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This special issue on Harold Adams Innis includes two different perspectives: first, a series of constructive engagements with Innis' approach; second, a biographical interest in some of the moments within his life.
For those readers unfamiliar with Innis' work, Menahem Blondheim's paper "Discovering 'The Significance of Communication': Harold Adams Innis as Social Constructivist" will serve as an excellent primer. Blondheim begins by reminding us that in his time, Innis was Canada's leading economic historian and political economist - renowned for his historical case studies of staples industries such as the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Atlantic cod fishery, and the fur trade. But for our field, Innis is remembered chiefly for his late schematic works on the role of communication processes and technology in the development of civilization. In the last years of his life, Innis sketched out a vast landscape of communication history in a series of public lectures and two monographs, Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication.
But Blondheim's essay is much more than a primer. In reviewing "the accepted Innis," he takes aim at two of the standard interpretations of Innis' legacy: first, that he was a technological determinist; and second, that he favoured media that were time-binding over those that were space-binding. Instead, Blondheim marshals considerable evidence to support his view that Innis was more of a social constructivist who favoured a dynamic equilibrium between time-based and space-based modes. Blondheim also contributes to the emerging picture of Innis' intellectual life by disentangling him from many of the ideas and influences of many of his colleagues at the University of Chicago in the 1920s.
In a similar vein, Paul Grosswiler, in "Dispelling the Alphabet Effect," challenges one of the main tenets associated with Innis and the "Toronto School." The alphabet effect is the notion that the phonetic alphabet had strong and distinctive psychological effects upon Western civilization. Grosswiler reminds us that this hypothesis was first sketched out by Innis and McLuhan and later elaborated extensively by Walter Ong and Robert Logan. Grosswiler cites McLuhan's claim that "ideogrammatic writing…retained a multisensory, oral quality, whereas the alphabet separated sight from sound to become visually abstract." Supposedly, this optical character of phonetic writing enabled such things as the capacity for analytical thought, a heightened sense of individuality, and, in the wider view, such Western institutions and social practices as science, democracy, and capitalism.
In the minds of the Toronto School, other forms of literacy, such as ideogrammatic writing in China, did not produce similar effects. In opposition, Grosswiler references those scholars who have taken exception to this view, amongst them Jack Goody, Lester Faigley, amd Andrew Robinson. Goody, for example, has taken issue with the notion that just because Chinese writing uses picture-like symbols, its psychodynamic effects (Ong) should be associated with the oral mode of culture, instead of the literate mode. Rather than trashing the alphabet effect thesis in its entirety, Goody and others have advanced the view that similar alphabet-like effects have occurred in other cultures (such as China) through the mediation of other-than-alphabetic writing modes.
Grosswiler's paper will not settle continuing debates over the alphabet effect. What his paper does accomplish is to make the point that more research is needed into the relations between media and mind - and media and society - on a cross-cultural basis. In this sense, Innis' thought still lives, not because his position on the alphabet effect is the correct one, but because it is still posing empirical and theoretical challenges for scholars today.
The next three papers are biographical in nature. Paul Heyer begins this set with his essay "History from the Inside: Prolegomenon to the 'Memoir of Harold Adams Innis Covering the Years 1894-1922.' " This paper can be read as a complement to Heyer's recently published biography of Innis.
In his prolegomenon Heyer comments on a short autobiographical memoir that Innis began but did not complete in the last year of his life. As the title indicates, the memoir only covers the early part of Innis' life: growing up in the Ontario countryside, attending school in nearby Otterville, moving on to McMaster University, and from there to the front in the Great War - and finally to the University of Chicago, where he completed his thesis on A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The memoir stops just prior to Innis' canonization within Economic History and Political Economy.
Heyer notes that when Innis carried out research on his various staples case studies he was strongly influenced by autobiographical memoirs. Heyer recounts three such formative memoirs: Peter Pond in relation to the fur trade; Alexander James McPhail in relation to the Prairie wheat pool movement; and Simeon Perkins in relation to the Atlantic cod fishery. In each case, the memoirs enabled Innis to get a close sense of how such actors reflected on their own experience and motivation - from the inside, as it were.
In looking over the memoir, Heyer tries to find traces of Innis' eventual destiny. He manages to identify such things as Innis' strong sense of self-discipline; the way his war experience shaped his disenchantment with empires of any sort; and, related to this, the way his working experience on the Prairies further shaped his sense of centres and margins. But in general, Heyer concludes: "The memoir ends in 1922 or early 1923, with the CPR study in press and the fur trade project on the horizon. It tells us a great deal about the man, but with the remaining thirty years of an extraordinarily productive life unavailable to us through his eyes, not nearly enough."
William Buxton contributes two pieces of archival research to this collection. In his first paper, "Harold Innis' 'French Inflection': Origins, Themes and Implications of His 1951 Address at Le Collège de France," Buxton provides historical context for a talk that Innis gave on the theme of monopolies of knowledge. For Buxton, the talk is historically interesting from at least two perspectives. On one hand, the knowledge monopolies theme links his presentation here with similar addresses he had given in other venues over the past three years and which had formed the basis for Empire and Communications.
But Buxton is more interested in reconstructing Innis' possible relationship to French scholarship. Buxton details the myriad ways that Innis was connected to French scholarship. He observes, for example, the way that Innis' work on the fur trade and cod fishery relied heavily on French-language archival and secondary materials. He also details the personal connections that Innis made with leading French intellectuals of the time.
But more importantly, Buxton suggests that Innis appeared to be interested in trying to find common ground regarding the history of civilization - between his own communication history approach and that of the Annales School (represented at the session by Lucien Febvre, who acted as its chair). Buxton notes that Innis would have found more resonance with the kind of inductive and strongly empirical approach of the Annales School than with the strongly speculative approach of either Toynbee or Spengler. In Innis' view the latter combination was still entrenched as a monopoly of knowledge in the philosophy of history. Buxton points out that Innis would have been searching also for like-minded souls - such as McLuhan - who were interested in resisting the current monopoly within the fledgling discipline of Communications in the United States, as exemplified in the approaches of Schramm and Karl Deutsch.
Buxton's second paper is entitled "The 'Values' Discussion Group at the University of Toronto, February-May 1949." Buxton tells us that the "Values" discussion sessions were a series of relatively unstructured meetings between about a dozen professors held weekly in Hart House in early 1949. Some index of the way that times have changed is evidenced in the grant request that Innis made to the Rockefeller Foundation that year to cover the costs of the project: $200 for the costs of a graduate student to take notes. For the interest of our readers, what makes these meetings noteworthy is the involvement of both Innis and McLuhan in each of these eight sessions. Of particular interest is session 5, in which McLuhan leads discussion on the role of the artist in society, and session 7, in which Innis speaks broadly about the relationship between communication and values systems in the history of civilization. As Buxton points out, Innis' address on this occasion previewed similar presentations he would give later that same spring at the University of Michigan. In terms of the history of our field, Buxton suggests that Innis' far-reaching remarks on this occasion are significant because they had considerable impact on McLuhan's thought at the time - and because they laid the foundations for later discussions by the Toronto School.
From the fragmentary notes that Jack Sword took in the seventh session we are still able to grasp a fleeting sense of Innis' presence - already accomplished and well recognized within his cognate discipline - getting ready for the full flight of ideas that would make him famous. The notes are only fragments, like pieces of shattered glass. Better yet would have been the full transcription - better still, in Innis' own view, would have been the actual capture of his oral presentation.
