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What did McLuhan mean by that?
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Isn’t it obvious?
“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Who’s looking at who?
In Understanding Media McLuhan says this old saying illustrates the fundamental principle “that distinguishes hot and cold media.” That principle being that cold or cool media demand participation because they are low definition (providing little data) while hot media demand relatively little participation because they are high definition (providing much data).
If you’re wondering how this proverb illustrates this hold on to your hat. McLuhan says, “Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image exceedingly, Marion the Librarian notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the other hand, create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of participation and completion.” In other words, girls who wear dark glasses get the passes, not because they’re hot but because they’re cool. And perhaps, also, boys who wear glasses don’t make passes, because they’re getting way too much information. Seriously, somebody should study this.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 49.
Advertising and culture.
Marshall McLuhan (1977, age 66). Try this experiment
Advertising (as figure) has much to instruct us about culture (as ground). This is something you can explore in a plug and play fashion by looking at advertisements. List as many different products as you can that are frequently advertised. What picture does this list form of our culture?
Me (May 2010, age 57). Let’s try it?
(This is another one of Marshall McLuhan’s exercises, which you can find in his book City as Classroom.) Let’s try a variation on this experiment by looking at the products advertised in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Here is a list of all of the products that appear in the ads that appear in the opening pages (inside cover to The Talk of the Town section) of the May 10, 2010 issue.
Vanguard investment fund
AT&T cell phone service
Novel by Isabel Allende
Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Continental airlines
New Yorker cartoon collection (The Graduation Collection)
Tiffany & Co. jewelry
Oil and natural gas exploration
New Yorker cartoon bank
Hyatt hotels
New Yorker T shirts
New Yorker cover prints
Chamber music concert at Lincoln center
Vintage golf photos
The magazine industry
U.S. Trust asset management
What’s your take on the culture described by these products? How does this culture fit with your picture of the ‘real’ US culture?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media , 1977, pp. 7.
So what?
Marshall McLuhan (April 16, 2010, age 99). This is too much!
“Corinne, he’s at it again! That Hinton bloke is going to be the death of me.”
“Marshall, you know that’s impossible.”
Me (April 2010, age 57). The implications are profound
Clearly, Marshall McLuhan’s biographers have recognized that McLuhan’s brain surgery had serious and irreversible effects on Marshall McLuhan: that he was fundamentally changed. But they do not seem to realize – or want to realize – the extent to which McLuhan changed or what this change means for our understanding of McLuhan and his work.
Of all McLuhan’s biographers, Douglas Coupland comes closest to capturing the seriousness of the effects of the surgery. But he does not go far enough or draw from it some basic conclusions. (If you have been following this blog you know that my belief is that the surgery killed McLuhan’s genius.) Here, I think, are three of those conclusions:
- Reading McLuhan is difficult, but the true McLuhan is to be found in the essays and books he published before the surgery of November 1967.
- Reading McLuhan is far more difficult in the essays and books published after his surgery because they were stamped by the influence of the surgery and that of his colleagues and co-authors.
- The best way to understand McLuhan (conversation not writing was his strength) is to attempt to hear him speak in interviews, letters, and the memoirs of the people who knew him. As always, I believe, it is best to pay more careful attention to McLuhan in the years before his surgery than after.
What implications of this for your understanding of Marshall McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan (2009)], pp. 182-83, p. 185
How did the operation end?
Marshall McLuhan (April 16, 2010, age 99). This is getting a bit too personal!
“Corinne, you will not believe what that Hinton bloke is going on about in his From Marshall and me blog. Says the brain tumor operation cost me my genius! How can he say such a thing? Look at all that I did despite that operation.”
“Calm yourself Marshall. Who are they going to believe? You or him? Did he win the Governor General’s award for non-fiction? Did he win an Order of Canada?
Me (April 2010, age 57). What do Marshall McLuhan’s biographers say?
Marshall McLuhan’s biographers have said that the operation was a nightmare, and McLuhan was forever changed by it, but he lived to go on to write books and articles and so the operation had a happy ending.
Here, for example is what Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan’s first major biographer, has to say about the effects of the operation on McLuhan: “The effects of the operation would linger for the rest of McLuhan’s life. In the months immediately following, it was dramatically obvious to his associates that McLuhan had changed.” The changes being: hypersensitivity to sound, loss of energy (which had been “his most obvious professional asset’), loss of a “photographic memory,” permanent loss of specific memories of reading over the previous “several years of reading,” the loss of “emotional and intellectual resilience,” and a strange new degree of fragility, irrationality, inflexibility, and quarrelsomeness – resulting in his uncharacteristic abusiveness “to students and colleagues.”
And Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan’s most recent biographer, says of the operation – which he describes as “a gross insult to the brain”: “he was back again, but he was back in reduced form. He had, in fact, lost swaths of memory; curiously, he had trouble remembering books he’d read many times over. … [H]e lost some of his ability to be civil to colleagues and students. In addition, his hypersensitivity to noises, always high, became extreme.” And “Marshall’s highly intrusive brain surgery at the age of fifty-six signaled the beginning of an end – the end of the high-water mark of Marshall’s fame, his notoriety, his earning potential, his vitality, and his ability to soak up information and to locate patterns.”
Again, if true, what implications are there for our reading and understanding of Marshall McLuhan? My final thoughts on this topic tomorrow.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan (2009)], pp. 182-83, p. 185
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989), pp. 213-14