The Economic History of Media—From Marx to Innis

Innis (Harold Adams Innis, 1894–1952), together with McLuhan, is recognized as one of the founders of the media ecology school. McLuhan highly praised Innis’s contributions, wrote prefaces to his two major works in communication studies, and even regarded his own breakthrough book *The Gutenberg Galaxy* as “a footnote to Innis’s viewpoint”[1].

But later, as McLuhan rose to fame, Innis instead became a footnote in McLuhan studies, a preliminary step in explaining the origins of McLuhan’s thought. In the academic context of media ecology, Innis is usually presented as McLuhan’s background or foil.

Of course, some scholars have noticed Innis’s distinctive value, especially James Carey, who placed Innis above McLuhan. Entering the new century, Innis experienced a revival in the academy, and a series of collections and monographs appeared one after another, such as the edited volume by Charles R. Acland and others, *Harold Innis in the New Century, Reflections and Refractions* (1999), and Paul Heyer’s *Harold Innis, Critical Media Studies* (2003), among others.

Even so, people’s understanding of what is distinctive about Innis often still remains at the level of style and attitude. For example, He Kuokuan believes that “Innis is an economic historian, skilled in textual verification, and his annotations are endless…,” whereas “McLuhan is a literary man, skilled in rhetoric and not concerned with rigor, and does not make a single note”[2]. Some scholars have also pointed out the contrast between Innis’s pessimism and critical attitude toward technology and McLuhan’s stance[3].

Only James Carey really got to the point. He characterized Innis’s work as “a historical, empirical, interpretive, and critical mode of scholarly inquiry”[4], and noted: “Both McLuhan and Innis took communication technology as central; the difference lies in the main way in which such technology operates. Innis believed communication technology chiefly acts upon social organization and culture, whereas McLuhan believed it acts upon the organization of the senses and upon thought. McLuhan talked more about perception and thought and less about institutions; Innis did the reverse.”[5]

Whatever the differences in style and research focus, what is refracted here are in fact two scholarly approaches that arrive at the same destination by different routes: Innis begins from political economy and economic history, while McLuhan begins from rhetoric and ontology. Their similarities and differences resemble the paths opened for contemporary philosophy of technology by Marx and Heidegger—to reduce the Marxist approach to the philosophy of technology merely to a “critical” line is also incomplete; what Marx opened up was precisely such a historical approach.

To reveal human facticity through history, and to reveal human finitude through ontology: these two threads complement one another and together form the foundation of the history of technology and the philosophy of technology.

In this chapter, I do not intend to delve into the specific details of Innis scholarship, but instead will offer an “Marxist” interpretation of Innis; in the next chapter, I will carry out a “Heideggerian” elaboration of McLuhan. Ultimately, the starting point of media ecology will be interpreted as a kind of “sea-horse” program for media history.

It is nothing new to place Innis’s thought within the category of Marxism; in fact, Innis himself acknowledged this point. He remarked: “Many of my formulations have a Marxist flavor, but what I have tried to do is to explain Marx with Marxist interpretations. I have not systematically and rigorously pushed Marxist conclusions to the extreme in order to show their limitations.” [6]

Yet in the lines between the words of his writings, Innis very rarely offers direct explanations of Marx; when he occasionally mentions Marx, it is mostly by way of quotation. Some researchers, though they have noticed the connection between Innis and Marx, have placed greater emphasis on his “critical” style and have seldom explored the issue in depth from the standpoint of historical method.

Scholars have paid more attention to Innis’s background in “economic history.” Innis studied political economy at the University of Chicago and was deeply influenced by the institutional economics of the Chicago School. After returning to the University of Toronto to teach, he wrote large-scale studies of commodities such as *The Fur Trade in Canada: an introduction to Canadian economic history* (1930) and *The Cod Fisheries: The history of an International Economy* (1940), which established his position in the academy. In 1941 he helped found the Economic History Association and served as the association’s second president (1944). Later he also served as president of the Royal Society of Canada (1946) and president of the American Economic Association (1952)[7]. And just as his academic reputation reached its peak, Innis suddenly turned to the study of communication history, and in the last years of his life published the three communication studies *Empire and Communications* (1950), *The Bias of Communication* (1951), and *Changing Concepts of Time* (1952).

Innis’s late works were not understood at the time. Aside from the abrupt shift in subject matter, their style of research also departed from the meticulousness and care of his earlier writings and came closer to “loose notes”; “one reason may be their outline-like nature, … perhaps the sense that his health was deteriorating made him feel pressed for time.”[8] Innis died young in 1952, leaving behind the unfinished manuscript of *The History of Communication*.

In the 1960s, Innis’s work in communication studies once again drew interest through McLuhan’s promotion, while his earlier economic history studies, once celebrated in the academy, were instead forgotten. Yet as research deepened, scholars came to realize that there was no absolute rupture between Innis’s early and later work, and that his pioneering work in communication studies was still a continuation of his economic history research.

Innis himself also positioned his communication studies within economic history. For example, he believed that *Empire and Communications* “is about the economic history of empires. … Obviously, we are persistently considering the economic causes of the rise and fall of empires.[9]” Elsewhere, he noted that he was discussing “the economic history of knowledge”[10].

Thus, here Innis extends the meaning of “economic history”: it no longer refers merely to some “history whose object is the economy,” but becomes a historical method in itself—the object of narration may be “the rise and fall of empires” or even “knowledge,” while “the economic” is a standpoint of narration rather than a topic.

This “economic historical view” is precisely the position that runs consistently from Innis’s early to his later work. The characteristic feature of the institutional economics of the Chicago School that he inherited was also to “step outside the domain of the economy and the market, and analyze within the broad picture of social change the relations of interaction and their transformations among psychology, custom, institutions, and economic behavior, thereby breaking the traditional economics’ static and rigid study of the economy.”[11]

And the rise of this “economic historical view” can be traced back even further to Marx.

We know that Marx’s contribution is often summed up as “historical materialism” or the “materialist conception of history,” but this formulation is too easily misleading, as Heinrich Cunow said: perhaps it would be better to call Marx’s materialist conception of history “the economic conception of history”[12].

“This conception of history consists in: starting from the material production of direct life, to examine the real process of production, and to understand the forms of intercourse associated with that mode of production, namely civil society in its various stages, as the basis of the whole history; then one must describe the activity of civil society within the scope of state life, while from civil society one explains the various theoretical products and forms of consciousness such as religion, philosophy, morality, and so on, and on that basis traces the process by which they arose.”[13]

In brief, the “economic conception of history” indeed means that “being determines consciousness, the economic base determines the superstructure.” But we must promptly clarify in what sense the concepts of “material,” “base,” and “determines” are being used here.

Marx and Engels point out:

“Not consciousness determines life, but life determines consciousness. The first mode of observation starts from consciousness and takes consciousness as if it were the living individual. The second mode of observation, which accords with real life, starts from real, living individuals themselves and regards consciousness only as their consciousness. This mode of observation is not without presuppositions. It starts from real premises and never departs from them for a moment. Its premises are human beings, but not human beings in some imaginary isolation and estrangement from the world, but human beings in their actual, empirically observable development under definite conditions. Once this active life process is depicted, history ceases to be, as even empirical thinkers who are themselves still abstract suppose, a collection of dead facts, and ceases also to be, as the idealists suppose, the imagined activity of imagined subjects.”[14]

We should first note that Marx’s so-called materialism is a “conception of history,” a “mode of observation,” rather than his portrayal of some ontological, automatically operating historical mechanism.

Engels put it bluntly: “So it is not, as some imagine for convenience’s sake, that the economic situation has an automatic effect; rather, people themselves make their own history. But they do so in an environment that conditions them, on the basis of already existing real relations. Among these real relations, although the other conditions—political and intellectual ones—have a great influence on economic conditions, the economic conditions ultimately still have determining significance. They form a red thread running through the entire process of development and the only thread that enables us to understand this process of development.”[15]

That is to say, the so-called determining significance of the material or the economic lies in its role as a basic thread running through history; only by means of this thread can we completely “understand” the process of historical development. It certainly does not mean that the evolution of history has an automatic mechanism, such that once its economic base is determined, everything that follows is already “decided.” That is precisely the kind of idealist “historical imagination” Marx opposed. And Marx’s historical study is not intended to construct in imagination a mechanical model of historical development, but to understand real historical facts and the real historical situation of human beings, and thus to find a point of departure and a foothold.

And this point of departure is less “material” than “human.” But the “human” here is not an abstract, essentialist “human being,” but the “actual” human being. Engels said: “Feuerbach moved from God to ‘man’… The true road to ‘man’ is exactly the reverse. We must start from ‘I’, from the empirical, corporeal individual, not in order, like Stirner, to become trapped within it, but in order to ascend from there to ‘man’. So long as the basis of ‘man’ is not the empirical human being, he will always remain a phantom.”[16]

What is called “material” appears precisely as the “conditions of existence” of the “real individual”: “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones; they are not dogmas, but real premises from which one can abstract only in imagination. These are real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both the material conditions they find ready-made and those created by their own activity. Therefore, these premises can be ascertained in a purely empirical way.” [17]

We can see that Marx always speaks of the priority of “material” from the standpoint of a “mode of observation.” Marx’s historical study is from experience to concepts; what should first be established as the point of departure for history writing and the “basis” of historical narration ought to be the “premises” that are first to be determined, namely the material conditions examined through experience: “German philosophy descends from heaven to earth; in complete contrast to it, here we ascend from earth to heaven, that is to say, we do not start from what people say, imagine, conceive, nor from people as they are spoken of, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at real people. Our point of departure is active human beings, and from their real life process we can also reveal the development of the ideological reflections and echoes of this life process.”[18]

Marx “by no means denied the role of ideological factors; rather, in Marx’s view ideological factors are not independent things, but are constrained by social life and thus also by the causal intermediate links of historical series.”[19]

That is to say, “material” as the premise of “consciousness” does not mean that in actual historical development consciousness is merely a derivative of matter. On the contrary, Marx always exalted human creative power, precisely because people “produce their material life itself.”[20] And whether production is creative is again the key point distinguishing human beings from animals. Thus it can be said that the economic base or material conditions are still the “products” of the human spirit. But the key point is that the human spirit is not some independently existing entity floating in the air; it is always historical, that is, conditioned by the corresponding environment of the age, especially by material conditions of life.

Indeed, every historical age has its own “spirit of the age,” and also its own “material basis,” or rather, people are always born into an already existing environment of life. Before people transform and create the new environment of their own age, what they first encounter is an already given real world that serves as the background making all creation possible. This is the “premises” under which people make history: “At every historical stage, there is a certain material result, a certain sum of productive forces; the historically formed relations between human beings and nature, and between human beings themselves, encounter a mass of productive forces, capital, and circumstances transmitted from the preceding generation to the succeeding one. Although on the one hand these productive forces, capital, and circumstances are altered by the new generation, on the other hand they also determine in advance the conditions of life of the new generation and give it a certain development and a particular character. It follows from this that this view shows: human beings create circumstances, and circumstances likewise create human beings. The sum of the productive forces, capital, and forms of social intercourse that each individual and each generation inherits as something ready-made is the real basis of what philosophers imagine as ‘substance’ and ‘human essence’, the real basis of what they have deified and against which they have fought”[21]

Engels pointed out that the inadequacy of the old materialist conception of history “does not lie in the recognition of the driving force of spirit, … but in failing to trace these driving forces further back to their causes.”[22] That is to say, spirit and ideas are indeed the driving forces of historical advance, but these forces still have their roots. Spirit creates matter, and matter constrains spirit. Historical study does not need to ignore the creative role of the human spirit; rather, it needs to investigate the interactive relation between spiritual creation and material conditions. And in this investigation, in order for history to become a rigorous empirical science and not sink into mysticism and speculation, material conditions should serve as the point of departure for research.

“Empirical observation should in any case, on the basis of experience, reveal the connection of social structure and political structure with production, and should not have any mystical or speculative coloring. Society and the state often arise from the life process of certain individuals. But the individuals referred to here are not the kind imagined by themselves or others, but real individuals, that is to say, these individuals are active, engaged in material production, and thus express themselves actively within definite material limits, premises, and conditions that are not subject to their arbitrary control”[23]

It is also worth noting that when Marx speaks of basis or determination, what he means are always “historical conditions,” the “limits” of human beings, and by no means causal relations described under some mechanistic worldview. Human beings possess an infinitely free creative power, but at the same time they are finite; unlike God, they do not create out of nothing. All human creation is constrained by some material environment and historical situation—that is what the “conditions” of history are.

Only after grasping these conditions can we truly, personally, from the standpoint of “I,” and starting from actual experience, understand those creations of ideas and spirit, instead of regarding them as empty castles in the air that descend from nowhere. This is by no means to say that once we have examined the material conditions we can mechanically deduce all the “results” in the realm of ideas.

In Innis, different ideas are “determined” by different environments of communication technology, but communication technology is likewise examined as a “historical condition” [24]. Communication technology is the “point of leverage” in Innis’s historical narration, not something he takes as the ultimate cause hidden behind history. Innis said: “Different civilizations view ideas of space and ideas of time in different ways. Moreover, even within the same civilization, attitudes vary greatly from period to period and from region to region. Western civilization since the advent of printing is one example. Even within a single political region, people in different localities have quite different attitudes toward time and space. … In explaining these differences, our point of leverage is the transformation of communication technology.” [25]

Like Marx, Innis is concerned with the material conditions of historical development and is grounded in people’s actual lives, but the difference is that Marx focuses on production activity, whereas Innis gives pride of place to communicative activity.

Marx had already attached great importance to human “interaction,” pointing out that “production itself is again presupposed by the intercourse between individuals. The form of this intercourse in turn is determined by production” [26]. Marx believed that “relation” is a human monopoly: “wherever some relation exists, this relation exists for me; animals do not enter into any ‘relation,’ and they have no ‘relation’ at all; for animals, their relation to other things does not exist as relation.” [27]

Yet in Marx’s eyes, the thing that always received the most attention was only the “relations of production” determined by the productive forces. Although in Marx this “relations of production” is already a rather broad concept: “The relations of production are also simultaneously relations of law, relations of domination and slavery, the relations between the capitalist and the wage laborer and the landowner, and wage-labor relations also count as relations of production. In addition, relations of production also appear as social relations, … Marx does not, like ordinary people, understand the term ‘relations of production’ as technical or ‘mechanical’ enterprise relations, but understands it as economic relations, that is, relations among members of society, the result of members of society participating in the social production process.” [28]

But Marx did not sufficiently notice that relations of production are not only constrained by the level of productive forces, but also by media of communication. Marx discovered that relations of production must “correspond” to productive forces, but he did not concern himself with the fact that interpersonal relations themselves also have corresponding “material conditions.” Marx mentioned that “the meaning of social relations refers to the cooperation of many individuals; as for under what conditions, in what manner, and for what purposes this cooperation is carried on, that is a matter of indifference.” [29]

Innis, however, found that the “manner” in which such cooperation among people takes place is by no means a matter of indifference; on the contrary, different modes of interaction, the material conditions that make interpersonal communication possible, are not merely neutral media, but have certain biases, and these biases determine possible forms of social organization and even people’s ideas and knowledge.

Innis believed that media of communication have two main biases: either toward time or toward space: “According to the characteristics of a medium of communication, a certain medium may be more suited to the vertical transmission of knowledge in time than to the horizontal transmission of knowledge in space, especially when the medium is cumbersome and durable and not suitable for transportation; it may also be more suited to the horizontal transmission of knowledge in space than to the vertical transmission of knowledge in time, especially when the medium is light and convenient for transport. To say that a medium is biased toward time or toward space means that, for the culture in which it exists, its importance has one bias or another.” [30]

Note that what Innis is concerned with is the transmission of “knowledge,” unlike Marx, who is concerned with the circulation of capital and commodities. But in fact, Innis’s concern with “knowledge” also arises from a political-economic perspective. “‘Monopoly of knowledge’ became an important term in Innis’s later works; it is not surprising that he did not give this term a formal definition. He merely said that it is an extension of economic terminology into the realm of knowledge, an extension of ‘economic concepts, especially the concept of monopoly.’” [31]

In Innis, the problem of monopoly of knowledge is at least as important as monopoly of capital and power; or rather, it is precisely the monopoly of knowledge that determines the composition of social classes.

In Marx, “class” is determined by social relations. Kuno points out: “Social life is regarded as a system of labor activity necessary for needs and the satisfaction of needs, and from this labor activity there necessarily arise certain social cross-relations or interrelations (relations of production). In the whole activity of society, individuals and groups who stand in the same relation to one another, that is, who belong to the same category of economic activity, constitute a class. It can thus be seen that what Marx regarded as decisive was not the amount of property, the amount of income, or the kind of occupation, but the mode of economic activity and the position of social members in the social economic structure determined by it.” [32] A wealthy worker still belongs to the working class, and a down-and-out capitalist still belongs to the bourgeoisie—as long as their way of life and social relations remain in the corresponding position.

Innis, however, believed that what determines people’s relational position in social intercourse is the structure of control over “knowledge.” In a certain sense, we have to admit that “knowledge is power”; historically, the stratification of power often corresponds to the stratification of knowledge, such as ancient priests, monastic systems, the civil service system, and so on, including the pattern of power and class distribution in the modern world. Innis mentions: “The newspaper not only intensified the importance of English relative to other languages, but also created a division of classes within English-speaking countries.” [33]

In Innis, “class struggle” unfolds through different forms of monopolized knowledge or the breaking of monopolies of knowledge. For example, Innis interprets the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes in ancient Greece as “the decline of the oral tradition’s monopoly over time… spatial problems became increasingly important, the rise of the common people, the spread of writing.” [34] And the Ptolemaic dynasty’s building of a library in Alexandria is interpreted as “to counterbalance the influence of the priestly class in the old capital of Thebes. The vernacular system and the reed pen were encouraged, thereby damaging priestly writing and the soft-tube pen.” [35] The rise of fascism is then explained as “the disappearance of the monopoly of time accelerated the expansion of state control” [36].

It is worth mentioning that Innis’s line of thought does not directly conflict with Marx’s theory of class struggle. In Marx, “class struggle” was originally a rather broad concept. Kuno points out that “as the relations of production change, the forms of struggle must of course also change. Therefore, activity that advances class interests through parliamentary negotiation or through influencing public opinion, through newspapers, speeches, pamphlets, or historical works, is also what Marx calls class struggle, and its significance is no less than that of class struggle for political rights through a general strike or street fighting. … Class struggle by no means requires the use of crude violence.” [37]

Innis’s interpretation of class struggle as conflict between different communication biases is by no means merely about so-called “fighting for discursive power.” In fact, the bias of communication determines the forms in which people communicate and organize together, especially centralization and decentralization. “A medium that tends toward decentralization is always counterbalanced by another medium that tends toward centralization.” [38]

We mentioned that, in Innis, communication media are a starting point for understanding history, not the cause of “history itself.” In fact, many times Innis describes the birth of a new medium as the result of class struggle, or more precisely, of the struggle over monopoly of knowledge. For example, he mentions: “In the case of monopoly of knowledge, the Christian organization emphasized control over time, and the monopoly of knowledge was based on parchment. Later, paper and parchment began to compete head to head. The development of trade and cities, the rise in the status of the vernacular, and the increasing importance of lawyers all depended on the support of paper. Paper strengthened the nationalist idea of space. First the monasteries monopolized knowledge, then the scribes’ guilds of the large cities monopolized knowledge. Large books were expensive, so someone tried to reproduce books by machine, and the result was that Germans invented the printing press. Germany at the time was in a marginal position relative to the territory controlled by the scribes’ guilds. France’s policy of centralized control made it poor at evading guild monopolies, whereas politically fragmented Germany was relatively able to evade guild control.” [39]

Innis’s historical model is roughly like this: at a certain historical stage, a civilization is often dominated by one communication bias or another, either favoring spatial expansion or favoring temporal inheritance. A bias in one direction requires a new medium to balance it, and this new medium often grows up from the “marginal” regions of the old civilization. And in “rare intervals,” the influence of the two media may reach equilibrium: “Only under such circumstances can a balance between time and space be achieved. The Sumerian civilization’s dependence on clay was only offset later by the Babylonians’ dependence on stone. Thus, under the Second Babylonian Dynasty established by the Kassites, a fairly long period of stability was achieved. The power of the oral tradition in ancient Greece restricted the bias produced by the written medium, providing support for cultural activity for a period of time; this was an unprecedented flourishing of cultural development. …” [40]

Innis’s analysis of media is very rough. From start to finish he divides media into only two categories: those biased toward time and those biased toward space. The former are often cumbersome and durable, decentralized, and conducive to religious inheritance; the latter are often light but fragile, centralized, and conducive to imperial expansion.

Such a binary division is obviously overly simplistic, and McLuhan protested: “He did not conduct a structural analysis of visual forms and auditory forms; he simply assumed that the spatial extension of information has a centralizing power, no matter which human faculty it amplifies and extends.” [41]

Indeed, Innis tried to conduct a structural analysis of society and culture through media of communication, yet he neglected to carry out a further structural analysis of the media themselves, as if the countless media from ancient times to the present amounted to only two structures in all. In this respect he is somewhat similar to Marx’s broad macrovision of the historical process. McLuhan’s work, by contrast, is closer to that of the phenomenologist: starting from the subtle and from individual experience, he performs one delicate deconstruction after another of the imaginative structure of each medium. Still, if Innis’s work is taken as an overall sketch of a new historical perspective, then his binary model is quite clear and intuitive.

Innis’s ideal civilization does not necessarily eliminate classes and differences; rather, it is to maintain tension between the two biases. Yet Innis himself seems more inclined to emphasize the side of “time,” because in his view the whole of modern civilization has forgotten the question of time, and people are obsessed with pursuing immediate interests while neglecting the inheritance of later generations. “The importance of short-lived things is increasing day by day. In order to satisfy more people’s needs, superficial things are bound to become necessities” and this is precisely due to “the effect of mechanization on the printing industry.” [42]

Innis calls for a renewed grasp of the spirit of Greek civilization’s oral tradition in order to resist the expansion of mechanization. He emphasizes the famous Greek oracle: “Nothing in excess” (凡事勿过度), and “modern civilization is dominated by the machine industry, and what it concerns itself with is specialization, and specialization can always be said to be ‘excess.’ … Concern with specialization and ‘excess’ means that we cannot understand those civilizations that care about balance or proportion.” [43] At the same time, he also pinned his hopes on his homeland Canada—as a marginal region of the “empire”—where a new corrective force might grow up.