Genius
Perseverance
Marshall McLuhan (1974, age 63). I have doubts …
I don’t know perhaps it was late. I was tired. The Monday night seminar had just ended. Eric was driving me home and I said to him: “Is it worth it? All this effort to alert people, when they just attack the bearer of news and do nothing. Do I have the right to, am I supposed to, should I continue to keep investigating and making discoveries? Why bother, if the West is being discarded and no one will do anything about it or even listen.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). But he never gave up
McLuhan had doubts about his ability to get through to people, to get people to think about, to comprehend, the power of media. He would have been a fool not to. His style insured him critics. But he never gave up. Today it is clear, as Douglas Coupland says, what with Google, Facebook, You tube, and everything else like this blog your reading on the internet, McLuhan “was right on the money four decades ahead of the biggest shift in human communication since the printing press.”
Am I getting through to McLuhan? What can we learn from him after all these years?
Like McLuhan I too have doubts. As we approach our 200th post questions come to me. What was I thinking when I committed to 300 posts? Should I keep going? It’s been great, but why bother? What good does it do to sieve through old ground? Is the medium a barrier to the message? But then occasionally there are discoveries …
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, p. 275.
What Marshall McLuhan was up to? [cont'd]
Marshall McLuhan (December 14, 1977, age 66). Really, I was stunned!
I still can’t get over Peter Gzowski’s outrageous suggestion on television yesterday that I failed grade six! I can’t imagine where he got the idea. As told him – “I never failed any grade ever.”
Me (June 2010, age 57). Could McLuhan have actually forgotten that he failed grade six?
One might think it odd for a man to forget failing grade six. Marshall McLuhan, however, forgot a great many things after the brain surgery he underwent in 1967. For example, he forgot books he had read, his children’s birthdays, and where his friends lived. Granted, his biographers do not comment on McLuhan’s denial that he failed grade six on the Gzowski show, which is when you think about it extremely odd. Perhaps they didn’t because it seemed like a small, unimportant thing. On the other hand it may also be a small, but striking example of how McLuhan was changed by the surgery and perhaps also his strokes.
Clearly, McLuhan was not the man he once was after his surgery. As McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand says: “his friend John Wain described him as ‘nervous, fragile, tense’ [in] the year after his operation. To some extent, he remained that way for the rest of his life.” And a neurologist Marcel Kinsbourne, who knew McLuhan in the 1970s, recalled “he was querulous and irritable in his later years … He didn’t come across as being particularly mentally alert or flexible.” The question is how fundamentally he was changed. As readers of this blog know, I believe the changes were pronounced. So much so as I have argued in earlier posts. One can say the surgery cost McLuhan his genius.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall Mcluhan: the Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 214.
Marshall McLuhan: Cult Hero (cont’d)
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 59). Let’s be serious.
Marshall?
Yes.
That book Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time. [see yesterday's post]
What about it?
If you’re a cult hero, does that mean people think you have the answers?
Yes. But as usual people are wrong. I don’t have the answers. I’ve got something far more important. I have the questions.
Me (June 2010, age 57). To find the questions look for the answers
Marshall McLuhan’s books would be easier to understand if he asked his questions in the form of questions. Instead his questions appear in the form of bold unqualified statements, which he called probes. Famously McLuhan said he made these statements not because he wanted people to believe him, but because he wanted them to think.
Here is an example: As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’ (The Essential McLuhan, 1995, p. 283.)
Consider the number of ways our age is becoming a ‘do it yourself age.’ In McLuhan’s day someone else made appointments, dialed telephone calls, took messages, and typed and edited reports and presentations, and published. Now with the help of technology, we do these things ourselves.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time, edited by Theodore L. Gross. New York: The Free press, 1970.
Marshall McLuhan: Cult Hero
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 59). Corinne, look at this!
Look at what, Marshall?
This new book, Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time. I’m a cult hero.
A what?
A cult hero. I quote – “the hero is an exceptional person who maintains authority over average people and seeks to realize an ideal. In the pursuit of this ideal, the hero demonstrates certain characteristics. He is a courageous, active social man whose passions are more intense than the people he represents; he is a man willing to dive, to take chances; he is someone finally who sees more deeply into the experiences of the average man.”
Is that what you are?
It appears so. But then who knows how long as my 15 minutes will last
Me (June 2010, age 57) Yesterday and today
A book like Representative Men, which was published in 1970, reveals the extent of Marshall McLuhan’s fame and influence in the late 1960s. Who made the list? Just to read some of the names is to get a sense of high Marshall McLuhan flew in the 1960s and how far he has fallen in the public’s estimation today: JFK, Jacqueline Onassis, J. D. Salinger, Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller, and Martin Luther King.
Certainly in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan was seen as someone who “sees … deeply into the experiences of the average man.” A man who had the answers. Whether he will ever be seen again as the man with the answers is doubtful. But, as I hope this blog shows, whenever you turn to McLuhan insight and answers are possible.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time, edited by Theodore L. Gross. New York: The Free press, 1970.
Marshall McLuhan, idea consultant!
Marshall McLuhan (June 3, 1955, age 43). I’ve got a billion of ‘em!
Bill Hogan and I have hit upon a scheme that will make us rich. We’ve formed a business called Idea Consultants. We’re the perfect team – I’m a good talker and he’s a good listener. Here’s our slogan – “A headache is a million-dollar idea trying to get born. Idea Consultants are obstetricians for these ideas.”
Here are three of our ideas:
- See-through potties for toilette training children
- Pollen-free package tours for hay-fever sufferers
- Urine-coloured underwear
All we need now is our first customer.
Me (June 2010, age 57). In part, Marshall, in part!
It’s easy to make fun of Idea Consultants and the ideas they came up with. {see two earlier posts – first, second] McLuhan and Hogan ran the business for two years, but never made a sale. However, some of their ideas were fascinating ideas for products that were far ahead of their time. For example today Mrs Hinton Googled “Idea Consultants” and got 17,300,000 results. One of their product ideas was for “television platters” – the DVD or video cassette. Another was for a TV program in which viewers would be presented with a dramatized business problem and a prize would be offered for the best solution. McLuhan believed that ordinary viewers were more likely to come up with innovative solutions than the experts.
Here’s your chance to test this idea: Imagine such a program on the BP gulf coast oil spill. Would amateurs be able to deal with the disaster better than the experts? What do you suggest BP do to cap the well?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 109.
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
What a month!
Marshall McLuhan (December 28, 1967, age 55). You can say that again!
It’s a great to be home. Hospitals and doctors are fine things but if you have a choice, I assure you, it’s best if you can avoid them. On November 25 I underwent the most horrendous operation: 22 hours to remove a brain tumor. Benign they told me, thank God, but still a devilish tricky thing; it was growing like weed. Had to come out it was the size of an avocado. Doctors said I’d go blind or mad if it didn’t. I came home on December 12. I’m delighted to be alive. The question is: Who am I now and what will happen next?
Me (April 2010, age 57) What did happen next?
If you’ve been reading this blog you know what I think about who he became and happened next - In short, the operation necessary for his survival robbed McLuhan of his genius and although he lived another 13 years in which books were published by him largely in co-authorship with other people the spark that made the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) was gone. [see series of posts starting here]
In the next couple of posts I’ll take a look at what McLuhan’s biographers – including the most recent biography by Douglas Coupland – have to say about the effects of this operation.
If true, what implications are there for our reading and understanding of Marshall McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 28 December, 1967, pp. 349-50.
What do the experts know?
Marshall McLuhan (January 28, 1966, age 54). They know too much.
Did you hear the story of the soft-hearted brain surgeon who when a patient told him he couldn’t afford surgery offered the retouch his x-rays for free. Experts never cease to amaze me. Tom Paine said that it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us but what we know that isn’t true. Experts are masters of this, of what they know that assures them that new ideas must be false. Whatever you say, they rest easy, knowing it can’t be true.
Me (April, 2010, age 57). Perhaps they do.
Marshall McLuhan’s idea is that the experts starting point to any idea is that it must be wrong. That is that there is nothing new under the sun. No matter what your idea is it must have already been tried. And therefore it must be wrong because if it wasn’t it would have been shown to be right, and we would know it already. What this means is that not being an expert gives you an advantage.
What is your advantage?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 334.
Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan [cont’d]
Marshall McLuhan (March 20, age 98). I failed!
Corinne went out shopping – heaven’s not what I thought it was going to be – which gave me the opportunity to take that test in Douglas Coupland’s book about me. For the record my score was 21, which is a delightful result, particularly because it is divisible by three.
Me (March 2010, age 57). So did I!
As I promised to do yesterday, I took the test, too. My score was 19, which, sadly, is not divisible by three, but is a prime!
The test as Coupland explains in Marshall McLuhan was devised by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge. It is called the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, and is ‘a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults.’ According to Coupland ‘in the first major trial using the test, the average score of the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher.’
Coupland suggests that to understand Marshall McLuhan it is helpful to view him as autistic. What does that mean? It does not mean, as Coupland says, that McLuhan couldn’t function in the world. He clearly did and so do many people who are autistic. It means in living his life he displayed particular traits. According to the test, someone with autism is more likely to prefer to do things on their own, do things the same way over and over again, and when imagining something, find it hard to create a picture in their mind. People without autism are just the opposite. Moreover the autistic tend to notice small sounds when others do not, are fascinated by numbers, and don’t particularly enjoy reading fiction.
But looking through this list I find it hard to see Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’. For example: He was fascinated by some kinds of numbers (numbers divisible by three – he was superstitious) but not all numbers (he thought of himself as a word man not a number man); and reading fiction was both his passion and his profession as a teacher of English literature at the University of Toronto. Admittedly, however, he did love his routines and often claimed to dislike change of any kind. The question is does the profile of someone with autism give us a quick and dirty way to profile Marshall McLuhan? Douglas Coupland says it does. I say no. I never met Marshall McLuhan. My understanding of him is based on my reading (including 4 biographies, his letters and books, and papers held at the National archives) and interviews with some people who knew him (including Professor Abraham Rotstein – who was part of McLuhan’s discussion group on media and technology at Toronto in the 1960s -and Dr. Michael Easterbrook – who is the son of McLuhan’s closest and oldest friend – Tom Easterbrook.
To profile Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’ makes for good tabloid reading. McLuhan did have some of the characteristics of autism. His hearing – like Coupland’s, apparently – was preternaturally acute. But many of the traits of autism seem to me to be wrong or smudgy ways to understand him. For example, the autistic, it is said, are often the last to understand the point of a joke. Marshall McLuhan was an irrepressible punning wise guy.
At bottom, my view is that to profile him as autistic is wrong on two levels. First, and most basically, it is wrong because the traits of autism mislead as much as they help in understanding McLuhan. And second, more fundamentally, it is wrong because it suggests, falsely, that McLuhan can be understood in one simple step. The messy reality of McLuhan is that he was an eccentrically unique complex individual who can and cannot be understood simply. A man of extraordinary gifts – creative genius, a photographic memory, the ability to make profound associations between people and events that at first sight would seem to be unrelated – he was a brilliant and unstoppable talker and a horrendous listener, oblivious social niceties and the needs of others. To label him as ‘autistic’ is not to know him better but to know him less.
Did you pass the test?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan, 2009