{"id":10382,"date":"2011-07-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:05:55","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:05:55","slug":"why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan","title":{"rendered":"Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n October 1958 an organization called the National Association of Educational Broadcasters held its annual convention in Omaha, Nebraska, and featured as its keynote speaker a Canadian professor of English named Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan gave what appears to have been a dazzling speech, as was his wont, and on the basis of it the NAEB \u2014 a forward-thinking body \u2014 commissioned him to produce for them a syllabus for a year-long eleventh-grade course devoted to the study of media, especially new and visual media. They wanted American high-school students to understand \u201cthe various and often contradictory qualities and effects of media,\u201d and believed that McLuhan was just the person to explain such matters. McLuhan gladly accepted the commission and set to work.<\/p>\n

But the syllabus and accompanying \u201ctextbook\u201d he eventually produced baffled the leadership of the NAEB. They discerned that McLuhan had given them an ambitious and intellectually dynamic project, but could not see how to use it in a high-school classroom. One can scarcely blame them for their befuddlement, given that this was McLuhan\u2019s idea of an appropriate discussion question for eleventh-graders: \u201cSpeech as organized stutter is based on time. What does speech do to space?\u201d<\/p>\n

When McLuhan revised and expanded his report and published it in 1964 as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/a><\/strong><\/i>, his general readers were often just as baffled. Nothing puzzled them more than the book\u2019s most basic and, in McLuhan\u2019s mind, crucial distinction, that between \u201chot\u201d and \u201ccool\u201d media:<\/p>\n\n\n

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in \u201chigh definition.\u201d High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, \u201chigh definition.\u201d A cartoon is \u201clow definition,\u201d simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

I think one reason readers had so much trouble with this distinction is that, on first reading and perhaps on second and third, it seems so obviously to be false. How different, really, is the amount of information the ear receives through a telephone\u2019s speaker and through a radio\u2019s speaker? Is it really the case that what comes from the radio is \u201cwell filled with data\u201d while what comes from the telephone is \u201cmeager\u201d? Is this just a matter of radio speakers, in general, being of higher quality than telephone speakers? Does it matter whether what comes through the radio is music or speech, given that \u201cspeech is a cool medium of low definition\u201d \u2014 so that if people are talking<\/i> on the radio then it becomes somehow a cool medium? Why does he say that a movie \u201cextends one single sense\u201d when movies have sound \u2014 not just speech but musical accompaniment, which was intrinsic even to films of the \u201csilent\u201d era? (Indeed, later in the book McLuhan says that \u201cfilm is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking.\u201d) Seriously, what gives?<\/p>\n

McLuhan was simply dismissive of such puzzlement. In his preface to a later edition of the book, he wrote that \u201cthe section on \u2018media hot and cool\u2019 confused many reviewers of Understanding Media<\/i> who were unable to recognize the very large structural changes in human outlook that are occurring today.\u201d His critics, then, are just out of touch with contemporary experience. In a later interview he would add, shifting the ground of his defense, \u201cClear prose indicates the absence of thought.\u201d Any confusion we experience is the inevitable result of McLuhan\u2019s profundity \u2014 a claim quite similar to the ones made by Judith Butler when responding to the news that she had \u201cwon\u201d the 1998 edition of the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature.<\/i><\/p>\n

I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/a><\/strong><\/i>. His centenary \u2014 McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 \u2014 provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions. First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan\u2019s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.<\/p>\n

That last judgment may perhaps be rather strongly worded. We shall revisit it.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>hat must always be remembered about McLuhan \u2014 though people rarely remember it \u2014 is this: he was a professor of English. In the early 1930s he took bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees from the University of Manitoba, and then decamped for England for another bachelor\u2019s degree, this one from Cambridge University. He earned an upper second \u2014 not the first-class degree he had hoped for, the kind of degree that would have marked him out as having a clear academic future. Nevertheless, he was allowed to return to Cambridge a few years later to write a doctoral dissertation, which he successfully completed in 1943.<\/p>\n

McLuhan\u2019s periods in Cambridge would prove decisive for his intellectual future, for several reasons. First of all, his decision to focus on the bawdy and energetic Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe led McLuhan into some unexpected intellectual territory. Nashe wrote everything from plays to political pamphlets to scurrilously erotic verse, and was about as of-his-moment as a writer could possibly be. Yet McLuhan discovered that Nashe, himself Cambridge-educated, was deeply learned in classical rhetoric; its tropes and techniques saturated his work. So there near the beginning of the age of print, in a London raucous with ballads, playhouses, and pamphleteers, were people who were at one and the same time thoroughly classical and utterly contemporary. The lesson would not be lost on McLuhan.<\/p>\n

But in Cambridge McLuhan also encountered major critics \u2014 especially F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards \u2014 who were intimately connected with literary Modernism. If today literature and criticism seem to be running on parallel tracks, rarely threatening to meet, such was not the case in the early twentieth century. For one thing, some of the most important poets \u2014 T. S. Eliot above all, but also Ezra Pound \u2014 were deeply influential critics as well. But more decisive was the willingness of professors to intervene in literary disputes as champions of certain authors and styles. For instance, Leavis celebrated D. H. Lawrence as a worthy heir of what he called \u201cThe Great Tradition,\u201d while Richards allied himself with the more experimental Modernists, such as Eliot, who returned the favor by citing his work in their criticism.<\/p>\n

McLuhan seems to have adopted Leavis\u2019s assured lawgiving manner, while embracing Richards\u2019s critical judgments. The writers Richards celebrated \u2014 James Joyce and Ezra Pound especially \u2014 became touchstones for McLuhan, and later for some of his students and younger colleagues (including the brilliant polymathic literary critic Hugh Kenner). But it is vital to understand, if we wish to grasp these thinkers\u2019 influence on McLuhan, that the Modernists were anything but sympathetic to the basic character of the modern world. Eliot commended Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/a><\/strong><\/i> because he thought that it found a way to address \u201cthe immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history\u201d; he envied the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras because they \u201cpossessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,\u201d a power of assimilating everything that might happen to someone \u2014 a power we have lost: \u201cin the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, Ezra Pound celebrated the Troubadours and Trouveres of twelfth-century Provence, along with certain ancient Greek and Chinese poets, for finding a comprehensively elegant style that he felt was impossible in his own day. For much the same reason, William Butler Yeats longed for \u201cthe holy city of Byzantium\u201d: \u201cI think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato…. I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.\u201d The great Modernists were united in little but their distaste for their own period, and their sense that it offered them few and shabby resources in comparison to what many of their distant predecessors had been able to draw upon.<\/p>\n

This lesson too was not lost on McLuhan. Everything he wrote that would make him famous he wrote as a professor of English literature, rooted as a scholar in the technological, scientific, and religious upheavals of the early-modern world, and fascinated as a thinker by the immensely ambitious attempts of the great Modernists to use the resources of the past to respond, critically but constructively, to the twentieth century. Perhaps the best way to think of McLuhan is as a belated Modernist: born a generation or so later than Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, and working in a different intellectual medium than they worked in, but one with them in interest and ambition. The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/i> is as much a document of magisterial Modernism as Ulysses<\/i>, the Cantos<\/i>, or The Waste Land<\/i>.<\/p>\n

T<\/i><\/span>he Gutenberg Galaxy<\/i>, published in 1962, made McLuhan famous. Like other major texts of Modernism, this one repudiates conventional forms of organization. It begins with a page explaining, in discreet small type, that the book \u201cdevelops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history.\u201d (The only<\/i> practical means? So all<\/i> the historians have been wrong?) For anyone confused or troubled by this method, McLuhan gently suggests that \u201cthe last section of the book, \u2018The Galaxy Reconfigured,\u2019 deals with the clash of electric and mechanical, or print, technologies, and the reader may find it the best prologue.\u201d So The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/i> opens, before the beginning as it were, with a suggestion that one might want to start at the end: a classically Modernist bit of deliberately disorienting stagecraft.<\/p>\n

The reader who disdains this advice and plunges in at page 1 discovers that the book has a prologue followed by 107 sections, averaging fewer than three pages in length each. Many run less than a page. The usual structure involves quotation followed by commentary. Sometimes McLuhan quotes primary sources \u2014 the book begins with a meditation on King Lear<\/i> and near the end focuses on Pope\u2019s Dunciad<\/i> \u2014 but more often he responds to recent work, and his instinct for the most provocative and influential scholarship is uncannily fine. A few of the books he cites warmly \u2014 Patrick Cruttwell\u2019s The Shakespearean Moment<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1954), for instance, or Rosemond Tuve\u2019s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1947) \u2014 have been largely forgotten, though they mattered much in their time; but a surprising number of the books McLuhan quotes have transformed their disciplines and, though they\u2019ve necessarily been superseded in some respects, are cited today: Eric Havelock\u2019s Preface to Plato<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1963), Walter Ong\u2019s Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1958), Ernst Kantorowicz\u2019s The King\u2019s Two Bodies<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1957), Erwin Panofsky\u2019s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1951), Johan Huizinga\u2019s The Autumn of the Middle Ages<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1919). All of these books are still in print, still read by scholars and students.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true that the books McLuhan was drawn to are strongly interdisciplinary. McLuhan\u2019s mind was not of the sort that fit into standard disciplinary categories anyway, but when he came to the University of Toronto in 1946, he entered an environment filled with extraordinarily ambitious thinkers whose work cheerfully, and fruitfully, disregarded the usual boundaries. Most important to McLuhan was a political economist named Harold Innis who was also an early theorist of communications. Others included the aforementioned Eric Havelock; the great literary and cultural critic Northrop Frye \u2014 with whom McLuhan had tense relations; the political and religious philosopher George Grant; and the historian Charles Norris Cochrane, whose masterpiece, Christianity and Classical Culture<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1940), should have influenced McLuhan\u2019s thinking about the transition from the classical to the medieval era, but unfortunately did not. This may be because Cochrane died in 1945, the year before McLuhan came to Toronto.<\/p>\n

To today\u2019s reader, McLuhan\u2019s responses to these works resemble nothing so much as a series of blog posts. (As my friend Tim Carmody has pointed out, this is even more true of McLuhan\u2019s first book, The Mechanical Bride<\/a><\/strong><\/i> [1951], which is basically an anthology of advertisements with brief commentaries, a kind of proto-tumblelog.) He quotes a passage, riffs on it for a few sentences or paragraphs, then moves on to another book: quote, riff, quote, riff. And sometimes just quote: one section consists largely of a lengthy three-paragraph selection from Iona and Peter Opie\u2019s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1959), while another gives seven brief paragraphs from Erik Barnouw\u2019s Mass Communication<\/a><\/strong><\/i> (1956), in both cases with very brief introduction but no comment. As I have noted, the \u201cmosaic\u201d method here is an intentional homage to or imitation of the non-linear structures of the great Modernists. It may even be significant that what Yeats wanted to do<\/i>, had he been granted the privilege of traveling through time to Justinian\u2019s Byzantium, was to work in mosaic tile, to be absorbed thereby into a great collective endeavor in devotion to which he could forget his own identity. McLuhan\u2019s refusal to produce a consecutive argument might well be an indication of his own mental quirks and limitations, but surely it was an attempt to allow \u201cthe Gutenberg Galaxy\u201d \u2014 the vast constellation of idea, inventions, and practices that constitute \u201cthe making of typographic man\u201d \u2014 to speak for itself.<\/p>\n

But what does McLuhan think<\/i> about all this that he has assembled? In his reading of the Dunciad<\/i>, he asserts that Pope sees the coming of \u201cuniversal darkness\u201d as largely the result of the rise of the printed word, and he seems to endorse that interpretation: \u201cPope has not received his due as a serious analyst of the intellectual malaise<\/i> of Europe…. Supported by the Gutenberg technology, the power of the dunces to shape and befog the human intellect is unlimited.\u201d (Note that this diagnosis of malaise<\/i> chimes nicely with Eliot\u2019s belief in the \u201cdissociation of sensibility\u201d that \u201cset in\u201d just a few decades before Pope wrote.) He concludes his reading of the Dunciad<\/i> by saying that that \u201cuniversal darkness\u201d is \u201cthe Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.\u201d For McLuhan believes, he says a few pages later, that the \u201cGutenberg technology\u201d has created a \u201cdilemma\u201d for us, and \u201cour liberation from the dilemma may, as Joyce felt, come from the new electric technology, with its profound organic character…. While the old Finn cycles had been tribally entranced in the collective night of the unconscious, the new Finn cycle of totally interdependent man must be lived in the daylight of consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the usual difficulties involved with trying to understand McLuhan \u2014 what does it mean to say that \u201ccollective\u201d experience is opposed to \u201cinterdependent\u201d experience? \u2014 and given that this statement misreads Joyce about as badly as it is possible to misread someone, it seems to make a pretty straightforward statement about the perniciousness of the culture ushered in by print and the hopes for liberation generated by a post-print world. Gutenberg\u2019s invention began a process of rationalization and systemization of human experience, directed by the sovereignty of sight over the other senses, which reached its apogee in the industrial nineteenth century. Against this the Modernists have led a revolt. \u201cConsistently, the twentieth century has worked to free itself from the conditions of [print-induced] passivity, which is to say, from the Gutenberg heritage itself.\u201d On this point, and in this book, McLuhan\u2019s stance is perfectly clear.<\/p>\n

B<\/span>ut beyond this point, puzzlement returns. \u201cThe electric light is pure information,\u201d McLuhan once told a gathering of businessmen. \u201cIt is a medium without a message, as it were.\u201d He seems not to have noticed that those two sentences directly contradict each other, nor that if either is true, it is true in a completely trivial sense. It was Tom Wolfe who seems first to have scoped out what was happening here: \u201cPerfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic!,\u201d he wrote in 1965. \u201cWith this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb \u2014 with these pronouncements \u2014 \u2018Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age\u2019 \u2014 with all this Nietzschean certitude \u2014 McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1960s, McLuhan moved with sedate dignity across the firmament, his Delphic-cryptic-epigrammatic pronouncements emerging with regular frequency. \u201cThe medium is the message,\u201d yes, and we live in a \u201cglobal village.\u201d But also: \u201cThe day of political democracy as we know it today is finished.\u201d \u201cMysticism is just tomorrow\u2019s science dreamed today.\u201d \u201cMass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person\u2019s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.\u201d \u201cWell, of course, a city like New York is obsolete.\u201d \u201cHeat obliterates the distance between the speaker and the audience.\u201d There seems to have been no subject on which McLuhan was not willing to pronounce authoritatively.<\/p>\n

It is in the attempt to put the pronouncements together into some coherent form that we run into trouble. Douglas Coupland, in his light and snappy recent biography of McLuhan<\/a>, is right to say that McLuhan \u201cpined for pre-modern, pre-technology times when people talked and didn\u2019t watch TV (he never took to it) and where books were read aloud in church by priests.\u201d That note is often struck in his writings and in his recorded speeches. But he also told Playboy<\/i> magazine in 1969 that \u201cThe computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it\u2019s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.\u201d Now, to be sure, the claim that \u201cglobal thermostats\u201d \u2014 thermostats?<\/i> and global?<\/i> \u2014 can somehow \u201coptimize human awareness\u201d is about as purely nonsensical as English gets, roughly on a par with \u201cAll mimsy were the borogoves, \/ And the mome raths outgrabe\u201d \u2014 except that it does<\/i> manage to indicate that people who classify McLuhan as a techno-utopian aren\u2019t simply making stuff up.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s useless to take any one<\/i> statement by McLuhan as indicative of his general orientation to technology or to anything else. In that Playboy<\/i> interview he suggests the possibility that \u201cthe extensions of man\u2019s consciousness induced by the electric media … [hold] the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ \u2014 Yeats\u2019s rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.\u201d But then, mere moments later, he sunnily affirms, \u201cI feel that we\u2019re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man\u2019s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos.\u201d We shall flourish \u2014 unless we perish utterly. We shall be annihilated \u2014 unless we emerge into the bright light of a new cosmic morning as lords of all we survey. This resembles nothing so much as the morning horoscope: \u201cGreat opportunities await you today \u2014 if you are ready to seize them!\u201d Amazing how that horoscope is always right<\/i>.<\/p>\n

At this point, one might be tempted \u2014 legitimately and justifiably tempted \u2014 to classify McLuhan as a huckster and move along to better things. And yet there\u2019s that line that Wolfe quotes: \u201cThe content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age.\u201d This could possibly be right, and importantly right \u2014 think about movies based on books, or the number of websites devoted to television programs \u2014 and even if it\u2019s not, in the strictest sense of the term, right<\/i>, it is usefully provocative. It stimulates thought.<\/p>\n

In this context I find myself thinking about a passage in Tom Wolfe\u2019s essay on McLuhan in which he tries to summarize McLuhan\u2019s primary ways of distinguishing between oral-aural and print-visual cultures. I quote the passage without commenting on its accuracy as a summary, in part because, as should by now be clear, there\u2019s really no such thing as an \u201caccurate\u201d summary of McLuhan\u2019s ideas. Wolfe:<\/p>\n\n\n

The TV children … have the tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they are \u201chot,\u201d they want to participate, to touch, to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man is an individualist; he is \u201ccooler,\u201d with built-in safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it is something he can\u2019t look up and check out \u2014 for example, some rumor like \u201cthe Chinese are going to bomb us tomorrow\u201d \u2014 his habit of mind is established. He has the feeling: All this can be investigated \u2014 looked into. The aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part of the collective consciousness; he believes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Again, leaving aside the question of whether this is a faithful account of a McLuhanian distinction, and also leaving aside the question of whether the distinction actually holds, I think the passage is helpful in identifying what qualities the reader of McLuhan needs. The worst reader of McLuhan is what\u2019s called here the \u201caural man,\u201d the believer, the emotional or instinctual responder. Such a person is basically credulous, and for him McLuhan indeed becomes<\/i> a huckster. It is, by contrast, the skeptical and analytical \u201cvisual man\u201d who can get the most out of McLuhan, because he is provoked by McLuhan\u2019s pronouncements to intellectual exploration. To what extent is<\/i> the content of an informational medium generated by the previous dominant medium? To what extent are<\/i> we becoming a global village? Are<\/i> there some media that demand more from their users than others, and if so, what do they demand? And how do we respond to those demands? Has McLuhan given a good account of the differences between oral and literate cultures, or between writing before Gutenberg and writing after his great invention? If not, what would be a better account?<\/p>\n

So it may be that the person best suited to evaluate McLuhan\u2019s claims is someone formed by Gutenberg\u2019s world \u2014 as McLuhan himself was. After all, though McLuhan frequently cites television programs, print advertisements, radio DJs, and the like, he invariably analyzes those phenomena by quoting from printed books<\/i> \u2014 from poets, novelists, and scholars formed wholly by print culture and available for his use strictly through the media of print culture. (What else would you expect from a professor of English literature?) Surely he could not have been deaf to this irony, though I have not been able to find a point where he acknowledges it directly. He frequently says that the lineaments of the Gutenberg age are visible to us because we are living in its aftermath, but that would scarcely account for his interest in doing something like the opposite: making visible the lineaments of the electronic age by using the wisdom acquired through Gutenbergian means.<\/p>\n

But I think this point enables us to see something central to McLuhan\u2019s enterprise, a peculiar kind of consistency that helps to explain his many inconsistencies: McLuhan is constantly setting different media, and different periods of cultural history, against one another \u2014 constantly using X to explain Z, never allowing Z to explain itself. Through the age of print we understand, or strive to understand, the era of the handwritten word that preceded it and<\/i> the era of the electronic word that succeeded it. Since we cannot leap ahead of the electronic era, we explain it in terms of the Gutenberg galaxy it strives to leave behind. McLuhan\u2019s method is to explain everything in terms of what it rejects, what it ignores.<\/p>\n

I<\/span> believe that once we realize the centrality of this oppositional or, I might say, isometric<\/i> method to McLuhan\u2019s thought, we are prepared to approach a question that has long befuddled McLuhan\u2019s critics and biographers: the relationship between his ideas and his deep Catholic Christianity. McLuhan was received into the Catholic church in 1937 \u2014 to some considerable degree influenced by his reading of G. K. Chesterton \u2014 and remained steadfastly faithful for the rest of his life. He taught only at Catholic institutions, moving from St. Louis University to Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, to St. Michael\u2019s College at the University of Toronto. He received the Eucharist almost daily, lamented the ignorance and apathy of the average Catholic layperson, and wished that priests more strongly emphasized doctrine and preached the dangers of Hell. And yet he rarely mentioned his faith in his writings or speeches.<\/p>\n

His best biographer, Philip Marchand, claims that McLuhan\u2019s decision to convert<\/a> \u201csettled all theological questions for him; they no longer had to be reasoned out or defended in his mind. After his conversion, in fact, he seems to have adopted the time-honored Catholic habit of leaving theology to the professionals, as if investigation into matters of divinity was dangerous to the rank and file.\u201d Douglas Coupland comments that \u201cMarshall didn\u2019t publicly discuss his religion. His theory was that people who can see don\u2019t walk around saying, \u2018I\u2019m seeing things\u2019 all day. They simply see the world. And so, with religion, it was simply there with him. This unwillingness to discuss religion caused him much trouble. Some people perceived it as arrogance. Some people saw it as weakness and shirking. Some people saw it as outdated and ridiculous. Some saw it as a wasted chance to make converts.\u201d<\/p>\n

I see it as a fundamental mistrust of language<\/i>. McLuhan\u2019s comment that \u201cMysticism is just tomorrow\u2019s science dreamed today\u201d should, I think, be taken seriously. McLuhan may, as Coupland says, have \u201cpined for\u201d a time when \u201cbooks were read aloud in church by priests,\u201d but he knew perfectly well that that era held its own spiritual dangers. This is why his short chapter on orality in Understanding Media<\/i> is called \u201cThe Spoken Word: Flower of Evil?\u201d Every form of communication, for McLuhan, presents a temptation to idolatry. Its failure to live up to its own promises must<\/i>, therefore, be demonstrated through an invocation of its technological alternatives. It cannot be demonstrated through comparison to the secure knowledge found in mystical contemplation and in the Eucharist itself, for these are beyond words.<\/p>\n

McLuhan\u2019s dream that \u201cman\u2019s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos\u201d can only truly be understood within these mystical, Eucharistic, and eschatological contexts \u2014 though McLuhan never bothered to make that clear. From Understanding Media<\/i>:<\/p>\n\n\n

Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by [twentieth-century French philosopher Henri] Bergson. The condition of \u201cweightlessness,\u201d that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

To this \u201ccollective harmony and peace\u201d all<\/i> speech, spoken, written, or digitized, is inimical. A strange thing for a professor of English to believe, one might think; but perhaps not so strange for one whose strongest daily experiences involved the silent reception of transubstantiated Bread and Wine.<\/p>\n

McLuhan\u2019s hopefulness about humanity\u2019s future was then ultimately theological, his reading of the advent of the computer shaped by his belief in God\u2019s interventions in human history; his dream was that God might bring about a perfected \u2014 a complete and fully immediate \u2014 communion of all His creatures by means of the digital computer. (And why not that means as well as any other?) But it is easy to see why the average reader would see his invocation of Pentecost here as wholly metaphorical. And so eschatological hope appears as nothing more than an early manifestation of cyber-utopianism.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>here are several ways to read McLuhan badly. One is to take the slogans and run with them: \u201cThe medium is the message\u201d \u2014 Go!<\/i> A second is to take any one of his isometric exercises, in which one communications technology is set against another, and see it as a free-standing illustration of his overall view of something \u2014 of anything. A third is to swallow his vast bland assertions without a great deal of mastication and, if necessary (and it\u2019s often necessary), regurgitation. A fourth, and the most understandable of them all, is to mistake his specifically Christian eschatological hope for a purely secular and material utopianism.<\/p>\n

In these circumstances, with so many ways to go wrong, I am tempted to suggest that McLuhan now be ignored \u2014 to argue that his greatest long-term value has been his ability to provoke people who are, if not simply smarter than he was, then more patient, methodical, and scholarly. McLuhan\u2019s attempts to account for the general landscape of media are fragmentary and inconsistent; those of his friend Neil Postman, who in following McLuhan\u2019s example virtually created the field of \u201cmedia ecology,\u201d are far superior in evidential detail and conceptual clarity. McLuhan\u2019s interest in literary modernism, and especially in Joyce and Pound, yielded a few memorable apothegms; but his student and friend Hugh Kenner, inspired and directed by him, produced major, field-transforming work on both writers. McLuhan\u2019s thoughts about oral and literate cultures, dependent largely on his reading of a few scholars of ancient oral poetry, lack historical grounding and intellectual rigor; but another of his students, Walter Ong, would make a great scholarly career specifying the lineaments of that historical transformation. The work of each of those scholars is far superior to anything that McLuhan ever wrote. So why not just read them instead of him?<\/p>\n

It is easy to come to dismissive conclusions when dealing with a thinker as distinctive as McLuhan. W. H. Auden once wrote of Kierkegaard that he<\/p>\n\n\n

is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one\u2019s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one\u2019s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

McLuhan is also one of those writers, and the difficulty of estimating him<\/i> justly is exacerbated by his one-time status as an international intellectual celebrity, appearing regularly on bestseller lists, jetting from place to place to give lectures to adoring crowds, appearing on television talk shows, and running an institute devoted to his own ideas at the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n

It must then be remembered that McLuhan never asked for such celebrity; that he did much of his lecturing in order to provide for a family of eight; that in the last years of his career at Toronto he had to ask for administrative help in drumming up interest in the center he ran; that in his last semester of teaching, before a major stroke permanently disabled him, only six students signed up for his class. He outlived his fame.<\/p>\n

And it must also be remembered that it is not likely that Postman, Kenner, Ong, and many others would have achieved anything like what they did had it not been for the example and the provocation of McLuhan. He was, to borrow a useful phrase from Michel Foucault, a \u201cfounder of discursivity\u201d \u2014 someone who didn\u2019t just have strong ideas but who invented a whole new way of talking, who created vocabularies that others could appropriate, adopt, adapt, improve, extend. In his recent book The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood<\/a><\/strong><\/i>, James Gleick cites a classically provocative McLuhanian assertion \u2014 \u201cMan the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer\u201d \u2014 and comments, \u201cHe wrote this an instant too soon, in the first dawn of computation and cyberspace.\u201d Much of what McLuhan wrote came an instant too soon, and perhaps that\u2019s the best reason to read him, infuriating and confusing though that experience may be. To read McLuhan is to gain at least an inkling of what it might be like to look around the next corner of history.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Jacobs on the man, the medium, and his message<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[2266],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10382"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10382"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}