what he termed The Age of Information.
Through his groundbreaking explorations, investigations, and “probes” (he believed a thinking person must poke and prod everything from language to reality to self-identity), McLuhan developed tools to respond to the overwhelming technological challenges that confront the information-glutted “contemporary anybodies” sleepwalking through life’s miraculous vistas (through no fault of their own).
A humanist to the core, McLuhan discerned that the post-industrial world derives its unity from technological imperatives and corporate or political forces rather than from nature, social responsibilities, or human-scale requirements. Investigation of the electr(on)ic world’s media and methods has replaced philosophical inquiry into worlds both natural and mechanical. The media of communication in the age of information have replaced the means of production, the overriding system of the era of industrialization. Now, of course, it’s clear the worlds in the midst of a revolution–a breakup, breakdown, breakthrough – from the age of industry (where the means dominated) to the age of information (where the media dominate).
Taking his cue from author and painter Wyndham Lewis’s observation that the “present cannot be revealed to people until it has become yesterday,” McLuhan points out individuals see only the past as part and parcel of what he termed “the rear-view mirror phenomenon” obscuring the present and obliterating the future.
According to McLuhan, each new medium produces a new cultural environment that becomes invisible while making visible the one of the previous culture. Enter the artist, the only figure capable of apprehending what will happen since artists naturally see what is happening (or, by definition, they are not artists). The artist is a uniquely capable translator of the “invisible” cultural environment of the present.
Doffing his thinking cap to poet Robert Browning’s “The Faultless Painter” as well as novelist James Joyce’s zest for the palimpsest (an aphoristic phrase resonating with echoes of its genesis in a source outside itself), the incorrigible neologizer shamelessly promoted his agenda in one of his funniest–punniest?–messages:
“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a metaphor?”
Believing “we become what we behold,” McLuhan went further: “We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.” In all his work, in fact, it’s not too far-fetched to suggest McLuhan penned a mournful eulogy for the billions of individuals (contemporary anybodies) afflicted with what he called “psychic rigor mortis,” that state where the human being is stripped of personal identity, conscripted into uniform conformity, and thwarted from truly living and experiencing a full and fruitful life by the unrelenting demands media, corporate, and commercial interests make upon any and all who hang around what he termed the global village.
The substance of his work and the style of his writing are considered to be apocalyptic, inscrutable, dogmatic, contradictory, bereft of traditional modes of scholarly or critical methodology, and dismissive of careful and close argumentation in favour of repetition, paradox, and dizzying digression. In response, McLuhan defends his collage-like approach as the only one capable of fully conveying the chaos, complexity, and contradictions of contemporary life. Breakdown inevitably leads to breakthrough, which always yields to greater understanding and the fine art of meaningful communication.
An advocate of simultaneous perception (global thinking) from the moment he first discovered its benefits during his studies of New Criticism at Cambridge, Professor McLuhan subsequently adopted the view that the only way to approach a work of literature was to examine it in terms of the way it works its magic or achieves its effects (rather than focusing exclusively on its major themes, representative motifs, or the biography of its creator).
McLuhan intuitively understood that television signalled a threat to literacy and that computers would rapidly become extensions of the human being’s central nervous system by expanding its range of sense perceptions. In the 1960s, when the relatively new medium of television was radical, instant, and global, McLuhan was frequently mentioned on Rowan and Martin’s hip comedy programme, Laugh-In. At the same time, the metaphysician of media was informing GE, Bell Telephone, and IBM they were not in the business of light bulbs, telephones, and business machines; rather, they were in the business of moving information. The medium is the message. In 1980, the year McLuhan met his Maker, CNN was up and running while personal computers were quickly becoming affordable acquisitions throughout the Western world.
“McLuhan,” literary critic Northrop Frye astutely observed in 1988, “was celebrated for the wrong reasons in the 1960s, and then neglected for the wrong reasons later.” Frye called for a long overdue reassessment of McLuhan’s work and its value. Four years later, a Mondo 2000 scribe marvelled that “reading McLuhan is like reading Shakespeare–you keep stumbling on phrases that you thought were cliches, only this guy made them up!”
The name is McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists it in 346 entries, one of which cites Quentin Fiore, the gifted artist-designer who teamed up with McLuhan to create The Medium Is the Massage, the 1967 bestseller featuring playful and exhilarating spins, swirls, comminglings, and intertwinglings of texts, images, and graphics that, thirty-odd years later, would come to serve as the template for magazines such as Shift, Details, and Wired.
Most importantly, though, McLuhan’s observations have since come into their own as profound commentaries on the ways in which relationships among individuals have been altered in Cyberia, where the body remains parked (or paralyzed) while the mind of the techno-traveller jacks in and roams the gratification grids of the information galaxy.
As with many of McLuhan’s pronouncements (including those that seem to have divined the nature and dynamics of the Internet many years before it even existed), this one seems to have been made by one of those unique individuals capable of peering into the future. A number of his observations baffled and astonished audiences at the time–the outrageousness of some of them tempted his apoplectic critics to describe his theories as “McLuhanacy.” Now, in the first decade of the new millennium, they seem perfectly intelligible.
It’s no surprise the prophet designation was–and continues to be–bandied about by many who search for a word to adequately describe the impact of insights and “outerings” (utterances) that boggle most minds. In his examination of the individual in the context of the global via the national, McLuhan correctly perceived electronic media would annihilate local culture. In the neo-tribalist global village where personality has been erased, sex sells and violence erupts as a quest for identity writ graphic.
As McLuhan astutely observed, new technologies would extend the range of both body and mind in ways that irrevocably altered an individual’s relationships with both the environment and every other resident of the global village, creating a universal nervous system of vast complexity and sophistication shared by any and all in possession of the inclination and the equipment to participate.
Since the modern world seems now to have achieved that “complete break with five-thousand years of mechanical technology” McLuhan identifies as his “main theme,” the “outerings” of the human sensorium (the senses considered collectively) combine and recombine to produce what he called network consciousness and what individuals have come to recognize as the realization of his “percept” that human beings will experience a world where the illusion of depth proliferates and all-inclusive nowness reaches critical mass.
Not surprisingly, then, when one of McLuhan’s friends asked him whether he really believed there was life after death, McLuhan cagily answered the question with one of his own:
“Do you really believe there is any life before death?”
Judith Fitzgerald
Canada
