Marshall McLuhan

 	Inside on the Outside, or the Spaced-Out American

Probing the hidden element of space
behind such diverse phenomena as privacy,
group speech, television, facial behaviour,
and literacy suggests that "simultaneous structures ...
are eating out the heart of American institutions".

North Americans may well be the only people in the world who go outside 
to be alone and inside to be social.  This hidden ground of our corporate 
awareness surfaced for me when I was to give a talk to some British 
advertisers about the North American attitude to advertising.  By way of 
illustrating the considerable difference between the two attitudes, I 
mentioned our resistance and rejection of ads in movies.  For some years 
I had mentioned this attitude to graduate students who were quite aware 
that Europeans make no objection to advertising in theatres and movies, 
until one student volunteered the observation:  "We take our dates to 
movies to be alone, and don't wish to have our privacy invaded".  At that 
point I began to make more observations concerning our attitudes to space 
in domestic and public buildings, and also our attitudes to space as 
expressed in literature.

The North American quest for privacy out-of-doors, and our turning 
indoors to the home as a friendly group space, holds very firm in Thoreau 
and Whitman and in Henry James, and many others.  Reading Lord Durham's 
1839 Report (1, p. 91) I was struck by the following passage:

		The provision which in Europe, the State makes for the 
protection of its citizens against foreign enemies, is in America 
required for what a French writer has beautifully and accurately called 
the "war with the wilderness".  The defence of an important fortress, or 
the maintenance of a sufficient army or navy in exposed spots, is not 
more a matter of concern to the European, than is the construction of the 
great communications to the American settler; and the State, very 
naturally, takes on itself the making of the works, which are matters of 
concern to all alike.

What stood our starkly for me was the phrase "war with the wilderness".  
I suddenly realized that this phrase defined our attitude to the 
out-of-doors and our typical acceptance of the indoors as a friendly 
refuge.  Since then, Margaret Atwood's remarks in Survival (2, p.60) have 
increased my awareness of the hidden ground of our attitudes to inner and 
outer space:

		The war against Nature assumed that Nature was hostile to 
begin with; man could fight and lose, or he could fight and win.  If he 
won he would be rewarded:  he could conquer and enslave Nature, and, in 
practical terms, exploit her resources.  But it is increasingly obvious 
to some writers that man is now more destructive towards Nature than 
Nature can be towards man; and, furthermore, that the destruction of 
Nature is equivalent to self-destruction on the part of man.

Whereas we accept the phone as an invader of our
homes, we are by no means ready to leap outside our homes
for socializing in the way which the videophone demands.

Maybe that is why Bell Telephone had to give up the videophone after 
spending millions on research and experiments.  Picking up the 
videophone, we are literally "on the air" as much as if we were in a 
broadcasting studio.  North Americans have not developed institutions 
suited to socializing away from home.  It is not only in the movie and in 
the theatre that we seek privacy, but also at restaurants and in 
nightclubs.

Another problem of the videophone relates to a very deep factor in the 
North American idea of going outside the home.  We are probably the only 
people in the First World who use only our private voices when we leave 
our homes.  British and Europeans alike put on a group voice, or some 
variety of "standard" English, French, German, etc.  In contrast, we 
associate group voices in America with unassimilated ethnic groups and 
Southerners, considering all of these to be socially comic.  Group, 
rather than private, voices are normal in all the rest of the world, 
forming the principal base of class society.  It would seem possible, 
then, that the reason for the classless character of American society is 
not so much economic, as the use of private instead of group speech.  
Whenever group speech surfaces as a form of elitism in America, it at 
once becomes part of the repertory of humour.

The North American also goes outside to be alone, both for work and for 
play, so that the coffee break as a form of socializing on company time 
can be remembered by many as a kind of social revolution.  The English 
Charlie Chaplin was so struck by this strange lack of sociability of 
North Americans in public places that he based his entire saga on the 
little man who goes out and finds nobody to talk with.  Chaplin's films 
stress the failure of policemen to chat, and also of waiters and 
employers, and even of fellow workers.  Recently a French visitor was 
reporting that Europeans take for granted that the Chaplin saga is a 
documentary of American life.  The same Frenchman spoke of the alarm felt 
in France at the obvious (to them) decline of intellectual life seen in 
the smaller numbers of diners at cafes.  We, on the other hand, try to 
measure the level of intellectual life by the number of serious books 
read at home in silence and privacy.

D.H. Lawrence, in his introduction to Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs (3), 
may well have misread the entire American attitude to the out-of-doors 
and to social life by imposing his U.K. idea of uniformity on the 
American.  He read the American need for privacy when out-of-doors as a 
metaphysical revulsion from human contact as such, completely unaware of 
the figure-ground relationship whereby the American finds indoors the 
warmth and sociability which the European cultivates outside the home.  
It is true that Lawrence perceived the American as figure against the 
ground of a vast and recalcitrant continent.  However, Lawrence 
transferred his U.K. feeling for inner and outer spaces to a new world 
which long before had radically reversed the older use and meaning of 
these forms:

		This is, roughly, the American position today, as it was the 
position of the Red Indian when the white man came, and of the Aztec and 
of the Peruvian.  So far as we can make out, neither Redskin nor Aztec 
nor Inca had any conception of a "good" god.  They conceived of 
implacable, indomitable Powers, which is very different.  And that seems 
to me the essential American position today.  Of course the white 
American believes that man should behave in a kind and benevolent 
manner.  But this is a social belief and a social gesture, rather than an 
individual flow.  The flow from the heart, the warmth of fellow-feeling 
which has animated Europe and been the best of her humanity, individual, 
spontaneous, flowing in the thousands of little passionate currents often 
conflicting, this seems unable to persist on the American soil.  Instead 
you get the social creed of benevolence and uniformity, a mass will, and 
an inward individual retraction, an isolation, an amorphous separateness 
like grains of sand, each grain isolated upon its own unyielding, yet 
heaped together with all the other grains.  This makes the American mass 
the easiest mass in the world to rouse, to move.  And probably, under a 
long stress, it would make it the most difficult mass in the world to 
hold together (3, p. ix-x).

If Europeans complain about our lack of friendliness in elevators and 
restaurants and theatres, visitors to Europe have long complained about 
how seldom they get to visit any European homes.

The entire paradox of the "reversed space" of the North American 
frustrated Henry James who made it a psychological crux in his novels, 
regarding it as "the complex fate" of being American.  James' delight in 
presenting his American personae to European bewilderment is a very rich 
subject indeed, but one which depends entirely on understanding the 
peculiar American quest for solitude in the wilderness, and discovering 
thereby a privacy and a psychic dimension which Europeans cannot 
encompass or understand.  The conflict in the mind of Henry James had 
occurred earlier in the life and work of Hawthorne.  The latter had also 
confused the North American quest for privacy out-of-doors with a weak 
concession of autocratic values and thereby a betrayal of democratic 
values.  In going outside to be social, the European seemed more 
democratic than the North American going outside to be alone:

		To state the case succinctly:  Hawthorne's compulsive 
affirmation of American positives, particularly in the political sense, 
led to a rejection of the idea of solitude; and solitude as an expression 
of aristocratic withdrawal sided with Europe rather than America when the 
two traditions stated their respective claims (4, p. 57).

Henry James finally clarified the conflict by a confession about his 
personal life which he confided to Hamlin Garland:

		He became very much in earnest at last and said something 
which surprised and gratified me.  It was an admission I had not expected 
him to make.  "If I were to live my life over again," he said in a low 
voice, and fixing upon me a somber glance, "I would be an American.  I 
would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.  I would study 
its beautiful side.  The mixture of Europe and America which you see in 
me has proved disastrous.  It has made of me a man who is neither 
American nor European.  I have lost touch with my own people, and I live 
here alone.  My neighbours are friendly, but they are not of my blood, 
except remotely.  As a man grows old he feels these conditions more than 
when he is young.  I shall never return to the United States, but I wish 
I could" (5, p. 461).

Perhaps the most obvious and least noticed
feature of going outside to be alone in North America
is seen in the role of the car in our lives.

The North American car is designed and used for privacy.  Unlike the 
European car, it is a big enclosed space, well suited to the business of 
meditation and decision-making.  Almost as much as TV, the car demands 
peripheral vision which undermines the "tunnel vision" needed for 
reading.  The motor car, then, for us is not only a means of 
transportation, but a way of achieving a deeply needed privacy when 
outside.

It goes without saying that there is very little privacy in the North 
American home because we do not seek it there but, rather, outside in our 
cars.  An unexpected factor in changing our attitudes to the inside and 
outside is in TV itself.  TV brings the outside (with all its dangers and 
violence) into the peacefulness of our homes.  If we began 200 years by 
assuming that to be out-of-doors was to be violent in the course of 
subduing Nature, then this pattern persists in the programming of TV.

The inside/outside flip provides a key to another very
special problem -- the North American physiognomy.

It has long been a mystery to students of the human countenance why North 
Americans should have, as Henry James has suggested, "so much countenance 
and so little face".  On this subject W.H. Auden commented in The Dyers 
Hand (6, pp. 103-104):

		Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the 
comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men 
and women who look like elderly babies.  If he stays in the States for 
any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack 
of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human 
life as keenly as anybody else.  The only plausible explanation I can 
find lies in his different attitude to the past.  To have a face, in the 
European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy 
and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most 
humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

		More than any other people, perhaps, the Americans obey the 
scriptural injunction:  "Let the dead bury their dead".

		When I consider others I can easily believe that their 
bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable.  But 
it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I 
inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or 
without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

Auden here seems clearly to indicate that Americans do not go outside to 
socialize facially, whereas Europeans put on a mask when they go outside, 
in order to preserve their privacy.

The strategy would seem to apply to speech where the American refuses to 
put on a group voice which would serve to mask his private self, whereas 
the European uses the "standard" speech as a corporate mask to preserve 
privacy.

Sorel Etrog, the international sculptor, has illustrated the 
inside/outside conundrum.  The Etrog world presents the tension between 
the old organic visual world and the new electronic discarnate man.  He 
enacts the conflict between the images of the old assembly-line and the 
pull towards the holistic new primitive man of electric circuitry.  The 
clash between the old connected world and the new world of postures and 
intervals is dramatized in the mobile hinge metaphors which present a 
world that grabs but does not relate to traditional values.

The Etrog drama is a conflict between rigid hardware and completely 
flexible modules that are forms of instant replay.  This is a drama of 
dialogue and interchange between experience and meaning, between percept 
and concept, which yields up the secrets of the ancient skeleton.  
Etrog's art reveals the inescapable attention between the outside and the 
inside as they exchange roles in a space/time action of visions and 
re-visions.  Etrog's images take up where the machine left off with its 
approximation of primitive abstract art.

In the electric age the mechanical world automatically becomes an art 
form, an art language of old clichs being transformed into new 
archetypes.  The contemporary world experiences a transformation of the 
old machine and its consumer products into transcended images of art and 
archaeology.  The mechanical age had pushed man into the machine mold.  
The man who had been subdued into a mechanism by time/motion studies in 
the early twentieth century now rebels and flips into his integral 
primitive state of space-time once more.

Let me conclude with an observation on literacy and
illiteracy which Newsweek (7) evoked by its allusions to
me, and then rejected as "over the heads of our readers".

I realize this is a tantalizing, teasing sort of footnote to a big 
subject.  My feeling, however, is that it is best to put out these 
observations as a probe if only in order to get some feed-back.

This note points to some other facts of the perception and recognition of 
space.  I refer especially to the fission experienced by Western man 
only, from the phonetic alphabet.  The separating of our visual faculties 
from the rest of the sensorium by the phonetic alphabet is nowadays being 
reversed by electronic experience, and especially by TV.

In the piece "Why Johnny Can't Write" I am cited as a prophet of the 
current literacy crisis, saying "literary culture is though" (7, p. 58).  
TV simply shaped totally different situations for readers and writers 
alike.  On the one hand, the TV image, with its simultaneous but 
discontinuous mosaic of millions of illuminated points, is not so much a 
visual as an acoustic image.  Tony Schwartz puts it very well in The 
Responsive Chord when he says that TV uses the eye as an ear (8).  On the 
other hand, the social environment has, likewise, become a simultaneous 
mosaic of electric information.  That is to say, both the small and the 
large aspects of the contemporary world have none of the continuous, 
connected qualities that go with alphabetic writing, and none of the 
qualities that go with visual or "rational" space.  To say, therefore, 
that "literary culture is through" is not an opinion but an observation 
of a dominant and constitutive situation.

Discontinuous matter arrived in 1900 with quantum mechanics (Max 
Planck).  Multi-locational art (later called Cubism) arrived at the same 
time.  In 1900 Freud's Interpretation of Dreams appeared, by-passing the 
continuous and rational world of consciousness and restoring the mythic 
and discontinuous world of the dream.  Serious artists in all fields 
began to alert consciousness to the new situation.  Arthur Miller's essay 
"1949:  The Year It Came Apart" details a more immediate sense of the 
situation that came about with the TV public.  Up until the eve of TV 
there had been a kind of homogeneous audience from New York to San 
Francisco:

		...In many ways it was a good audience, but the important 
point to remember is that it was the only one, and therefore catholic.  
Traditionally it could applaud the Ziegfeld Follies one night and O'Neill 
the next, and if it never made great hits of Odets' plays, it affected to 
regard him as the white-haired boy.  Both O'Neill and Odets would 
privately decry the audience as Philistine and pampered, but it was the 
audience they set about to save from its triviality, for they could not 
really conceive there could be another (9).

The simultaneous audience has nothing in common with the sequential one 
stretched from New York to San Francisco, just as the Johnny who sits in 
the classroom of 1975 has nothing in common with the Johnny who sat there 
in 1955.  The new Johnny has very little private identity and no tunnel 
vision of any conceivable goals in life.  This, again, is not a value 
judgment, but simply a structural observation, since there cannot be 
deferred goals in a simultaneous world.  Immediate quality of life and 
complex role-playing takes over from the visual point of view and the 
pursuit of goals.  Mildred Hall and Edward T. Hall make an observation 
about a flaw in Western consciousness that dearly concerns the future of 
America.  Their point needs to be focused directly upon the future of 
literacy in the U.S.:

		The most pervasive and important assumption, a cornerstone 
in the edifice of Western thought, is one that lies hidden from our 
consciousness and has to do with man's relationship to his environment.  
Quite simply the Western view is that human processes, particularly 
behaviour, are independent of environmental controls and influence (10, 
p. 7).

It needs to be noted that the strategies for saving literacy, or the 
Western way of life, are always pointed to the content of specific 
programs.  No heed is given to the effects of the new man-made 
environments in reshaping the perceptual life of the young.  It is 
obvious that if man-made environments are destroying the institutions of 
American society, then these environments can also be altered in such 
ways as to restore and to sustain the desired way of life.  This desired 
effect actually calls for a suspension of the simultaneous structures 
that are eating out the heart of American institutions.  Should this 
appear to be too great a sacrifice to demand, there would at least have 
been confrontation.  Would not a deliberate decision be preferable to the 
current mood of absent-minded incompetence and drift?

(First published in The Journal of Communication Autumn 1976. 
Republished in The Antigonish Review Vol 74-75. p144)