Riding Range With Marshall Mcluhan

McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the 60s,

but he had, for a very brief period of time, about five or six years,

an extraordinary influence on American culture.

You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV

without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what he thought,

what he predicted.

He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians,

with Hollywood, so forth and so on.

And his influence, he died in the early 70s,

and his influence died with him.

Even though he had founded the Center for Media Study

at the University of Toronto in Canada,

he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors,

was a unique personality and breakthrough,

much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality,

and spawned very few imitators.

And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work

before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media.

He did his work as a Joyce scholar.

That's what he was, literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist,

that sort of thing.

And then in the early 50s or middle 50s,

he wrote a book, which I've never read,

it's very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride.

That was his first testing of his ideas.

McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist

or a philosopher of media.

And that's what he talked about.

He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method

on the technologies of communication,

printing, film, photography, dance, theater,

even such things as money, he thought of as forms of media.

And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media

and reached very controversial conclusions.

One of the things that was puzzling to me

as I went back through and read all this

is one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous

with incomprehensibility in the 60s.

I mean, the whole thing was,

who can understand this guy?

You know, he's like Buddha.

He speaks these words that we can't understand.

Well, now, 25, 30 years later,

it reads pretty straightforwardly.

And most of what he's predicted has come to pass.

I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed

with which the Gutenberg world has been overturned.

I mean, there's no hint in here of home computers,

let alone interactive networks, virtual reality,

phone sex, and so forth and so on.

But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill,

and he would have had, he lived,

had much to say on this.

It surprised me in reading this stuff

how demanding it is on your own literacy.

I mean, he assumes, basically,

that the people he's talking to have read everything

and have understood it.

I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Mad Magazine,

he assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film

and popular print journalism and popular culture.

All of this was grist for his mill.

I'll show you the books I'm reading from and talking about,

and then I'll actually read you a section of McLuhan,

because it's a, like Joyce,

it's a stylistic thing

that you can't really encompass

without getting your feet wet.

This was his best-known book, probably,

and this is the original paperback edition.

This book was immensely discussed

when it came out,

and probably very little read,

judging by the quality of the discussion.

Understanding Media,

The Extensions of Man.

This is how most people heard of McLuhan.

And he followed it up

with The Gutenberg Galaxy.

These are all first editions.

These books, I don't think, are in print.

Few intellectuals in this century

have fallen so totally through the cracks

as McLuhan.

The Gutenberg Galaxy,

very interesting.

I'm going to read from some of it tonight.

It's organized around chapter headings

such as,

does the interiorization of media

such as letters

alter the ratio among our senses

and change mental processes.

Or,

Pope's Dunciad indicates

the printed book

as the agent of a primitivistic

and romantic revival.

Sheer visual quantity

evokes the magical resonance

of the tribal horde.

The box office looms

as a return to the echo chamber

of bardic incantation.

That's a chapter heading.

Topography cracked

the voices of silence.

And one of my favorite,

Heidegger surfboards along

on the electronic wave

as triumphantly

as Descartes rode

the mechanical wave.

So there's a lot of fun

in McLuhan.

And this comes out of his

being a Joyce scholar.

You just can't mess with that

without fun.

This is his third book

with Harley Parker

Through the Vanishing Point,

Space in Poetry and Painting.

And I guess I should say,

a few years ago,

somebody asked me to review

McLuhan's letters,

which had been published,

which I did.

It was a gnosis or somebody.

Anyway, it brought back to me,

he was a convert to Catholicism

and an extraordinarily complex

intellectual with a medievalist

who became a Joyce scholar,

who became a communications expert.

And in McLuhan,

there is a very deep strain

of nostalgia

for the essence

of the medieval world,

of what he called

manuscript culture.

And essentially his entire output

is a critique of print

and of the impact of print

on culture.

And I think though he attempted

to be fairly even-handed,

his final resolution of all this

was that it had had many,

many detrimental and distorting effects

on the Western mind.

This is another little book

he published back in the heyday,

and he experimented

with topographic layout,

somewhat hearkening back

to the surrealists,

whom he discusses a great deal.

And there was something about,

it was his fascination

with topographical layout

that also brought him

into such congruence

with the wake.

So let me read you

a section

from the Gutenberg galaxy

that is both interesting

to think about,

or, if you can't understand it,

then an interesting example

of what McLuhan's style was like,

and what I mean by

that he was an extraordinarily

demanding intellectual,

he doesn't cut you much slack.

This is a short section called

Only a Fraction of the History

of Literacy Has Been Typographic.

Till now we have been concerned

mostly with the written word

as it transfers or translates

the audio-tactile space

of sacral, non-literate man

into the visual space

of civilized or literate

or profane man.

Once this transfer

or metamorphosis occurs,

we are soon in the world

of books,

scribal or typographic.

The rest of our concern

will be with books,

written and printed,

and the results

for learning and society.

From the 5th century B.C.

to the 15th century A.D.,

the book was a scribal product.

Only one-third of the history

of the book in the Western world

has been typographic.

It is not incongruous, therefore,

to say, as G.S. Brett does

in psychology, ancient and modern.

And here's the quote.

The idea that knowledge

is essentially book learning

seems to be a very modern view,

probably derived from

the medieval distinctions

between clerk and layman,

with additional emphasis

provided by the literary character

of the rather fantastic humanism

of the 16th century.

The original and natural idea

of knowledge

is that of cunning

or the possession of wits.

Odysseus is the original type

of thinker,

a man of many ideas

who could overcome the cyclops

and achieve a significant triumph

of mind over matter.

Knowledge is thus a capacity

for overcoming the difficulties

of life

and achieving success

in this world.

So that closes the quote.

Then McLuhan comments,

Brett here specifies

the natural dichotomy

which the book brings

into any society,

in addition to the split

within the individual

of that society.

The work of James Joyce

exhibits a complex clairvoyance

in these matters.

His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses,

a man of many ideas

and many devices,

is a freelance salesman.

Joyce saw the parallels

on one hand

between the modern frontier

of the verbal

and the pictorial

and, on the other,

between the Homeric world

poised between

the old sacral culture

and the new profane

or literate sensibility.

Bloom,

the newly detribalized Jew,

is presented

in modern Dublin,

a slightly detribalized

Irish world.

Such a frontier

is the modern world

of the advertisement,

congenial, therefore,

to the transitional culture

of Bloom.

In the 17th

or Ithaca episode

of Ulysses,

we read,

what were habitually

his final meditations

of some one

sole unique advertisement

to cause passers

to stop in wonder,

a poster novelty

with all extraneous

accretions excluded,

reduced to its simplest

and most efficient terms,

not exceeding the span

of casual vision

and congruous

with the velocity

of modern life.

In the books

at the wake,

James S. Atherton

points out,

and here's Atherton's quote,

amongst other things,

Finnegan's wake

is a history

of writing.

We begin

with writing

on a bone,

a pebble,

a ram skin,

leave them to cook

in the mothering pot,

and Guten Morgue

with his

Cro-Magnon charter,

tinting fats

and great prime,

must once

for omnibus

step rubric red

out of the word press.

The mothering pot

is an allusion

to alchemy,

but there is

some other significance

connected with writing,

for the next time

the word appears,

it is again

in a context

concerning

improvement

in a system of,

in systems

of communication.

The passage is,

all the Irish

signics

of her

dip and dump

help a bit

from

and Father

Hogan

till the

Muttermaskens.

Dip and dump

help a bit

combine the

deaf and dumb

alphabet

signs

in the air,

or Irish

signs,

with the ups

and downs

of the ordinary

ABC

and the more

pronounced up

and downs

of Irish

Ogham

writing.

The Mason

following this

must be

the man

of that

name

who invented

steel pen

nibs,

but all I

can suggest

for Mother

is the

mothering

of Freemasons

which does

not fit

the context,

although they

of course

also make

signs in the

air.

Is that

perfectly clear?

Now,

back to

McLuhan.

Guten Morg

with his

Cro-Magnon

Charter

expounds

by mythic

gloss

the fact

that writing

meant the

emergence

of the

caveman

or sacral

man

from the

audio world

of simultaneous

resonance

into the

profane

world

of daylight.

The

reference

to the

Masons

is to

the world

of the

bricklayer

as a

type

of speech

itself.

On the

second

page of

The Wake,

Joyce

is making

a mosaic,

an Achilles

shield,

as it

were,

of all

the themes

and modes

of human

speech

and

communication.

By

Meister

Finnegan

of the

stuttering

hand,

Freeman's

Maurer

lived in

the broadest

way

immarginable

in his

rush lit

too far

back

for

massages

before

Joshua

and Judges

had given

us numbers.

Joyce

is in

The Wake

making

his own

Altamira

cave

drawings

of the

entire

history

of the

human

mind

in

terms

of

its

basic

gestures

and

postures

during

all

phases

of

human

culture

and

technology.

As

his title

indicates,

he saw

that the

wake of

human

progress

can

disappear

again

into

the

night

thin

cycle

of

tribal

institutions

can

return

in the

electric

age,

but if

again,

then let's

make it

awake,

or awake,

or both.

Joyce

could see

no advantage

in our

remaining

locked up

in each

cultural cycle

as in a

trance or

dream.

He

discovered

the means

of living

simultaneously

in all

cultural

modes

while quite

conscious.

This

means

he

cites

for such

self-awareness

and correction

of cultural

bias

in his

colliderioscope.

This term

indicates

the interplay

and colloidal

mixture

of all

components

of human

technology

as they

extend

our senses

and shift

their ratios

in the

social

kaleidoscope

of cultural

clash.

Deor,

savage,

the oral

or sacral,

scope,

the visual

or profane

and civilized.

So,

that's his

comment.

Only a

fraction of

the history

of literacy

has been

typographic.

These

people,

Joyce,

to some

degree

Pound,

McLuhan,

they were

the profits

of the

world

in which

we now

stand,

the world

of

integrated,

interactive

media,

extraordinary

data retrieval

that erases

the 17th

century notion

of the

unconscious.

Nothing

is now

unconscious

if your

data search

commands

are powerful

enough.

And the

remaking

of the

human

image

that

required

centuries

for print,

the transition

that we

talked about

in here

from

scribal

culture

to true

book culture

occupied

500 years.

The transition

from book

culture to

electronic

culture has

occurred in

less than

50 years.

I mean,

it's eerie

to read

his

examples

of

contemporaneity

because

there's

stuff like

Marilyn Monroe,

Perry

Como,

James Dean.

I mean,

he's writing

from another

era,

and yet

from his

point of

view,

he's firmly

embedded in

a kind of

super future

that we

are now

able to

look back

on.

Here's

another

section

that I

think

makes

some

of

this

more

clear.

The name

of this

section

is,

The

medieval

book trade

was a

second-hand

trade,

even as

with the

dealing

today in

old

masters.

From the

12th century

onward,

the rise of

the universities

brought

masters and

students into

the field

of book

production

in class

time,

and these

books found

their way

back to the

monastic

libraries when

students returned

after completing

their studies.

A number of

these standard

textbooks,

of which

approved

exemplars

were kept

for copying

by the

stationari

of the

universities,

naturally

found their

way into

print quite

early.

For many

of them

contained in

undiminished

request in

the 15th

century as

before,

these official

university texts

offer no

problems of

origin or

nomenclature.

And then

he's quoting

Goldschmidt,

he adds,

soon after

1300,

the expensive

vellum could be

dispensed with

and the

cheaper paper

made the

accumulation of

many books a

matter of

industry.

Since,

however,

the student

went to

lectures pen

in hand,

and it was

the lecturer's

task to

dictate the

book he was

expounding to

his audience,

there is a

great body

of

reporterata

which constitute

a very complex

problem for

editors.

So,

really,

like for

Joyce,

for

McLuhan,

the book

is the

central symbol

of the

age,

the central

mystery of

our time.

In a sense,

I sort of

share that

notion.

It's a very

Talmudic

notion.

It's a very

psychedelic

notion.

It's the

idea that

somehow the

career of

the word

is the

central

overarching

metaphor of

the age.

And,

naturally,

if the

book is

the central

metaphor for

reality,

then reality

itself is

seen as

somehow

literary,

somehow

textual.

And this,

in fact,

is how I

think reality

was seen

until the

rise of

modern

science.

We're always

taught,

you know,

that the

roots of

modern

science go

back to

democracy

and atomism,

which is,

of course,

true.

But the

number of

people who

knew that

a thousand

years ago

was probably

very few.

The real

notion out

of which

science had

to divest

itself is

the notion

of a book

of a book,

or, if

that seems

too concrete,

a story,

a narrative,

the story

of man's

fall and

redemption.

That was

what the

Christian

exegesis

of

post-Edenic

time was

all about.

With the

rise of

modern science,

the idea

of narrative

has become

somewhat

overthrown.

McLuhan would

say that

narrative

persisted far

beyond its

utility because

the biases

of print

kept it

in place

for such a

long time.

Everyone

assumes that

tools are

tools and

you use them

and that's

toolkit of

modern Western

man can be

traced to

the unconscious

assumptions of

print.

For example,

the idea of

the individual,

which is a

pretty personal

notion right

there in

close to the

heart, the

idea of the

individual is

a post-medieval

concept

legitimized by

print.

The idea of

the public,

this concept

did not

exist before

newspapers

because before

newspapers there

was no

public.

There were

only people

and rulers

very rarely

bothered to

pass on their

thinking to

anybody other

than their

closest associates

and then only

for utilitarian

reasons.

The notion

of an

observing

citizenry

somehow

sharing the

governance of

society, this

again is a

print-created

idea.

The idea of

interchangeable

parts

without which

our world

would hardly

function,

there would

not be

automobiles,

buildings,

aircraft,

interchangeable

parts.

That's an

idea that

comes from

the

interchangeability

of letters

in a

printer's

block.

That was

the first

industry to

ever utilize

the concept

of easily

reformulated

subunits.

and it's

strange,

you know,

the Chinese

get credit

for inventing

printing

thousands and

thousands of

years before

Europe, but

they would

carve a

single block

of wood

and print

it.

They didn't

get the

notion of

movable

type.

And

movable

type, the

distribution

of books

becomes the

paradigmatic

model for the

distribution of

any product.

You know,

it's produced,

it's edited,

it's manufactured,

it's sold,

and then

sequels are

spawned.

All products

have followed

this model,

but books

were one of

the earliest

mass-manufactured

objects to be

put through

this cycle.

Modern city

planning,

the linearity

of it,

the way

in which

land surveys

are carried

out,

these are all

unconscious

biases

imbibed

from the

world of

print,

and they

make sense

if you're a

print head.

But one of

the peculiar

things,

notice that

animals do

not possess

language.

Many human

societies

do not

possess

writing,

and very

few human

societies,

only two on

earth,

invented

printing,

and yet

once invented,

it feeds

back into

the evolution

of social

structures,

and defines

everything,

and yet

it's an

extraordinary

artificiality,

and we

have been

imprisoned in

it for

hundreds and

hundreds of

years now.

Now it is

breaking down,

and we

are changing

to a

different

sensory

ratio,

and you

might suppose,

if you

hadn't given

this a lot

of thought,

that the

new

electronic

media,

television,

and so

forth,

would carry

us into

an entirely

different

sensory

ratio.

McLuhan

felt

differently.

He felt

that it

was

restoring

us

to a

medieval

sensory

ratio.

He felt

that a

television

screen is

much more

like an

illuminated

manuscript

than a

page of

print.

The

distinction

may seem

subtle at

first,

but if

you're

looking at

an illuminated

medieval

manuscript,

notice I

said looking,

you must

look in

order to

understand.

end.

More

than

the

simple

words

I

try

to

say

I

only

lift

to

love

you

more

each

day

more

than

all

far

beyond

forever

the

other

way

to

do