The Original Explorations

History

The journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication initially grew out of a collaboration of Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan who met at the University of Toronto (U of T) in 1948. Carpenter was an anthropology professor who worked with the Inuit in the Canadian far North and McLuhan was an English professor working in the area of literary criticism especially interested in modern poetry. Both young professors were interested in communications and the effects of technology. They both developed an interdisciplinary approach to their studies and often tangled with their older and more conservative colleagues at the U of T. They formed a life-long friendship and collaboration.

Together with the support of a colleague in the English Department, Claude Bissell, who later became the president of the university, McLuhan and Carpenter applied for a Ford Foundation grant. The terms of the grant were that there was to be a focus on behavioral science and related fields employing an interdisciplinary approach and the organization of an ongoing seminar for two years. McLuhan and Carpenter were delighted to discover that they won the competition beating out two other teams from the U of T to become the first Canadian recipients of a Ford Foundation grant. The award of $44,250, a very handsome sum in 1953, allowed them to assemble a significant team consisting of the following U of T professors in addition to themselves: Tom Easterbrook in economics, Carl Williams in Psychology, and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt in architecture and town planning.

One of the first things they did within the framework of their project was to launch the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication with Carpenter and McLuhan as co-editors that ran from 1953 to 1957 with 8 issues. Carpenter did much of the day to day editing of journal including its layout in the first six issues with McLuhan working on issues 7 & 8. Although the journal published the results of the findings of the seminars it also included contributions from a very impressive list of scholars and poets including Jorge Luis Borges, e. e. cummings, Northrup Frye, Sigfried Giedion, Robert Graves, Walter Gropius, Edward Hall, György Kepes, Fernand Léger, Jacque Maritain, Ashley Montagu, Jean Piaget, David Riesman, and Hans Selye. Carpenter sans McLuhan edited and published a ninth issue of Explorationsin 1959 entitled Eskimo with text by him and images from Robert Flaherty’s film on the Inuit and Frederick Varley’s drawings.

The Explorations journal from 1953 to 1957 together with the ongoing seminars had an enormous impact in the five short years that it was in operation. It was instrumental in the establishment of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. 

In his biography of McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, Philip Marchand (1989) stressed the importance of the Explorations journal to the subsequent development and maturation of McLuhan’s thought writing:

McLuhan’s final appearance in Explorations, in the October 1957 issue neatly caps the intellectual progress he made since the periodical had been launched. In this summation of his ideas, he reiterated that literacy was merely one mode of perception and that the gloomy pronouncements of educators concerning the baneful effects of television and the resistance of the young to traditional classroom fare were entirely beside the point. He repeated that we were returning to tribal, primitive “acoustic space” where “extra sensory perception is normal” and “all time is now.” Everything McLuhan said or wrote afterward is directly traceable to something he wrote in the first eight issues of Explorations. The heart of McLuhan’s approach to reality had been articulated – and never more cogently – in the pages of that quirky and marvelous periodical.

The Mission Statement

…of the Original Explorations Journal and that of the New Explorations Journal

The spirit of Explorations as its title suggests was that of exploration or as McLuhan like to say the activity of probing. In fact, the mission statement of Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication stated this explicitly: 

Explorations is designed not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envision a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communications are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each of the four winds of the humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man (Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. 1953. Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication 1, iii). 

New Explorations embraces the mission statement of the original Explorations but also deals with the new environment constituted by ubiquitous digital technologies and AI. To the four winds of the original Explorations project we now add the fifth wind of the digital environment to understand what it is to be human in 2020 and beyond.