong conviction, the two most important North American thinkers of all time. My objective is to point out the basic premises upon which I base the validity, utility, and rigor of such an assumption. Both of them, by the way, have their own relentlessly dark stories as New York newcomers. Peirce arrived in New York in 1895, running away from an order for his arrest issued by a courthouse in Pennsylvania. He was being prosecuted for unpaid debts and assault. His entire life reminds one of a tragicomic thriller. He lived like a pariah, without permanent residence, occasionally even stealing to eat, and plagued by the maladies of his second wife, who suffered at that time from severe gynecological ailments. From that moment until his death in 1914, Peirce daydreamed about commercializing miraculous inventions that would provide fortunes that never arrived. In despair, he imagined that there existed an international campaign designed to destroy and demoralize him. It is said that he intended to commit suicide, and, certainly, he wrote letters saying goodbye to his closest friends. Over all, however, the New York years ended up being extraordinarily productive and inspired a major turn in his philosophical system. McLuhan, on the other hand, arrived in New York in 1967 after an invitation from Fordham University and thanks to the award of a $100,000 fellowship. McLuhan reached the top of his popularity and influence in New York. In the countercultural anti-war atmosphere of 1968, he published War and Peace in the Global Village, his second book with the designer Quentin Fiore. In New York, the Canadian scholar started to go crazy, physically crazy, due to a gigantic tumorthe size of a tennis balllocated at the base of his cranium. To extirpate all the abnormal tissue, doctors had to lift his entire brain, and, in the process, some neurons were damaged. The intervention lasted a day-and-a-halfthe longest neurological procedure in U.S. history up to that time. A few years of readings got lost, McLuhan would say. But essentially, the man would never again have the emotional and intellectual fervor, nor the extraordinary memory, that had characterized him. From this point on, disaffection among his colleagues and students accompanied his intellectual and physical decay, which had caused him to be abusive and inflexible. To make things worse, his younger son, Michael, dropped out of high school and moved into an abandoned apartment in the East Side. Here, the youngster would dig into dope and the hippie experience to the chagrin of his parents. Now, one would assume that it is Peirce who requires introduction more urgently than does McLuhan. But I would warn that understanding McLuhan should not be taken for granted. McLuhan is a type of writer whose interests are displayed in disconnected mosaics, aphorisms, sudden rhetorical turns, and contradictions, scattered along thirty years of intellectual activity. McLuhan would often assert something and, later on, in another context, state quite the opposite, always dogmatically. Some of his most convincing books are capricious, disobedient, and change dramatically from one subject to the other, alternating penetrating insights with boring digressions. His main themes suffer from infinite repetition, reminiscent of those of a pop singer. McLuhan is, without a doubt, one of the most quoted and least

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studied authors of the modern world and, in a way, is comparable to Darwin, Marx, Einstein, and Freud. (Who, for instance, might have read The Laws of Media, a book whose obscurity seems calculated and whose structure seems determined to resist any traditional expectation?) At any rate, lets first go back to Peirce. The life of Charles Sanders Peirce will no doubt stand as an unrivalled example of how some individuals are scorned in their own age and rehabilitated much later. This arrogant clich of history will certainly take place in the twenty-first century in the case of this Bostonian logician, who is, beyond any doubt, the most original intellect the Americas have ever produced. During the next two decades the work of Peirce will be published in its entirety, and gradually we will have the occasion to employ, in an increasingly rigorous way, his delicate philosophical architecturethis in order to decipher, among so many other crucial things, the implications of the digital geist. The digital mode makes more appropriate and necessary not only the postulates of Marshall McLuhannot a big surprisebut more especially those of Charles Peirce. Peirce wrote ninety thousand pages, of which only 10% have been published thus far. This makes him the most prolific intellectual in the United States, beyond even John Dewey. With the publication of the Harvard Peirce Manuscripts, The New Elements of Mathematics, and the first volumes of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition; and with the founding of the Institute for Pragmatism in Lubbock Texas and the Peirce Edition Project in Indianapolis, where his manuscripts are housed, the sources are finally at our disposal to give unified form to his thought. As you will no doubt see, my assertion that Peirce is a philosopher for the twenty-first century is not simply a metaphor. Max H. Fisch, an eminent scholar of Peirce studies, offers a far more informed and even grander assessment of Peirces achievements. Fisch asks:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer Charles S. Peirce is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, economist, lifelong student of medicine; dramatist, actor, short story writer, phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician. He was, for a few examples, the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of the economy of research. He is the only system-builder philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.1

For me, Peirce is in essence a great logician and a system builder. His confessed ideal was that of designing a model that rivaled, corrected, and superseded those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, by virtue of its logical foundation, its roots in empirical science, and its connection with the history of thought. His rare mix of talents allowed him to articulate a system of ideas that certainly competes in pertinence and originality with the great edifices of Occidental philosophy. There is no mystery why such an extraordinary man is still so little known, almost ninety years after his death. Peirce was an extremely uncongenial and authoritarian man, spoiled by his father Benjamin Peirce, who was widely acknowledged as the best American mathematician of the nineteenth century. Even so, the elder Peirce maintained that, in fact, Charles was the superior mathematician in the family. Peirce was also something of a dandy, a womanizer, a drug and alcohol addictfeatures that did not sit well with the provincial and insecure post-Civil War universities of his day. The only stable job he held as an academic was at Johns Hopkins (probably the first American college that designed true graduate courses). He lost the position, actually a lectureship, right after the third year of his stay in Baltimore, for associating with

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an eccentric French woman while still married to his first wife. We should also consider the fact that the United States is a society that has never praised its intellectuals in the fashion Europeans do. We all know that this country has a richly contradictory tradition of acclaiming achievement over abstract authoritya trend that, by the way, has gained unprecedented arrogance with the onset of the Internet Economy and its admiration for hands-on knowledge. In any case, I am convinced that the core reason why Peirce has not attained the status his work deserves has to do with the subtlety and originality of his findings, among which his theory of semiotic evolutionism is uppermost. None of his writings on semiotics were published during his lifequite a paradox given the fact that he is today considered the father of modern semiotics, which is by far the most rigorous and comprehensive theory of information ever created. His doctrine of signs pervades his entire system of thought and offers a pattern to explain all the ontological aspects of the universe of signs, by virtue of which information exchanges take place, both in nature and in cultural systems. Traditional and urgent problems of epistemology, the acquisition of meaning, and the difference between reality and fiction gain clear and precise explanation with the help of Peirces semiotics. Peirce is being rehabilitated for the simple fact that he provides a theory that relates to a postmodern conception of man. Our age is neither ontocentric like the classical and Latin ages, nor anthropocentric like the Renaissance, nor logocentric like modern times; ours is semiocentric. We now understand that everything is relative because everything depends in absolute ways on the existence of signs. To my understanding, Peirces idea of signification is not conceived in an evolutionary void as is the case with Saussures semiological project, nor does it privilege language as a paradigm to explain the remaining forms of communication. Instead, Peirce sees semiosis, the action of signs, at the heart of a world that is evolutionary on its own, pervaded by, if not composed exclusively of, signs. In culturea particular state of evolutionthe activity of signs connects with human experience and all its different communitarian institutions, languages, and artifacts. Peirce understands the naturalistic foundation of semiosis as previous and simultaneous to any human endeavor. Here we reach the very point I have been driving at, for it is my deep conviction that Peirces ideas intimately resonate with, extend, and tune up McLuhans understanding of cultural evolution. Technically, they both promote a conception of evolution that very clearly overcomes Descartess radical distinction between res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (thought). Accordingly, I consider Peirce the first postmodern thinker, while McLuhan is certainly the most prominent one. For Peirce there are only two types of operative actions in the universe: dyadic actionsor the mechanicaland triadic actionsor those involved in growing processes, signification, and mediation. In Peirces view, the world is not divided into things (mechanical actions) on one side and signs (mediational actions) on the other. The universe depends instead on the relationship between things that can become signs and signs that can only be signs because they are things too. Signs can only be interpreted by other signs, that is to say, by other elements of the evolutionary chain of thought. This is pretty much what happens when we look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary. What we find are some other words explaining what the former means. Appropriately, Peirce insists that just as we say that a body is in motion and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us. [. . .]2 He continues: The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community [. . .].3 Such an assertion resounds deep in McLuhans view. McLuhan says:

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I have insisted that any new structure for codifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social liveseven without benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance [. . .]. That is what Ive always meant by the medium is the message.4

The works of both Peirce and McLuhan entail a rejection of the Cartesian notion of mind, which served as the grounding for modern subjectivism and psychologism. Intertwining these two authors helps us understand the philosophical implications of McLuhans findings, most of them encapsulated in the phrase the medium is the message. Those five little words, like the aphorisms of the pre-Socratics, are ultimately more profound than the entire works of Marx and all those that assume economic determinism as the principal device for deciphering cultural evolution. After all, the cold war was won because some people believed that the driving force in history was not the conflict of classes but the recognition of media as the message. To be more accurate, while it is true that McLuhan never presented his findings in terms of a social theory, he helped recognize that class struggle could not be abstracted from the invisible service that environments created by the work process itself. In other words, Marx failed to consider the total system that he claimed to describe. Marx did not see how capitalism was bound to bring travel, consumption, and education to the common people: When Europeans used to visit America before the Second World War they would say, But you have Communism here! What they meant was that we not only had standardized goods, but everybody had them. Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really thought of themselves as middle-class people.5 Elsewhere, he writes: Today, with the multi-billion service environments available to everybody, almost for free, (these include the massive educational and information world of advertising) it means that we have plunged very deep into tribal Communism on a scale unknown in human history [. . .]. What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history.6 McLuhan was rehabilitated in the nineties for the essential reason that he had the poetic and epistemic tools to recognize, forty years ago, that electronic media were not a trend, not even a revolution, but a whole change of anthropological proportions. I have said, McLuhan claimed, that the medium is the message in the long run. It would be easy to explain and confirm this point historically. He explains:
Print simply wiped out the main modes of oral education that had been devised in the Greco-Roman world and transmitted with the phonetic alphabet and the manuscript throughout the medieval period. And it ended that twenty-five-hundred year pattern in a few decades. Today, the monarchy of print has ended and an oligarchy of new media has usurped most of the power of that twenty-five-hundred year old monarchy.7

The interconnection of McLuhan with Peirce mutually illuminates their evolutionary visions and gives us the grounding to identify major present and future changes within a broader philosophical frame. At the same time, and at less abstract levels, Peirces triadic system provides a map in which we can expand and tune up the usual McLuhanesque dichotomies that we commonly apply to current communication phenomenahot and cool, acoustic and visual, medium and message. Peirces classification of signs, of which the triad icon/index/symbol is the most famous, provides the epistemic foundation for a fullfledged ecology of media. These are not mutually exclusive types of signs but rather elements of semiosis that vary greatly in their relative prominence in different contexts of information exchange. We may therefore call a sign, for short, by the name of that aspect that is most prominent about it, or to which we want to direct attention, without thereby implying that the sign has no element or aspect of the other two kinds. McLuhan saw these interrelations in a more intuitive, recognizable way by asserting that the content of any medium is another medium. Peirces theory of scientific discovery helps us explain what I would call the three McLuhans. In Peirces terms, the first McLuhan would be the abductive one. Peirce proved that to interpret surprising facts we had to propose surprising hypotheses. Such ideas must be very adventurous because they are trying to explain phenomena whose behaviors respond to unknown rules. This is what Peirce calls abduction,

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hypothesis, or simply guessing. With this in mind, I would call our first McLuhan the abductive one, that is to say, the poet, the fortune-teller, the magician of hypothesis and interplay of things that, originally, were not meant to be connected. This is the type of author who is mostly related to the sixtiesa moment typified by a new appetite for tolerance and respect towards the poetic modes throughout the whole social fabric, from the anti-war youngsters and the academics to the businessmen. The second McLuhan would be the inductive one. He is the intellectual who came back into fashion because he certainly had the capacity of explaining localized side effects of technology that not only became pertinent but urgent to most of us. This is the author who used to go back to the medium to treat it as a hidden ground, in which the symptoms of the out-of-awareness new environment reside. This is the McLuhan who influenced businessmen during the sixties and seventies and also the intellectual who is related to the ninetiesthe patron saint of the digital age. Finally, we find the deductive McLuhan, the evolutionist, who is apt to provide the laws of cultural evolution and, perhaps, the rules of a new semiocentric metaphysics. I would like to think that this is the McLuhan for the first decades of this century. In my opinion, this third McLuhan needs the help of some other thinkers, like Peirce, who have a more rigorous logical-epistemic grounding. But Peirce himself also needs the help of McLuhan. With McLuhans presence, Peirce may eventually become a cool author, fully incorporated into media studies. Semioticians need the sly, cunning touch of McLuhan to surmount the unnecessary aura of arrogance and the useless abstraction that so many others have denounced: McLuhan finds the key to our overloaded cultural environment, and his swift rhythms, playful If these two authors are indeed the most important North American intellectuals ever, we ought to explain why these two gentlemen, separated by time, both considered signification, mediation, and interface the critical aspects to deciphering reality.
Aquiles Est can be reached at ae35@nyu.edu

tone and deft touch make academic semiotics look ponderous, pretentious and pointlessly abstract.8

ENDNOTES
1 Max Harold Fisch, Introductory Note, Thomas Albert Sebeok, The Play of Musement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) 17.

Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 5.289, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-66).
3

Charles S. Peirce 5.354.

Marshall McLuhan, The Man who Infuriates the Critics, interview with Thomas P. McDonnell, U.S. Catholic 1966. Quoted in Paul Benedetti and Nancy Dehart, eds., Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan (Cambridge: MIT, 1996) 106. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 198.

Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, eds. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 373. Marshall McLuhan, Fourteenth National Conference on Higher Education, 1959. Quoted in Benedetti and Dehart 142.
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Camille Paglia, The North American Intellectual Tradition (salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/03/04/inteltrad/ index.html).