Richard Cavell

Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922–2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career.As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953–59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the CBC, and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter’s marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter – austere, generous, and unpredictable – to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations.The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter’s work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.

While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

Shakespeare produced his works during a media shift that was unmatched – until our own. Mediatic Shakespeare by media theorist Richard Cavell examines how Shakespeare’s writing engaged with the cultural upheaval of an era shifting rapidly from spoken traditions towards print materials. Cavell argues that print was an active cultural force that was in the process of reshaping Shakespeare’s world and work. Nostalgic for oral communality, Shakespeare engaged guardedly with print, producing a media dynamic that resonates throughout his work. Drawing on media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert, Cavell traces Shakespeare’s engagement with the effects of a media ecology in which knowing and being were aggressively in flux. Structured across four chapters, Mediatic Shakespeare explores Shakespeare’s media ecology, the unsettling interfaces of orality and literacy, the breakdown of the sensus communis, and the implications for his work of the printing involution.

Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922–2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career.As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953–59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the CBC, and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter’s marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter – austere, generous, and unpredictable – to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations.The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter’s work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.

Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould's last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg's works were performed during his California exile. It is here, after that last performance, that Gould encounters a spectral Schoenberg in a staged conversation that explores Schoenberg's travails in rethinking the fundamentals of Western music. This first part of Speechsong recalls Schoenberg's operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron, in which the divinely inspired Moses seeks the help of his brother to relate his vision: Moses speaks and Aron sings. Written as a twelve-tone composition, the opera produces an involution of harmonics that was Schoenberg's response to Richard Wagner's diatribes about synagogue noise. For Gould, Schoenberg's is a formalist revolution; Schoenberg's life, however, suggests that it was a search for personal and political freedom.The second half of Speechsong is a critical essay in twelve "moments" that re-articulates the staged conversation as an inquiry into the intersections of music and mediation. Gould's turn to the recording studio emerges as a post-humanist inquiry into recorded music as a repudiation of the virtuoso tradition and a liberation from unitary notions of selfhood. Schoenberg's exodus from musical tradition likewise takes his twelve-tone invention beyond musical performance, where it emerges, along with Gould's soundscapes, as a prototype of acoustic installations by artists such as Stephen Prina and Cory Arcangel. In these works, music abandons the concert hall and the exigencies of harmony for an acoustic space that embraces at once the recordings of Gould and the performances of Schoenberg that have found their home on the internet.Richard Cavell has written extensively on Marshall McLuhan and on media theory generally. He is the co-founder of the Media Studies program at the University of British Columbia and the curator of the website Spectres of McLuhan. Speechsong, his second critical performance piece, was preceded by Marinetti Dines with the High Command (2014).

The Friedman House is a modernist icon, designed by Frederic Lasserre, founder of the UBC School of Architecture, and landscaped by Cornelia Oberlander. Faced with demolition, it was saved by purchasers who understood its architectural value and historical significance. This book reflects on the possibility of its destruction, remarking on what has been salvaged by its continued existence, and what could have potentially been lost.

While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

The first book to propose that Marshall McLuhan be read as a spatial theorist, McLuhan in Space argues that space is the single most consistent concept in McLuhan's vast and eclectic body of work. Richard Cavell demonstrates how McLuhan extended insights derived from advances in physics and artistic experimentation into a theory of acoustic space, which he then used to challenge the assumptions of visual space that had been produced through 500 years of print culture. The notion of acoustic space provided McLuhan with a heuristic probe of prodigious range, allowing him to examine critically the many social and cultural forms of contemporary media production. It also enabled him to cross over intellectually from the purely theoretical realm into that of artistic production, where his interests in radical notions of spatial production were shared by a range of avant garde artists from bp Nichol to Glenn Gould, from John Cage to the Fluxus artists - an artistic milieu in which McLuhan increasingly came to situate his work. Cavell's book is the first to examine McLuhan's work in light of this artistic backdrop, and the first to examine his contribution to Canadian studies.