McLuhan, Marshall (1911-1980)

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McLuhan, Marshall (1911-1980)

As an audience of millions watched the first United States television appearance of the Beatles, a scant few months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one person thought to connect these two events. If the new rhythms, the lyrics, and the haircuts of the Liverpool four brought the first genuine distraction for some from the senselessness of Dallas, for media analyst Marshall McLuhan it brought confirmation of his view that the medium is the message. McLuhan was about to publish his Understanding Media, a book that would stake a place for itself amid the turbulent events of the 1960s, explaining them in terms of the effects of electronic technology on the physical senses and sensibilities of mankind.

Born in Edmonton, Canada, McLuhan spent most of his youth in Winnipeg. He attended the University of Manitoba, receiving his B.A., and then an M.A. with a thesis on nineteenth century English novelist George Meredith, before going to Cambridge University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1942 for his dissertation on the work of sixteenth century dramatist and satirist Thomas Nashe. When McLuhan achieved international renown in the 1960s and 1970s, many people assumed that somewhere between completing the Nashe thesis and publishing Understanding Media he had quietly dropped the study of English literature. But in McLuhan's earliest days in Cambridge, and in the earliest days of his teaching career in the United States, literary studies and media analysis were already complementary for him, and remained so.

There are at least two suitable metaphors for McLuhan's life. The first, the title of Edgar Allan Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelstrom," McLuhan himself used for over 30 years in evoking the effects of technology on our bodies, our clothes, our homes, our cities, our jokes, our toys, our words, our weapons, and more. The second metaphor is related to the solution that Poe's sailor finds for surviving the deadly waters of the Maelstrom, but it is McLuhan's own phrase: "escape into understanding."

The phrase is an injunction, the injunction at the center of all McLuhan's teaching and teasing, an invitation to join him on a voyage of discovery. Applied to McLuhan himself, to his life and his legacy, the phrase also summons us to escape from the misunderstandings that surrounded and still surround McLuhan's teachings. Though it was television that he likened to bacteria and poison (prescribing the antidote of reading), journalists could confidently report that he condemned print. If we look carefully at what McLuhan taught, we find him saying that as new media develop they do not so much replace older ones as complicate them. In an age of on-line encyclopedias and dictionaries, and the latest Tom Wolfe available only on CD (compact disc), we may take this for granted; in 1964 it was obvious to few but McLuhan, and just as few reported his percepts with much accuracy.

Even casual inspection of McLuhan's writings makes it apparent that the rich variety of his sources includes fields as diverse as anthropology, economic theory, psychology, philosophy from antiquity to the twentieth century, literary criticism, and English and European literatures spanning four centuries. McLuhan said in Understanding Media that language was the first technology by which humans let go of their environment in order to grasp it in a new way. The same book devoted one early chapter to the spoken word (conjuring French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire but discussing philosopher Henri Bergson) and the next to the written word (subtitle: "An Eye for an Ear"). McLuhan's posthumously published Laws of Media transformed the ancient rhetorical device of chiasmus into the dynamic vectors of tetrad structures for describing semiotics, slang, cliche and symbolist poetry, and advanced the notion that all man's artifacts are structurally linguistic and metaphoric. Clearly, probing the nature of language and fully understanding its role in human affairs was a central concern for McLuhan.

Another McLuhan theme, inherited from William Blake, that of cleansing the channels of perception, comes together not only with the entire, timeless, poetic enterprise of offering a critique of language but through the work of James Joyce, I. A. Richards (as well as Richards's sometime collaborator, the mysterious C. K. Ogden), and even the father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce.

Marshall McLuhan knew nothing about galvanic skin response technology, terminal node controllers, or the Apple Newton. He did not know what a biomouse is. But he pointed the way to understanding all of them, not in themselves, but in their relation to each other, to older technologies, and above all in relation to ourselves—our bodies, our physical senses, our psychic balance. He was disturbed about western society moving toward the twenty-first century with nineteenth century perceptions. His writings continue to challenge us to escape into understanding.

—W. Terrence Gordon