Installation view of Through the Vanishing Point, commissioned by the 2010 Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Coach House Institute, Faculty of Information, University of TorontoAppropriately enough, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.
Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities McLuhan attributed to print culture. Meanwhile, McLuhan adopted the cerebral and cavalier cool approach he credited to successful television politicians like John F. Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau, who responded to attacks with insouciant indifference.
Early on in the program, McLuhan and Mailer tackle the largest possible issue, the fate of nature:
McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.
Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.
McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.
Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.
McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.
Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.
McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.
Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.
McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.
It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, Mailer — a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns — comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason. Mailer once observed that McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.” Many others were similarly divided. It was easy to be overawed by McLuhan’s quick-wittedness, his startling erudition, and his ability to describe the familiar world in shockingly fresh language while remaining uncertain about the ultimate value of his ideas.
McLuhan has strong claims to being the most important thinker Canada has ever produced. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, he established himself in the emerging field of cultural studies by offering a caustic survey of the dehumanizing impact of popular magazines, advertising, and comic strips. By the 1960s, he had widened his lens to examine the power of media as a whole. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he offered a map of modern history by highlighting the hitherto-unexplored effect of print in shaping how we think. This was followed by Understanding Media, which prophesied that new electronic media would rewire human consciousness just as effectively as print once did, giving birth to a “global village” where people all over the world would be linked via communication technology.
McLuhan has also long been a fiercely polarizing figure, especially during the height of his fame in the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, the American novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe praised him in the most extravagant terms: “At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has been only McLuhan in communications studies.” Meanwhile, the German essayist and poet Hans Enzensberger denounced McLuhan as a “reactionary” and a “charlatan,” a shallow theorist who attempted to “dissolve all political problems in smoke” and promised “the salvation of man through the technology of television.”
One of the most contentious aspects of McLuhan’s life and work was his devout Catholicism, which some critics saw as antithetical to his academic pursuits. In 1971, the British intellectual Jonathan Miller published a short monograph on McLuhan as part of Fontana Books’ Modern Masters, a series of pocket guides on important thinkers. Unrelentingly hostile, Miller argued that McLuhan’s ideas were rooted in a reactionary Catholicism and had little basis in science. According to Miller, the “hidden bias” of McLuhan’s work was that it was “strongly animated by Catholic piety.” He claimed that “McLuhan found it necessary to elaborate a psychological theory which owes considerably more to the unacknowledged authority of St. Thomas Aquinas than it does to any of the scientific sources he openly refers to.” A running theme of Miller’s book is that McLuhan’s ideas were cloaked in the impartial language of science, but carried with them implicit moral values based on his Catholicism.
