The McLuhanesque McLuhan, Esq.

The words Marshall McLuhan remain, 10 years after the Toronto theoretician’s death, fighting words. His name seems to provoke but two reactions: aggressive contempt from leftish intellectuals and impish smiles from more practical communicators, such as artists, composers, and advertising and TV people. Still, when one presses past initial prejudice, virtually everybody admits to not having finished any of his books, only two of which ever sold in anything like influential quantities--the numbingly incomprehensible “Gutenberg Galaxy” and “The Medium Is the Message,” a 160-page picture book that was “co-ordinated” by Jerome Agel in the same charmingly accessible style he used for “co-ordinating” “I Seem to Be a Verb,” which popularized the theories of another thunder-thinker of the ‘60s, Buckminster Fuller.

This year has already seen the publication of more McLuhan than any year since the ‘60s. In addition to the first biography, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand, there have appeared in quick succession three semi-posthumous volumes: The Global Village by McLuhan and Bruce Powers; Laws of Media by McLuhan and his son Eric; and Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald, this last being a collection of McLuhan’s essays interleaved with essays by some of his more lucid disciples.

The biography is quite good, offering in the course of its account of McLuhan’s intellectual development the best--I might almost say the only good--precis of McLuhan’s thought that I have ever read. It is rather less good on the life--to protect the living, I surmise--and it appears to have been proofread by an orangutang. The anthology is excellent--and almost as easy a read as McLuhan’s one “linear” (i.e., well-edited) book, “Understanding Media.” The “collaborations” (if that’s the accurate word), completed posthumously by Powers and Eric McLuhan, are both worthy but overlapping--and will probably drive any but the advanced McLuhanatic to distraction. Enter them, as McLuhan would advise, “mosaically” (i.e., anywhere), seize the fugitive insight, and run.

But in the McLuhan mountains, “The Gutenberg Galaxy” remains Mount Everest, and there one must begin. The reason the book is so exasperating is that McLuhan never seems to prove anything, only to make the same odd assertions over and over. That is the objection of a practiced reader. To a student trying to crack communications theory, however, the initial stumbling block is not the lack of sequential logic but the stunning array of allusions to other works, other times. McLuhan was a man of inexhaustible energy who read (and more or less understood) everything and was always making connections. Once one begins to check his sources and discovers his basic faithfulness to them, one comes to surmise that jealousy at McLuhan’s polymath performance is one reason for his harsh treatment at academic hands.

Another is his humor, which so often involves put-ons of high-brow reasoning. When, on the first page of “Gutenberg” he tells us that “King Lear” “is a presentation of the new strategy of culture and power as it affects the state, the family, and the individual psyche,” he knows he is being outrageous. Really, he is just using quotations from “Lear” to anchor and illustrate his views, as a preacher might apply a Bible passage to a situation it was never intended for. Despite what he says, he is not actually trying to get us to view “Lear” as a case-book of “left-wing Machiavellianism.”

Marchand, in his biography, relates the story of McLuhan’s gnomic, omnivorous, breezy performance at a distinguished Columbia gathering. When he finished and asked for questions, the esteemed sociologist Robert Merton rose like a lion poised for the kill. “Well, Prof. McLuhan,” said Merton, “there were so many things about your paper that need cross-examination. Uh, I don’t know where to begin . . . with your title or the first paragraph.”

“You don’t like those ideas,” McLuhan cut him off with a shrug. “I got others.” Such insouciance did not endear him to his more earnest and plodding colleagues.

From Marchand we also learn that McLuhan was not at his best on paper. He could not bring himself to edit or rewrite, and he thought prose style nothing other than effete affectation. But what, beneath the tortured, allusion-studded, cyclical prose, was McLuhan saying?

McLuhan’s basic insight is exceedingly simple--and, so far as I can learn, original. It is that human society and sensibility have changed dramatically under the effects of human inventions, especially those inventions that act as direct channels of communication. The alphabet made empire possible; the printing press gave us Protestantism and the solitary point of view, which in turn gave us alienation even before atheism. Hitler would not have been possible without the hot, super-auditory media of radio and loudspeakers--and television, which McLuhan viewed as cool and participatory, would have done Hitler in by making him appear ridiculous.

By its very nature, this is not an insight subject to verification under the sorts of controls scientists are fond of. It belongs, more nearly, to the realm of Great Insights--such as Plato’s World of the Forms or Thomas Aquinas’ God as Being or Freud’s Psyche as a Treatable Energy System. As a modern insight with immediate practical implications, it is much more like Freud’s than like those of the metaphysicians, but it shares with theirs a glorious unverifiability. Rather than ask for proof, one has the choice of accepting it as congruent with one’s own experience or rejecting it. What sidetracks us here is that McLuhan’s insight depends upon interpretation of historical data--which are verifiable--rather than being an insight into Being or even into a lesser zone of the spirit, such as the human psyche. But because the data are totally unwieldy, involving all of human history and pre-history, the overall insight is untestable.

As a student, McLuhan was fortunate to find himself at Cambridge in the heyday of F. R. Leavis and his wife, Q. D., who with the critic I. A. Richards gave McLuhan access to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and to an approach to literature that studied neither the fine phrase nor the structure of the language but the (often subliminal) effect upon the reader. This directed McLuhan to look at the effects of inventions rather than at the inventions themselves. A second, and very different influence, came from McLuhan’s native Canada in the theories of Harold Innis, a professor of political economy who was more interested in fur trappers and wood pulp manufacturers than in media of communication but whose “Empire and Communications” provided McLuhan with the final hints he needed to construct a grand theory of culture.

This theory, as expounded by McLuhan over a lifetime, went off in many directions and up not a few blind alleys. But he was often on target. He predicted 35 years ago the invention of the video cassette. He incisively analyzed John Kennedy’s cool TV victory over the overheated Nixon as the triumph of “the shy young sheriff” over “the railway lawyer who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town.” And his anticipation in 1968 of the Reagan presidency was uncanny: “The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.”

He saw oral man as the possessor of a unified sensibility, in which the ear, though properly dominant, worked in harmonious coordination with the other sense. For McLuhan the great rending came with Gutenberg, whose invention, by creating the printed book as the first form of mass production and making literacy virtually mandatory, distorted our humanity in certain important respects. No longer engaged in smelling, touching, hearing our fellow man, we find ourselves alone in a room, using only our eyes, picking our way with inhuman haste over line after line of uniform symbols. “Nothing in Plato,” Marchand elucidates, “is as important as the fact that in a given classroom all copies of ‘The Republic’ have the same word at the same place on the same numbered page.” Since you are what you read, the invention of print has created the processed, uniform human being, anxious about his freedom (which the uniformity of the assembly line has robbed him of), detached from his surroundings, linear, logical, specialized--and, though McLuhan never quite says so, bloodless. It is no wonder that he called the Reformation (which was, above all, the Revolution of the Printed Book) “the greatest cultural disaster in the history of civilization.”

But McLuhan, who is so often accused of sanctifying the new illiteracy of the television era, was a voracious reader who allowed his own children one hour of television a week. “I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening,” he declared. “I study it for my own survival.” He was, in the ironic words of a colleague, “one of the most linear men I’ve ever met.” But it is not surprising to learn, late in Marchand’s narrative, that McLuhan had been “left-handed in childhood but was subsequently compelled to use his right hand.” Beneath the skin of the self-made linear man lived an intuitive child.

The most sustained attack on McLuhan’s thought thus far was mounted by the English critic and theatrical director, Jonathan Miller, in “McLuhan,” the short book he wrote for Frank Kermode’s Modern Master series. Basically, he accuses McLuhan of intellectual dishonesty for hiding his Catholicism, which Miller sees as the gnosis that gives form to all McLuhan’s theories. The book is in reality a sustained ad hominem , the worst kind of argument: McLuhan is a Catholic (and, Miller adds somewhat mystifyingly, a Canadian); therefore, he must be wrong. Actually, McLuhan, who came by his Catholicism out of adult conviction and not ancestral loyalty, was well aware that the branch of Christianity to which he gave his allegiance was a favorite whipping-boy of intellectuals. For this reason he played down his religion in the hopes of eluding just the kind of attack that Miller launched.

But, in a funny way, Miller is almost right. McLuhan did not expound his theories in order to secretly defend a Catholic worldview, but the same outlook that brought him to Catholicism brought him to his theories; he wished to see humankind whole, living a richly symbolic life--in which words were not mere signs but “things with a mysterious life of their own,” in which all symbols were real, not arbitrary, and life was corporeal, not ethereal.

He defended his theories as structured not by the logic of either scholastic disputation or of scientific method but by analogy. In other words, McLuhan was making a poem, the poem that had been taken from him when whoever-it-was took the pen from his left hand and put it in his right. It was the same poem that the medieval mystics and poets and theologians were making when they said that all Being is analogous and that there stretches, therefore, between man and God not an impassable gulf but a miraculous bridge.

LAWS OF MEDIA:

The New Science

by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (Toronto: $27.50; 252 pp.) THE GLOBAL VILLAGE:

Transformation in World

Life and Media in

the 21st Century

by Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers (Oxford: $19.95; 208 pp.) MARSHALL McLUHAN:

The Medium and

the Messenger

by Philip Marchand (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; 320 pp.)

MARSHALL McLUHAN:

The Man and His Message

George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald, editors (Fulcrum: $17.95; 230 pp.)