Harold Innis' "French Inflection": Origins, Themes, and Implications of His 1951 Address at le Collège de France

Abstract

While Harold Innis’ address at le Collège de France in 1951 has recently begun to draw some attention, the circumstances surrounding Innis’ brief appearance in France remain obscure, and the meaning and significance of the address have yet to be explored in any detail. This article seeks to provide context to Innis’ talk by examining his long-standing “French inflection.” It also examines the address itself, not only in terms of its themes and concerns, but also as a performative bid to find common ground with others (including the Annales School) who were challenging emergent monopolies of knowledge about the history of civilization. The presentation provides a point of entry into a final phase of Innis’ intellectual life that has been overlooked, namely, his efforts to generate a community of like-minded interlocutors who were opposed to particular currents of thought that had become ascendant in the post-war period. Résumé : Bien que l’allocution d’Harold Innis au Collège de France en 1951 ait récemment commencé à attirer de l’attention, les circonstances entourant le bref séjour d’Innis en France demeurent obscures, et le sens et la signification de l’allocution n’ont pas encore été explorés en détail. Cet article tente de fournir un contexte au discours d’Innis en examinant son penchant de longue date pour la pensée française. Il examine aussi l’allocution même, non seulement par rapport à ses thèmes et préoccupations, mais aussi en tant que tentative performative de trouver un terrain d’entente avec d’autres (y compris certains dans l’école des Annales) qui posaient un défi aux monopoles du savoir sur l’histoire de la civilisation. L’allocution d’Innis permet en outre de comprendre une phase finale de sa vie intellectuelle qui a été négligée, à savoir ses efforts de former une communauté d’interlocuteurs de même sensibilité s’opposant à certains courants de pensée devenus prédominants dans l’après-guerre.

The Flux of Communication: Innis, Wiener, and the Perils of Positive Feedback

“…Harold Innis, an important contemporary, in a different "school" of communication on the margins of cybernetics, independently gravitated toward the same sets of concerns as Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and other founders of cybernetics. 5 While contemporaries in both schools knew of their counterparts, and scholars such as Donald Theall (2001), William Buxton (2004, William Kuhns (1971), andMichael Darroch (2016) have made attempts to identify parallels-or at least identify some relation-between the two camps, 6 few commentators then or now have appreciated the extent of Innis' preoccupation with information, and the dynamics underlying its dissemination. 7 The parallel between the two, however, while interesting, is not particularly significant when considered on its own.…”

Harold Innis’ “Crisis in Public Opinion”: Performance, Retrieval, and the Politics of Knowledge

“…Rather than seeking to explain how he moved from one object of research (staples and Canadian economic history) to another (media and the global history of communications), one can explore how his ongoing intellectual practice took him in different directions as geo-political circumstances-and his own reaction to them-shifted over time. His later communication work could arguably be best understood as an effort to challenge particular conceptions of civilizational change (such as that developed by Toynbee and Kroeber), while finding common cause with those offered by others (such as Sorokin and the Annales School) (Buxton, 2004). Innis' 1943 speech, with its call for critical engagement in the public interest, could be seen as a rehearsal for a more wide-ranging intervention into debates about the course of civilization.…”

“…This suggests that Innis viewed the role of the fur staple and the natural environment as contingent to, rather than determinant of, political and economic life. Hence, with its emphasis upon how the natural world did not determine human activity, but rather provided various possibilities for organized initiatives, Innis' standpoint resonates with that of the "possibilist" approach to human geography and calls into question the standard claim that he was an environmental determinist (Buxton, 2004). 9.…”