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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 24, 2011
Son of a Luhan
We have been celebrating this last week the 100th birthday of Canada's most famous English professor - more famous even than Northrop Frye. Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, at age 69, in a moment when his star appeared to be setting. Since, it has risen again.This is because, once again, the man appears to have his finger on the pulse of our times. He made an arguably uncanny prediction of the emergence of the World Wide Web, about 30 years before it came into existence, and the cyberspace geeks came therefore to honour themselves through him, in retrospect. "The medium is the message," as McLuhan so famously intoned, and insofar as McLuhan was himself a medium, his style of presentation was subliminally communicated to the next generation. It often seems today that the techies - at their most scientifictional and fantastic - are speaking like McLuhan, though without the great breadth of learning that lay behind his own sibylline pronouncements. For McLuhan was indeed an English professor, and his own formation, beyond English Lit. was in the classical literature of the West. This was not something dispensable. He was writing about the development of human societies in time - verily, some of his best yet least-remembered work was in co-operation with the brilliant cultural anthropologist, Ted Carpenter. And one must know some history to discuss developments in time. For otherwise, one is just vomiting. I recently dredged up from storage my copies (first editions!) of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and Understanding Media (1964), and in the midsummer heat, was attempting to read them. I believe they were my father's copies: he taught once at a college with Mc-Luhan's impressive son Eric, who also became a friend of mine. (We're a small country, Canada. We all know each other.) And my mind was blown, by the epigrammatic speed and intensity with which McLuhan carried on. To a person of slow and grinding wit, such as myself, almost every sentence seems to invite the response, "Wait a minute." Yet almost every one is also exhilarating. Let me share with my reader just one, encountered on page 111 of the latter work: "Western man, were he determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well advised to scrap all his electronic technology since the telegraph." My first response was of course, "Hear! Hear!" But consider, there are those who would like to dis-invent the atomic bomb. And we need not even consider whether that would be a good thing, or a bad thing, since it will not happen in the foreseeable future (trust me on this). Nor can the spray of other "advanced technology" be conveniently recalled, like some car with a defective braking system. And when the whole network of electrically-powered devices collapses, owing to the asteroid hit of some vast war, or other social convulsion, the world after still will not resemble the world before. McLuhan was accused of sometimes stating the obvious, in a cryptic way. It is necessary to find ever-new ways of stating the obvious. In this case, I am trying to bring home, as I think McLuhan would have done, the profound and unavoidable fact of existence, often misplaced in our "virtual" environments. The past really happened. It is ineradicable. My Catholic Christian faith, and Mc-Luhan's, rubs our noses in this (often unpleasant) reality. The past will not go away, any more than the future will go away, and so has to be dealt with. One of the ways we deal with things is by trying to understand them. McLuhan's academic project, as I understand it, was to contribute to a history of consciousness, which would be adequate; which would take in all of its non-linear dimensions. He was sidelined by fame, to some degree, when he was "discovered" by certain advertising and media executives, back in those sexy '60s, and nearly distracted from his task of describing things that go beyond the reach of print, in the fine old-fashioned medium of print. True, he rather enjoyed the limelight. But he was reaching for something very important: for an understanding of the way our very media of communication have altered and will alter the way we see the world, and by inevitable extension, the way we behave. Many of his aphoristic comments may be easy to dispute, but there is a whole aggregated vision there, and a huge implicit moral warning against media naiveté. So how should we read McLuhan, today? As the sensible Alan Jacobs writes in that strange, neo-Baconian journal, The New Atlantis: "The worst reader of McLuhan is what's called here the 'aural man', the believer, the emotional or instinctual responder. Such a person is basically credulous, and for him McLuhan indeed becomes a huckster. It is, by contrast, the skeptical and analytical 'visual man' who can get the most out of McLuhan, because he is provoked by McLuhan's pronouncements to intellectual exploration." I could not say that better, so just quoted the man. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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