Schafer’s and McLuhan’s Listening Paths Convergences, Crossings & Diversions

Abstract

"... seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander...”/“... since we exist as conversation, listening to each other....” This is the line of a long poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, a German poet from the beginning of the 19th century, who is famous for his highly philosophical poetry, addressing themes of Greek mythology and essences of antique thinkers. It might seem unusual to start a lecture about two contemporary personalities, Murray Schafer and Marshall McLuhan, by referring to a German Romantic poet. However, the fragment “... since we exist as conversation, listening to each other....” seems to summarize perfectly the essence of my endeavours, to understand Murray Schafer against the backdrop of Marshall McLuhan and vice versa:

The poem talks about a common “we”, a multitude of minds, which identifies itself as a medium of communication: that of conversation. This medium is based on common rules of participation and interaction: listening, sense making, understanding and sound making i.e. practicing a dynamic relationship based on listening and soundmaking. The system of conversation assigns roles and behaviours, creates perceptual structures, coins values, forms social organizations and political systems, and can thus be considered an environment, exemplary for any medium.

This lecture is primarily about Schafer and McLuhan, but on a second level is concerned with environment as a conceptual approach or a figure of thought: creating a specific mindset and relation to world and cognition, which exclusively linear-causal approaches – as cultivated traditionally in technological, historical and sociological sciences – would not allow.