Montreal, Quebec H2L 3Z1
Wise Guy is a literary study of Marshall McLuhan’s life and career. The quotation of phrases from books written by Marshall McLuhan and copyrighted by his publishers is intended to illustrate the biographical information and criticism of McLuhan’s work presented by the author and thus constitutes fair dealing under Canadian copyright law.
The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing – you, your family, your neighbourhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically.
– Marshall McLuhan
and Quentin Fiore,
The Medium Is the Massage (1967)
To Philip Marchand, Michelle & Monica McKenna, Isaac Gray, Donna, Geoff, April, Sarah & Laura Gompers, and Valerie, Ruth & Leah Shertzman.
Acknowledgments
To Philip Marchand, whose McLuhaniacal investigations always inspire my own, thank you for your coyote generosity and, especially, for making a difference: The template is perfect; the errors are mine. I shall always remain deeply grateful for your willingness to share your brilliant work and research as a collaborator in absentia in the making of Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy.
To XYZ’s editorial director, Rhonda Bailey, mere thanks cannot begin to express my admiration and respect for your good sense and great spirit. You make the editorial process a genuine pleasure. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy is
To Peter C. Newman, Canadian National Arguranter Extraordinaire, heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support of Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy and the Quest Library biography series.
To Daniel “DTM” Jalowica, muchical boundlinesses for your invaluable input and overall irreplace-ability.
To Connie & Paul McKenna, André Vanasse, Dick & Lenore Langs, T. F. Rigelhof, Francine Auger, Cheryl Taylor, Darcy Dunton, and Cynthia Cecil, a round of heartfelt thanks.
To Kelley Lynch & Lennie C, Leon, Musia, Susan & Robert Schwartz, and Marie Mazur (thank you for rhythm, reason, and rhyme).
To Carol Mclntyre, Helen Major, and Wayne Snow at the Sundridge Post Office (thank you for all the neat treats and feats).
Special thanks to Irving Layton, Assumption University’s President Father Bill Irwin, David Sobelman, Monique Pasternak, Adam & Martin Levin, Joan Ramsay, Dafydd Price Jones, Michael S. Connaghan, Taku Moero, Robert Parkins, Anne Marie Smart/Parkins, Laurie Smith, Mark Barker, and Antonio D’Alfonso.
To Henry Blanco, Library Assistant in the Archives and Special Collections of the A. C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, thank you for the invaluable additional information you graciously provided for the “Wise Guy to the World” chapter.
To the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canada Council, the Public Lending Rights Commission, CanCopy, and the Ontario Arts Council, thank you for your continued support. Without your assistance, Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy would not exist.
Contents
2 First Comes Love, Then Comes Cambridg
4 Going Places
5 The Doctor is In
6 I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N
7 The Centre of the University
8 Wise Guy to the World
9 You Mean My Fallacy Is All Wrong?
10 Eloquent Silence
Chronology of Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Sources Consulted
Index
Critical Mass
The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.
– Marshall McLuhan
What Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis, Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is to communication theory and cultural anthropology. One of the most influential intellectual mavericks of twentieth-century thought, McLuhan began his career working within the relatively obscure confines of the ivory tower where he toiled away polishing essays analyzing literature and creating lectures on how to appreciate its merits and values.
Stylization, not imitation, was the key to McLuhan’s approach. His speciality was media and he simply overturned all assumptions concerning same: “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way,” he explained in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).
Something of a seer-savant, most likely a genius (but most assuredly a giant on our cultural landscape), Canada’s best-known visionary imagined the future and mapped its contours in living colour. Now, his magical and initially bewildering signature, “the medium is the message,” seamlessly supports his reputation as a “crisis” philosopher on the razor’s edge of the information revolution. More than any other single individual, McLuhan equipped
