A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Rhetoric
The elusive Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (May 19, 1966, age 54). Foul play!
“How is it Professor McLuhan,” Eric Goldman asked me earlier today on WNBC television program The Open Mind, “that you should be so concerned with media? Here you are the son of Baptist parents, convert to Catholicism, a Canadian student of English literature, formerly an engineering student and now …”
“Oh, don’t bother with that data.” I said.
“Why?
“It’s all wrong! And in any case quite unnecessary.”
Me (June 2010, age 57). What was McLuhan up to?
Gerald Stern who quotes this exchange between McLuhan and Goldman in his introduction to McLuhan: Hot and Cool says that McLuhan typically refused to discuss his family life, personal opinions or his past. As a result, “personal and biographical information about McLuhan is difficult to trace.” And, “Stearn adds, “there is a coy, almost purposeful elusiveness about the man himself.” Why? Stearn suggests there is no good reason why McLuhan side stepped these subjects: he was simply a “puzzling” character.
This is possible, but there is I think a better answer. It is more probable that McLuhan actually believed what he said: that biographical details were “quite unnecessary.” McLuhan was trained at Cambridge in the close reading critical analysis of I. A. Richards. I imagine if McLuhan had been asked if asked about the usefulness of biographical details in the understanding of any authors work he would have said these details were “quite unnecessary.” Everything you needed to know to understand a poem or a novel, Richards taught, was in the written work – that is in the work’s diction, rhythm and structure. And this was the method McLuhan followed in his teaching.
(And see tomorrow’s post for a more troubling example of McLuhan’s elusiveness.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, 1967, p. IV.
The measure of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (May 6, 1966, age 54). Really?
Well, how’d I do Corinne?
You were magnificent Marshall. But surely Patrick Watson was exaggerating when he said that “no one can make sense out of more than ten percent of what” you say.
Me (June 2010, age 57). A test
While Marshall McLuhan was renowned for being difficult to understand to say that 90 percent of what he says is incomprehensible does seem an exaggeration. Granted Patrick Watson’s aim was to be controversial when he said this on the CBC television program “This Hour Has Seven Days.” (May 6, 1966) But this is as good an excuse as any to make the point that Marshall McLuhan is not as difficult to understand as is commonly thought. Or maybe he is.
Here by way of a test is a bit of what Marshall McLuhan had to say on the program.
[The interviewer, Robert Fullford, asks.] “Has [the world] changed because of TV?”
[McLuhan replies:] “Television gave the old electric circuitry that’s already here a huge extra push in this direction of involvement and inwardness. You see, the circuit doesn’t simply push things out for inspection, it pushes you in. It involves you. When you put a new medium into play, people’s sensory life shifts a bit, sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics. Since TV, Canadian, British and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis … .”
What do you think? Is 90 percent of this something “no one can make sense out of?”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan, edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 135-36.
The brevity of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (October 3, 1964, age 53). Watch out for the meat!
T. S. Eliot said the message of a poem is the meat thieves throw to the dog to distract its attention while they break into your house. Running this backwards, then, if you want to nail down the message of a poem or a book it’s not hard to do. All you need to look for is the meat that’s being thrown at you.
Me (June 2010, age 57). Is it that easy?
My apologies for putting this idea into Marshall’s mouth. You will not find it in anything Marshall McLuhan wrote or said. But aside from the fact the focus is on the message not the medium, it does sound like something McLuhan might have said in a lucid, unmystical moment. Marshall McLuhan’s uncanny ability to go to the heart of a book with very few words was something that was very real and frequently impressed his friends and colleagues. For example, Ted (Edmund) Carpenter with whom McLuhan first began to work on media studies in the 1950s, says in an interview which you can find appended to the documentary film McLuhan’s Wake: “He had a way of getting to the point.” And “[I was] stunned by the brevity he could summarize things.”
For example, in a letter to Pierre Trudeau, McLuhan summarizes the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication this way: “Shannon and Weaver were mathematicians who considered the side–effects of noise. They assumed that these could be eliminated by simply stepping up the charge of energy in a circuit.” [for more] And here is McLuhan’s summary statement of Peter Drucker’s Managing for Results: “[I]n every situation 10% of the events cause 90% of the events. The 10 % is the sector of opportunity, the 90 % is the area of problems. [Typically] the opportunity or environmental and innovational area is ignored. All sensible people deal first with problems – that is, the dead issues.”
Can McLuhan’s power of “brevity” be learned? If it can, how?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post:
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 311 and 542.
Understanding McLuhan: The less is more approach
Marshall McLuhan (May 7, 1966, age 54). New York City here I come!
Today, Eric reminded me, I’m booked to speak at the Kauffman Art Gallery on 92nd street in New York City. My talk is about the way the media work us over. The title of the talk is “The Medium is the Massage.” I’m bubbling over with ideas I want to talk about. I only hope there’s time for me to say everything I want to say.
What’s that Corinne? My cab’s at the door? Must run, wish me luck.
Me (June 2010, age 57). Good luck, Professor McLuhan!
Reading this speech today it’s easy to understand why so many people, then and now, find it hard to understand Marshall McLuhan. In some ways McLuhan’s speech has the standard characteristics of great public speaking: an opening that grabs attention (“I have been introduced recently as Canada’s revenge on the United States); a clear statement of a theme (an electronic medium “massages the population in a savage way); humour (a cat is hunting a mouse, the cat imitates the barking of a dog, the mouse thinks the cat’s been chased away by a dog and it’s safe to come out from its hiding place, the cat eats the mouse and remarks – it pays to be bilingual); a personal and conversational style (“when our thirteen-year-old saw this, he said, “Dad that’s real cool …”).
But McLuhan cancels out its good features and pushes his talk across the line from understandable to overwhelming because he can’t stick to one or two main subjects. Instead, by my count, he deals with 52 subjects: including, the problem with value judgments, the world as teaching machine, memory and discovery, the future of work, the future of the book, perception and science, how to study media, computers and social change.
To understand McLuhan I think you must read him very slowly and in bits and pieces. For example consider just one idea from his talk: If you want to lose your job be sure to specialize: eventually someone will figure out a way for a computer to replace you. Something to think about.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Massage,” in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, 2003, pp. 76-97.
How to deal with hecklers.
Marshall McLuhan (June 13, 1974, age 62). For what it is worth
Hecklers are easily dealt with. The heckler’s goal is “to annoy or confuse a speaker by interrupting with questions or taunts.” As I was telling Pierre Trudeau here are my two favourite ploys. Depending on your mood you can: (1) invite them to come to the microphone and address the audience; or (2) look at them quizzically and ask them, “You mean my fallacies are all wrong?” Very few hecklers are prepared to deal with either approach. [for more on heckling]
Me (May 2010, age 57) I wonder
Marshall McLuhan might have found these effective strategies . I doubt that Pierre Trudeau would have found them helpful. But then …
What are the best ways of dealing with hecklers?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 499.
Pearls before swine?
Marshall McLuhan (May 14, 1969, age 57) Appalling!
Just got back from the Bilderberg Conference. If I had known that the participants understood so little about the electric world in which we live I would never have agreed to speak. As I told Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, who was a splendidly urbane host, only artists see the world as it is the rest – and I include the delegates to the Conference in this less than august company – see it as it was thirty years ago. The shocking thing is that these are the people who are running our world.
Me (April 2010, age 57) In every way!
McLuhan’s performance at Bilderberg was one of his worst. And he was not invited back. Apparently the delegates, who included such political heavy weights as Robert MacNamara, George Ball, and Dean Rusk, did not appreciate McLuhan’s “foul language.” It is also likely that the delegates found that what McLuhan had to say foully expressed or not as insulting and incomprehensible. For example here are three ideas McLuhan brought to the delegates attention:
(1) By 1830 the Industrial Revolution had made England a communist state;
(2) Today thanks to advertising we live in communist states; and
(3) Given the above why the hell is America fighting communism.
Is there anything more to these particular ideas than a peculiar sort of word association? (Communism is defined to be a world in which an abundance of material wealth is found.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 372-73 and 531.
Want to write like Milton?
Marshall McLuhan (April 20, 1964, age 52). Hendiadys is the key.
At breakfast I remarked to Corinne and the children that Ernest Sirlock’s remarkable article on Milton’s prose got me thinking about Milton’s use of the grammatical figure of Hendiadys. Blank looks all around. No matter – this is important. Hendiadys is the mark of the 17th century mind. A mind conditioned to look at the world ambivalently. Not simply as “A” or “B” but “A” and “B”. I looked again at Paradise Lost. Do you know that Milton uses this device 19 times in the first 100 lines? “Death and Woe,” “Restore and regain,” “Raise and support” et cetera and ad infinitum! Someone should study this.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Let’s study it
But let’s study it not in Milton’s prose but Marshall McLuhan’s. “Hendiadys” is a figure of speech, a “striking or unusual configuration of words or phrases.” It is a Greek word meaning, “one by means of two.” Richard Lanham (A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms) defines it as the”expression of an idea by two nouns connected by “and” instead of a noun and its qualifier.” He gives as an example, “Not you, coy Madame, your lowers and your looks,’ for “your lowering looks.” If we apply this model to McLuhan’s examples from Milton we get the following translations: “deathly woe,” “restorative regain,” and “raising support.”
McLuhan is struck by the number of times he finds hendiadys appearing in the first 100 lines of Paradise Lost – 19. How many times do you think we could find hendiadys appearing in the first 100 lines of his best seller Understanding Media published in 1964? 2 or 3? I counted 20. Here are the first three: “fragmentary and mechanical,” “space and time,” “collectively and corporately.”
Did Marshall McLuhan have a 17th century mind? Did he intentionally edit his prose to increase its “complexity and ambivalence” (excuse my hendiadys)? Would this feature, rather than the number of new ideas, say, be the real reason Understanding Media is difficult to understand? Can you use hendiadys to effect in your writing to increase its power and profundity?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.298.
Opposites attract
Marshall McLuhan (February 7, 1960, age 50). Watch out for Mr. In Between.
Marshall, Corinne said to me at breakfast, things are not all black and white. I had simply said that telephone calls in this house must be strictly limited to no more than 2 minutes a call. She said that our two oldest girls, Teresa and Mary, were teenagers and that we must expect them to want to talk for far more than 2 minutes a call. I told her that of course she was right. Between black and white there is grey. But not everything is grey. I said that when it comes to intellectual discovery – and what can be more important than that – it is better to ignore grey entirely and see what makes the most sense, black or white? Corinne said what makes the most sense is the preservation of her sanity. I imagine what that means is that telephone calls will not be strictly limited to less than 2 minutes. Thank God – and believe me I do – I’ve got an office to escape to. After all, I’ve work to do.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Figure and ground.
Marshall McLuhan liked to view the world through the tension of opposites. Not black and white, with its suggestion of good and bad, but hot and cold, high definition and low definition, and, later, left brain and right brain, and figure and ground.
What he used to tell his students in the 1970s, I’m told, is that to truly understand a medium you must be able to look at it both as figure and ground at the same time. That is to see it for what it is, the senses it extends and how (figure) and for how the environment around it adapts and adjusts to its presence (ground). Which brings me to a question posed by Julien Smith, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Trust Agents, in a recent blog post: Can you both stand out (make an impression, cut a figure) and fit in (be accepted, blend into the ground) at the same time? The answer is yes. That’s what rhetoric is all about. To persuade you must stand out and fit in.
Do you try only to stand out or only to fit in? Or do you try to do both?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 286-287.