ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that integrationism, rather than being an isolated set of critical voices within linguistics, actually reflects the preoccupations of broad currents of thinking on language and representation in the twentieth-century West. These include modernism and its various strands (Symbolism, Primitivism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, etc.), the popular intellectual movement, General Semantics (most commonly associated with its slogan: “The map is not the territory”), interacting lines of conceptual art, popular Orientalism, Zen Buddhism, and therapeutic semantics (Edward de Bono), as well as post-structuralism and deconstruction. This point is illustrated with reference to the Toronto School of Communications, and its most notable figure, Marshall McLuhan. The chapter tracks attitudes to orality, literacy, and communications technology within the School, noting Roy Harris’s responses, which are often critical, yet also align in key respects. Twentieth-century thinking on the image and representation, on space, time, and linearity, and on indeterminacy and fragmentation offers an intellectual context for understanding the emergence of integrationism, and this offers insights that escape an exclusive focus on the history and disciplinary formation of linguistics.
