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Adam Lauder

Bertram Brooker and the Toronto School of Communication ABSTRACT

As editor of Marketing magazine in the mid-1920s, the Toronto-based artist, author and advertising executive Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) introduced new techniques of market research to Canadian readers and elaborated innovative analyses of advertising as a synesthetic media system. Brooker’s writings on markets are explored as a possible influence on Harold Adams Innis’s research on economic staples and the social production of space as well as on Marshall McLuhan’s early writings on market research and mass affect. Brooker’s writings on radio and synesthesia are compared with McLuhan’s later writings on shifting sense ratios. Brooker is posited as a leading contributor to the sensuous media culture of Toronto circa 1921–1955, and an indirect influence on the Toronto School of Communication.

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RÉSUMÉ

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En tant que rédacteur en chef de la revue Marketing au milieu des années 20s, Bertram Brooker (1888–1955), artiste, écrivain et publicitaire torontois, introduit de nouvelles techniques d’étude de marché aux lecteurs canadiens et élabore des analyses innovatrices de la publicité en tant que système médiatique synesthétique. Cet article explore les écrits de Brooker sur les marchés comme une influence possible sur les recherches de Harold Adams Innis sur les principales ressources et la production sociale de l’espace ainsi que les premiers écrits de Marshall McLuhan sur l’étude de marché et l’effet de masse. Les écrits de Brooker sur la radio et la synesthésie sont comparés avec les écrits plus récents de McLuhan sur les changements au rapport des sens. Brooker est aussi considéré comme avoir influencé de manière indirecte l’école de communications de Toronto. KEYWORDS: Bertram Brooker; Marshall McLuhan; Harold Adams Innis; medium

theory; advertising; spatial theory

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“Printers’ ink threatens to submerge even the literary arts in Canada,” wrote Harold Adams Innis in “The Strategy of Culture” (1952: 1). His urgent response to intensified American cultural imperialism in the years following World War II endorsed the policy of cultural protectionism advocated by the Massey Report (1952: 13–4).1 William J. Buxton (1998) has noted that Innis stressed the role of advertising in accelerating the condition of “present-mindedness” which, he warned, was upsetting the relative “balance” of interests necessary to sustain liberal democracy (Innis 1951: 62, 64). Drawing on the spatial theories of Canadian-born artist, author and critic Wyndham Lewis, Innis argued that advertising’s emphasis on the instantaneous reconfigured temporal experience, engendering monopolies of power modelled on the “one-day world” of the advertisement (Lewis quoted in Innis 1951: 79; Watson 2006: 339–53).

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Through his association with the informal network of scholars retrospectively identified as the Toronto School of Communication, Innis’s communications writings are irrevocably linked with the city of Toronto. However, the impact of the Toronto milieu (beyond the boundaries of the University of Toronto campus) on Innis’s writings remains relatively unexplored. Perhaps as a result of Innis’s own relentless focus on the perceived threat posed by the American culture industry, his writings have never been situated within the context of the advertising industry in Toronto.2 In particular, the advertising writings of Toronto-based artist, author and advertising executive Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) have been overlooked with regard to their possible influence on Innis’s studies of the newspaper industry in the 1940s and 1950s, and their conclusions regarding the impact of media “bias” on the organization of societies and markets (Innis 1946: 1–34; 1952: 73–103; 1951: 156–89). If the idiosyncratic methodology Innis developed to compose his communications writings (which involved the juxtaposition of secondary sources, loosely re-written, in a non-linear “collage”) meant that Wyndham Lewis could be practically excised from “A Plea for Time,” even though Innis redeployed some of his arguments practically verbatim, it is plausible that Brooker may have suffered a similar fate (Marchessault 2005: 95; Marchand 1990: 114–15; Watson 2006: 352–53; 2008: xxi). The early writings of Marshall McLuhan echo Innis in criticizing instruments of American advertising such as the trade journal Printers’ Ink for mesmerizing mass audiences (1947b). Yet McLuhan’s later work proposed making “a raft of ad copy” to navigate the electronic media (1962: 77). This strategy is exemplary of Donald Theall’s characterization of McLuhan as “an artist playing with percepts and affects”—a distinctively aesthetic approach to the study of media evident as early as The Mechanical Bride (1951) (Theall 2001: 13). Although McLuhan subsequently rejected the moralizing tone and industrial focus of that text (McLuhan 1954d: 495), its interdisciplinary methodology and innovative design cleared a path for the radical works he authored after receiving a Ford Foundation grant


with Edmund S. Carpenter in 1953; these were published in the interdisciplinary journal Explorations (Darroch 2008; Darroch and Marchessault 2009). Richard Cavell (2002) identifies Brooker’s advertising textbooks as precedents for McLuhan’s fusion of aesthetics and advertising in The Mechanical Bride. Cavell also cites Brooker’s experiments in the “spatialization of the sonic” in such abstract canvasses as Sounds Assembling (1928a) as influential on McLuhan’s theorization of “acoustic space” (Cavell 2002: 15; McLuhan 1954a). Brooker’s writings from the 1920s and early 1930s reveal a preoccupation with the effects of advertising media on the sensorium and on perceptions of space and time. This constitutes evidence of an indigenous discourse on sensory media whose influence on the Toronto School of Communication has been overlooked. To date, Cavell’s brief but insightful discussion of Brooker—cited by Sarah Stanners (2010)—remains the sole reference to the little-known and undertheorized Canadian media innovator in the corpus of McLuhan studies. Brooker does not surface in the literature on Innis.

Though provocative, discussion of Brooker in the work of Betts, Cavell and Willmott is silent on the issue of Brooker’s attention to the effects of advertising on human perception. While investigation of McLuhan’s relationship to his Canadian context has been almost exclusively limited to his dialogue with Innis (Blondheim and Watson 2007; Stamps 2001; Kroker 1984; Carey 1967), with occasional side-glances at the work of Eric Havelock and Northrop Frye (Siegel 2007), a look at Brooker’s multi-disciplinary career and extensive network of contacts opens up a broader purview of the sensory media culture that emerged in Toronto between the early 1920s and the mid-1950s. Elsewhere, I compare McLuhan’s early writings on the aesthetic and social dimensions of marketing technologies with Brooker’s counter-hegemonic, Bergsonian construction of marketing in texts published in the 1920s and 1930s (2006). In a subsequent study, I propose a connection between the organicism of McLuhan’s later writings on electronic communications and the Anglo-American vitalist modernism derived from Bergson, which gained currency in Toronto cultural circles

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McLuhan also appears in the small but growing literature on Brooker. Gregory Betts (2005, 2009) and Glenn Willmott (2000) have both identified a relationship between Brooker and McLuhan. Their discussions note parallels between the authors’ respective recycling and fusion of advertising techniques and modernist tropes of formal experimentation to explore the institution of literacy, with specific reference to Brooker’s Layout Technique in Advertising (1929a) and McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (Betts 2005: 234; Willmott: xii). Betts recently proposed a link between Brooker’s critique of advertising in the essay “Idolaters of Brevity” (1931), published in The Sewanee Review, and McLuhan’s treatment of the press in the pages of the same journal a decade later (Betts 2009: xxxi).

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from the 1920s through the 1950s and which informed Brooker’s distinctive approach to art and advertising. However, I have not explicitly analyzed the relationship between Brooker’s writings on advertising and McLuhan’s media studies. Paul Tiessen (1993) situates McLuhan’s writings within an indigenous media discourse that developed in Canada during the 1920s through the 1940s, which he terms “a pre-McLuhan body of Canadian media theory” (1993). Tiessen views the phenomenon of a proto-McLuhanesque Canadian media theory as evidence of “a distinctive mass-media consciousness, a consciousness underscored by a sense of national wariness and purpose” (1993). However, the bulk of Tiessen’s paper is devoted to unearthing links between interwar Canadian media theory and the contemporaneous media discourse of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Tiessen’s study provides a framework for positing the existence of an indigenous media discourse in Toronto. Janine Marchessault has argued for the necessity of placing McLuhan in a Toronto context that extends beyond the halls of the University of Toronto:

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McLuhan’s work needs to be understood as arising out of collective engagement, conversations, letters and dialogue. Just as The Mechanical Bride grew out of courses he taught at St Louis University, so too did The Gutenberg Galaxy grow out of an interdisciplinary confluence of students, scholars, scientists, artists and journalists in Toronto. (2005: 77)

Despite Marchessault’s call to arms, the present paper constitutes the first attempt to locate the media thought of both Innis and McLuhan within the indigenous, non-academic media discourse of early- to mid-20th-century Toronto exemplified by Brooker’s writings about advertising. This paper explores articles Brooker published in Marketing magazine in the 1920s, scrutinizing these groundbreaking pieces of market research and innovative analyses of advertising as a synesthetic media system, and charting their contribution to an indigenous media culture in Toronto. Brooker’s work served as the immediate context for Innis’s research on monopolies of space, as well as McLuhan’s exploration of the sensory effects of media in early texts produced in and around the Culture and Communications seminar. In keeping with the insights of the Toronto School of Communication, this paper applies a media-ecology perspective (Strate 2010: 26). Media ecology proposes that media constitute environments or systems that relatively enable and constrain the social production and reproduction of sensory bias and spatio-temporal relations (Stevenson 2010). This framework is employed here to study the shared cultural and socio-economic environment of early- and mid-20th-century Toronto and its influence on the mutual interest of Brooker, Innis and McLuhan in the effects of media on social organization and perception. I specifically draw on dualist traditions of media ecology to study how the introduction of new market-research instruments as well


as the appearance of radio were formulated by Brooker, Innis and McLuhan as part of a broader shift from a spatial, print-based regime of communication to an oral system of electronic dialogue privileging temporality (Blondheim 2007; Kroker 1984; Watson 2006). This reading follows Menahem Blondheim’s characterization of Innis’s work as “inverted determinism” (2007: 80). Like Blondheim, I interpret Innis as arguing that while media relatively determine social conditions, they also set in motion challenges to dominant values from the margins that result in a dynamic tension between competing social interests, which remains permanently open to contingency.

Whether or not Brooker made personal contact with Innis or McLuhan (although this seems probable, to date no definitive evidence of a meeting has been uncovered), his influence was likely felt indirectly. Moreover, it must be stressed that

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In articles such as “Idolaters of Brevity” (1931), Brooker reveals a proto–medium theory understanding of technologies as producing an “environment” that, in turn, influences spatio-temporal perception, social behaviours and, in particular, approaches to artistic production (264). Brooker’s media insights indirectly contributed to the medium theory articulated by scholars at the University of Toronto. Specifically, Brooker’s participatory approach to advertising parallels the non-linear style of exposition adopted by both Innis and McLuhan in an effort to involve the reader in the process of reception. Moreover, Brooker’s campaign for improved census data; his history of Canadian advertising, which represents the development of advertising as inseparable from the growth of the press; his analysis of the Quebec market as a society based on enduring traditions of language and religion; and his early maps and visualizations of demographic information and commercial systems in the pages of Marketing magazine all invite comparison with Innis’s drive for better census data and maps in the 1920s, and Innis’s subsequent theorization of media as forming environments that influence the relative spatial or temporal orientation of a given society vis-à-vis the comparatively space-binding or time-binding characteristics of the dominant media system. Coterminous with Innis’s formulation of monopolies of space and time, Brooker wrote extensively on the impact of commodities on temporal relations and how the emergence of the daily press, in particular, accelerated the pace of social interaction in modern society. Similarly, preceding McLuhan’s theorization of shifting sensory ratios and technologies as “extensions” of the human sensorium, Brooker explored synesthetic strategies that could compensate for the optical bias of print media in innovative graphic designs and marketing texts, which he explicitly situated within an evolutionary and intertwined conception of media and human physiology. As in Tiessen’s study of pre-McLuhan media theory in Canada, Brooker’s relationship to the Toronto School of Communication is brought into relief through a comparative analysis of their respective responses to the new medium of radio and to national media initiatives such as census data and mapping techniques.

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Booker’s insights remained unsystematic, reflecting his status as an innovative practitioner with a limited and largely improvised knowledge of theory (Betts 2005: 17–18). Although analysis of texts by Brooker, Innis and McLuhan reveals sometimes striking correspondences, the University of Toronto professors developed more rigorous methodologies and their conclusions are consistently more profound and wide-reaching in implication.

Biography

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Brooker was born in 1888 in Croydon, England. In 1905, he immigrated with his family to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Initially finding employment as a timekeeper for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (Betts 2009: xviii), Brooker later qualified for clerical work through night courses (Lee: 287). Some of his earliest surviving artworks date from the period following his relocation to Neepawa, Manitoba, where, in 1912, he opened a movie theatre with his brother (Betts 2009: xv; Zemans 1989: 18). This exposure to popular culture proved decisive: Brooker was soon writing scenarios that were adapted into silent films by the Vitagraph Company of America, three of which I have recently located (Lauder 2010: 96, 104n93). Numbering among Brooker’s first works of visual art are responses to the modernism showcased at the 1913 Armory Show (Zemans 1989: 18). Early experiments in graphic design such as The Romance of Trademarks and Reznor (both ca. 1913–15)—which may derive from Brooker’s work as a journalist and commercial artist in Portage la Prairie, Neepawa and later Winnipeg—combine consumer products into decorative patterns. The pointillist technique employed by Brooker in these early pen-and-ink drawings resonates with the artist-advertiser’s reinterpretation of developments in physics. Much as McLuhan raided concepts such as “resonance” and “field” from the world of subatomic physics to give shape to his interdisciplinary insights (Marchand 1990: 142), the theory of gravitation devised by Brooker in his youth (which he submitted for review to the Royal Society in London, England), continued to inform his art and advertising for the remainder of his career (Wagner 1989: 45; Surrey 1925a: 201). Brooker’s personal physics proposed a pre-Socratic vision of the cosmos as a mass of electrons animated by an affective force that he termed the “First Desire” (Arnason 1989: 79; Wagner 1989: 45). Joyce Zemans (1989) has convincingly argued that the personal belief system developed by Brooker by 1912—which he labelled “Ultimatism”—does not fit neatly into any recognized movement or “-ism.” In my view, Brooker’s fusion of art and physics has wrongly been construed as mystical (Betts 2005, 2009; Davis 1992; Reid 1973). His adaptation of William Blake’s notion of “spiritual sensation” as the “ratio” of the senses to the theoretical models of Einstein and Whitehead insists on an immanent interpretation of physical phenomena in its appeal to the “flux” of sensation (Surrey 1930a: 216; Murry 1933: 15).


Notes for a 1927 lecture on William Blake delivered at Hart House in Toronto reveal Brooker’s ongoing interest in the “formlessness” of Whitehead and other philosophers of flux as a methodological tool for the analysis of art and visual culture (Brooker 1927a: 19). Brooker’s analysis and appropriation of Blake’s spiritual sensation as a critical methodology is remarkably close to McLuhan’s later reading of the Romantic poet in The Gutenberg Galaxy. It is from Blake and Aquinas that McLuhan derived his notion of “ratio” as antidote to the “matching theory” of communication promoted by information theory (McLuhan 1962: 268). Sherrill Grace underscores that Blake was a writer “of the greatest importance” to Brooker (Grace 1985: 8). Certainly, Blake’s depersonalized representations of affect as abstract “powers” suggest comparisons with the transpersonal affects represented

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Examples of graphic design and layout overseen by Brooker during his period as promotion manager of the Winnipeg Free Press (then the Manitoba Free Press) reveal his early application of non-Euclidean structures suggestive of his gravitational theory to sell electronic commodities. The polyvalent design of “Electrify Your Gifts this Christmas” also suggests analogies with McLuhan’s later observations on the connections between “electricity and ‘unified field’ awareness” (Williams 1955: 114; Manitoba Free Press, December 4, 1920: 19; McLuhan 1962: 29). For Brooker and McLuhan alike, the non-perspectival spatial models developed by modern physicists provided a means of visualizing the non-linear patterns of information latent in the emergent post-industrial environment generated by advertising and other media of mass communication. Sounding very much like McLuhan in his “prophetic” mode, in April 1927 Brooker predicated in the pages of Marketing that “within a few years on this continent there will be more people employed in distributing goods that producing them”; the artist’s forecast of an expanded service sector resonates with Innis’s analysis of the nascent “information industries” fifteen years later. (Brooker 1927b: 304; Innis 1951: 83) Marchessault has noted that McLuhan appropriated figures from the new physics of Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and Louis de Broglie to give shape to his speculations on acoustic space—a strategy that parallels Brooker’s recourse to Einstein and Whitehead during the period of his synesthetic experiments in the pages of Marketing (discussed below) (Marchessault 2005: 208). Both Brooker and McLuhan seized on the potential of matter to express statistical patterns of behaviour in a fashion strikingly similar to articulations of “dynamic matter” in contemporary affect theory (Clough et al. 2007: 62). Like Patricia Ticineto Clough and colleagues, Brooker and McLuhan viewed matter as a medium for “the circulation of affects” in a society increasingly dominated by a statistical conception of both organic and inorganic life (Clough 2004: 5). In the writings of both Brooker and McLuhan, we approach a concept of “affect-itself ” as “dynamic matter’s [capacity] for self-forming” (Clough et al. 2007: 60). Parallels with contemporary affect theory may be ascribed to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of virtuality in Bergson—Bergson also serving as a source for Brooker and McLuhan.

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by Brooker in his art and advertising texts. Brooker initially drew upon the theories of British artist and art theorist Vernon Blake to develop his critical reworking of the formlessness he perceived in the art of William Blake. Abstractions produced by Brooker during the 1920s, such as ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’—Blake (1927a) and Alleluia (1929), which pulsate with vivid patterns of particles, perform a “translation of inorganic matter into organic matter” that resonates with the Bergsonian thrust of his advertising writings of the same period (Surrey 1930a: 58).

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In an article for Marketing written shortly after his arrival in Toronto, Brooker explored the possibility of adapting Einstein’s theory of relativity to advertising. In a fictional dialogue between an ad man and a professor of physics, Brooker wryly observed that the space sold by advertising agencies, according to relativity theory, is, strictly speaking, “crooked” (Aker 1921: 381). Such references to the nonEuclidean geometry of contemporary physics situate the artist-advertiser’s modernist graphic designs within a broader early-20th-century dialogue between art and science that also nourished McLuhan, who likewise cited “relativity physics” as an inspiration for his own non-linear methodology (Henderson 1983; McLuhan 1951b: 3). An undated proposal for an advertisement to be based on “the pattern in the construction of every atom of matter” elucidates Brooker’s design for a series of advertisements for The Globe and Reliance Engravers that appeared in the pages of The Globe and Marketing in 1928 and 1929. Here, geometric patterns of elementary particles hum like force fields of affect (Brooker 1928a; 1928b).3 Similarly, in “Visualize Events—Not Things—in Advertising Copy,” Brooker invoked the “vortex—or ‘event’” precipitated by the meeting of electrons to elucidate the process whereby the advertisement is transformed from static copy into a “happening” (Spane 1929: 161, 162). Brooker’s use of atoms to sell newspapers sets the stage for “the invasion of the human subject by TV electrons” which McLuhan promulgated in the 1950s (McLuhan, 1955b: 15). Brooker’s commercial designs were many Canadians’ first exposure to non-objective art and design, and would have been highly visible in Winnipeg during the period of McLuhan’s studies at the University of Manitoba from 1928 to 1934. Brooker’s deployment of “dynamic matter” both to promote modernist abstraction and to market commodities to Canadian art audiences and consumers has been largely ignored because of the pervasive attention paid to the role of music in his artwork (Clough et al. 2007: 62; Williams 2000; Reid 1973). While music deeply inspired Brooker, and undoubtedly contributed to the synesthetic vocabulary of such early artworks as Green Movement (1927), Chorale (1927) and Fugue (1930), the repetition of “formless,” coil-like structures in these works simultaneously redeploys the artist’s earlier theorization of matter as a carrier of mass affect. Connections between Brooker’s abstract designs and use of metaphors from physics is notable in works such as ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’—Blake (1927a), which closely approximates the futurism of his contemporary graphic designs for


The Globe and Reliance Engravers. This aspect of Brooker’s practice represents an indigenous precedent for McLuhan’s writings on the connections between modern physics, affect and sensation in The Mechanical Bride. In one oft-quoted section of that work, McLuhan invokes Alfred North Whitehead to shed light on the cubistic technique of an advertisement for Berkshire nylons in a fashion that was strikingly similar to Brooker’s commercial designs and writings on advertising of the 1920s and early 1930s (McLuhan 1951b: 80).

Betts and Johnston underline the literary character of Brooker’s writings on advertising (Betts 2005: 4; Johnston 2001: 174), which suggest parallels with McLuhan’s characterization of Poe as exemplary of “the man of letters in society” (McLuhan 1944: 30). Much as Poe’s innovations responded to the technology of the press—as both Brooker and McLuhan noted—so too was Brooker’s synesthetic formulation of the media inextricably tied to his work as a graphic designer, copywriter and magazine editor (Brooker 1931b). Brooker was renowned for controversial articles championing Dickens and Shakespeare; he referred to the latter as “that consummate copy writer” (Marketing 1922b: 528).4 In article after article published in Marketing and the influential American trade paper Printers’ Ink, Brooker urged his peers to apply the “methods of the novelist” to problems in advertising (Surrey 1924a: 256). Brooker’s aesthetic language in these texts sets the stage for McLuhan’s understanding of “the media as art forms” in the early 1950s (McLuhan 1954a: 6–13). In 1951, McLuhan wrote in the The Mechanical Bride of the “spontaneous cubism achieved in The New York Times” (10). In his 1953 article “The Age of Advertising,” McLuhan likened an advertisement to “a piece of

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As Brooker’s work began to register a newfound social consciousness during the 1930s (Betts 2009; Hudson 1997), the crystalline geometry of his earlier art and design was replaced by an organicism stimulated by a growing interest in Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution (Lauder 2010). Underlying the “rhythmic biomorphic energy and flow” characteristic of these later works was a search for the “organization of any living thing,” as Brooker wrote in notes for a 1949 lecture delivered at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, during a period in which Innis and McLuhan were active at the university (Brooker 1980: 36; Zemans 1989: 30). Similarly, his later advertising writings, which began to taper off following his move to MacLaren Advertising in 1934 (where he retired as vice president in the year of his death), reveal an intensified interest in the genetic capacity of layout to suggest the divergent directions of plural narratives through the synthesis of multiple advertising techniques (Brooker 1940; Betts 2005: 29). Brooker’s Bergsonian valorization of multiplicity in his late writings on advertising and culture resembles McLuhan’s subsequent notion of “simultaneous perception” via multiple senses as the apprehension of a “total and diversified field”—a concept derived, in part, from McLuhan’s comparative analysis of newspaper layout and cubist composition (Brooker 1940; McLuhan 1951b: 3; McLuhan 1962: 267).

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abstract art” (1953: 555.). By 1954, McLuhan was asserting that “the entire economy is on an artistic or magical basis” (McLuhan 1954b). While it has proved impossible to establish a direct influence, Philip Marchand’s observation that McLuhan “was in the habit of clipping ads” for years prior to the publication of The Mechanical Bride—eventually compiling them in an extensive personal archive—underlines the strong possibility that Brooker’s distinctively aesthetic approach to the analysis of advertising, disseminated through the leading American and Canadian trade journals of the day as late as 1940, may have informed the media theorist’s insights without McLuhan becoming aware of his influence (Marchand 1990: 107).5 Brooker’s use of multiple pseudonyms in his professional and literary writings enhances the likelihood that McLuhan may have studied Brooker’s distinctive contributions to advertising culture as examples of “anonymous history,” rather than recognizing them as the work of a single authorial voice (Darroch and Marchessault 2009: 12).

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Brooker was awarded the first Lord Tweedsmuir Award (subsequently the Governor General’s Award for Fiction) in 1936 for his novel Think of the Earth. He remained at the centre of the Toronto literary scene well into the period of McLuhan’s mature studies of advertising through the publication of his novel The Robber in 1950. The Robber was adapted for radio and broadcast by the CBC on April 7, 1950 (Betts 2005: xxviii, 46). Brooker and his multidisciplinary achievements were again celebrated in the Canadian media when, in 1952, the Association of Canadian Advertisers awarded him the Silver Medal for lifetime contributions to advertising (Betts 2009: xxii). An acquaintance of University of Toronto faculty members Northrop Frye and Barker Fairley, Brooker was at the centre of a network of prominent Toronto artists and intellectuals, including Fairley, that met regularly at the Arts and Letters Club (Betts 2005: 214; Denton 2011; Frye 2001: 200, 327; Hudson 1997: 16; Frye and Kemp 1996: 704, 707, 715; Frye and Kemp 2007: 109, 111; Mastin 1993: 28). Anna Hudson has described the Arts and Letters Club as a hub of cultural and intellectual exchange: For [Charles] Comfort, [William] Ogilvie and Brooker, along with fellow [Canadian Group of Painters] members Charles Goldhamer and George Pepper, the Arts and Letters Club provided an ideal environment for discussion of a comprehensive alliance of the fine and industrial arts for the advancement of culture in Canada. Leading representatives of Toronto’s commercial art scene were there, including René Cera of Eaton’s College Street [department store], (in 1934 Cera spoke to fellow members on the art of advertising), C.A.G. Matthews and J.E. Sampson of the firm Sampson-Matthews, (where [Group of Seven member] A.J. Casson was employed), and J.A. MacLaren of the MacLaren Advertising Co. Ltd. for whom Brooker went to work in 1940 [sic]. Altogether it was an eclectic mix of individuals whose interest in the influence of popular culture attracted the membership of…prominent academics from the University of Toronto. (Hudson 1997: 147–48)


Brooker wrote a number of dramatic works that were staged at the Arts and Letters Club in the 1930s and 1940s (Grace 1985: 6; Wagner 1989: 50). While the majority of these were comedic sketches, Brooker’s anti-war play The Storks— staged at the Arts and Letters Club in January 1939—was more substantial and controversial (Wagner 1989: 50–51). Brooker claimed that The Storks was nourished by a careful reading of F. M. Cornford’s study of Aristophanes: “this extravaganza follows very closely the comic formula used by Aristophanes, which F.M. Cornford has reconstructed in his book, The Origin of Attic Comedy” (Brooker quoted in Wagner 1989: 50). Significantly, Cornford’s theorization of space, outlined in his 1936 essay “The Invention of Space,” influenced the spatial theories of both Innis and McLuhan (Cavell 2002: 18, 233n46; Watson 2006: 362–63). Brooker’s dramatization of Cornford’s research for an elite group of Toronto artists, intellectuals and media practitioners at the Arts and Letters Club is compelling evidence of the artist-advertiser’s participation in a common discourse network with members of the Toronto School of Communication. (The archives of the Arts and Letters Club reveal that McLuhan was a member there from 1964 to 1967 [Denton 2011].)

From the early 1920s through the mid-1930s, Brooker contributed fiction and artwork to the leftist magazine The Canadian Forum, for which he also acted as a

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The painters Charles Comfort and William Ogilvie were mutual close acquaintances of Brooker and prominent Arts and Letters Club members who jointly formed a graphic design firm in 1931. They are known to have been influential in the formation of painter Ronald York Wilson, with whom they both worked at the commercial art firm of Brigden’s in Toronto in the mid-1920s (Carpenter 2011; Hudson 1997: 144, 147). Wilson’s daughter, Virginia, married McLuhan’s collaborator Edmund Carpenter in 1961. Comfort contributed the introduction to the influential 1951 Massey Report (the foil for McLuhan’s 1954 Counterblast, produced with Carpenter’s assistance), citing “modern communications, with their tendency to reduce time and space and establish and strengthen a common ground for thought and behaviour”—an observation that may reflect the influence of his long-time friend Brooker (Cavell 2002: 200). Carpenter, who took his first teaching position at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in 1948 (then administered by the University of Toronto) would likely have been in contact with Comfort, who was an associate professor in the department of art and archaeology at the university from 1940 to 1960 (Darroch 2011; Library and Archives Canada; Parker). As a regular meeting place for McLuhan and Carpenter and for research associates of the Communication and Culture Seminar, the ROM café—like the Arts and Letters Club—served as a hub for interdisciplinary exchange in mid-century Toronto that may have put McLuhan in touch with Brooker’s art and ideas via conduits between the worlds of art and science like Carpenter (Marchessault 2005: 81).

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member of the editorial committee. Forum contributors at that time included Fairley (likewise an editor) and Frye as well as Eric Havelock,the historian of oral communication whose writings were influential on Innis and McLuhan. American anthropologist Edward Sapir, then living and working in Ottawa, whose theory of linguistic relativism—developed with Benjamin Lee Whorf—was influential on McLuhan, was also a contributor, as was behavioural psychologist E. A. Bott, whose work on auditory space was another important source for McLuhan (Cavell 2002: 21; Marchessault 2005: 87). Innis’s spouse, Mary Quayle Innis, was a frequent contributor of fiction to the Forum during this period; her texts were accompanied by artworks by members and associates of the Group of Seven, who were well known to Brooker. In 1936, Brooker contributed original illustrations to the Forum under the editorship of CBC radio pioneer Graham Spry, whom he had earlier invited to contribute to an unrealized volume of the Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, thus placing him in contact with one of the leading exponents of the preMcLuhan media discourse network traced by Paul Tiessen (Spry 1992: 53; Tiessen 1993). Spry’s liaison with and later marriage to Innis’s academic collaborator and confidant, Irene Biss—with whom Innis conducted field research on the cod industry, and with whom he had planned to co-author studies of the pulpand-paper industry (a plan cut short by Biss’s marriage)—is further evidence of Brooker’s participation in an indigenous media discourse which formed the backdrop to the Toronto School of Communication (Watson 2006: 169, 192, 195, 197). Innis’s biographer, Alexander John Watson, views Innis’s conflict with Biss over the role of politics in the academy (Biss, like Spry, was a socialist) as a pivotal episode in his intellectual trajectory. It is tempting to see Brooker, whom Anna Hudson has identified as a leading exponent of a “socially-conscious modern movement of painting in Canada,” and an associate of socialists, including Spry, through his contributions to The Canadian Forum and work with CBC radio, as representing “the type of engaged intellectual that Innis despised” (Hudson 1997: 3, 33; Watson 2006: 191–95, 197). Brooker’s work in advertising may thereby have served as a lightning rod for the academic’s critique of the information industries and may perhaps explain Brooker’s exclusion from Innis’s extensive bibliographies. The editorial committee of the Forum in the mid-1920s also included two of Innis’s colleagues in the department of political economy at the University of Toronto: Gilbert Jackson and Hubert Kemp.6 A 1929 Innis article on newsprint, published in the Forum, resonates with Brooker’s insights on how different media interact to form a system and to produce markets, outlined in his 1924 history of Canadian advertising published in Marketing (Innis 1929; Watson 2006: 160). Watson proposes that Innis’s celebrated approach to the study of staples was likely influenced by a marketing course taught by C. S. Duncan at the University of Chicago. “In a sense The Fur Trade in Canada is a superior example of the type of commodity-analysis approach taught by Duncan” (Watson 2006: 147). Innis’s willingness to draw on marketing studies combined with the relative paucity of


primary data on the Canadian market noted by Watson would have made Brooker’s detailed studies, innovative data visualizations and maps in the pages of Marketing an attractive resource for the junior economist. Brooker’s efforts in the early 1920s to enhance government census data in support of market research also parallel Innis’s campaign for new maps of Canada to facilitate the marketinginspired staples analyses in which he was engaged in the mid- to late 1920s ( Johnston 2001: 206; Watson 2006: 147).

Participatory Media Culture in Toronto 1921–55 The Gutenberg Galaxy draws attention to the advertising industry’s precocious awareness of an emerging “global village” of instant and potentially unlimited electronic communication (1962: 21). McLuhan’s ubiquitous slogan has been attributed to Wyndham Lewis, whose 1949 book America and Cosmic Man predicted a dematerialization of human subjectivity in the wake of electronic media (Marchand 1990: 75). Alternatively, Cavell posits Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke as an influence on this idea (Cavell 2002: 14). Brooker’s writings, influenced by both Lewis and Bucke (Brooker 1927: 6, 23), underline the connection between commerce and expanded consciousness subsequently explored in The Gutenberg Galaxy. In an early unpublished manuscript, Brooker formulated a

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McLuhan’s personal network included a mix of businessmen and intellectuals (Marchand 149). Given the relatively restricted social horizons of 1940s and 1950s Toronto, it is unlikely that Brooker and McLuhan’s social networks did not overlap. In situating Brooker and McLuhan as participants in a common discourse network, it is germane to consider that the final meeting of the Communication and Culture Seminar, organized by McLuhan with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Tom Easterbrook and Edmund Carpenter with funds from the Ford Foundation, did not occur until April 1955, the very month of Brooker’s death (Marchand 1990: 125). This fact underlines the parallel trajectories of Brooker’s investigations of popular culture and multimedia art practice (which, as I have shown, were known to such University of Toronto faculty as Northrop Frye) and those of the seminar, whose interdisciplinary activities and pioneering exploration of media in the earlyto mid-1950s are too diverse to describe here, but which were studied by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault. Furthermore, Brooker’s contributions to Marketing in the 1920s coincided with the career of McLuhan’s father as a salesman for the North American Assurance Company in Winnipeg, beginning in 1921. In 1955, McLuhan followed his father into the world of business through his formation of Idea Consultants with William Hagon and Murray Paulin. Although Idea Consultants never sold a single business concept, the location of its offices in downtown Toronto places McLuhan in the midst of a business community of which Brooker was a high-profile member until his well-publicized retirement in the year of the company’s founding.

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utopian marriage of commerce and communications that resonates with the central themes of McLuhan’s later writings: Commercialism is here, and Commercialism stands for construction.… [Commercialism] has tightened the cosmic bands that hold this little worldful of people together in peace…. Commercialism is linking art with life, and giving every man an occupation worth living for. (ca. 1913–15: 1, 2)

Brooker continued to make frequent trips to Winnipeg following his move to Toronto in 1921, during the period of McLuhan’s master’s studies at the University of Manitoba (Cavell 2002: 233n40). He would have loomed large in cultural circles in that city. Brooker’s writings for Marketing magazine, which he published and edited from 1924 to 1927. freely mix references to Bergson, Einstein and Shakespeare with the latest trends in advertising, an approach resembling McLuhan’s “mosaic” technique (McLuhan 1962: 265). The striking parallels between Brooker’s interdisciplinary analyses of advertising and those of McLuhan are thrown into relief by a passage from the pages of Marketing that links advertising and James Joyce: TOPIA 27 80

There are a good many books, nowadays, of a thorough-going literary character that somehow illuminate business. One finds in them an odd paragraph, or perhaps even a whole chapter, which applied to some business or advertising task, seems to shed more light on it than all the literature of business and advertising put together. And then again there are books of a purely literary character that are influenced by the permeation of business and advertising into almost every nook and cranny of modern life. As instances of this latter aspect I am thinking of…“Ulysses,” by James Joyce, the hero of which is an advertising solicitor in Dublin. (Ting 1929: 212)

Compare Brooker’s comments in the passage above with McLuhan’s analysis of Joyce in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters. His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a free-lance ad salesman. Joyce saw parallels, on one hand, between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the sacral culture and the new profane or literate sensibility.… Such a world is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial, therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom. (McLuhan 1962: 74)

For both Brooker and McLuhan, Joyce’s polyvocal writings provided a template for generating interdisciplinary insights into the inner workings of modern business and the sociology of modernity at large. Moreover, Joyce’s omnivorous word


play may have suggested a model for Brooker’s investigations of polysemia and the aural possibilities of print media (for example, the punning pseudonym, “Mark E. Ting,” with which he signed the above commentary on the Irish author), as it later served as an example for McLuhan’s explorations of the oral tradition in such articles—published during Brooker’s lifetime—as “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process” (1951a) and “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press” (1954c). Brooker’s literary approach to the study of advertising taught him that “the consumer will listen, but he won’t think” (Surrey 1930b: 51). Joyce would have been an important source for the innovative, sound-based paradigm that Brooker elaborated in his Marketing texts and advertising textbooks, that pitted the “oral” properties of dialogue against the linear and visual bias of American “reason-why” copy.

Brooker’s investment in participatory advertising techniques is evident in his “lifelong fascination with the detective genre” (Betts 2005: 17). One marketing text by Brooker, comparing advertising to the unfolding of a detective mystery, sought a model of reader participation in the puzzle-like construction of a G. K. Chesterton murder mystery (Spane 1923: 142). Significantly, Chesterton was also tremendously influential on McLuhan’s intellectual development (Marchand 1990: 23–24).8 Like Brooker, McLuhan invoked detective fiction as a framework for making sense of popular culture. Indeed, Marchand informs us that “McLuhan, who loved mysteries and puzzles thought of himself as a sleuth” and Marchessault

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The ambivalence cultivated by Brooker in his writings on advertising parallels the “indeterminacy” identified by Daniel Robinson (2004: 35) as a primary characteristic of advertising campaigns for Wrigley gum between 1890 and 1930.7 Yet, whereas the non-linguistic branding strategies devised by Wrigley took second place to psychological “themes” (2004: 27), Brooker’s use of “polysemic” techniques of brand messaging largely dispensed with semantic content altogether in favour of an emphasis on the sensory effects and participatory potential of advertising media themselves: “One might say that an advertisement is something like a novel with the hero or heroine left out. Each man or woman is supposed to step into the vacant place and act the part” (Surrey 1930a: 121). Brooker’s advertising texts are concerned with “giving place to consumer activity” (158). This participatory stance is consistent with his art criticism, which promoted a Bergsonian vision of a society of creators: “My primary concern,” Brooker wrote in a 1930 letter to H. O. McCurry, the assistant director of the National Gallery of Canada, “my whole concern, in fact—as a writer on the arts is that people should become artists” (1930b: 2). Brooker’s participatory approach also suggests comparisons with the later, controversial style of Innis, who, according to McLuhan, “offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits, like a symbolist poet or an abstract painter” (McLuhan 1962: 217). Influenced by the Bergsonian modernism of interwar Britain and the writings of Joyce, Brooker similarly developed “do-it-yourself kits” for consumers and art audiences alike.

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observes that Sherlock Holmes was McLuhan’s “favourite literary figure” (Marchessault 2005: 206; Marchand 1990: 95). McLuhan explicitly appropriated the art of the sleuth as a critical methodology in The Mechanical Bride: “The sleuth embodies an attitude, a personal strategy for meeting an opaque and bewildering situation” (108). Writing a few years later, McLuhan argued that newspaper layout inspired Edgar Allan Poe to compose his plots backward—an important contribution to the formal development of the detective genre (1954c). For McLuhan, the structure of detective fiction provided a critical methodology for “working backwards from effect to cause” as well as a framework for reader participation (1962: 277). The Gutenberg Galaxy likened the reversal of traditional narrative structure found in detective fiction to “the following of process in isolation from product” (1962: 45). This formulation corresponds almost exactly to the participatory plan of Brooker’s Copy Technique, which is conceived according to the reverse structure of a generic detective novel:9

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It is necessary to work backward, as it were, in much the same way that a writer of detective stories concocts his plots.… We all know that these writers construct their plots backward, working their complicated network of clues into a growing and ordered sequence that finally brings together a unified and simple situation which gives rise to a murder. In the same way, when you see an advertisement for Palmolive Soap which says, “Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion,” you realize that the idea back of it didn’t drop out of a clear sky. (Surrey 1930a: 5)

Not only did Brooker’s writings on advertising topics incorporate techniques derived from detective fiction, his creative output included a number of experiments in the detective genre as well. The protagonist of his early Vitagraph scenarios, Lambert Chase, was modelled on Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. A 1936 novel, The Tangled Miracle, is also structured as a detective story. Significantly, the plot of The Tangled Miracle centres on technologies of information distribution and the manipulation of a gullible public through the mass media—themes that resonate with the concerns of both later Innis and early McLuhan (Betts 2005: 138, 159–62). As early as 1946, McLuhan was analyzing the “aristocratic ideal” embodied by the sleuth as a popular media construction, a theme to which he would return in the pages of The Mechanical Bride (McLuhan 1946: 624). McLuhan’s representations of the sleuth recall the figure of Lambert Chase and, indeed, Brooker himself. Brooker deployed the techniques of the sleuth to study the effects of media—an approach that may have been nurtured (as it would later be for McLuhan) by a familiarity with techniques of close reading developed by I. A. Richards (Betts 2005: 116; Gow 2001). Brooker, like McLuhan, was more interested in “performing” media than in objectively describing their material attributes (Surrey 1930a:


95). Whether or not McLuhan was familiar with Brooker’s advertising writings or not, they represent a significant contribution to the sensory media culture of Toronto in which McLuhan participated. If comparison of the writings of Brooker and McLuhan reveals a common interest in how media reconfigure reader reception and the beholder’s share, analysis of the writings of Brooker and Innis discloses a mutual concern with the role of media in establishing what Innis termed “monopolies of space” (Innis 1951: 128). Brooker’s texts for Marketing display a remarkable sensitivity to the effect of media in extending the commercial interests of metropolitan centres such as Toronto and Winnipeg as well as the resistance of marginal “oral” cultures—such as the francophone society of Quebec—to the advances of spatial media such as the press and print advertising.

Marketing Monopolies of Space and Affect

As a contributor to Marketing from 1921 to 1924, Brooker was familiar with the innovative use of census data made by W. A. Lydiatt—Marketing’s editor in those years—vis-à-vis his influential newspaper directory Lydiatt’s Book: What’s What in Canadian Advertising ( Johnston 2001: 204). Though Lydiatt was an indefatigable

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The late communications writings of Harold Innis are coloured by his training and earlier practice as a political economist. Partly under the influence of Wyndham Lewis—whose impact on Brooker is evident as early as his 1927 Hart House talk on William Blake—Innis in the 1940s increasingly turned his attention to the effects of the media of communication on the economic organization of empires through time and across space. Innis was particularly interested in how media bring marginal territories within the sphere of commercial systems such as markets by facilitating the extension of political control to the peripheries of empire (Heyer and Crowley 2008: xxxi). It was the capacity of space-binding media such as the press to support “monopolies of knowledge” that particularly obsessed—and troubled—later Innis (1950: 22). His evocative term describes the concentration of knowledge in imperial centres incidental to territorial expansion, and also references the attendant constraints on critical appraisal of that knowledge imposed by the relative temporal or spatial bias of the media of communication that supported that accumulation of knowledge in the first instance. The capacity of media to carve out monopolies of power across space is exemplified by Innis’s analysis of newspapers and markets: “In building up circulation itself and creating goodwill the newspaper attempts to establish a monopoly position which can be capitalized on by advertisers attempting to build up monopoly positions for products advertised” (Innis 1952: 84). Head of the first media and research department in a Canadian advertising agency ( Johnston 2001: 210), Brooker was similarly concerned with the emergent nexus of technology, space and power from at least the early 1920s.

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promoter of market research, Johnston notes that Brooker wrote in greater detail on the subject (206). Though sceptical of then-current psychological theories, Brooker “believed that market research provided the data that were sought: the demographic details necessary to visualize the ideal consumer” (206).10

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Johnston has demonstrated that Brooker’s articles pictured an ideal consumer who represented a composite of government-generated statistics and private surveys. Brooker’s Marketing texts were equally engaged in bringing demographic spaces into representation through innovative visualization techniques, including new maps and charts. Brooker’s visualizations of statistical data endowed markets with new spatial definition. In the artist-advertiser’s able hands, Canadian geography was translated into a spatial expression of commercial interests. This remediation of Canadian geography coincided with Innis’s near-contemporary interpretation of the determining influence of geography on Canadian development in the celebrated final chapter of The Fur Trade in Canada (1930). Prior to Innis, Brooker’s maps (Fig. 1) visualized “Canada as a big ‘staples commodity’” (Kroker: 18). Johnston has placed Brooker’s contributions into perspective, noting that during the period of his innovations in market research, no advertising courses were yet taught at Canadian universities and, indeed, no Toronto trade paper featured an article by or commissioned consulting work from a professional psychologist ( Johnston 2001: 56, 171, 185).

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Fig. 1. Advertising In the Prairie Zone. Marketing 27(3).

The parallels between Brooker’s innovative visualizations of Canadian markets as a production of space and the commercial geographies represented by Innis as spatial monopolies is thrown into relief through comparison of an advertisement for the Canadian retailer Eaton’s (for which a pencil mock-up—drawn in Brooker’s distinctive hand—survives in the Brooker estate), printed in 1930 as a full-page spread in the national daily The Financial Post (Fig. 2); a Canadian government map was reproduced in Innis’s 1930 The Fur Trade in Canada, showing fur trading


posts and transport lines (Fig. 3). Brooker’s design illustrates the westward expansion of the Eaton’s retail market during the period from 1869 to 1930 through a sequence of maps representing discrete time steps (1869, 1905 and 1930, respectively), each of which indicates the location of retail stores, factories and other components of the retailer’s network at a specific moment in the company’s development. In Innis’s terminology, Brooker’s design represents Eaton’s corporate narrative as a progressive monopolization of Canadian geography through the establishment of an interdependent network of economic institutions whose coordinated action (i.e., through advertising media) extended spatial control from centre to periphery. Similarly, Innis deploys a government map—one of only two visual aids included in his monumental study (whose design almost certainly harnessed the University of Toronto economist’s expertise, and may have been a direct result of his own campaign for new government maps)—that likewise represents the fur trade as a spatial network for which “geography provides the grooves” (Innis 1946: 87). Although, unlike Brooker, Innis does not employ multiple maps to represent the expansion of monopoly through time, his accompanying narrative study of the fur trade can be seen to perform a similar function. Stated differently, Innis employs a government map to visualize the spatial monopoly whose institutional development he narrates in the body of his text. TOPIA 27 85

Fig. 2. Eaton’s of Canada. The Financial Post, January 23, 1930, 31.


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Fig. 3. Dominion of Canada Showing Fur Trading Posts and Transport Lines (Innis 1930: 376).

Brooker’s attentiveness to spatial and temporal factors in the constitution of markets is particularly evident in the special features devoted to the Quebec market he published in the pages of Marketing during his tenure as editor (1925; 1926; 1927). Through a sophisticated combination of statistical, geographic and ethnographic instruments, Brooker and fellow Marketing contributors promoted Quebec as a market defined by a distinct monopoly of knowledge (to employ Innis’s terminology). Unlike English-speaking Canada, which, they argued, could be adequately defined with recourse to data documenting purchasing power and buyer habits, Marketing’s commentators on Quebec looked to language and religion as defining attributes of the francophone market (Fife 1927; Landels Love 1926; Nom de Plume 1927; Tarte 1923). The picture of Quebec that emerges from the pages of these special features is that of a static society defined by the oral institutions of language and religion: On account of their origin the habits and thoughts of the French-Canadians differ from those of other people in Canada. Although separated from the country of their ancestors for more than two centuries, they still possess the characteristics of the French people and French is their mother tongue. One must constantly keep in mind that the social life and customs of French people are different in many ways from those of the Canadians of other origin, nor must it be overlooked that they are all Roman Catholics. This latter fact alone should be responsible for at least


a slightly changed appeal in most copy planned to appear in Quebec. (Nom de Plume 1927: 244)

Marketing’s representation of Quebec anticipates Innis’s later writings on the temporal bias of oral societies predicated on continuity through time. Somewhat ironically, Marketing’s characterization of Quebec as a society founded on enduring traditions of language and religion simultaneously served to define it as a territory with new spatial ambitions tied to language.

The correspondence between articulations of temporality evident in the respective characterizations of Quebec found in the writings of Brooker and Innis is representative of a broader accord in their treatment of the effects of commodities on the social production and reproduction of temporal relations. Brooker’s marketing texts are attentive to how commodities affect the representation of time (indeed, Brooker consistently represents advertising media as themselves being in a state of constant “flux”) (Surrey 1930a: 216). His 1929 textbook Layout Technique in Advertising contains a characteristic passage in which the artist-advertiser analyzes an advertisement for Hoover vacuums. The product is depicted as being encircled by its own electric cord: “The ‘active’ line of the cord,” writes Brooker, “does more than break up the space of the layout. Its curves are ‘events’ rather than forms,” Brooker declares (Surrey 1929a: 176). The strongly temporal effect of the electric cord is underscored by the numeric bullets of the copy, which follow the curving line of the cord to evoke the face of a clock (Lauder 2010: 90). Brooker’s analysis of the Hoover ad suggests parallels with later Innis’s analysis of the social effects of time-binding media such as radio, as well as his observation in “The Press, a

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Brooker’s sensitivity to regional differences and their role in shaping Canadian identity in his introduction to the 1929 Yearbook of the Arts in Canada echoed his marketing writings in acknowledging the role of geography and culture in shaping the fundamentally pluralistic and regional character of Canada. Indeed, some passages of “When We Awake!” read uncannily like sections of The Fur Trade in Canada, published the following year.11 The spatial effects of Brooker’s definition of Quebec as a francophone market predicated on monopolies of time also clears a path for McLuhan’s later comments on the relationship between radio, vernacular and nationalism and its implications for Quebec (Havers 2003: 522–23; McLuhan 1964: 36, 297, 306). Innis’s earlier comments on radio, language and orality anticipate McLuhan’s insights and echo Brooker’s descriptions of Quebec: “with the development of the radio, protection of language enabled French Canadians to take an active part in the preparation of scripts and in the presentation of plays” (1952: 13). Prior to Innis and McLuhan, Brooker visualized Quebec as a territory resistant to the encroachment of (anglophone) imperial centres via the spatial technologies of press and advertising. Moreover, Brooker explicitly tied that resistance to the persistence of distinct oral traditions and religion through the centuries, much as Innis would later do.

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Neglected Factor in Economic History” that “Advertisers build up monopolies of time to an important extent through the use of news” (1950: 196; 1952: 94). In Brooker’s analysis of the Hoover ad, it is a commodity (conceived as a locus of “events”) rather than a news item that functions to build up temporal monopoly, but the parallels with Innis are striking. Much as Innis argued that “inventions in communication compel realignments in the monopoly or the oligopoly of knowledge,” Brooker associated the rise of advertising and the daily press with a broad societal shift toward what he termed— echoing Wyndham Lewis—“Today-dom” (Surrey 1923b: 45; Innis 1951: 4). In the late essay “The Strategy of Culture” (1952), Innis proposed that “an emphasis on speed and action essential to books produced for individual reading weakens the position of poetry and the drama particularly in new countries swamped by print” (2). This argument corresponds very closely with the thesis articulated by Brooker in a 1931 article printed in the Sewanee Review, “Idolaters of Brevity”:

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The development of a daily press at a certain point in America’s literary evolution when other circumstances might have been conducive to lengthier production, brevity and fugacity did become concomitant qualities which have reduced much of our literature to the level of journalese.… With the popularization of the daily press the idolatry of brevity began in earnest…poetry, of course, no longer counts. It simply fills in odd corners of magazines when a short story or an article does not quite fill the page.… In America the vogue of the “curtain-raiser” was not long-lived, but the oneact play had been established as the prevalent dramatic form. (Brooker 1931b: 265)

Sounding like the Innis of “A Plea for Time,” Brooker concludes his essay by reflecting, “We, concerned more with the moment than any past people, deliberately ignore the past and pride ourselves on our ‘pure reactions’ to the immediate present” (268). Earlier, in the pages of Marketing, Brooker had observed a related phenomenon: “Without going into any arguments, pro and con, I think it can be accepted as generally true that the masses today, although much better educated than formerly, probably do less thinking than their forbears” (Surrey 1930b: 52). In these and other comments, Brooker parallels Innis in correlating the media of advertising and print with a social trend toward present-mindedness: “The distorting effects of industrialism and advertising on culture in the United States have been evident on every hand,” wrote Innis; “their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity” (1952: 10–11). If Brooker’s exercises in market research resemble Innis’s speculations on the interdependence of the media of communication and monopolies of knowledge, his pioneering history of Canadian advertising—published in five installments in the


pages of Marketing in 1924—bears a marked resemblance to Innis’s later studies of the pulp-and-paper industry. Innis asserted that a proliferation of newspapers, stimulated by the availability of cheap pulp and paper, encouraged the growth of advertising through intensified demand for new sources of revenue (1952: 84; 2008: 77). Similarly, Brooker began his series with an overview of Canadian newspaper history. He posited that the tremendous growth of journalism in the later19th century had created an increased demand for advertising: “Toronto newspapers were kept alive chiefly by the advertising of wholesalers and retailers in the city” (Brooker 1924a: 283). Like Innis, Brooker viewed advertising and newspapers as interdependent components of a media “environment” (Brooker 1931b: 264). Moreover, his history of advertising put forward what we would now view as characteristically Innisian arguments (later reworked by McLuhan); namely, that media create markets and, in effect, that markets are the true “content” of media. Predating the first published monograph on Canadian advertising history by more than fifteen years (Stephenson and McNaught 1940), Brooker’s detailed history would have been a valuable source of information for anyone studying Canadian advertising and publishing history in the later 1920s and 1930s.

The critique of visual culture mounted by McLuhan as early as the late 1940s— which took aim at the “brainless routines” of everyday life fostered by industrial

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If Innis was primarily interested in markets as monopolies of space, McLuhan’s writings of the 1940s through the mid-1950s disclose a preoccupation with marketing technologies that parallels Brooker’s interest in the capacity for market research to capture the affective economy of consumers ( Johnston 2001: 207). Early texts on advertising by McLuhan reveal a preoccupation with how advertising shapes the “behaviour patterns” of consumers (McLuhan 1947b: 435). McLuhan was keenly attuned to the effects of market research in reducing the public to “a number” (1951b: 79). McLuhan’s focus on the reductive effects of market research in The Mechanical Bride represents an early awareness of the pernicious influence of what Innis dubbed the “information industries” (1951b: 83). Innis feared that the linear transmission model of communication promulgated by proponents of information theory was pushing out the dialogic paradigm of democratic process inherited from the “oral” society of ancient Athens, and replacing it with a spatial regime in line with the imperial ambitions of American cultural producers. Innis’s anxieties resurface in the writings of McLuhan as a suspicion that, “we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information” (1964: 57). McLuhan’s anxieties about the transmission model are evident in his comments on the Nielsen Audimeter in The Mechanical Bride: “It is obviously the commercial counterpart of the secret microphone installed for political reasons. It is the mechanical sleuth which eventually pieces together the radio habits of a household into a single chartimage” (1951b: 48). McLuhan was interested in the way that the technologies of market research were being applied to problems of “social engineering” (50).

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technology—bears a close resemblance to the methodology of recent affect theory (McLuhan 1949: 9; McLuhan 1947a). Patricia Ticineto Clough has explored how entertainment and surveillance technologies are employed to “control bodies of information and to treat bodies as information” (2004: 3). Sounding very much like the McLuhan of The Mechanical Bride, Clough observes that “these technologies aim to affect the subject’s subindividual capacities, that is, capacities to be moved, to shift focus, to attend, to take interest, to slow down, to speed up, and to mutate” (2004: 3). Drawing on the work of critical theorist Michel Foucault (1977; 1976), Clough interprets affective technologies such as television as evidence of an epistemic shift from “disciplinary” societies to a regime of “biopolitical” control (2004: 5). Similarly, Tiziana Terranova (2004a; 2004b) has employed affect theory to “understand bodies as modes of organization” in a contemporary network society regulated by information technologies (Clough 2004: 12). Viewed through the lens of affect theory, Brooker’s early application of statistical instruments to chart the affective capacities of consumers in his marketing texts and coeval depictions of depersonalized figures and abstracted body parts in machine-like arrangements in his visual-art and graphic designs can be seen to bring into representation the statistical contours of an emergent “affect economy” predicated on the efficient “circulation of affects” by means of a biopolitical entanglement of entertainment and information technologies Clough (2004: 5, 15). In addition, the critique of advertising mounted by early McLuhan can be seen as a response to the conjunction of entertainment, statistics and Bergsonian virtuality first marshalled in Canada by Brooker (indeed, even when viewed within a North American context, Brooker’s controversial articles from the early and mid-1920s seem to attempt a theorization of what we would now recognize as an affect economy). It should be noted that McLuhan’s later writings on the extensions of man are less amenable to analysis through the lens of affect theory than his early critique of mechanism and statistics in the Mechanical Bride and roughly contemporaneous writings. In McLuhan’s view, the management of consumer populations is achieved through the “intoxication” of number: “Our private and corporate lives have become information processes,” he wrote in Understanding Media (1964: 52). The cybernetic feedback loops of market research endlessly multiply the siren gestures of the Hollywood starlet in McLuhan’s celebrated analysis of the “love-goddess assembly line” (1951b: 93–97). McLuhan’s comments could equally take the machinic chorus line depicted by Brooker in Green Movement (1927) as its referent: “there is some sort of relation between the dynamo of abstract power which imparts motion to ‘the line’ and the dynamo of abstract finance and engineering which moves the passions of the tired business man idolatrously seated in front of that line” (1927: 96). The abstracted body parts of Brooker’s canvas embody the transpersonal affect communicated by the information industries that he analyzed in his advertising textbooks—a theme subsequently taken up by McLuhan. The affective assembly line of Green Movement finds a commercial equivalent in


a contemporary advertisement for Kayser hosiery that Brooker analyzes in Layout Technique in Advertising (Fig. 4). The repetition of women’s legs as a compositional motif in Green Movement and the Keyser hosiery ad alike suggests analogies with the cover design of McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, which superimposes lines of women’s legs (appropriated from an advertisement for Gotham Hosiery) onto a design of simplified mechanical cogs. According to McLuhan, these “legs ‘on a Pedestal’…are one facet of our ‘replaceable parts’ cultural dynamics” (1951b: 98).

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Fig. 4. Style No. 64x: The Chiffon Hose Adopted by Smart Canadian Women (Brooker 1929: 63).

The schematization of human motility in the Keyser hosiery ad similarly visualizes Brooker’s conception of affect as “e-motion”: “The force that most easily sets the consumer in motion is e-motion, inner motion—that mysterious agitation which takes place when our feelings are moved” (Surrey 1924c: 344). A comparable understanding of media’s capacity to communicate affect is found in Brooker’s


analysis in Copy Technique in Advertising of Bergsonian techniques of empathic communication in Walter de la Mare’s Memoires of a Midget: In one of the early chapters the midget discovers a dead mole. She speaks of stooping “with lips drawn back over my teeth,” while she surveyed “the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly.” When I read that passage I consciously and deliberately drew my own lips back over my teeth, to see what it meant. Try it yourself, and your nose will immediately wrinkle, and you will feel yourself actually confronted with some distasteful spectacle. (Surrey 1930a: 133)12

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Brooker’s writings anticipate McLuhan’s insights on the impact of quantitative instruments in reducing populations to a composite identity defined by the circulation of affect, bodies and information (Surrey 1923a: 264). Brooker’s writings represent a significant but overlooked contribution to the emergence of the affect economy studied by Clough, in which the principle commodity is the transpersonal affect of bodies—“patterns of living,” to employ McLuhan’s language (McLuhan 1947b: 440). The abstract patterns that dominate such artworks by Brooker as Green Movement (1927), Chorale (1927) and Fugue (1930) bring into representation the “recipes and formulas for reducing everybody to the same pattern” deployed by the advertiser, which McLuhan later analyzed in The Mechanical Bride (1951b: 94–96). Brooker’s contemporary writings on advertising are replete with affective formulas: “People are interested in life, not in ‘products’…not dead things put up in cartons at so much a dozen. They are living states of mind or activities of the body” (Surrey 1930a: 21). Brooker’s affective geometries suggest analogies with the abstract representations of efficiency found in the contemporaneous motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (1917). Much as the Gilbreths applied the affective techniques of industrial efficiency pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor to the domestic sphere, Brooker’s affective geometries participated in the “attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society” subsequently studied by McLuhan (1964: 227). Brooker’s representations of advertising as a form of “cosmic consciousness”—like Innis’s subsequent study of media as forms of “transpersonal memory” and McLuhan’s contemporaneous explorations of the “behaviour patterns” propagated by visual culture—are significant precedents for contemporary analyses of the affect economy by Clough, Terranova and others (Brooker 1930c: 202; McLuhan 1947b: 435; Innis 1950: 30).

Selling via All Five Senses: A New Ratio for Radio The anxieties about the dehumanizing effects of market research that McLuhan expresses in his early texts were shared by Brooker, whose writings consistently reminded peers that “markets are people!” (Brooker 1925a). In the midst of a marketing regime dominated by behaviourist psychology and quantitative instruments, Brooker promoted a corrective approach to market research that he termed


“humanics” ( Johnston 2001; Surrey 1930a: 78). Yet the qualitative thrust of Brooker’s writings was not opposed to statistical methods (Surrey 1930a: 236). Brooker, as we have seen was a key player in the importation of statistical techniques to Canada; nevertheless, he emphasized that statistics give only a momentary snapshot of ever-evolving and ultimately unpredictable social trends ( Johnston 2001: 207). Brooker was less charitable in his assessment of behaviourism, however (ibid: 173). His qualitative psychology may be seen as an attempt to substitute a Bergsonian respect for qualitative “becoming” for the quantitative formulas promoted by the crude version of behaviourism tht circulated in professional advertising circles in Canada in the 1920s (Lauder 2010).

Janine Marchessault has explored the significance of Bergson’s anti-mechanistic writings on temporality and multiplicity to McLuhan’s studies from the Explorations period onward (2005: 208–9, 214–15). Brooker’s frequent recourse to Bergson and his followers, beginning with his Marketing texts of mid-1920s and intensifying in the 1950s with the late, unpublished manuscript The Brave Voices (1954), suggests that Bergson was a mutual point of departure for the artist-advertiser and members of the Toronto School of Communication. While it is beyond the scope of the present paper to parse the works of Frye and Havelock for traces of Bergson, it is clear that Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Bergsonism in Time and

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One aspect of Brooker’s innovative approach to advertising that Johnston omits from his analysis is Brooker’s consistent exploration of the sensory effects of media. Brooker understood that to speak the language of the consumer, the advertiser must address the senses in addition to drawing on the census. Brooker’s privileging of direct sensory communication is evident in Copy Technique in Advertising, in which he wrote, “sensation is more potent than thought” (Surrey 1930a: 42). The abundance of motile metaphors in that work resonates with the proprioceptive themes identified by Gregory Betts in his reading of Brooker’s poetry and prose (2005: 113). I have argued that the prominent place of motility in Brooker’s advertising texts may reflect the influence of Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the body as a “locus of action” and layout as a “motor diagram” into which the subject may insert the “sketch” of possible action which it marks out on matter virtually, in advance of actual movement (Lauder 2010: 82, 86; Lauder 2006: 76–77). If Brooker did not absorb this concept through a reading of Bergson in the 1920s (we know that he did read Bergson at that time, though references are relatively infrequent during the 1920s and 1930s by comparison with his immersion in Bergson during the 1950s),13 his close reading of texts by former Bergsonists such as Walter de la Mare, Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry in Copy Technique in Advertising suggests the possibility of a second-hand influence (Betts 2009: xlviii; Lauder 2006). Complementing Brooker’s proprioceptive interests was a concern with synesthesia that sets the stage for McLuhan’s subsequent writings on the interplay of the senses.

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Western Man (1927) served as a common, if highly ambivalent, reference for Brooker, Innis and McLuhan alike. All three cited elements of Lewis’s argument with approval, only to reject his thesis as a whole. In his 1927 lecture on Blake delivered at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, Brooker drew on Lewis’s theories to interpret the function of “formlessness” in Blake, but criticized his refusal to “die into life” (Brooker in Betts 2009: xlviii). Brooker reiterated this position in a June 1931 article published in the British journal The Adelphi (edited by the Bergsonist Middleton Murry), “Prophets Wanted,” in which he characterized Lewis as “another crier in the wilderness of pessimism” (1931a). As we have seen, Innis cited Lewis’s critique of the present-mindedness promoted by American advertising with approval (a gesture that amounts to a rejection of Bergsonian flux) (Marchessault 2005: 103, 216). Yet, in the final analysis, Innis’s privileging of the temporal—albeit the longue durée of the oral tradition—jars with the spatial paradigm promoted by Lewis. Early McLuhan is alone in articulating complete agreement with Lewis’s spatial methodology; however, as Marchessault observes, McLuhan later abandoned the stasis of the “vortex” celebrated by Lewis, beginning with his participation in the Communication and Culture Seminar (Marchessault 2005: 215–16). The deployment of Bergson, noted by Darroch and Marchessault (2008: 22), in the writings of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt—a fellow organizer of the Communication and Culture Seminar—is further evidence that a readership of Bergson contributed to the development of the Toronto School of Communication. Although the synesthetic dimension of Brooker’s practice has been treated extensively, in previous studies it has been framed as evidence of either, or both, the artist’s purported mysticism (Davis) or musical interests (Williams). Whereas a mystical reading of Brooker’s synesthetic interests is not borne out by the textual evidence, Brooker does make repeated reference to the specifically auditory overtones of his experiments in synesthesia (Zemans 1989: 21). Yet, interpretation of synesthesia in Brooker’s practice has, to date, failed to register the important role that synesthetic tropes play in his writings on advertising. In a series of articles featured in Marketing magazine between 1922 and 1930, Brooker explored the possibility of “selling via all five senses” (Stokes December 12, 1925: 353). These articles represent an early attempt to describe the media as a synesthetic system—an overlooked contribution to the media ecology of Toronto that served as the backdrop to McLuhan’s theorization of the media of communication as “extensions” of the human sensorium (Carey 1967: 15; Marchand 1990: 119). Looking back in 1929 on the synesthetic approach to advertising that he advocated in the pages of Marketing for several years, Brooker wrote, “I debated, of using ink and paper to stimulate the palate or to cause the mind to ‘auditionize’ unheard sounds in the same way that it ‘visualizes’ unseen sights” (Ting 1929: 212). Brooker’s conception of the sensory impact of media is perhaps


most forcefully conveyed by a cartoon (Fig. 5) that he contributed to a December 1925 Marketing article by Charles W. Stokes, assistant advertising manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway ( Johnston 2001: 205). The cartoon features a man with enormous, bug-like eyes. The caption reads: “Our tame cartoonist predicts what the race will look like a few generations hence if eye-mindedness is carried much further” (Brooker in Stokes 1925: 353). This striking image complements Stokes’s comments on the relative strength of the five senses and advertisers’ tendency to overlook the non-visual senses as potential channels of communication due to cultural factors.

Fig. 5. Bertram Brooker, “Our tame cartoonist predicts what the race will look like a few generations hence if eye-mindedness is carried much further” (in Stokes 1925: 353).

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Brooker’s forecast of intensified sensory adaptation is strikingly similar to McLuhan’s subsequent contention that technological stress on a single sense upsets the balance of the sensorium. In the tradition of Aquinas, McLuhan viewed the harmonious interplay of senses as a form of cognition, or “sensus communis” (McLuhan 1962: 106). He conceived of this intelligent interplay of the senses in explicitly synesthetic terms that recall Brooker’s adaptation of Blake: “This interplay of synesthesia is a kind of tactility such as Blake sought in the bounding line of sculptural form and in engraving” (265). Much of McLuhan’s media writings are devoted to studying the shifting “ratio” of the senses under the impact of electronic media, a preoccupation that parallels themes found thirty years earlier in the work of Brooker (likewise informed by Blake’s concept of ratio). In one of his earliest expositions of this theme, McLuhan employed the same language as Brooker to describe the sensory “bias” of Western culture as being “eye-minded” (McLuhan 1954b: 11).


Brooker’s most extended commentary on the synesthetic potential of advertising is an analysis of an advertisement for National Carbon Company radio batteries: There were five different models of the product illustrated in the immediate foreground, standing out against white space. Behind the topmost battery in the group was a picture of three people listening to a radio set. This was a littler greyer than the batteries and was vignetted into the white space at the bottom. At the top it broke into an oblong background which took up more than half the space, filled with figures of choir boys walking in a processional through the lofty aisles of a church or cathedral. This large background illustration was so grey as to be almost misty, which added to its interest and impede that it was being heard rather than seen. (Surrey 1928b: 132)

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This scene of sensory readjustment is significant for the way in which it explicitly couples synesthesia and electronic media. Brooker’s analysis of the National Carbon Company ad associates changing sensory ratios—a new emphasis on the auditory—with the medium of radio. Moreover, Brooker’s analysis exemplifies his dictum “suit copy to the mediums used” (Surrey 1929c: 88).14 Similarly, Brooker’s comments on an advertisement for Philco radio batteries in 1930 focus on the use of distorted photographs of musicians resembling fun-house mirrors as a synesthetic talking point: The distortion idea, as pictured in these twisted photographs, ingeniously duplicates the feeling a radio listener has when he hears a voice that is familiar to him—a singer he has heard on the concert stage, for example— distorted by bad reception. instruments stretched into thin and monstrously warped shapes, with curious u n n a t u r a l [sic] bulges where they shouldn’t be, do somehow correspond to the effect produced on one’s hearing when the radio starts to “act up.” These thematic illustrations are perhaps as close as it is possible to go, pictorially, in representing an auditory experience. In other words, as a friend of mine remarked recently—not intending a pun—they constitute a “sound idea.” (Spane 1930b: 102)

It is notable that the period of Brooker’s interest in the synesthetic potential of “‘sonorous’ words” in advertising copy coincided with the radio craze that swept Canada beginning in 1922 (Surrey 1929b: 39; Weir 1965: 2). Marketing promoted the potential of wireless technology as an advertising medium as early as June 1922 (1922b: 480). Charles Stokes’s article on the untapped potential of non-visual perception in advertising (and Brooker’s accompanying visualization of the limitations of optical media when, in McLuhan’s argot, they become “overheated”) may be interpreted as an attempt to construct a consumer with sensory capabilities commensurate with the auditory bias of the new medium (McLuhan 1964: 33). This project may have responded to the competition for advertising revenue generated by radio.15 Weir has noted that in the early 1920s, “widely diverse opinions


about the purpose of the new medium and how the medium should be supported” (Weir 1965: 3). Brooker’s synesthetic articles clearly stake a commercial claim on the radio medium. Rather than positioning radio in competition with print, however, Brooker implies the possibility of integrating both media within a synesthetic media system—thereby generating new possibilities of revenue for the synesthetic advertiser. Brooker’s statements on radio in the pages of Marketing emphasize the mediumspecific characteristics of the new device: The trade figures we were once familiar with—such as Sunny Jim—were produced by an artist and could be easily copied by other artists if, by any chance, the original cartoonist was gathered to his fathers or retired to California with his riches. The radio figure, however, is a flesh and blood creation, even though it is only his voice that is heard. (Spane 1930a: 78)

Clearing a path for the medium theory subsequently advanced by McLuhan, Brooker’s comments on radio privilege the properties of the medium over semantic content. Brooker’s understanding of media coincides with McLuhan’s recognition that “the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception” (McLuhan 1964: 18). In “Radio and TV vs. the ABCED-Minded,” McLuhan argued that radio prepared audiences for the revolution of television: “the ear readied the eye” (McLuhan

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Brooker’s synesthetic approach to marketing radio suggests that multiple media produce an integrated media system that requires synesthetic techniques (and a synesthetic conception of the body) to reach (or create) new markets. Such an approach emphasizes the medium itself (e.g., radio) rather than the content or product (e.g., batteries) of a campaign. Brooker’s deployment of synesthetic tropes to sell the medium of radio resonates with Innis’s conceptualization of “news as a device for advertising the paper as an advertising medium” (1951: 162). A similar recognition emerges from the resume of an interview with Alex MacKenzie, sales manager of Canadian National Carbon, which appeared in Marketing in 1924 (probably authored by Brooker). MacKenzie emphasized that “our advertising has not been to sell batteries, but to sell radio. Its aim has been to spread the gospel of radio, to multiply the number of fans both in town and country” (MacKenzie 1924: 131).16 MacKenzie’s comments echo a 1922 Marketing cover story— “Selling Electricity to Rural Communities”—that likewise emphasized the advantages of promoting a medium over a particular message or product (1922a). Brooker’s synesthetic alternative to the either/or approach to radio adopted by many early commentators (representing either the vested interests of print media or proponents of the new medium) sets the stage for McLuhan’s later vision of the electronic media as effecting a reintegration and rebalancing of the senses (Francis 2009: 190).

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1955b: 13). A comparable interplay of auditory and visual is exploited in Brooker’s 1928 advertisement for the Toronto printer Reliance Engravers, “The Eye Versus the Ear” (Fig. 6).

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Fig. 6. “The Eye Versus the Ear” (Brooker 1928b: 90)

Brooker’s copy for this ad resonates with McLuhan’s later observation that radio effected a “meeting of eye and ear” (McLuhan 1964: 301). Moreover, Brooker’s experimentation with layout, typography and graphic design to visualize the auditory in this ad is a harbinger of the synesthetic experiments of McLuhan in Counterblast (1954) and Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (1967). Other advertisements Brooker designed for Reliance in 1928 through early 1929 embody his belief in “the power of sound being greater than the power of sense” (Surrey 1930a: 192). The concentric rings of “Another Boost for Silvertones” (Fig. 7) resonates with D. C. Williams’s influential description of “acoustic space” in the pages of Explorations: “Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries” (1955: 17). Like the futurist patterns that appear in Brooker’s contemporaneous advertisements for The Globe, the design of “Another Boost for Silvertones” exploits Brooker’s dynamic conception matter to bring auditory effects into representation


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Fig. 7. “Another Boost for Silvertones” (Brooker 1930a: 15).

by conjuring the resonant properties of the “field.” A similar conjunction of acoustics and physics informed McLuhan’s writings: “The new physics,” he asserted in The Gutenberg Galaxy, “is an auditory domain” (McLuhan 1962: 27). Brooker’s Marketing writings anticipate McLuhan’s interdisciplinary insight: “Industry, one might say, has been Einsteinized” (Brooker 1927c: 79). The concentric rings of “Another Boost for Silvertones” set the stage for McLuhan’s evocative image of radio as “showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum” (McLuhan 1964: 298). As in McLuhan’s writings on radio, Brooker’s advertisement permits the reader to “stand once more in the magical acoustical sphere of pre-literate man” (McLuhan 1955a: 59). Brooker, who was fond of quoting Joseph Conrad’s statement that “the power of sound [is] greater than the power of sense,” underlined the selling force of pre-modern “folk words” (Surrey 1930a: 138, 149–50, 192). For Brooker, as subsequently for McLuhan, the electronic media usher in an era characterized by what McLuhan’s student Walter J. Ong termed “secondary orality”—a technologically-mediated orality that takes the older media of print and speech as its content (Ong 1982: 3).


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Long before McLuhan predicted a revival of oral communication under the impact of electronic technologies, Innis promoted the dialogical potential of radio in a manner paralleling Brooker’s statements on the oral and participatory properties of the new medium (Comer 2001; Zhao 2007: 206). “The bias of paper towards an emphasis on space has been checked by the development of a new medium, radio. The results have been evident in an increasing concern with problems of time” (Innis 1950: 196). It is curious that the influence of Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Bergson led Brooker to a Bergsonian celebration of experience as a “constant state of becoming,” whereas later Innis was compelled to make a plea for the endurance of oral traditions (Marchessault 2005: 103; Surrey 1930a: 215). Despite these differences, Brooker and Innis disclose a common commitment to oral communication and temporality that they both derived from reading Lewis against the grain. “My bias is with the oral tradition,” wrote Innis in The Bias of Communication (1951: 190). Similarly, in the undated essay “Time, the Enemy,” Brooker wrote, “Time actually is our life, all our life, and persists beyond our life.” In contrast to his celebration of the flux of experience in his advertising writings, in the journal article “Idolaters of Brevity” Brooker coincides with later Innis in condemning the “philosophy of brevity” promoted by the daily press for its destructive impact on the arts of poetry and theatre (Brooker 1931: 264–65). This apparent contradiction in Brooker’s evaluation of the temporal effects of advertising and other media reveals a fundamental dichotomy in his thought: like the McLuhan of the Communication and Culture period and after, Brooker celebrated the flux and multiplicity of perception for sharpening awareness of the environment and facilitating dialogue, whereas—like later Innis (and early McLuhan)—he criticized the social and cultural impact of new technologies. Though Lewis was also an inspiration for McLuhan, it is primarily on the basis of their mutual reading of Blake on the ratio of the senses as well as the Romantic poet’s representations of transpersonal affect that comparisons between Brooker’s and McLuhan’s respective approaches to the sensorium may be drawn. Notwithstanding the importance of Bergson to McLuhan’s mature project noted by Marchessault, the Canadian media thinker remained essentially a spatial theorist, as Cavell has convincingly argued—an orientation that distinguishes his critical project from the temporal commitments of Brooker and Innis.

Conclusion Bertram Brooker’s writings for Marketing magazine in the 1920s would have been a valuable source of primary information about Canadian markets for political economists of Innis’s generation. Brooker’s pioneering history of advertising, published in serial form in the pages of Marketing in 1924, may have provided the young Innis—whose research on staple commodities was informed by marketing theory—with information about the intertwined histories of the Canadian press


and advertising industry and, as such, may have provided an indigenous model for a materialist approach to the history of media in Canada. The Toronto artistadvertiser’s use of innovative visualization techniques to endow Canadian markets with spatial definition represents a significant precedent for the geographic orientation of Innis’s early staples research, as well as his later work on the press as a factor in the development of monopolies of space in North America. Furthermore, Brooker’s attentiveness to the temporal attributes of oral societies in his analyses of the Quebec market sets a precedent for Innis’s writings on time-binding media and monopolies of time. Brooker’s sensitivity to the effects of radio in reorganizing the sensorium toward an auditory orientation anticipates the sensory theories of McLuhan that has been largely overlooked. Clearing a path for McLuhan’s writings on the interplay of the senses, Brooker argued that technologies that place stress on a single sensory organ disrupt the harmonious coordination of the sensorium, thereby stimulating ongoing sensory adaptation. Brooker’s comments on radio suggest that—like McLuhan—he forecast a shift from a primarily optical to an acoustically dominant sensory regime (a theme echoed later by Innis’s plea for dialogical media).

Notes 1. The 1951 Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, commonly referred to in English Canada as the Massey Report. 2. “Canadian publications supported by advertising of products of American branch plants forced to compete with American publications imitate them in format, style and content” (Innis 1952: 11). 3. See: The Globe 1928a: 5; 1928b: 12. Brooker’s account book confirms his involvement in the design of these advertisements. 4. “Dickens had almost all the instincts of the successful copy-writer…. Dickens analyzed the consumer of his day and adjusted his production accordingly” (Marketing 1921a: 332.). For the controversial reception of Brooker’s articles, see: Cameron 1925; Crothers 1925; Knapp 1925; Surrey 1925b. 5. Brooker’s simplified approach to copy “was strongly felt in international advertising,” wrote an industry observer in 1951 (quoted in Betts 2005: 231).

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Brooker emerges from this analysis as a leading participant in the sensory media culture of Toronto circa 1921–55, which served as the backdrop for the discoveries of the Toronto School of Communication. Brooker’s advertising writings provide clear evidence of an indigenous media discourse that reveals compelling parallels with the medium theories of Innis and McLuhan. It must be stressed that any influence on the writings of Innis and McLuhan is likely to have been indirect; nonetheless, Brooker’s innovative graphic designs and visionary marketing texts represent compelling artefacts of anonymous history of the type that fascinated Innis and McLuhan alike.

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6. Although undated, Brooker’s residential address helps us to date this document to the period 1922 to 1926 (Sproxton 1980:9). 7. References to Wrigley appear regularly in Brooker’s columns. Surrey 1923c: 41; Marketing 1924: 291. 8. McLuhan’s first published essay was devoted to Chesterton. “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic” appeared in the Dalhousie Review in 1934 (McNamara 1969: v.). 9. “My hope is to demonstrate how bones can be put together in living patterns that will achieve contact with living people” (Surrey 1930: 4). 10. See: Brooker 1924b; Brooker 1925b; Surrey 1923b. 11. Brooker’s analysis of the Quebec market resonate with Innis’s comments on advertising and regionalism: “[the] demands of regional advertising…accentuates regionalism” (Innis 1952: 107). 12. Brooker’s analysis of this passage from de la Mare resembles McLuhan’s description of the affective technology of reading aloud in The Gutenberg Galaxy: “In the absence of visual aids the reader will find himself doing exactly what ancient and medieval readers did, namely reading aloud” (McLuhan 1962: 84). 13. See: Brooker 1954; Spane 1928; Surrey 1930: 217; Surrey 1924b. 14. See also: Surrey 1928a: 140. TOPIA 27 102

15. “Radio becomes a more important competitor for advertising” (Innis 1952: 77). 16. “The main idea of the campaign [was] to advertise something which the advertiser does not manufacture.… The featuring of radio being rather than batteries is being stressed more in magazines and farm papers than in the daily newspapers. The reason for this is obvious. The magazines and farm journals reach general readers many of whom are not yet converted to radio” (MacKenzie 1924: 132).

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———. ca. 1926–30. The New Game of Music-Colour. University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections. Box 8, folder 3.

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