person
1906–1984·also known as Empson
British literary critic, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and, with I.A. Richards, part of the Cambridge milieu around T.S. Eliot. Cameron traces a founding tension in McLuhan to his early reading of Empson and Richards: language as inherently ambiguous, an ambiguity that can never be demobilized.
Across the dialogues
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The Cambridge inheritance — language as inherently ambiguous, from the very start of McLuhan's career
Reading Empson and Richards around 1930 confronted McLuhan with language as inherently ambiguous — words not labels, but ambiguity that great poets mobilize.
"So words aren't kind of labels that are stuck on things. Words are inherently ambiguous, and great poets mobilize that ambiguity."
That inherent ambiguity sits at the very start of McLuhan's career — a balance of irreducible uncertainties he never stopped working.
"These uncertainties actually go back to the very start of McLuhan's career, and he was constantly trying to balance ambiguities that are inherent that could never ever be sort of demobilized from language, because that's what language is."
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Enrolled in the serious "we" — named with Eliot, Richards, McLuhan and Leavis as the exacting minority set against the crowd's "regular we"
Connections
influence onMarshall McLuhan
Reading Empson and I.A. Richards in Winnipeg around 1930 gave McLuhan his founding sense of language as inherently ambiguous.