Catching up to (with?) McLuhan
"McLuhan: What If He's Right?" asked Tom Wolfe in 1965. "Turns out he was right" answers Nick Ripatrazone in Slate this week.
“Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of motivated somnambulism.” Letter, May 14, 1969.
In 1965, Tom Wolfe started something when his article on McLuhan was published in The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine. As it happened, McLuhan caught Wolfe’s attention not by accident but design. A man by the name of Howard Gossage, an eccentric San Francisco ad man and humanitarian had been introduced to McLuhan’s work by his partner Gerry Feigen, proctologist and amateur ventriloquist. Feigen passed Gossage ‘Understanding Media,’ hot off the press and gaining attention, and Gossage decided to make it his business to bring McLuhan to the world using all the marketing tools of his trade. Gossage believed McLuhan’s message needed to reach a wider audience, and the first step was bringing McLuhan to New York and introduce him to people like Tom Wolfe. That summer, 60 years ago next week, a Marshall McLuhan Festival was held in San Francisco, and a media guru was born. For the rest of the 60s, Marshall McLuhan was everywhere to the delight and annoyance of many.
Wolfe noticed that McLuhan wasn’t your average English teacher - note that McLuhan was an English teacher his entire career while also becoming a pioneer media studies on the side. He never left English for Communications, staying close to the discipline which gave him the critical skills that he turned from literature to technology and culture.
While his profile rose around the world, it sank in the academy. Today, it seems every professor wants to be (needs to be?) a ‘public intellectual’ but in the 1950s and 1960s it was… unseemly. Not the sort of thing a proper academic does if he wants to be taken seriously. In an iconic CBC interview, McLuhan in the middle on a swivel chair, the host asked him about that and he replied that “oh, McLuhan is taken far too seriously!” And then, asked if he’d ever taken LSD replied that he didn’t need to, he’d read Finnegans Wake. The audience of young people loved it. Key to McLuhan’s approach was holding assumptions lightly. Play. Experimentation. This was not (still mostly isn’t) the way ‘serious people’ did things but that’s exactly the point. McLuhan was trying to discover, to learn, and you rarely learn anything new by doing the same thing. Probably the first thing Marshall discovered about media was that a new approach was needed.
The academy never forgave his impudence. Returning to Toronto at the height of his fame, he was given an old coach house (the university’s president at the time was a rare supporter) tucked away behind the Department of Medieval Studies where he ran his Centre for Culture and Technology for just over a decade. In the late 70s he suffered a stroke which removed his ability to communicate, and he lived the last year and a half of his life in that condition. In his late 60s, he was forced into retirement by an administration (the supportive president long gone) waiting for the chance, and the Centre for Culture and Technology was closed and filled with bric a brac because the university said they needed the storage space.
Despite an effort to reopen the centre, with people like Woody Allen writing letters of protest and support, it remained closed when McLuhan died in his sleep on New Year’s Eve, 1980.
A few years later, it reopened. But it was never the same - it could never be the same, despite the efforts of well-meaning former students and admirers. But not all were admirers. McLuhan’s popularity has risen again in recent years as much of what he said back then seems not only to have been right, but is now obvious and undeniable. We can plainly see how technologies reshape us and our world mainly by their form, with content playing a distinctly subordinate role. In fact, the content turns out to be the carrier of the effect. The medium is the message.
“The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs… It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” [‘Understanding Media’, 1964]
But haters gonna hate, and plenty of academics past and present have not been amused. The Centre, now under the Faculty of Information, and not its original host, St. Michael’s College (where Marshall taught from 1946-1979) was briefly renamed The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. In 2022, the family which had finally agreed to allow the McLuhan name on the building, removed that short-lived permission following a statement from its new director:
“The programming for next year does not presume that McLuhan’s way of entering into these problems is still especially salient, nor even that it was particularly apt in its time.”
Pretty wild statement from the director of something called The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology.
“What I wouldn’t give for a large sock with horse manure in it.” [Alvy Singer in Annie Hall’]
More than one person has told me that they were actively discouraged from citing Marshall McLuhan in their work in graduate university programs. Told they will be failed. Some quit and left university rather than compromise their principles. These attitudes persist, and it’s a large reason why I didn’t go to university myself. I thought that might make it hard to become a teacher but it hasn’t. In fact, active students and teachers, even retired professors take my Understanding Media class along with artists and various other professionals. I even get asked all the time to guest lecture university classes, which I’m usually happy to do—and I barely graduated high school. Maybe I’ll get an honourary degree some day.
On the other hand, there are still pockets of support. There are plenty of academics out there who don’t mind mentioning McLuhan, and even have his work on their reading lists — many of them can be found at the Media Ecology Association.
McLuhan’s fame had already peaked and he (I think gratefully) had faded from constant public attention when Woody Allen put him (not Allen’s first choice for the part, but Fellini wasn’t available) in Annie Hall as himself. The famous scene is perfect on so many levels. Even the guy who played the insufferable academic seems to have remained pissed off at McLuhan to the end, completely missing the point and McLuhan’s ad-libbed joke. He truly knew nothing of McLuhan’s work.
Nick Ripatrazone, author of ‘Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan's Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age’ (incredibly 75% off list price at Fortress Press right now!) raised the spectre of McLuhan in his Slate article this week “I thought of McLuhan this June, when, in a conversation with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”
Ripatrazone, or his editors, (purposely?) invoked Wolfe’s 1965 article by saying ‘Turns Out He Was Right.’ The take? That electric technologies change our relationship with out bodies, making us somewhat ‘discarnate,’ a condition McLuhan first refered to as Angelism before switching, appropriately I think, to ‘discarnate.’ We spend much of our time these days having sort of ‘out of body experiences.’ Ripatrazone quoted McLuhan from a memorable interview with Mike McManus, one of McLuhan’s last:
“The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. “Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us,” he said during a television appearance. “At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.” That’s exactly what it feels like to spend time on TikTok or X—and was said by someone who died in 1980.” [Nick Ripatrazone in Slate]
“Everybody has become porous” also struck Akira the Don, a producer known for inventing a genre of music he calls ‘meaningwave.’
In ‘Porus’, Akira the Don plays soundbytes from the McManus interview [Marshall McLuhan in conversation with Mike McManus on TVO] with an infectious pop track underneath.
Half a century later, we are able to go beyond asking ‘what if he’s right?’ to admitting that it ‘turns out he was right.’ Well, some are.
The question now is will we go beyond being amazed that McLuhan saw the future? Because the truth is that McLuhan was speaking in the present tense. He was describing the world he lived in, which we see as the one we live in, which begs another question: what is going on today that won’t be obvious to most people for another half a century?
With books like ‘Understanding Media,’ literally a guidebook to understanding media, and interviews like that with Mike McManus, McLuhan left quite a lot of himself behind to show us the way.
Thanks for being here, or there, or… thanks.
Andrew.
A funny interpretation of the Annie Hall scene: I recently learned that McLuhan was a student of I.A. Richards at Cambridge who helped cultivate the New Criticism approach to literary interpretation.
After suspecting that students really “knew nothing” of the works they were reading, but were instead just recapitulating bromides about the authors, Richards began to give them poetry and literature — as I understand it — to interpret, but without the author’s name on it or the title of the work. They had to actually think now!
In a sense, a lot of people fell back on asking authors what their intentions were in creating a piece of poetry, literature, or art…but the creation of that art, according to the New Criticism, causes it to become its own autonomous entity, much like how McLuhan came to say that media create their own environments irrespective of the intentions of their creators.
So, all of this is to say that when McLuhan is brought up in Annie Hall and delivers his famous line, “You know nothing of my work!”, it is likely playing with the idea of “The Intentional Fallacy” written about in the New Criticism movement.
That is, McLuhan’s work was predicated on not necessarily listening to authorial intentions (e.g., Narcissus as Narcosis) and reading into literature a little more deeply than even the authors intended. So, to pull in McLuhan to say, “You know nothing of my work!”, directly contradicts his ideas, perhaps playfully and intentionally.
Or I could be reading into it more than Woody Allen and Marshall McLuhan intended, but I’d suspect he’d be okay with that. I find it fascinating how he went from applying the New Criticism from literature to every other creation in the world.
And it worked.
Yes, McLuhan was much misunderstood by his academic detractors. After all, how can you argue with someone who says:
"I don‘t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult."
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
"You don't like those ideas? I got others."
For an excellent essay by Robert K. Logan on "McLuhan misunderstood" see: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/870/1/Logan_McLuhanMisunderstood_2011.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com