Canadian economic historian at the University of Toronto whose account of how communication media bias a civilization toward time or space became a major — if mythologized — influence on Marshall McLuhan. In Dialogue 10, Cameron and Bob pick that influence apart: McLuhan told a tidy public story about when he first read Innis, but the record — and a 1950–51 letter — shows he had been reading Innis' essays as they were issued, through W.T. Easterbrook. The page is less a biography than a study of one scholar's pull on another.
Across the dialogues
Weighs how much McLuhan really owed Innis — and how much he mythologized the debt
McLuhan valued Innis as an authoritative Canadian anchor for media work he was already doing in the 1940s.
"McLuhan told me through the Evergreens that he really appreciated Innis, because it allowed him to take an authoritative scholar in Canada and in the world and use him to anchor what he was already messing with in the '40s — early media analysis."
By McLuhan's own account he extracted what he could from Innis — and was, in the long run, satirizing him.
"I, you know, squeezed him for all I could get."
Cameron reads the "satire" as mask-work — McLuhan could wear the Innis persona and drop it at will.
"I think what he's talking about there is, by satirizing, I think he means that he could put the Innis mask on, but he could also take it off."
McLuhan's 1953 essay "The Later Innis" openly faulted Innis for lacking the aesthetic dimension McLuhan cared about.
"And even writes that in '53 in his essay, The Later Innis."
In a 1950–51 letter, McLuhan urged Innis that understanding media figures required turning to art analysis.
"Sometime around the turn of 1950–51, McLuhan wrote to Innis and said that if he wanted to understand these media figures better, he would have to turn to art analysis."
McLuhan had read individual essays of The Bias of Communication as they appeared from 1946 — not as the single first encounter he later claimed.
"The Bias of Communication is a collection of essays that were written starting, I think, in 1946 and coming up to 1950 or maybe even '51. And McLuhan had read some of the essays in The Bias of Communication when they were issued."
Easterbrook, Innis' associate and McLuhan's longtime Winnipeg friend, was the conduit through which McLuhan encountered Innis' essays.
"He was doing that through Easterbrook, who was sort of Innis's secretary — his very good friend, and who had been McLuhan's friend for decades, back in Winnipeg."
McLuhan foregrounded The Bias of Communication for its catchier title — embroidering the story of who had influenced him.
"I see McLuhan highlighting The Bias of Communication because it's a great phrase. Maybe more appropriate for pop culture than Empire and Communications for his own purposes. So yes — he makes up a story. He's a poet there, about who he's influenced by."
For McLuhan — "a poet of ideas," in Carpenter's phrase — Innis was one passing source among many, not a foundation.
"McLuhan, as Carpenter pointed out, was a collector of new, interesting ideas — a poet of ideas and scenarios. So Innis was just another passing thinker."
Innis pulled the America-leaning McLuhan toward a Canadian vantage — a more "Canadian, dynamic" perspective, situated between England and the U.S.
"And here was Innis, a Canadian, who had a very good feel for the situation of Canada between England and the United States."
Even granting the influence, Innis was one of several figures McLuhan engaged around 1950 — the debt shouldn't be overstated.
"Innis was only one of the figures that McLuhan was engaged with, let's say around 1950."
Back-dated into the Nova Scotia story — the shared 1936 Dalhousie Review issue pushes McLuhan's first contact with Innis' work back fifteen years before the official meeting
The archival find that resets the chronology — Innis' article shared the very 1936 Dalhousie Review issue that carried McLuhan's first essay, so McLuhan knew Innis' work from the start, not from the "distorted" 1951 first-meeting story.
"But here's the amazing thing that you discovered is that in that issue in 1936 where McLuhan was first published was also an article by Harold Innis."
Surfaces as the source of McLuhan's dividing line between the cognitive and moral artist — the aphorism that separates the reader of "radiant signatures" from the romantic forger
The Innis aphorism McLuhan wields to split the two schools of art — the artist as reader of "radiant signatures" versus the romantic "signer of a forged check" who forges significance on our hopes and sympathies.
"the artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on the materia signata, but the signer of a forged check."
Returns as the theorist of the node — the fur-trade post set beside the poem as two ways of establishing a point that gathers what comes in and goes out, both "complicated in their own ways"
Cameron folds Innis' economic geography into the media argument — a poem and a "fur trade post" are equally attempts to "establish a node," a point that organizes flow in and out, so Innis' trading post and McLuhan's art object are one kind of thing seen at different scales.
"They are both attempts to establish a node and to conceptualize how things come into the node and go out of the node."
Reduced to a spark — "Innis lit a match with McLuhan," the striking of the associations "nobody could understand," and the Toronto tradition Peterson would have to engage to escape the "Ewen Cameron hero"
Innis reduced to catalyst — the spark that set McLuhan making "the associations that nobody could understand," his collage method; the same tradition Cameron says Peterson must engage, "not only McLuhan, but Harold Innis," to get past the "Ewen Cameron hero."
"Innis lit a match with McLuhan so that he began to make these kinds of associations that nobody could understand."
Recentered as the series' own nineteenth-century archaeologist — his quotation-built essays on English literature yield Bulwer and Bagehot, and his "century of peace to century of war" thesis reframes McLuhan's whole project as a search for lost balance
Cameron reads Innis' method as McLuhan's template — essays "90% quotations from other people," so that "you never know when it's Innis talking or when he's quoting somebody," the same unacknowledged-quotation practice as the Gutenberg Galaxy.
"it's the kind of model for Gutenberg Galaxy."
Cameron names Innis' master theme — how England passed from a nineteenth century of peace to a twentieth of war — and answers it with the loss of "balance," not the rise of democracy.
"Innis wants to know how we got to a century of war, the 20th century, from a century of peace, the 19th century."
Innis' name for the cul-de-sac — the "solipsism of Western civilization," the trap Easterbrook took from him as the outstanding fact of modern life.
"Innis called this the solipsism of Western civilization."
One of the McLuhan themes Cameron finds already in Innis' 1946 book — "the new literature followed the new journalism" — a line McLuhan also knew from the French symbolists, so Innis "rang a bell" rather than taught him from scratch.
"the new literature followed the new journalism."
Carried forward as the academy's early witness — his 1940s sight of the failed "guardians of Western civilization" is drawn into the session's attack on endowment-fat universities
Cameron draws Innis' 1940s diagnosis into the academia critique — the universities meant to guard Western civilization are the very institutions letting it fall apart, a betrayal Innis had already seen.
"as Harold Innis already saw in the 40s, these are the people and the institutions which are supposed to be the guardians of Western civilization."
Named as McLuhan donor-idea — communication as the key to cultures — which McLuhan narrows from Innis media-history to the microscopic question "what are media?"
Cameron traces McLuhan's starting move to Innis — communication as the key to cultures — which McLuhan then sharpens past Innis' media-history into "the microscopic analysis of what media are."
"So he took over the idea from Innis that communication is the key to understanding different cultures."
The department politics filled in and the determinist charge refused — set against his own chair Urwick and the "Know-Nothing School," the Innis–McLuhan line defended as never technologically determinist, and the century of war reread as the making of "a new kind of human being"
The Toronto department mapped as two camps — Easterbrook's 1960 article sets "the McLuhan School" against the "Know-Nothing School" of Innis' own chair Urwick, with Innis and Easterbrook themselves standing between.
"the McLuhan School and the Know-Nothing School."
Cameron's flat rejection of the determinist label — Innis relates newspapers to roads, paper, and cheap printing, but the process is equally psychological and social, so the charge "is a misreading... an imposition on their text."
"This whole idea that McLuhan and Innis are technological determinists is bullshit."
Innis' bridge from balance to war given a communications mechanism — reading Bulwer on the "Gutenbergian gulf," Innis concludes the century of war produced "a new kind of human being," made by the newspaper-and-telegraph revolution.
"maybe one of the ways to articulate what happened between the century of peace and the century of bullets is to say that we have a new kind of human being caused by communication breakdown, or communication revolution"
The disputed debt argued out — his 1946 turn to communications dated before he had heard of McLuhan, so the "poison of Lewis" Bob credits is refused, and his old right-wing establishment reputation recalled alongside the Irene Biss "betrayal"
Cameron's rebuttal of the Lewis-influence thesis — Innis' 1946 book already shows him "well on his way to communications theory" before he had "met or heard of McLuhan," so, against Bob's claim that McLuhan "made Innis into a McLuhan by giving him the poison of Lewis," his development owes nothing to a Lewis who reached him only secondhand and late.
"in 1946 he was well on his way to communications theory. And this was before he ever met or heard of McLuhan."
His limitation given a cause and his pessimism given a mechanism — the missing knowledge of art is traced to a specific consequence, an inability to reach the genesis of bias, and the solipsism of his last years is presented not as temperament but as the correct conclusion from a premise McLuhan refused
The standing critique gets its missing middle term — if all communication is artistic, then not knowing art is precisely what blocks access to communication, not merely a narrowness of taste.
"his criticism of Innis was that Innis had great insight into many things, but he didn't know much about art. And so he was unable to understand the types of human communication."
The late pessimism reconstructed as an argument rather than a mood — the regress is real, and Innis simply followed it where it goes, arriving at "a solipsism that eats itself" at the base of civilization.
"he became very pessimistic and he talked about the necessity of solipsism because he thought that whatever investigation you do of bias is always already biased and you can never get to the end of that."
The readership problem explained by apprenticeship — Pound and Finnegans Wake trained McLuhan in difficult prose, so his access to Innis was a acquired skill rather than sympathy.
"Remember that Innis is very hard to read. McLuhan was able to read Innis because he was able to read Pound."
The difficulty named in McLuhan's own vocabulary — and dated, since the metaphor comes from the same late-1940s stretch in which he was reading Eisenstein and thinking about frames.
"as McLuhan says, Innis did not think linearly. He jumps around a lot. He was cinematic."
Demoted in the genealogy of the art formula — offered as a help but overtaken by Mallarmé as the more probable source of what McLuhan was reaching for by 1951
The standard Canadian lineage is set aside for a symbolist one at exactly the point where McLuhan's most private theme starts to be nameable.
"Innis, I think, helped, but probably Mallarmé may have been more important."
His classical grounding given a source — Cochrane supplies the Greeks and Thucydides, and the fascination with the reporter in the Mechanical Bride is traced straight back to him
The Mechanical Bride's question about our fascination with the reporter is attributed straight to Innis, which puts him inside McLuhan's first book rather than among his later sources.
"Yeah, and that's directly from Innis."
Connections
Innis gave McLuhan an authoritative Canadian scholarly anchor for the media work he was already doing in the 1940s.
Easterbrook — Innis' associate and McLuhan's longtime Winnipeg friend — was the channel through which McLuhan met Innis' essays as they were issued.
Cameron likens Innis' Empire and Communications to the Formula Chart — both trace how a medium centralizes and provokes reaction — but the chart is more focused and dynamically diagrammatic.
Bob speculates Havelock's coolness toward McLuhan partly reflected his sense that McLuhan had misrepresented the Innis chronology.
Innis' associate and the conduit through which McLuhan read Innis' essays as they were issued, before 1951.