EUGENE GOODHEART
Marshall McLuhan Revisited
W
HI LE 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 mes–
sage," 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.
0
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: a ll have asso–
ciations 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 aga in. 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 achieve–
ment. In his unsympathetic treatment of McLuhan in the
Modern Mas–
ters
series (197T), 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 reputa–
tion; but though most people are familiar with his name, and some
know his more dramatic mottoes, on ly a sma ll 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 famollsly,
Understanding
