On renaissances.
McLuhan, Eric
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of
culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.
(Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy)
WHY are there no studies of renaissance as a phenomenon? We in the
West have now endured a sufficient number of them that we ought, in
hindsight, to be able to enunciate at least a few general principles.
Such at least will be the aim of these brief notes. I do not know that
any study has ever been made of renaissances in general. Every study
that I have seen concerns this renaissance or that renaissance in
particular; occasionally, two renaissances are looked at simultaneously
for contrast or comparison. Such studies are well focused and properly
scholarly; and there is besides the veritable wealth of books about this
or that renaissance for general consumption. But there are no
book-length studies, nor is there even a single article, concerning
renaissances as a phenomenon.
Our renaissances have a number of characteristics in common. One of
the most remarkable, perhaps, is the numbing effect of the spectacular
event. Consequently, there is never, at the time, any realization or
acknowledgement that a renaissance is underway. This paradox is the
first characteristic of renaissances, and it applies also to our own
time: a renaissance is always invisible to those who live through it. To
them, the action of renewal and revivification is so habitual that they
accept it as the norm: the convulsion was too completely environmental
to be noticeable as such. At such times, one notices only that matters
are in an advanced state of chaos. Change follows upon change and there
does not appear to be a direction or pattern to it all. The
feeble-minded chant "Change is Good!" and burble slogans about
"progress" to allay their uncertainties. Change is generally
catastrophe in slow motion.
Another characteristic is this: a renaissance is not an isolated
phenomenon. A renaissance is a side-effect of a precipitating action or
event occurring elsewhere. Some new technology arrives on the scene and
radically reshapes perception; similarly, an undersea earthquake can
spin off a tsunami wave. In the case of the renaissance presently
underway, we have been treated to a protracted cascade of electric
technologies from the A.C. motor to the MP3, from the telegraph to the
satellite, the radio to the Internet or GPS or "cloud"
computing. A renaissance always accompanies an earthquake in
sensibility: it is the outer manifestation of interiorizing a
technology.
The first area of the culture to respond to the onset of a
renaissance is the arts: as the poet Ezra Pound observed, artists
function as "the antennae of the race." One after another, all
of the arts burst into renewed life and sometimes into furies of
innovation. The spectacular efflorescence in the arts diverts attention
from the comparatively ponderous reorganization of culture and society.
Some, perhaps many, of the sciences will also be affected and will make
major discoveries, will revise or replace long-held theories.
A renaissance is the leading edge of a new mode of culture and
society; it brings with it a new-fashioned identity. That is, while the
renaissance is evident almost immediately because of the ferment in the
arts, the accompanying new culture will be discovered some time after it
has established itself, perhaps two or three generations later. The arts
are the Early Warning System.
Another remarkable feature of renaissances is this: each is
accompanied by a major war. In our present case, we have had World Wars
One and Two and the Cold War, to mention a few, and now we are embroiled
in the first round of the Terrorist Wars. At the speed of light, the
front is gone, the battleground is the entire globe and that much larger
paysage interieur. In War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), we
showed that violence is always a response to a sudden change in patterns
of identity.
WE habitually refer to the magnificent renaissance of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries as the Grand Renaissance because it so far
outshone the glories of all previous renaissances; but the renaissance
that ushers us into the twenty-first century, this new millennium, is
grander by far because it subsumes all prior times and all prior forms
of awareness. In the West we are recycling and revisiting not only our
own culture but also exploring all the others--every form of experience
that humans have ever created or indulged. The content, then, of the
renaissance surging about us is the entire Neolithic era. The Neolithic
age, which is now over, used the pastoral hunter as its content and has
for over a century used pastoralism as its esthetic. Our present
environment is not made up of specialized tools; rather, it is
constituted of information and software.
The Orient is undergoing the same retrievals, of Western culture as
well as its own, in the same measure and degree that we are
rediscovering the East. Similarly, this is the new rise of Islam. And we
have just launched another phase of this rolling renaissance on the
Internet and the World Wide Web. These new forms demand participation
and are by their very nature inclusive and encyclopedic. Our new media
environments are now global instead of being confined to a single
culture or society. They bring every culture on earth into abrasive
interface with every other--an experience which fuels terrorist fury.
The Grand Renaissance of the sixteenth century is aptly named not
only because it was the grandest and most comprehensive renaissance in
human experience, but also because it involved the entire cultural
matrix of the Western world. Certainly, the renaissance of the twelfth
century seemed to the participants no less grand and less extensive, yet
to us it still pales somewhat by comparison with the events of the
sixteenth century. But we should notice that both of these cultural
explosions were just that--outward movements, expansions; our present
renaissance, powered by electricity and vastly more extensive and
eclectic than any of the others, is implosive because it involves the
entire globe at once. Once the entire globe is involved, no further
expansion--or expansionism--is possible. This condition raises the
prospect that, unlike any previous time, this twenty-first-century
renaissance will simply continue without surcease, that renaissance will
become our permanent address.
All oral and tribal peoples regard present and past and future as a
single multidimensional cycle or set of cycles or gyres, a vortex of
cultural energies that charges them with being and cosmic significance
and destiny. We have echoes of this sense of things today in the popular
reappearance, for example, of reincarnation, and even in the saying,
"what goes around comes around." In the electric age, all
times are simultaneously present and accessible as real, available
experience. Cyclicity implies dynamism and compactness, a means to
charge and re-charge the cultural batteries. The alternative, the
familiar rational line of history, presents instead a single prolonged
discharge or endless effusion. Today we live in post-history in the
sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness
and that all the futures that will be are here now. To live today is to
live mythically in all cultures and times at once: the narrative of
history now concludes, as does the history of narrative. If there is a
future to history, it resides, as the Italian rhetorician Giambattista
Vico tried to indicate, in the hands of poets and artists.
A brief review of our acknowledged renaissances may suggest some
further observations.
FOR the Grand Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
the driving technology was clearly the printing press. It ushered in a
flowering and retrieval such as still holds the world in thrall,
including a revival of learning, of ancient rhetoric, and of the entire
manuscript culture of the ancient world and the middle ages. The
explosion of culture extended to newfound territories around the world
and ushered in a spate of empire-building by Spain, Portugal, England,
and others, made possible by the new technology of ocean-going ships.
Like the present one, which got underway in the nineteenth century, this
renaissance straddles two centuries: it began in the fifteenth and
continued in the sixteenth century.
The same universal recognition holds true for the "Medieval
Renaissance," the renaissance of the twelfth century. The fact that
it is widely deemed to be of lesser significance than that of the
sixteenth century is a matter of comparison only, so much is it
overshadowed by the Grand Renaissance. Yet this period enjoyed a
pronounced revival of learning due to the reappearance of paper
supplies.
The renaissance of the twelfth century might conceivably be taken
so broadly as to cover all the changes through which Europe passed in
the hundred years or more from the late eleventh century to the taking
of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204 and the contemporary events
which usher in the thirteenth century, just as we speak of the Age of
the Renaissance in later Italy ... More profitably we may limit the
phrase to the history of culture in this age--the complete development
of Romanesque art and the rise of Gothic; the full bloom of vernacular
poetry, both lyric and epic; and the new learning and new literature in
Latin. The century begins with the flourishing age of the cathedral
schools and closes with the earliest universities already well
established at Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Montpelier, and Oxford. It
starts with only the bare outlines of the seven liberal arts and ends in
possession of the Roman and canon law, the new Aristotle, the new Euclid
and Ptolemy, and the Greek and Arabic physicians, thus making possible a
new philosophy and a new science. It sees a revival of the Latin
classics, of Latin prose, and of Latin verse, both in the ancient style
of Hildebert and the new rhymes of the Goliardi, and the formation of
the liturgical drama ... (Haskins 6-8)
Where the renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
a renaissance of rhetoric and audience-making, that of the twelfth
century was a renaissance of manuscript culture and the ancient
tradition of literary studies, the translatio studii. Prior to these
events there was another also sometimes called a "medieval
renaissance": I refer to Charlemagne and the Carolingian
renaissance and the Carolingian empire.
Charles the Great, crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in
Rome in A.D. 800, believed that his own preoccupation with the arts and
sciences was the very duty of a ruler.
It has sometimes been alleged that idealism prompted the artists
and scholars of Europe to gather at the court of Charlemagne in order to
unite their efforts for the cultivation of classical beauty and wisdom.
They were, after all, so the argument runs, true humanists who
endeavoured to re-kindle the fire of culture and to keep it alive for
coming generations. They had no interest in material gain. Alcuin, the
model of this kind of humanism, repeatedly praised poverty and impressed
his idealistic motives upon his readers. Notker. also, explained that
the first of the "humanists" had not been prompted by desire
for material gain when they had first approached the royal court. (Innis
116)
Another driving technology was the stirrup: the Franks of the
eighth century invented mounted shock combat (Whyte). Antiquity imagined
the centaur; the Middle Ages made him the master of Europe. The times
bring to mind to mind such personages as Bede, Alcuin, St. Boniface; in
the eighth century, England held the intellectual leadership of Europe,
and it owed this leadership to the Church. The earliest written records
of Old English date from this time. In the eighth century, English
vernacular literature and the arts received new impetus. Workers in
stone and glass were brought from the continent for the improvement of
church-building. Islam was on the rise.
As regards military conflict at this time, the fallout of this
renaissance included the partition of Europe and the decline of the
tribal structure of that continent, the rise of the royal houses, and
the schism between the Eastern and Western churches.
Two earlier renaissances loom as part of this survey. The first of
these occurred in the fourth century A.D., the other at the turn of the
millennium, about the year zero. Constantine, 288-337 or so, established
Christianity as the religious foundation of Western civilization. A few
familiar names will give some points of orientation: St. Augustine, St.
Jerome, Martianus Capella. At this time, too, the West repels assaults
by Persia and Eastern empires. The Edict of Milan, 313, gave for the
first time full legal recognition to the Christian community. The
Council of Nicea, in 325, was the world's first Ecumenical Council.
This time also initiated Caesaropapism: the emperor's becoming head
of the Christian commonwealth precipitated a massive retrieval,
refurbishing, and renewal. May 11, 330, saw the foundation of
Constantinople. This city was intended from the outset to be the center
of art and learning. Charlemagne built its libraries and stocked them
with Greek manuscripts from an antiquity that included the great
products of classical Greece. He filled the streets and squares and
museums with art treasures drawn from all over the Greek orient.
Four centuries before these events, the emperor Caesar Augustus
mounted a massive program of cultural reform. It undertook a careful
retrieval of ancient Roman values and culture. Augustus revived and
reestablished the office of vates, the poet/priest of the temple of
Palatine Apollo, devoted to the spiritual side of Roman culture. It had
a cultural priesthood devoted to the "sacred" responsibilities
of poetry and the arts, and gave high salience to the work of Horace,
Varro, and Virgil. This time was a period also of moral and social
reform. Christianity made its appearance ...
Nor is this the end of the matter.
Since we are surveying Western renaissances, and the West may be
said to have been defined by the phonetic alphabet, if we look beyond
the zero date we will discover that the pattern operative in the
Christian Era had an earlier beginning, though the date of the first
renaissance is in doubt. Certainly the fifth-to-fourth-century glory of
Athens would qualify: all of the other characteristics are in place. The
eighth century B.C. presents us with Homer and Hesiod and the early
onset of phonetic literacy, which instilled a dramatically new bias of
sensibility and occasioned the first major retrievals due to alphabetic
writing. The Theogony was used as a pattern for retrieving and
systematizing the Greek religion and to regularize ideas of the gods and
goddesses. This was also the time of the Hoplite revolution, occasioned
by bronze armor and by the innovation of cavalry.
This eighth-century revolution affected not just the arts but every
walk of life. It accompanied the maturity of the Greek Iron Age... Iron
had been in use from before the turn of the millennium (the "early
Iron Age") but an enormous development of iron metallurgy between
c. 750 and c. 650 improved and accelerated the speed and efficiency of
life in many fields, and under this more stable mode of existence the
population of Greece multiplied to a remarkable extent.
This increased number of inhabitants encouraged a wholesale switch
from pasturage to arable farming, and food-production notably
intensified. (Grant 7) (1)
The events Homer recorded in Iliad and Odyssey, occurred four
centuries earlier still, in about the twelfth century B.C., which was
also a time of renaissance, for Troy, perhaps, and certainly for
Mycenae. It was called the Golden Age, the beginning of the great
Classical Period in Greece.
The curious thing that emerges from our survey of Western
renaissances is the realization that they occur in a regular
four-century rhythm: every fourth century we have a renaissance. That
isn't to say that nothing goes on in the intervals between
renaissances: a great deal does, beyond question. But whatever does
occupy those times does not qualify as a full-scale renaissance of the
sort we've been discussing.
Now, I realize that the four-century cycles are clearly not at all
exact. Charles Haskins pointed out that, when one is dealing with
effusions such as renaissances,
chronological limits are not easy to set. Centuries are at best but
arbitrary conveniences which must not be permitted to clog or distort
our historical thinking: history cannot remain history if sawed off into
even lengths of hundreds of years. (Haskins 8-9)
RENAISSANCES have this one common characteristic: each one results
from an earlier action. Some spasm or cultural convulsion pulled the
awareness of the culture into a new shape. In other words, what we
normally notice about a renaissance, the intensifying of artistic action
and innovation, is actually a side-effect of a deeper action. Then, a
renaissance is the shock-wave produced as that technology penetrates the
whole culture and works its particular influence. So the pattern
we've found in our renaissances shows us the effects, not the
causes. The questions in each case then arise:
* What caused such a massive drift in perception as to reinvigorate
these old things? And to do so in this or that particular manner?
* What prodded perception into that manner of noticing?
* Where was the stress applied?
In each case, the precipitating or deciding factor was a new
technology.
Then, if there is in fact a cycle or rhythm of renaissances in
Western culture, does this mean that there is in our culture a definite
rhythm to our technologies? We already know that, with the first tools,
human evolution shifted from biology to technology. In all of creation,
we are the only species that has thus taken charge of the course of our
own evolution. That is, inasmuch as the technologies are actual
extensions of a biological organism (us), may not that rhythm be a
biological one?
Now, what of the renaissance around us? Its underpinnings include
the cascade of electric technologies over the last century and a half:
radio, telegraph, film, television, videotape, computer ... The pace is
accelerating, with personal computers, cellular telephones, global
positioning satellites, space exploration and space telescopes, virtual
reality, interactive multimedia, the Internet, and the World Wide Web
all appearing in a couple of decades. We have undergone an explosion of
interest in outer space and other planets, voyages to the moon, probes
sent to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. One immediate result of satellites
was our discovery (rebirth) of Earth as a polluted planet that needed
cleaning up and updating. Nature ended, the planet became an art form
inside a manned capsule, and life will never be the same. Nature ended
and art took over. Ecology is art. Since the present renaissance began
in the nineteenth century, we have seen an extensive list of
innovations, more than a few of which would have been enough to launch a
distinctly new form of sensibility, as events have proven: the
telegraph, the photograph, movies, television, satellites, computers,
and so on. Any of these would, under ordinary circumstances, have set a
renaissance in motion. But we have had one after another without, it
seems, a break, and the rolling renaissance seems to continue washing
over our culture and civilization unabated, instead of waxing and
waning. Possibly, then, our renaissance is not one but actually a series
of overlapping renaissances, each feeding on the energy of the last. As
the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological
rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most
valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective
purposes.
ONE further characteristic: our renaissances are generally
accompanied by Vatican Councils. In the case of the renaissance
presently humming around us, we have had two. We may expect a third
before long. Noticing that the Councils of Nicea and Trent occurred
during renaissances, I took a closer look and found the following: more
than half the Church Councils held have occurred during renaissances,
and they tend to be the major ones. Here is a list of those that
coincided with renaissances.
Twenty-First (Ecumenical Council: Vatican Two
Reformed the Mass, the Catechism, demoted Latin. Etc.
Twentieth (Ecumenical Council: Vatican One
Dec. 1869 to July 1870
Pope: Pius IX
Decreed Infallibility ex cathedra
The Council of Trent (19th (Ecumenical)
A.D. 1545-1563
Five Popes: Paul III, Julius III, Marcellus II, Paul IV, Pius IV
Vs. Luther and other reformers.
Reform the Church, improve discipline
Infallibility ex cathedra
The Fifth Lateran (18th (Ecumenical) Council
A.D. 1512-1517
The Council of Constance (16t" (Ecumenical)
A.D. 1414-1418 (rather early?)
The Eleventh (Ecumenical / Third Lateran Council
A.D. 1179
Pope Alexander III
Vs. Albigensians
The Tenth (Ecumenical / Second Lateran Council
A.D. 1139
Pope Innocent II
1000 prelates, & Emperor Conrad
The Ninth (Ecumenical / First Lateran Council (the first one held
in the Lateran)
A.D. 1123
Pope Callistus II
900 bishops & abbots
The Seventh (Ecumenical Council or Second Council of Nicea
A.D. 787
Convoked by Constantine VI & his mother, Irene
Pope: Adrian One
Regulated veneration of images
The Second (Ecumenical Council or First General Council of
Constantinople
A.D. 381
Pope Damasus
Emperor Theodosius I
150 bishops
Added end articles to the Creed
The First (Ecumenical Council, or The Council of Nicea
A.D. 325, lasted 2 mo. 12 days
Pope: Sylvester
Emperor Constantine
318 bishops were present
Nicene Creed; Vs. Arius; fixed date of Easter
I leave you with the mystery of the renaissance cycles and with a
few questions.
* Are there in fact other iterations of the four-century cycle? In
the sixteenth century B.C., for example? Or the twentieth, or
twenty-fourth centuries B.C.?
* What precipitating technologies are responsible for each
renaissance? Can we now use the cycle to date other major technological
revolutions as accurately as carbon dating allows us to do, for example?
Might it be possible to use this cycle as a guide to events in
prehistory? In Laws of Media: The New Science (1988), we showed that all
human innovation is a form of speech, that the things we make have
exactly the same structure as our words. Technology is language without
syntax. This suggests that the rhythm of renaissances in our culture
reflects some fundamental rhythm of a verbal and uniquely human
nature--an area for further investigation.
* What is the significance and meaning of events in the intervening
centuries? Is there a rhythm to them too?
* Do other, non-Western, cultures march to a different rhythm or
observe a different pattern of renaissance? Or do they have no rhythm at
all? That is, is the four-century cycle to our
innovations-and-retrievals-and-renaissances peculiar to the West alone?
Or does it actually extend to other cultures such as those in the Orient
or in Central or South America or in Africa or in primitive Europe?
Perhaps other cultures do have different rhythms. China, for example,
and Egypt have followed the lines of force of the dynasty, rather than
those of the democracy, and their social rhythms clearly differ from
ours. Their language-patterns and language-rhythms differ from ours, and
I would maintain that innovation and utterance are linked absolutely.
I have tried in the foregoing to sketch a complex matter. In the
process I have had to omit an immensity of detail and of related
concerns cultural and anthropological. The entire matter of our
renaissances and their relation to technological and perceptual change
deserves prolonged study. More important, however, is the mystery of the
renaissance underway at the present: the first Global Renaissance. The
present is not too soon to mount studies of the present situation, if
only for orientation. With some awareness of the environmental pressures
on psyche and society alike, we might discover means to channel or
control some of those energies, to reduce human misery, preserve
cultures, and allay international uncertainty.
Works Cited
Grant, Michael. The Rise of the Greeks. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons,1987.
Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1972.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man. U of Toronto P, 1962.
McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science.
U of Toronto P, 1988.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the Global
Village. Bantam Books, 1968.
Whyte, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford UP,
1966.
Notes
(1) See also R. Higg, ed., The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth
Century B.C.--Tradition and Innovation (Stockholm, 1983).
