Innis-first half
I pretty much like Innis’s style. As much as he jumps around from place to place and civilization to civilization without offering us logical segues or explicit connections, I found it fairly easy to extract themes and recurrent motifs of his writing. In “Minerva’s Owl”, Innis lays out his main arguments early on, following with somewhat chaotic evidence from history. His central argument is that the character of knowledge in any time or place can be understood through the lens of the dominant communications medium, and that new communications media compel realignments of the monopolies and oligopolies of knowledge toward which human society has strong tendencies and a long history. He identifies law and politics, religion, learning (mostly of the organized sort), and economics as central institutions influencing the use of a medium and the knowledge regime which controls it. He uses Hegel’s quote (“Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk”) to argue that cultural production by scholars, artists, and musicians tends to flower in light of their societies’ imminent decline (this due to weakened protection of organized force, ie. war).
He continues by arguing that “the success of organized force is dependent on an effective combination of the oral tradition and the vernacular in public opinion with technology and science. An organized public opinion following the success of force becomes receptive to cultural importation” (5). The rise of TV in the U.S. is perhaps a compelling example of the first part of this statement, namely that after World War II (1950s), TV programming developed to woo the American public and promulgate a shared sense of the greatness of America and the American dream through the use of vernacular language and imagery. The second part, suggesting that organized public opinion lends itself to cultural importation, eludes me, and Innis doesn’t really develop an explicit argument in support of this contention. It seems perhaps more intuitive that a public with a strong and unified opinion such as might develop in support of the ruling party (a unified opinion against the ruling party would necessarily characterize an un-unified public opinion) would be more prone to reject cultural influences from the outside in the name of nationalism, and might promote the exportation of their own cultural forms.
This is perhaps where the frustration voiced by many scholars toward Innis’s work comes in; pulling out his main points is not difficult, but locating the appropriate evidentiary support in the chaotic jumble of historical information that surrounds these points is not only mentally taxing, but can also be a futile endeavor.