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