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Works in perspective
Introduction
During his years
at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), McLuhan
evidently worked concurrently on two ambitious
projects: his doctoral dissertation and the
manuscript that was eventually published in 1951
as the book The Mechanical Bride, which included
only a representative selection of the materials
that McLuhan had prepared for it.
McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral
dissertation is a formidable piece of scholarship,
surveying the history of the verbal arts (grammar,
dialectic and logic, and rhetoric -- aka the
trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time
of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications McLuhan
at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to
outline an orderly and systematic picture of
certain periods in the history of Western culture.
McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for
instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis
on the formal study of logic. The key turn that
led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of
ancient texts but a reemphasis on the importance
of rhetoric and language rather over the formal
study of logic. This shift signalled in
Renaissance humanism was largely a shift in
emphasis, not a shift to totally eliminate one
verbal art. Modern life is characterized by the
reemergence of grammar as its most salient
feature--an approach McLuhan felt was exemplified
at times by the New Criticism of Richards and
Leavis. (For a nuanced account of McLuhan's
thought regarding Richards and Leavis, see
McLuhan's "Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The
Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson" in
the Sewanee Review, volume 52, number 2 (1944):
266-76.)
McLuhan's doctoral dissertation is scheduled to be
published by Gingko Press in the near future. It
is a key work for understanding where McLuhan is
coming from in all of his subsequent works. For
example, when we consider that rhetoric has long
been characterized as the art of persuasion, we
will more readily understand how he came to study
the various items displayed in The Mechanical
Bride -- the common denominator is that all of
these items in one way or another aim to persuade
us. Gingko Press also plans to publish the
complete manuscript of items and essays that
McLuhan prepared, only a selection of which were
published in his 1951 book. When these two
announced books have been published, then we will
be in a better position to assess McLuhan's work
overall.
Because both dialectic and rhetoric in the
classical trivium aimed at persuasion, it is not
surprising that McLuhan turned his attention to
analyzing and commenting on numerous contemporary
examples of persuasion in popular culture -- in
The Mechanical Bride (1951). From centering his
attention on persuasion in his 1943 doctoral
dissertation and in his 1951 book, he made a
dramatic inward turn, as it may be styled, in
attending to the inwardness of persuasion carried
out by communication media as such, as distinct
from their content. His famous (or infamous,
depending on your point of view) slogan "the
medium is the message" uses hyperbole to call
attention to the inward impact of communication
media.
Because many people have not followed McLuhan's
inward turn, it should be noted here that he read
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding by Bernard
Lonergan, S.J., when it was first published in
1957. In his letter of September 21, 1957, to his
former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J.,
McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's
Insight" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987: 251).
Lonergan's Insight is an extended guidebook on
making the inward turn to attending ever more
carefully to one's own consciousness and
reflecting on it ever more carefully and
monitoring one's articulations ever more
carefully.
We can use Lonergan's terminology to clarify the
meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is
the message": At the empirical level of
consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas
at the intelligent and rational levels of
consciousness, the content is the message.
When McLuhan declares that he is more interested
in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in
effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan
refers to as the empirical level of consciousness
than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent
level of consciousness in which concepts are
formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the
rational level of consciousness in which the
adequacy of concepts and of predications is
adjudicated. McLuhan's inward turn to attending to
percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the
empirical level of consciousness through the
impact of communication media sets him apart from
more outward oriented studies of sociological
influences and the outward presentation of self
carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman,
Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan,
and others.
The Mechanical Bride (1951)
McLuhan's The
Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
(1951) is a pioneering study in the field known
today as popular culture. This book is the work of
a deeply original thinker. It is sui generis, as
is his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which
McLuhan carries forward his use of short essays
that can be read in any order -- an approach that
he styles a mosaic approach to writing a book.
McLuhan's interest in the critical study of
popular culture was influenced by the short book
Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys
Thompson (1933). Even so, it is impossible to
imagine Leavis or any of McLuhan's other teachers
at Cambridge University undertaking such a
detailed critique of popular culture. McLuhan's
former student and friend Walter J. Ong wrote a
highly laudatory review essay about McLuhan's 1951
book: "The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore
of Industrial Man," Social Order 2 (Feb. 1952):
79-85. In a letter to Ong dated Jan. 23, 1953,
McLuhan says, "Your review of Bride literally the
only review that made sense. You were generous,
but you saw what was up. The absence of serious
study of these matters is total. i.e. universal
emotional and intellectual illiteracy. And so
unnecessary" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan 1987, p.
234).
In a letter to Ong dated May 31, 1953 (p. 236),
McLuhan reports that he has received a two-year
grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry
out a communication project at the University of
Toronto involving faculty from different
disciplines. In connection with this project,
McLuhan and Ted Carpenter started the journal
Explorations in Communication.
According to McLuhan, a student at the University
of Toronto told him that Harold Innis had put The
Mechanical Bride on the reading list for one of
his courses there, which led McLuhan to discover
Innis's later work.
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
McLuhan's The
Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(written in 1961, first published in Canada by
University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a
pioneering study of print culture, a pioneering
study in cultural studies, and a pioneering study
in media ecology.
Throughout the book, McLuhan is at pains to reveal
how communication technology (alphabetic writing,
the printing press, and the electronic media)
affects cognitive organization, which in turn has
profound ramifications for social organization:
...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of
our senses outside us into the social world, then
new ratios among all of our senses will occur in
that particular culture. It is comparable to what
happens when a new note is added to a melody. And
when the sense ratios alter in any culture then
what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become
opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will
become translucent. (Gutenberg Galaxy 1962, p. 41)
His episodic and often rambling history takes the
reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the
electronic age. According to McLuhan, the
invention of movable type greatly accelerated,
intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and
cognitive changes that had already been taking
place since the invention and implementation of
the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic
orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish
the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic
writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)
Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press
in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought
about the cultural predominance of the visual over
the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an
observation on the nature of the printed word from
Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins,
McLuhan remarks:
In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the
ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even
more important, points out the visual homogenizing
of experience of print culture, and the relegation
of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the
background. [...] The technology and social
effects of typography incline us to abstain from
noting interplay and, as it were, "formal"
causality, both in our inner and external lives.
Print exists by virtue of the static separation of
functions and fosters a mentality that gradually
resists any but a separative and
compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. (Galaxy
pp. 124-26)
We find the gist of McLuhan's argument (later
elaborated in The Medium is the Massage) that new
technologies (like alphabets and printing presses,
and, for that matter, speech itself) exert a
gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn
affects social organization: Print technology
changes our perceptual habits ("visual
homogenizing of experience"), which in turn
impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality
that gradually resists all but a... specialist
outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of
print technology contributed to and made possible
most of the salient trends in the Modern period in
the West: individualism, democracy, Protestantism,
capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these
trends all reverberate with print technology's
principle of "segmentation of actions and
functions and principle of visual quantification"
(Galaxy p. 154).
Visual, individualistic print culture will soon —
McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s — be brought
to an end by what McLuhan calls "electronic
interdependence," when electronic media replace
visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this
new age, humankind will move from individualism
and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a
"tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new
social organization is the global village, a term
which has predominantly negative connotations in
The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later
popularizers):
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian
library the world has become a computer, an
electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of
science fiction. And as our senses have gone
outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless
aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into
a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a
small world of tribal drums, total
interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.
[...] Terror is the normal state of any oral
society, for in it everything affects everything
all the time. [...] In our long striving to
recover for the Western world a unity of
sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no
more been prepared to accept the tribal
consequences of such unity than we were ready for
the fragmentation of the human psyche by print
culture. (Galaxy p. 32)
Note again
McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of
a medium's cognitive effects: If we are not
vigilant to the effects of media's impact, the
global village has the potential to become a place
where totalitarianism and terror rule.
Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that
technology has no per se moral bent — it is a tool
that shapes profoundly an individual's and, by
extension, a society's self-conception and
realization:
Is it not obvious that there are always enough
moral problems without also taking a moral stand
on technological grounds? [...] Print is the
extreme phase of alphabet culture that
detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first
instance. Print raises the visual features of
alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus
print carries the individuating power of the
phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript
culture could ever do. Print is the technology of
individualism. If men decided to modify this
visual technology by an electric technology,
individualism would also be modified. To raise a
moral complaint about this is like cussing a
buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone
says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even
witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem,
but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to
clear away some of the moral fogs that surround
our technologies. It would be good for morality.
(Galaxy p. 158)
Technology affects cognition, and the moral
valence of these changes is, for McLuhan, good or
bad, depending on one's perspective. In the later
seventeenth century, for instance, McLuhan
identifies a considerable amount of alarm and
revulsion towards the growing quantity of printed
books. A few hundred years later, though, many
thinkers express alarm at the "end of the book."
If there can be no universal moral sentence passed
on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can
only be disaster arising from unawareness of the
causalities and effects inherent in our
technologies."
Though the World Wide Web did not yet exist when
McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan is, if
not the coiner then a popularizer, of the term
"surfing" when used to refer to rapid, irregular
and multidirectional movement through a
heterogenous body of documents or knowledge, e.g.,
statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on
the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes
rode the mechanical wave."
McLuhan frequently quotes Ong's Ramus, Method, and
the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had
prompted McLuhan to write this book. Once again,
Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new
book in America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747.
However, in the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia,
Ong subsequently qualified his earlier praise by
characterizing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as
"a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly
detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the
sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological
changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to
print and beyond" (8: 838). In short, certain
parts should be read with a grain of salt, but it
is definitely worth reading to this day.
McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won the 1962
Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, Canada's
highest literary award.
Understanding Media (1964)
McLuhan's most
widely known work, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (1964), is also a pioneering
study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposes
that media themselves, not the content they carry,
should be the focus of study -- popularly quoted
as the medium is the message. More
controversially, he postulates that content had
little effect on society -- in other words, it did
not matter if television broadcasts children's
shows or violent programming, to illustrate one
example -- the effect of television on society
would be identical. He notes that all media have
characteristics that engaged the viewer in
different ways; for instance, a passage in a book
could be reread at will, but (at least until the
advent of the videocassette) a movie had to be
screened again in its entirety to study any
individual part of it.
McLuhan generally divides media into hot
(content-rich) and cool (content-poor). This could
be compared with hot a high definition photograph
where the viewer can glean a lot of information
contrasted with a quick sketch where the viewer
has to 'fill in the blanks'.
[edit]
McLuhan in popular culture
After the publication of Understanding Media,
McLuhan received an astonishing amount of
publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized
English teacher in the twentieth century and
arguably the most controversial.
For example, Newsweek magazine did a cover story
on him. He made a cameo appearance as himself in
Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall. Woody captured an
important aspect of McLuhan's personality--having
him utter the line "You don't understand my work
at all." McLuhan was fond of telling his students
and others that they simply did not understand
him, no matter how much of his work they had
studied. Playboy magazine published a lengthy
interview of McLuhan. In 1983 he was lampooned in
the David Cronenberg film Videodrome, where his
character was given the name "Professor Brian
O'Blivion" and issued such memorable quotes as
"The television screen has become the retina of
the mind's eye" and "I refuse to appear on
television, except on television".
For their part, McLuhan's detractors generated
enough articles supposedly criticizing his thought
to fill up several volumes. But the controversies
over his thought generated far more heat than
light. Many of his detractors did not give
evidence of understanding his thought by
accurately summarizing it in their own words
before they tried criticizing it. Thus McLuhan's
oft-repeated line about people not understanding
his thought, mentioned above, was often accurate.
This is not to say that his thought is above
criticism, but to say that most of his critics do
not give evidence of understanding his thought
before they set forth their supposed objections.
In 1970 McLuhan was made a Companion of the Order
of Canada.
After McLuhan's death, his former student and
friend Walter J. Ong wrote what is arguably the
most favorable assessment of McLuhan in print
anywhere to this day: "McLuhan as Teacher: The
Future Is a Thing of the Past," Journal of
Communication 31 (1981): 129-35.
As mentioned above, Oxford University Press
published the 550-page Letters of Marshall McLuhan
in 1987. Two biographies of McLuhan have been
published -- one by Philip Marchand in 1989 and
the other by W. Terrence Gordon in 1997. Books and
articles in which McLuhan's thought is discussed
are far too numerous to enumerate here.
Further information about McLuhan's thought can be
found in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory and Criticism (1st ed. 1994: 481-83; 2nd
ed. 2005: 643-45), Encyclopedia of Contemporary
Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (U of
Toronto P, 1993: 421-23), and Encyclopedia of
Literary Critics and Criticism (Fitzroy Dearborn,
1999: 744-47).
Recognizing his lasting global influence for his
pioneering work on the study of media ecology, the
government of Canada honoured him with his image
on a postage stamp in 2000 (pictured above).
In 2004 the University of Chicago Press noted that
Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong today "enjoy the
status of honorary guru[s] among technophiles"
(see the back cover of Ong's Ramus, Method, and
the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse
to the Art of Reason that was reissued by the
University of Chicago Press in 2004, with a new
foreword by Adrian Johns).
On March 27-28, 1998, Fordham University sponsored
a symposium on the Legacy of McLuhan, who had
taught at Fordham for one year. In 2005, Hampton
Press published papers from the symposium as the
book The Legacy of McLuhan.
[edit]
Bibliography
1951 The
Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
(Gingko Press) ISBN 1584230509
1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul) ISBN
0710018185
1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Gingko Press)ISBN 1-58423-073-8
1967 The Medium is the Massage (written with
Quentin Fiore; produced by Jerome Agel) (Random
House; 2000 reprint by Gingko) ISBN 1584230703
1968 War and Peace in the Global Village
(design/layout by Quentin Fiore; produced by
Jerome Agel) (2001 reprint by Gingko) ISBN
1584230746
1989 The Global Village (with Bruce R. Powers)
(Oxford University Press) ISBN 019505444X
Biographical works
Carpenter,
Edmund. "That Not-So-Silent Sea" [Appendix B]. In
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. By Donald F. Theall.
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001: 236-61.
(For the complete essay before it was edited for
publication, see the external link below.)
Daniel, Jeff. "McLuhan's Two Messengers: Maurice
McNamee and Walter Ong: world-class interpreters
of his ideas." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Sunday,
August 10, 1997: 4C).
Flahiff, F. T. Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A
Life of Sheila Watson. Edmonton: NeWest Press,
2005.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into
Understanding: A Biography. Basic Books, 1997.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium and
the Messenger. The MIT Press; Revised edition (May
1, 1998).
Molinaro, Matie; Corinne McLuhan; and William Toye,
eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1987.
Ong, Walter J. "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is
a Thing of the Past." Journal of Communication 31
(1981): 129-35. Reprinted in Ong's Faith and
Contexts: Volume One (Scholars Press, 1992:
11-18).
Ong, Walter J. [Untitled review of McLuhan's The
Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of
Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962]. Criticism 12 (1970):
244-51. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for
Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002: 69-77).
Theall, Donald F. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan.
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. |
