The fall and rise of Marshall McLuhan
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1027327--the-fall-and-rise-of-marshall-mcluhan
2011/07/19
It was December 1970 and warning signs were already visible. The
reputation of Marshall McLuhan, professor of English at the
University of Toronto and oracle of the electronic age, was under
siege. An editorial in the Toronto Star in defence of McLuhan
attributed hostility partly to good old Canadian envy of "the local
boy who had made good." That local boy was a "pioneer in studying the
effect of new means of communication such as television on society,"
the editorial stated, an intellectual whose "many intuitive leaps and
dazzling insights have made him one of the few seminal thinkers of
the 20th century." Sure enough, the Star pointed out, "Canadian
critics and reviewers are attacking him right and left."
This year's numerous celebrations of McLuhan's centenary he was
born in Edmonton on July 21, 1911, has made it clear McLuhan's
reputation has survived, and is now thriving. His is a remarkable
story. For years he toiled in relative obscurity, a University of
Toronto professor and expert in Renaissance literature who turned his
attention toward contemporary culture and the effects of the media of
communication, notably the printing press and television, on the
human nervous system. In the mid-sixties, with the publication of
such books as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1964), his work caught the attention of intellectuals in North
America and Europe. Journalists followed suit. He was the subject of
an article in Harper's entitled "Marshall McLuhan: Canada's
Intellectual Comet," a profile in New York magazine by Tom Wolfe, a
cover story in Newsweek. He was mentioned in New Yorker cartoons and
cheerfully saluted in Laugh-In, a popular show in the late sixties.
A reaction set in, and not just among McLuhan's fellow Canadians.
McLuhan's playful style, his love of puns and aphorisms and
one-liners, his refusal to play by the rules of academia, enraged
that class of individual the poet T. S Eliot described as "the
mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter." McLuhan's
embrace of celebrity confirmed suspicions among many of his
colleagues that he was little more than a charlatan. In fairness to
these critics, McLuhan, who had experienced long years of
penny-pinching in support of his wife and six children on a
professor's salary, frankly admitted he wanted to cash in on his fame
while it lasted.
For a while after McLuhan's death in 1980 it seemed that his
reputation was indeed destined for oblivion, despite the defence of
McLuhan in that Toronto Star editorial. He would never again trouble
the peace of Communications Departments in universities across the
land. When I began research on my biography of McLuhan in the
mid-1980s, I often had to remind people who he was. (Usually I
mentioned McLuhan's appearance in Woody Allen's 1976 movie, Annie Hall.)
At the same time I noticed a curious phenomenon. I kept coming across
articles that ripped off McLuhan's insights with no acknowledgement
of source. It reminded me of Friedrich Engels' remark about political
economists in his day who were as busy plagiarizing Marx's work as
they were persistent in trying to kill it by silence.
The revival of McLuhan under these circumstances is no mystery. His
insights about the effect of electronic technology in particular
the re-tribalization of the young, the vanishing of such concepts as
privacy, the weakening of personal identity, the tendency among users
of the media to become what McLuhan called "discarnate," or almost
literally bodiless these insights are more pertinent than ever in
the world of Facebook and iPhones. His writings from the sixties and
seventies seem to apply more to our own era then they do to his.
The lectures and seminars now being held as part of the McLuhan
centenary are not simply trying to celebrate the man and to defend
his style a non-academic style more attuned to playful conversation
than to scholarly research. They are not simply vindicating that 1970
Toronto Star editorial. They are challenging us to adopt McLuhan's
approach of full awareness of our new media-constructed environments.
The first step may be to stop moaning and groaning about young people
and their video games, their constant use of "social media," and so
on. McLuhan was deeply suspicious of the effects of television, for
example, but he realized it did no good simply to express disgust
with television. The job was to pay attention to what this technology
was actually doing to our minds and our sensibilities. Perception and
not moralizing was the key. As McLuhan noted, in one of his great
sayings, "With understanding, there is no such thing as inevitability."
--
Philip Marchand is a former Star book critic and the author of
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger.
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