Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, editors
MARSHALL MCLUHAN UNBOUND
412pp. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press. $35.
1 58423 051 7
Marshall McLuhan should have been living at this hour. Who could foresee that the biggest thing in British television’s 2005 winter schedules would be the daughter of a former Prime Minister urinating on screen? But Carol Thatcher battling through to “victory” on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1) wasn’t the half of it. A few weeks later, the producers of Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 4) brought together the freak show to end all freak shows. Even the historic memory of the defrocked Vicar of Stiffkey, mauled to death by a lion in a 1937 fairground sideshow, paled by comparison. This time a whole human menagerie, including an eccentric MP, a cosmetically enhanced transvestite, a faded actress and a disgraced television presenter, competed with one another to win viewers’ votes. When the winner was a factitious celebrity called Chantelle – a blonde part-time model from Essex whose “fame” had been invented by the producers – the news made the lead story on BBC2’s Newsnight. A column-inch count revealed that the leftish Guardian and its Sunday partner the Observer had gone wildest with their coverage: 15,687 column inches, as against a mere 7,613 in the Sun and News of the World. In the Daily Telegraph, Jan Moir hailed the series as “Not pretty, not nice, but unmissable”.
Famously – some would say notoriously – McLuhan defined television as a “cool” medium, that is one in which consumers felt they were participants, as opposed to a “hot” medium like radio where, he argued, they were more like passive recipients (few people talk back to a radio, many do to a television set). For the ITV1 and Channel 4 shows, the viewers were participants in the most direct way. They had to phone in, on costly special lines, to cast their decisive votes. Though such shows are called “reality TV”, they exactly match the concept of “hyper-reality” put forward by McLuhan’s direct heir, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. By this, Baudrillard means a media simulacrum which is taken for real life. In his best-known paradox, he argued that the Gulf War of 1990–91 “did not take place”, because, for most people worldwide, it was only a set of tightly controlled images on a television screen.
Neither I’m a Celebrity nor Big Brother represented any reality, of course, other than itself. The shows were television, as most of the press reviewers approvingly agreed, in its purest form. McLuhan, with a better feel for history than Baudrillard, would have been delighted that Peter Bazalgette, the “chief creative officer” of the production company that makes Celebrity Big Brother, is the great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer of genius who built Victorian London’s sewer system. Best to let the metaphor lie, and not take it as the cue for a sermon. McLuhan himself seldom sermonized. It was one of the objections his critics raised against him, especially at a time when what little discussion there was of the mass media mainly consisted of finger-wagging. “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding”, he claimed, though he didn’t always stick to this policy.
McLuhan’s reputation, currently, is a strange one. His name is not forgotten. He has five entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (sixth edition, 2004), and nineteen in the New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations (2003), including the one just cited. Both dictionaries include his perception that the world has been turned electronically into “a global village” and his premiss that “the medium is the message”.
These statements have been much disputed, both at the time and since. But earlier this year the novelist John Lanchester wrote about Google in the London Review of Books under the headline “The global Id”. He concluded
“The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.”
This is pure McLuhan. Recently, in Digital McLuhan (1999), which won the 2000 Lewis Mumford Prize, the science writer Peter Levinson argued that McLuhan’s work can be “better understood through the lens of the digital revolution”. This would make McLuhan, whose principal writings appeared between 1951 (The Mechanical Bride) and 1964 (Understanding Media), a John the Baptist of media studies. His work is now, I suspect, much more often mentioned than read. But then, as the sociologist Michael Young wrote, apropos the 1994 American reissue of his own The Rise of the Meritocracy, out of print at the time in Britain: “the most influential books are always those that are not read”.
The Gingko Press, a small Californian publishing house closely associated with McLuhan’s son Eric, is helping to keep the flame alight. It plans to reissue all McLuhan’s books as the 2011 centenary of his birth approaches. Its latest publication, Marshall McLuhan Unbound, is a boxed collection of twenty essays, reprinted as fascicules. They range across the forty-one years from 1936, when McLuhan was a graduate student at Cambridge, to 1977, when his great 1960s reputation had already frayed at the edges (he died, aged sixty-nine, in 1981). None of the essays will, or did, set the world on fire, but they demonstrate that nothing McLuhan said sprang out of nowhere.
Here is an early use (1956) of the assertive, disjointed slew of paradoxes and puns he increasingly favoured. He called it his “mosaic” style; sceptics might think it was more like fortune-cookie aphorisms. Here, also, is the first time he worked his way to the phrase “the medium is the message” (the title of a 1960 essay), having begun in a 1954 essay, “Notes on the Media as Art Forms”, with a gropingly worded attack on
“the gratuitous assumption that communication is a matter of transmission of information, message or idea. This assumption blinds people to the aspect of communication as participation in a common situation. And it leads to ignoring the form of communication as the basic art situation which is more significant than the information or idea “transmitted”.”
This thought was first explored in any detail in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), where McLuhan tried to pin down the impact of printing as printing, irrespective of what the words said. Before that, in The Mechanical Bride, he had launched into an entertaining survey of what consumer advertisements actually meant if you close read the text and the pictures. The “mechanical bride” was the car makers’ not very covert promise that the right automobile would be both sexy and docile: McLuhan seized on the Buick Roadmaster 1949 advertising campaign, which was headlined “Ready, Willing – and Waiting”. This was a pioneer analysis: six years, for example, ahead of Roland Barthes’s 1957 essay collection, Mythologies. Both men used wit, American-style and French-style, as their chief weapons.
But Understanding Media carried the message widest. In The Letters of Marshall McLuhan (edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye, 1987), which is one of the best biographical sources, the editors comment that that book’s popularity “could not have been foreseen”; the 1965 paperback sold at least 100,000 copies. It began as an education project. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters, in the United States, had commissioned him to come up with a secondary-school approach and syllabus for teaching the nature and effects of the mass media. This became the raw material for much of the book, though one chapter was a reprinted essay (on the nature of print) from the TLS.
McLuhan said his interest in popular culture began in 1936, at the University of Wisconsin, his first job after degrees at Manitoba and Cambridge: “I confronted these classes of freshmen and I suddenly realised I was incapable of understanding them. I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture: advertising, games, movies . . . to meet them on their grounds was my strategy in pedagogy: the world of popular culture”. He began work on the drafts that became The Mechanical Bride.
After Understanding Media, the genuine novelty of his insights began to wear off. Exploiting his late success, McLuhan (already in his fifties) did become something of a snake-oil salesman and the tide of commentary started to turn against him. In 1971, in his McLuhan volume in Frank Kermode’s Fontana Modern Master series, Jonathan Miller acknowledges that, after all the objections, “one is left with the disconcerting suspicion that McLuhan is ‘on to something’” – “he has successfully convened a debate on a subject which has been neglected for too long”. But the book’s closing sentence – a sentence in both senses – is this: “Perhaps McLuhan has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies”.
This anathema is partly based on McLuhan’s poor grasp, as Miller sees it, of “the rules of experimental psychology”. It is also based on McLuhan’s Roman Catholicism, which McLuhan himself never, I think, raises as an issue, but which Miller decodes with great ferocity. He lumps McLuhan in with the priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose Le Phénomène humain was published in 1959, as writers whose “horror” of the sciences “is equalled or surpassed by their susceptibility to their special jargon”. Ouch!
In Understanding Media, as in The Mechanical Bride, the most memorable pages are not McLuhan’s broad interpretations of how media impinge on our general perceptions of the world. They are the vivid short chapters on specific things: newspaper advertisements, clothes, money (“the poor man’s credit card”), comics, computers, photographs, typewriters, clocks (“the scent of time”), landscape (“the motor car ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser”) and so on. Years ago, the critic Michael Wood called them “a series of jokey, irritating but alert and funny essays”. That judgement stands, though what irritates with McLuhan’s books and essays is not his enlivening sharpness of tongue and eye, but the constant repetition of thoughts and examples. The essay editors claim this as evidence that “his thinking, like the river Liffey in Finnegans Wake, enriched itself from all that it touched and returned to its starting point”. This is pitching it high, even though Joyce was a constant point of reference for McLuhan; but it is a useful reminder that McLuhan started off as a literary critic. A surprising amount of his writing consists of literary analysis or analogies. At Cambridge he was taught by I. A. Richards (“I owe you an enormous amount”, he told him later). He brought to examples of mass media his own version of the close reading of texts that will always be associated with the interwar New Criticism school.
