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We are Still Looking: Alexander Watson, Marginal Man, and the Continuing Search for the Hidden Innis Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. By Alexander John Watson. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 525 pp. ISBN 0802039162.
Each and every time a new contribution devoted to the com- munication writings of Harold lnnis emerges, it faces a cen- tral question: is it telling us something new? More to the point, is it telling us something of the "hidden lnnis"? It is a truism in the literature that lnnis, a political economist at the University of Toronto from 1920 to 1952, was an awful writer. It is also a truism, however, that lnnis' writings on media and communication technology contain more than they apparently let on.
In Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis forwarded three important propositions about media: that their material properties engender a bias in cultures either toward the dimension of space or toward time; that communication technologies, over time, will lock communicants into one bias or another, a state that lnnis referred to as the Monopoly of Knowledge; and that cultures, through default or design, can thwart the debilitating effects of media by actively constructing knowledge and continually querying formulations already in circulation, an ethic lnnis referred to as the Oral Tradition (lnnis, 1950, 1951).
These theories, in their turn, have provoked both admiration and upset. Critics have faulted lnnis, particularly in his formulations on media, with forwarding simplistic notions that do violence to history. Defenders, in response, have set for themselves the task of refuting that charge. Their work has been guided by the premise that if lnnis was capable of discerning new and important relationships in history, he was further capable of discerning that history is comprised of relationships that extend beyond the causal impact of communication media. The proper task of Innis scholarship, therefore, is to abstract Innis' philosophy of history, the historical dynamics he believed governed Canadian and imperial history.
Enter Alexander John Watson. With the publication of his 2006 book Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, he emerges as the latest in a long line of interpreters who have attempted to wrest some order from the chaos of Innis'...