Marshall McLuhan Revisited

Eugene Goodheart

While preparing this essay, I asked a number of graduate students in their late twenties and early thirties whether they knew who Marshall McLuhan was. Most of them had never even heard of him; one or two had the vague sense that he had written about the media; a few remembered his cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. They had heard the phrase, "the medium is the message," and its variation, "the medium is the massage," but had not heard of the author. Marshall McLuhan, prophet of the technological revolution that absorbs the generation presently in their teens, twenties, and thirties, has virtually disappeared from view—or at least from their view. For those who grew up with an awareness of his iconic status in the sixties and the seventies, McLuhan is still a point of reference. No longer front and center, he remains a figure in the background of our awareness of the cultural scene. The advent of television, the presence and power of the media, our increasingly global existence: all have associations with McLuhan’s work.

The vicissitudes of reputation don’t have a single explanation. Times change and a writer may no longer speak to the times. Or, the work may continue to have relevance, but attention may be drawn elsewhere. A reputation can rise and fall and rise again. It is of course possible that a body of work once regarded with universal interest does not survive scrutiny years later. McLuhan’s work did arouse universal interest in the sixties and the seventies, though much of it was hostile to his achievement. In his unsympathetic treatment of McLuhan in the Modern Masters series (1971), Jonathan Miller notes the paradox of McLuhan’s reputation at the time of Miller’s writing: "It has sometimes been said that Marshall McLuhan’s most impressive achievement is his reputation; but though most people are familiar with his name, and some know his more dramatic mottoes, only a small section of the reading public is directly acquainted with the main body of his characteristic ideas." And the paradox is enforced by the fact that a book devoted to a "modern master" demolishes his claim to mastery.

How are we to judge McLuhan’s achievement two decades after his death? His three most important books are The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and, most famously, Understanding Media (1965). I don’t recall having read them through when they came out, but I do recall the excitement that McLuhan generated as a presence on the cultural scene. There was a sense that his charisma exceeded his achievement in print—a fitting coincidence, since McLuhan presented himself as a critic of the limitations of print culture. Having read the books with some care in recent months, I can occasionally glimpse the reasons for the excitement at the same time that I share the disappointment many of McLuhan’s most astute readers felt.

His liveliest and best book, in my view, is The Mechanical Bride (1951), a tour de force survey of the advertising culture of the time, in which he displays an uncanny instinct for the movements of the Zeitgeist, written in language that crackles with a quirky energy. Like Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, it is filled with sharp satiric aperçus about commercial culture, many of them striking and even original for their time, some of which have retained their freshness; others have become the common coin of the realm, and still others now seem hyperbolic and not always convincing.

An ad for Lysol, accompanied by an illustration of a young woman immersed in the water of "doubt, inhibitions, ignorance, misgivings," with arms raised and "crying out in anguish," elicits the comment: "Closely related to the combination of moral fervor and knowledge is the cult of hygiene. If it is a duty to buy those appliances which free the body from toil and thus enable housewives not to hate their husbands, equally urgent is the duty ‘to be dainty and fresh.’" (McLuhan fails to note the subtext: it is a subliminal ad for contraception. Perhaps he noted it, but couldn’t say it in 1951.) An ad for a 1949 Buick Roadmaster entitled "Ready, Willing and Waiting" draws the obvious rhetorical question: "Has the car taken up the burden of sex in an increasingly neuter world?" Superman represents

the psychological defeat of technological man. As a third-rate reporter whose incompetence wins him the pity and contempt of the virile Lois Lane, his hidden superself is an adolescent dream of imaginary triumphs. While Clark Kent can’t win even the admiration of Lois Lane, Superman is besieged by clamorous viragos. Superman accepts a self-imposed celibacy with the resignation of a stamping forge, while Kent is merely resigned.

This is McLuhan at his counter-intuitive best. The virile female and the emasculated male also appear in his treatment of Blondie ("She has ‘poise and confidence,’ know-how and drive") and Dagwood ("a supernumerary tooth with weak hams and a cuckold hairdo"). In his turn on Sherlock Holmes and "the sleuth cult," McLuhan hyperbolically sees a "foreshadowing of the police state."

Like Barthes, McLuhan is a demystifier who takes pleasure in the mystifications of popular culture. You get the feeling from the wit and vividness of his language that he relishes the ads and comic strips that provide him with the lowdown of what our culture is really about. His severest strictures are reserved for the great books and great ideas of academic culture—particular targets being Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago. The Mechanical Bride features a photograph of Adler and associates grouped around a display of great ideas written on cards and alphabetized ("angel," "animal," "aristocracy," "art"—all the way to "wealth" and "will": x, y, and z apparently don’t qualify for greatness) as if they were tombstones in a cemetery of ideas. McLuhan is bothered by Hutchins’s defeatist attitude toward mass culture. He quotes Hutchins: "But to hope that even the best training in criticism can cope with the constant storm of triviality and propaganda that now beats upon the citizen seems to me to expect too much of any educational system." McLuhan comments: "Why has it not occurred to Dr. Hutchins that the only practical answer to the ‘storm of triviality and propaganda’ is that it be brought under control by being inspected? Its baneful effects are at present entirely dependent on its being ignored." This is a refrain that runs through all of McLuhan’s work.

He means to defend the great books in his criticism of Hutchins and Adler, and of what he calls "the little magazine culture."

To win more and more attention for the best work it is necessary to demonstrate what constitutes the second-rate, third-rate and so on . . . .The air of unreality which has hovered over the little magazine culture in general is due to their neglect of the close interrelations between the good and bad work of the period. The result of this neglect is, finally, failure to see the goodness of the work itself. The great artist necessarily has his roots very deep in his own time, roots which embrace the most vulgar and commonplace fantasies and aspirations.

Pierre Bourdieu has recently made a similar argument: we can understand the distinction of the authors who have survived by studying "the universe of contemporaries with whom and against whom they have constructed themselves," which means "rehabilitating second-rate authors."

You may not like popular culture, you may fear its effects, but if you want not to be victimized by it, you’d better understand how it works. So we need to ask how McLuhan understands popular culture and how this understanding leads to the control he desires. If one looks for a clear exposition of ideas in his work, one is bound to be disappointed. He prefers what he calls "probes" to sustained exposition and argument, the probes being held together by overarching themes or by a narrative statement. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, the history of culture in its broadest outline is a movement from oral culture to print and finally to our electronic culture. Oral culture synthesizes the senses, print separates them, giving pride of place to the visual sense, and the electronic restores the unity of the senses. The Christian narrative of paradise lost and regained is close to the surface of McLuhan’s thought (he remained a good Catholic throughout his life), as is T. S. Eliot’s literary myth of the dissociation of sensibility. Before Gutenberg, culture was an organic whole: vision, sound, and touch were interdependent, thought and feeling inseparable. Print with its "lineality" catastrophically separated the senses, subordinating the auditory-tactile to the visual. One effect of print is point of view ("equitone prose"), a cultural misfortune in McLuhan’s opinion, which his prose (to the discomfort of his readers) tries to overcome. The social effect of print culture is detribalization and the emergence of nationalism, an effect asserted without argument or evidence. According to McLuhan, we have now entered a new phase: the retribalization of culture into a global village through electronic technology. The romantic longing for organic unity paradoxically finds its satisfaction in our experience of electronic media. All the significant changes that have occurred in culture are the result of technological changes in the media. McLuhan can be fairly called a media determinist.

His style is intimidating. He doesn’t argue his case; rather, he hammers it home through reiteration supported by long quotations (whose relevance is not always clear) from virtually every major writer of the Western tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ramus, Shakespeare, Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Spengler, to name a few) and a host of minor writers. McLuhan’s self-described "mosaic" style is supposed to provide an antidote to the lineality of the book, the medium in which he is compelled to express himself. McLuhan has denied from time to time that he views the book (the consummate expression of print culture) as a misfortune. After all, he reads omnivorously and writes prolifically. Then where does he stand on the matter of print culture? But that is a question of point of view, and McLuhan, in the spirit of his animus against what he believes to be a feature of print culture, resists being pinned down. "The theme of [The Gutenberg Galaxy] is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves."

This is a version of the statement that we have already encountered in The Mechanical Bride: we cannot presume to control the effects of mass culture if we don’t learn its ways. A laudable aim, but nowhere in McLuhan’s work is there the slightest hint of how understanding leads to control. What we get is an account of our media fate, but not of how to master it. McLuhan seems to subscribe to the Hegelian definition of freedom as the recognition of necessity.

Is it not possible to emancipate ourselves from the subliminal operation of our own technologies? Is not the essence of education civil defense against media fall-out? Since the effort has never been made in any culture the answer may seem to lie in doubt. There may be some hitherto unsuspected and wise motive for mental sleep and self-hypnosis in man which the confrontation of the effects of the media technology would reveal.

McLuhan’s questions provoke questions. First there is the matter of his contested understanding of the changing technology of the media and the effect of that technology on the sensorium. Is it true that print culture separates the senses, and, in giving primacy to the visual sense, allows the other senses to atrophy? In his little book on McLuhan, Jonathan Miller, a trained neurologist, deftly exposes his understanding of the sensorium. Miller’s demonstration is too extensive and complex for summary. Here is an example. "[McLuhan] speaks. . .about print ‘stepping up the intensity of vision,’ which is not wrong exactly but meaningless. For vision is not the sort of ‘thing’ to which the concept of intensity can be significantly applied. One may talk about the intensity of a visual stimulus—but it makes no sense to talk about the intensity of vision." Miller then provides a technical account of how "the intensity of a spot of light" is a function of stimulus and not of vision. Miller also refutes McLuhan’s claim that "the mind becomes biased by undue emphasis applied to one particular sense" by showing that it is "cognitive interest [that] determines the use to which the various senses will be put, not vice versa." It is not enough to make an effort to understand; one must achieve understanding. McLuhan’s insistence that electronic culture restores the unity of the senses becomes a refrain unsupported by evidence.

But supposing for the sake of argument that he truly understands the history of the media, what should or can be done about it? If the electronic media are replacing print culture, isn’t the remedy for what ails us in print culture already in place? No longer will the auditory and tactile senses be subordinated to the visual. We may no longer be required to understand the media or do anything about it. The matter is not so clear, however, for McLuhan is equivocal about the respective advantages and disadvantages of print and electronic media. He resists the idea that only bad things issue from print culture, but he refuses to say "that there is anything good or bad about print culture." I suspect that this moral neutrality disguises uncertainty about the relative advantages and disadvantages of print and electronic culture. "Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums, among the other organs and extensions of the body." Translation: technological change has benefits and costs to our well-being. We are not provided, however, with a cost-benefit analysis.

In his overall argument, electronic culture seems like the consummation for which McLuhan, an avatar of the current breed of professional champions of our pop culture, devoutly wishes. Murray Siskind, the charismatic college instructor in DeLillo’s White Noise, speaks McLuhanism when he affirms the codes and messages of our media-dominated culture.

TV is a problem only if you’ve forgotten how to look and listen. . . . My students and I discuss this all the time. They’re beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages.

And yet while watching television, McLuhan bursts out: "Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Enlightenment-Modern-Western Civilization you better get an axe and smash all sets." What can such an outburst mean for his understanding of the media? McLuhan tells us again and again that print is a "hot" medium that renders the reader passive, whereas TV is a "cool" medium in which the spectator becomes actively and fully involved—a desirable situation. (Counterintuitively, McLuhan views reading as a passive experience and watching television as actively involving all the senses.) Why then does he vent his spleen on television? Could it be that he is appalled by the content of its programs, despite his insistence that content is an irrelevance in our experience of TV? "The medium is the message." Smashing the set with an axe is hardly the act you expect to follow from an understanding of the medium. In a less excited mood, he makes a more reasonable suggestion: "To resist TV. . .one must acquire the antidote of related media like print." So after all that he has said about the fragmenting of the sensibility by print, it remains an agent for saving civilization from electronic barbarism.

McLuhan and his defenders don’t feel obliged to be consistent. Consistency of point of view or of argument is a function of print culture, which it is McLuhan’s task to overcome. An admirer, Samuel Becker, advises us not "to respond to McLuhan’s work as though it is a scientific research, historical or anthropological observation, or even serious criticism, [but rather] to respond to it as the object it most closely approximates—a projective test. We ought not to read it for what it or McLuhan means, but rather for its help on loosening our imaginations, for stimulating us to think about communication in fresh and imaginative ways, for causing us to dredge up out of the very recesses of our own minds the ideas which are lurking there." In other words, McLuhan is himself a cool medium like television in which we find what we want to find. He is the forerunner of a radical reader-centered criticism in which the reader in effect constitutes the text. If his work is intended as a sort of Rorschach, then it is disingenuous for him and his defenders to assert again and again, as they do, that he has been misunderstood by his critics. Misunderstanding implies the possibility of a true understanding of an author’s intention. But McLuhan and his cool electronic culture have effectively undermined the whole idea of authorship and authorial intention. Post-print media, in this view, are now the possession of active readers and spectators.

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan’s application of the formalism of Eliot and Joyce to the products of popular culture. "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." McLuhan "burglarizes" Eliot’s metaphor for the effect of the content of a poem on the mind of the reader. But what does it mean to ignore content in responding to the medium? We can only guess from his examples. His readings of "the folklore of industrial culture," the subtitle of The Mechanical Bride, follow an established model of demystification—in Freud’s terms, revealing the latent content hidden in the manifest content. The automobile has "taken up the burden of sex." Superman is "the adolescent dream of imaginary triumphs," a compensation for impotence. Dagwood, the man, is emasculated; Blondie, the woman, is virile. Content doesn’t disappear: one content replaces another. Marx, Freud, Kenneth Burke (who called it rhetorical criticism), and Roland Barthes have been practitioners of the art of demystification.

The Mechanical Bride was not written under the aegis of "the medium is the message." The examples in Understanding Media suggest another view of the contentless medium: "One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. . . .It was no accident that Senator McCarthy lasted such a very short time when he switched to TV." He was a "hot" figure, and "TV is a cool medium." "In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, those who heard them on the radio received an overwhelming idea of Nixon’s superiority. It was Nixon’s fate to provide a sharp, high-definition image and action for the cool TV medium that translated that sharp image into the impression of a phony. It might well be that FDR would not have done well on TV. He had learned, at least, how to use the hot radio medium for his very cool job of fireside chatting." McLuhan provides the kind of knowledge that benefits party officials and political consultants in their choice of candidates. Ideas and policies are irrelevant content. What counts is the look of the candidate. In the instances of McCarthy and the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the effect of evacuating content from the medium is to trivialize the events.

McLuhan describes the effects of the media and doesn’t pass judgment. He eschews "a moral point of view" because "too often [it] serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters." Premature moralizing can interfere with understanding. As Jonathan Miller puts it, "McLuhan tends to cast suspicion upon any form of investigation that allows ‘values’ or anything else to limit the lines of inquiry." His resistance to a moral point of view, it could be argued, enables him to perform the role of double agent between high and popular culture. But then what are we to make of a value-neutral description of something whose effects may be benign or noxious? Where does it leave us? We are left wondering whether McLuhan is complicit with "the cool" medium, or whether he is simply saying, well, here it is and there is very little that you can do about it. So much for understanding in order to achieve control.

McLuhan was not the only academic of his time to take popular and mass culture seriously; his contemporaries included Kenneth Burke in America, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in England, and Roland Barthes in France. Nor does he have priority in his response to electronic culture; he acknowledges indebtedness to the work of his Canadian compatriot Harold Ennis and to that of Siegfried Gideon, among others. What distinguishes McLuhan is the theatrical enthusiasm with which he embraces his subject—the way he allows what he writes about to infect his style. He never comes across as a mere academic. He is always "with it," a "cool" medium of the media he is studying. (Here are samples of his style taken randomly from The Mechanical Bride: "All that glitters is jitters." "Crime thrills for the law abiding. Sex thrills for the impotent." "You want to feel secure. Well, nothing recedes like success." "Is it what’s in the jigger that makes them bigger?") It should not come as a surprise that among his admirers were Duke Ellington, Alvin Toffler, Kurt Vonnegut, Andy Warhol, Bob Newhart, Ann Landers, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

McLuhan’s prophesy about the demise of the printed word has not been fulfilled. As Robert Darnton recently remarked, "‘The Gutenberg galaxy’ still exists, and ‘typographic man’ is still reading his way around it." Moreover, there is no indication of their imminent decline. As a guide to an understanding of electronic media at the present time, McLuhan has little to offer. His prejudice against content does not help us reflect upon the quality of the programs on television (the representation of political and social commentary in its talking heads, the representation of our social and family life in its sitcoms, the representation of violence and sexuality in its dramas). The distinction between "hot" and "cool" does little to illuminate the uses and abuses of the Internet. McLuhan’s vision of a global unity of interdependent groups or nations seems little more than a fantasy in our time of ethnic and national conflict. Darnton sums up McLuhan’s irrelevance to our present condition: "His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium we are about to enter."

McLuhan’s biographer, W. Terrace Gordon, informs us that Thomas Carlyle was an early favorite of McLuhan’s because of his "bold innovative style." Like Carlyle’s vatic pronouncements, McLuhan’s utterances have the aura of prophesy. Neither Carlyle nor McLuhan depends upon careful and reasoned "linear" argument. Both writers appear at the beginnings of revolutionary change: the industrial revolution for Carlyle, the electronic revolution for McLuhan. But the differences between them are also instructive. Unlike McLuhan, Carlyle wrote and spoke from a moral point of view. He did not leave his readers in doubt about where he stood. He was a critic of the industrial revolution, but not a Luddite. He knew that it was an irreversible and creative force, but he also knew that it could be destructive unless ways were found to subordinate it to moral and spiritual purposes. He wrote what may be called, oxymoronically, hopeful jeremiads. His advocacy of a balance between the mechanical and the spiritual, the outer and the inner life, influenced almost every major writer of the nineteenth century (Ruskin, Dickens, Mill, and Morris, among others). In contrast to Carlyle, McLuhan embraces the technological revolution of his time with few reservations. He does on occasion have Luddite fantasies about TV, and speaks of "print" as an antidote, but these are isolated expressions that are never integrated into his general "argument." In his preferred stance of moral neutrality, McLuhan effectively abdicated the role of social or cultural critic.