Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? Alan Jacobs - The New Atlantis

Alan Jacobsthe willingness of professors to intervenein literary disputes as championsof certain authors and styles.For instance, Leavis celebrated D. H.Lawrence as a worthy heir of whathe called “The Great Tradition,”while Richards allied himself withthe more experimental Modernists,such as Eliot, who returned the favorby citing his work in their criticism.McLuhan seems to have adoptedLeavis’s assured lawgiving manner,while embracing Richards’s criticaljudgments. The writers Richardscelebrated — James Joyce and EzraPound especially — became touchstonesfor McLuhan, and later forsome of his students and youngercolleagues (including the brilliantpolymathic literary critic HughKenner). But it is vital to understand,if we wish to grasp these thinkers’influence on McLuhan, that theModernists were anything but sympatheticto the basic character ofthe modern world. Eliot commendedJoyce’s Ulysses because he thoughtthat it found a way to address “theimmense panorama of futility andanarchy which is contemporaryhistory”; he envied the writers ofthe Elizabethan and Jacobean erasbecause they “possessed a mechanismof sensibility which could devour anykind of experience,” a power of assimilatingeverything that might happento someone — a power we have lost:“in the seventeenth century a dissociationof sensibility set in, fromwhich we have never recovered.”Similarly, Ezra Pound celebratedthe Troubadours and Trouveres oftwelfth-century Provence, alongwith certain ancient Greek andChinese poets, for finding a comprehensivelyelegant style that hefelt was impossible in his own day.For much the same reason, WilliamButler Yeats longed for “the holycity of Byzantium”: “I think if I couldbe given a month of Antiquity andleave to spend it where I chose, Iwould spend it in Byzantium a littlebefore Justinian opened St. Sophiaand closed the Academy of Plato....Ithink that in early Byzantium, maybenever before or since in recorded history,religious, aesthetic and practicallife were one.” The great Modernistswere united in little but their distastefor their own period, and their sensethat it offered them few and shabbyresources in comparison to whatmany of their distant predecessorshad been able to draw upon.This lesson too was not lost onMcLuhan. Everything he wrote thatwould make him famous he wroteas a professor of English literature,rooted as a scholar in the technological,scientific, and religious upheavalsof the early-modern world, and fascinatedas a thinker by the immenselyambitious attempts of the greatModernists to use the resources ofthe past to respond, critically butconstructively, to the twentieth century.Perhaps the best way to think ofMcLuhan is as a belated Modernist:born a generation or so later than126 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Alan Jacobsnarily ambitious thinkers whose workcheerfully, and fruitfully, disregardedthe usual boundaries. Most importantto McLuhan was a political economistnamed Harold Innis who was alsoan early theorist of communications.Others included the aforementionedEric Havelock; the great literary andcultural critic Northrop Frye — withwhom McLuhan had tense relations;the political and religious philosopherGeorge Grant; and the historianCharles Norris Cochrane, whosemasterpiece, Christianity and ClassicalCulture (1940), should have influencedMcLuhan’s thinking about the transitionfrom the classical to the medievalera, but unfortunately did not.This may be because Cochrane diedin 1945, the year before McLuhancame to Toronto.To today’s reader, McLuhan’sresponses to these works resemblenothing so much as a series of blogposts. (As my friend Tim Carmodyhas pointed out, this is even moretrue of McLuhan’s first book, TheMechanical Bride [1951], which isbasically an anthology of advertisementswith brief commentaries, akind of proto-tumblelog.) He quotesa passage, riffs on it for a few sentencesor paragraphs, then moves onto another book: quote, riff, quote,riff. And sometimes just quote: onesection consists largely of a lengthythree-paragraph selection from Ionaand Peter Opie’s Lore and Languageof Schoolchildren (1959), while anothergives seven brief paragraphs fromErik Barnouw’s Mass Communication(1956), in both cases with very briefintroduction but no comment. AsI have noted, the “mosaic” methodhere is an intentional homage to orimitation of the non-linear structuresof the great Modernists. It may evenbe significant that what Yeats wantedto do, had he been granted the privilegeof traveling through time toJustinian’s Byzantium, was to workin mosaic tile, to be absorbed therebyinto a great collective endeavor indevotion to which he could forgethis own identity. McLuhan’s refusalto produce a consecutive argumentmight well be an indication of hisown mental quirks and limitations,but surely it was an attempt to allow“the Gutenberg Galaxy” — the vastconstellation of idea, inventions, andpractices that constitute “the makingof typographic man” — to speak foritself.But what does McLuhan think aboutall this that he has assembled? In hisreading of the Dunciad, he assertsthat Pope sees the coming of “universaldarkness” as largely the resultof the rise of the printed word, andhe seems to endorse that interpretation:“Pope has not received his dueas a serious analyst of the intellectualmalaise of Europe....Supportedby the Gutenberg technology, thepower of the dunces to shape andbefog the human intellect is unlimited.”(Note that this diagnosis ofmalaise chimes nicely with Eliot’sbelief in the “dissociation of sensibil-128 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?ity” that “set in” just a few decadesbefore Pope wrote.) He concludeshis reading of the Dunciad by sayingthat that “universal darkness” is “theNight from which Joyce invites theFinnegans to wake.” For McLuhanbelieves, he says a few pages later,that the “Gutenberg technology” hascreated a “dilemma” for us, and “ourliberation from the dilemma may, asJoyce felt, come from the new electrictechnology, with its profound organiccharacter....While the old Finncycles had been tribally entrancedin the collective night of the unconscious,the new Finn cycle of totallyinterdependent man must be lived inthe daylight of consciousness.”Given the usual difficultiesinvolved with trying to understandMcLuhan — what does it mean tosay that “collective” experienceis opposed to “interdependent”experience? — and given that thisstatement misreads Joyce about asbadly as it is possible to misreadsomeone, it seems to make a prettystraightforward statement about theperniciousness of the culture usheredin by print and the hopes for liberationgenerated by a post-print world.Gutenberg’s invention began a processof rationalization and systemizationof human experience, directedby the sovereignty of sight overthe other senses, which reached itsapogee in the industrial nineteenthcentury. Against this the Modernistshave led a revolt. “Consistently, thetwentieth century has worked to freeitself from the conditions of [printinduced]passivity, which is to say,from the Gutenberg heritage itself.”On this point, and in this book,McLuhan’s stance is perfectly clear.But beyond this point, puzzlementreturns. “The electric light ispure information,” McLuhan oncetold a gathering of businessmen. “Itis a medium without a message, as itwere.” He seems not to have noticedthat those two sentences directlycontradict each other, nor that ifeither is true, it is true in a completelytrivial sense. It was Tom Wolfewho seems first to have scoped outwhat was happening here: “Perfect!Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical!Epigrammatic!,” he wrote in 1965.“With this even, even, even voice, thisutter scholarly aplomb — with thesepronouncements —‘Art is always onetechnology behind. The content ofthe art of any age is the technologyof the previous age’ — with all thisNietzschean certitude — McLuhanhas become an intellectual star of theWest.”Throughout the 1960s, McLuhanmoved with sedate dignity across thefirmament, his Delphic-cryptic-epigrammaticpronouncements emergingwith regular frequency. “Themedium is the message,” yes, andwe live in a “global village.” Butalso: “The day of political democracyas we know it today is finished.”“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s sciencedreamed today.” “Mass trans-Spring 2011 ~ 129Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Alan Jacobsportation is doomed to failure inNorth America because a person’scar is the only place where he can bealone and think.” “Well, of course, acity like New York is obsolete.” “Heatobliterates the distance between thespeaker and the audience.” Thereseems to have been no subject onwhich McLuhan was not willing topronounce authoritatively.It is in the attempt to put thepronouncements together into somecoherent form that we run intotrouble. Douglas Coupland, in hislight and snappy recent biographyof McLuhan, is right to say thatMcLuhan “pined for pre-modern,pre-technology times when peopletalked and didn’t watch TV (he nevertook to it) and where books wereread aloud in church by priests.”That note is often struck in his writingsand in his recorded speeches.But he also told Playboy magazinein 1969 that “The computer can beused to direct a network of globalthermostats to pattern life in waysthat will optimize human awareness.Already, it’s technologically feasibleto employ the computer to programsocieties in beneficial ways.” Now,to be sure, the claim that “globalthermostats” — thermostats? andglobal? — can somehow “optimizehuman awareness” is about as purelynonsensical as English gets, roughlyon a par with “All mimsy were theborogoves, / And the mome rathsoutgrabe” — except that it does manageto indicate that people who classifyMcLuhan as a techno-utopianaren’t simply making stuff up.But it’s useless to take any one statementby McLuhan as indicative of hisgeneral orientation to technologyor to anything else. In that Playboyinterview he suggests the possibilitythat “the extensions of man’sconsciousness induced by the electricmedia...[hold] the potential forrealizing the Anti-Christ — Yeats’srough beast, its hour come round atlast, slouching towards Bethlehem tobe born.” But then, mere momentslater, he sunnily affirms, “I feel thatwe’re standing on the threshold of aliberating and exhilarating world inwhich the human tribe can becometruly one family and man’s consciousnesscan be freed from theshackles of mechanical culture andenabled to roam the cosmos.” Weshall flourish — unless we perishutterly. We shall be annihilated — unlesswe emerge into the bright lightof a new cosmic morning as lords ofall we survey. This resembles nothingso much as the morning horoscope:“Great opportunities awaityou today — if you are ready to seizethem!” Amazing how that horoscopeis always right.At this point, one might be tempted— legitimately and justifiablytempted — to classify McLuhan as ahuckster and move along to betterthings. And yet there’s that line thatWolfe quotes: “The content of the artof any age is the technology of theprevious age.” This could possibly be130 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?right, and importantly right — thinkabout movies based on books, orthe number of websites devoted totelevision programs — and even ifit’s not, in the strictest sense of theterm, right, it is usefully provocative.It stimulates thought.In this context I find myself thinkingabout a passage in Tom Wolfe’sessay on McLuhan in which he triesto summarize McLuhan’s primaryways of distinguishing between oralauraland print-visual cultures. Iquote the passage without commentingon its accuracy as a summary, inpart because, as should by now beclear, there’s really no such thing asan “accurate” summary of McLuhan’sideas. Wolfe:The TV children...have the tribalhabit of responding emotionallyto the spoken word, they are“hot,” they want to participate,to touch, to be involved. On theone hand, they can be more easilyswayed by things like demagoguery.The visual or print man is anindividualist; he is “cooler,” withbuilt-in safeguards. He always hasthe feeling that no matter whatanybody says, he can go check itout. The necessary informationis filed away somewhere, categorized.He can look it up. Even if itis something he can’t look up andcheck out — for example, somerumor like “the Chinese are goingto bomb us tomorrow” — his habitof mind is established. He has thefeeling: All this can be investigated— looked into. The aural manis not so much of an individualist;he is more a part of the collectiveconsciousness; he believes.Again, leaving aside the question ofwhether this is a faithful account ofa McLuhanian distinction, and alsoleaving aside the question of whetherthe distinction actually holds, Ithink the passage is helpful in identifyingwhat qualities the reader ofMcLuhan needs. The worst readerof McLuhan is what’s called herethe “aural man,” the believer, theemotional or instinctual responder.Such a person is basically credulous,and for him McLuhan indeedbecomes a huckster. It is, by contrast,the skeptical and analytical “visualman” who can get the most out ofMcLuhan, because he is provoked byMcLuhan’s pronouncements to intellectualexploration. To what extentis the content of an informationalmedium generated by the previousdominant medium? To what extentare we becoming a global village? Arethere some media that demand morefrom their users than others, and ifso, what do they demand? And howdo we respond to those demands?Has McLuhan given a good accountof the differences between oral andliterate cultures, or between writingbefore Gutenberg and writing afterhis great invention? If not, whatwould be a better account?So it may be that the person bestsuited to evaluate McLuhan’s claimsis someone formed by Gutenberg’sSpring 2011 ~ 131Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Alan Jacobsworld — as McLuhan himself was.After all, though McLuhan frequentlycites television programs, printadvertisements, radio DJs, and thelike, he invariably analyzes thosephenomena by quoting from printedbooks — from poets, novelists, andscholars formed wholly by print cultureand available for his use strictlythrough the media of print culture.(What else would you expect froma professor of English literature?)Surely he could not have been deaf tothis irony, though I have not been ableto find a point where he acknowledgesit directly. He frequently says thatthe lineaments of the Gutenberg ageare visible to us because we are livingin its aftermath, but that wouldscarcely account for his interest indoing something like the opposite:making visible the lineaments of theelectronic age by using the wisdomacquired through Gutenbergianmeans.But I think this point enables us tosee something central to McLuhan’senterprise, a peculiar kind of consistencythat helps to explain his manyinconsistencies: McLuhan is constantlysetting different media, anddifferent periods of cultural history,against one another — constantlyusing X to explain Z, never allowingZ to explain itself. Through the ageof print we understand, or strive tounderstand, the era of the handwrittenword that preceded it and the eraof the electronic word that succeededit. Since we cannot leap ahead of theelectronic era, we explain it in termsof the Gutenberg galaxy it strivesto leave behind. McLuhan’s methodis to explain everything in terms ofwhat it rejects, what it ignores.believe that once we realize theI centrality of this oppositionalor, I might say, isometric methodto McLuhan’s thought, we are preparedto approach a question thathas long befuddled McLuhan’s criticsand biographers: the relationshipbetween his ideas and his deepCatholic Christianity. McLuhan wasreceived into the Catholic churchin 1937 — to some considerabledegree influenced by his reading ofG. K. Chesterton — and remainedsteadfastly faithful for the rest ofhis life. He taught only at Catholicinstitutions, moving from St. LouisUniversity to Assumption Collegein Windsor, Ontario, to St. Michael’sCollege at the University of Toronto.He received the Eucharist almostdaily, lamented the ignorance andapathy of the average Catholic layperson,and wished that priests morestrongly emphasized doctrine andpreached the dangers of Hell. Andyet he rarely mentioned his faith inhis writings or speeches.His best biographer, Philip Marchand,claims that McLuhan’s decisionto convert “settled all theologicalquestions for him; they no longerhad to be reasoned out or defendedin his mind. After his conversion,in fact, he seems to have adopted132 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?the time-honored Catholic habit ofleaving theology to the professionals,as if investigation into matters ofdivinity was dangerous to the rankand file.” Douglas Coupland commentsthat “Marshall didn’t publiclydiscuss his religion. His theory wasthat people who can see don’t walkaround saying, ‘I’m seeing things’ allday. They simply see the world. Andso, with religion, it was simply therewith him. This unwillingness to discussreligion caused him much trouble.Some people perceived it as arrogance.Some people saw it as weaknessand shirking. Some people saw it asoutdated and ridiculous. Some saw itas a wasted chance to make converts.”I see it as a fundamental mistrust oflanguage. McLuhan’s comment that“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s sciencedreamed today” should, I think,be taken seriously. McLuhan may, asCoupland says, have “pined for” a timewhen “books were read aloud in churchby priests,” but he knew perfectly wellthat that era held its own spiritualdangers. This is why his short chapteron orality in Understanding Media iscalled “The Spoken Word: Flower ofEvil?” Every form of communication,for McLuhan, presents a temptationto idolatry. Its failure to live up to itsown promises must, therefore, be demonstratedthrough an invocation of itstechnological alternatives. It cannot bedemonstrated through comparison tothe secure knowledge found in mysticalcontemplation and in the Eucharistitself, for these are beyond words.McLuhan’s dream that “man’s consciousnesscan be freed from theshackles of mechanical culture andenabled to roam the cosmos” canonly truly be understood within thesemystical, Eucharistic, and eschatologicalcontexts — though McLuhannever bothered to make that clear.From Understanding Media:Today computers hold out thepromise of a means of instanttranslation of any code or languageinto any other code or language.The computer, in short,promises by technology a Pentecostalcondition of universalunderstanding and unity. Thenext logical step would seem tobe, not to translate, but to bypasslanguages in favor of a generalcosmic consciousness whichmight be very like the collectiveunconscious dreamt of by [twentieth-centuryFrench philosopherHenri] Bergson. The condition of“weightlessness,” that biologistssay promises a physical immortality,may be paralleled by thecondition of speechlessness thatcould confer a perpetuity of collectiveharmony and peace.To this “collective harmony andpeace” all speech, spoken, written, ordigitized, is inimical. A strange thingfor a professor of English to believe,one might think; but perhaps notso strange for one whose strongestdaily experiences involved the silentreception of transubstantiated Breadand Wine.Spring 2011 ~ 133Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Alan JacobsMcLuhan’s hopefulness abouthumanity’s future was then ultimatelytheological, his reading of the adventof the computer shaped by his beliefin God’s interventions in human history;his dream was that God mightbring about a perfected — a completeand fully immediate — communion ofall His creatures by means of thedigital computer. (And why not thatmeans as well as any other?) But itis easy to see why the average readerwould see his invocation of Pentecosthere as wholly metaphorical. And soeschatological hope appears as nothingmore than an early manifestationof cyber-utopianism.There are several ways to readMcLuhan badly. One is to takethe slogans and run with them: “Themedium is the message” — Go! A secondis to take any one of his isometricexercises, in which one communicationstechnology is set againstanother, and see it as a free-standingillustration of his overall view ofsomething — of anything. A third isto swallow his vast bland assertionswithout a great deal of masticationand, if necessary (and it’s often necessary),regurgitation. A fourth, andthe most understandable of them all,is to mistake his specifically Christianeschatological hope for a purely secularand material utopianism.In these circumstances, with somany ways to go wrong, I am temptedto suggest that McLuhan now beignored — to argue that his greatestlong-term value has been his abilityto provoke people who are, if not simplysmarter than he was, then morepatient, methodical, and scholarly.McLuhan’s attempts to account forthe general landscape of media arefragmentary and inconsistent; thoseof his friend Neil Postman, who in followingMcLuhan’s example virtuallycreated the field of “media ecology,”are far superior in evidential detailand conceptual clarity. McLuhan’sinterest in literary modernism, andespecially in Joyce and Pound, yieldeda few memorable apothegms; buthis student and friend Hugh Kenner,inspired and directed by him, producedmajor, field-transformingwork on both writers. McLuhan’sthoughts about oral and literate cultures,dependent largely on his readingof a few scholars of ancient oralpoetry, lack historical grounding andintellectual rigor; but another of hisstudents, Walter Ong, would make agreat scholarly career specifying thelineaments of that historical transformation.The work of each of thosescholars is far superior to anythingthat McLuhan ever wrote. So whynot just read them instead of him?It is easy to come to dismissive conclusionswhen dealing with a thinkeras distinctive as McLuhan. W. H.Auden once wrote of Kierkegaardthat heis one of those writers whom itis very difficult to estimate justly.When one reads them for the134 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?first time, one is bowled over bytheir originality (they speak in avoice one has never heard before)and by the sharpness of theirinsights (they say things whichno one before them has said, andwhich, henceforward, no readerwill ever forget). But with successivereadings one’s doubts grow,one begins to react against theiroveremphasis on one aspect ofthe truth at the expense of all theothers, and one’s first enthusiasmmay all too easily turn into anequally exaggerated aversion.McLuhan is also one of those writers,and the difficulty of estimatinghim justly is exacerbated by his onetimestatus as an international intellectualcelebrity, appearing regularlyon bestseller lists, jetting from placeto place to give lectures to adoringcrowds, appearing on televisiontalk shows, and running an institutedevoted to his own ideas at theUniversity of Toronto.It must then be remembered thatMcLuhan never asked for such celebrity;that he did much of his lecturingin order to provide for a familyof eight; that in the last years of hiscareer at Toronto he had to ask foradministrative help in drumming upinterest in the center he ran; that inhis last semester of teaching, beforea major stroke permanently disabledhim, only six students signed up forhis class. He outlived his fame.And it must also be rememberedthat it is not likely that Postman,Kenner, Ong, and many otherswould have achieved anything likewhat they did had it not been forthe example and the provocation ofMcLuhan. He was, to borrow a usefulphrase from Michel Foucault, a“founder of discursivity” — someonewho didn’t just have strong ideasbut who invented a whole new wayof talking, who created vocabulariesthat others could appropriate, adopt,adapt, improve, extend. In his recentbook The Information: A Theory, aHistory, a Flood, James Gleick cites aclassically provocative McLuhanianassertion — “Man the food-gathererreappears incongruously as information-gatherer”— and comments, “Hewrote this an instant too soon, in thefirst dawn of computation and cyberspace.”Much of what McLuhan wrotecame an instant too soon, and perhapsthat’s the best reason to read him,infuriating and confusing though thatexperience may be. To read McLuhanis to gain at least an inkling of what itmight be like to look around the nextcorner of history.Alan Jacobs, a New Atlantis contributingeditor and the author of the TextPatterns blog on TheNewAtlantis.com,is a professor of English at WheatonCollege. His most recent book is ThePleasures of Reading in an Age ofDistraction (Oxford, 2011).Spring 2011 ~ 135Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.