In the Garden with the Guru

McLuhan opened with a riff about movies. “Film is high-definition pictures. You don’t have to fill in the blanks, so you’re detached and can think critically. Radio, telephone—they give you less to go on, and you have to fill out the message with your own story. But they’re still relatively hot. At the far end of the gamut is TV. It’s cool, low definition; you get completely absorbed in processing the bombardment of dots, hypnotized. It’s also non-sequential, like newspapers. Movies flow narratively, sequentially, the way we see. TV throws everything at us holus-bolus like sound. We can see only one thing at a time, but we can hear many things at once, even around corners. That’s why film is an eye medium and TV an ear medium.”

Looking around I noticed eyes widening and perplexity come over some of the faces. What surprised me was that many of the faces glowed with excitement, and I too felt I was hearing something fresh and challenging. Before anyone could butt in too much, McLuhan went on to talk about tools. Fragments of ideas drifted over us like flakes of an early snowfall.

The phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man. The printing press hit him like a hydrogen bomb. Now we’ve been blitzkreiged by TV.

The horseless buggy was the only way people could describe the automobile. Families whose wealth was based on carriages and buggy whips soon went bankrupt. Horsepower moved from animals into cars.

The wheel extends the foot in an automobile. In this way the wheel amplifies the power and speed of the foot, but at the same time it amputates. In the act of pressing the gas peddle, the foot becomes so specialized it no longer performs its original function, which is to walk.

If the wheel is an extension of the foot, then money is an extension of muscle, radio an amplification of the human voice, and the hydrogen bomb an outgrowth of teeth and fingernails.

Why should the sending or receiving of a telegram seem more dramatic than even the ringing of a telephone?

What do you think Hitler meant when he said: “I go my way with the assurance of a sleepwalker?”

I went next door a week later to ask one of the McLuhan daughters to babysit. A voice called me in. There lay McLuhan, the fireplace alight despite the heat of the afternoon, flat on his back with a magazine suspended parallel to his stretched-out body. He knew who I was but he was never lavishly chummy with his students. Before I could speak he pointed a finger at me and said: “I’ll tell you why Americans are suddenly buying small cars. The time of the big car as arrow aimed at a target is over. Now the car is a womb, a little cozy place away from the hurly-burly.” I stood quietly, taking my medicine as McLuhan dosed it out, then I backed out the door as if the sole purpose of my visit had been to hear this important pronouncement.

[ ... ]

Like all original thinkers from Blake to Einstein, McLuhan was much misunderstood. He never promoted TV over books as popular accounts gave out. He never expressed a preference for tribal culture over individualism. He never said the patterns of perception imposed by the ear are superior to those of the eye. One small aphorism sticks with me: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” However precious! Those are the operative words, about as far as McLuhan went in taking sides. But they also bring his innermost sympathies to the fore.

Until The Mechanical Bride in 1951 McLuhan despaired of the modern world in the manner of his youthful hero, G.K. Chesterton. After the book’s disappointing reception he changed his tune. He would no longer judge society by mocking it; he would simply describe it. By 1968 when the boy from Edmonton had become the most popular intellectual in the English-speaking world, far from vilifying modernity, he had become modernity, often pronouncing that the present age was the most challenging and exciting time since the beginning of civilization. To some that made him sound like an enemy of books, a cheerleader for TV, hoopla and pop culture.

But whatever his disparagers said of him during his rise to fame, McLuhan was no apologist for the modern age. Not only was he too much the detached observer as a matter of conscious policy—he was too playful. His love of probes, percepts, put-ons, puns and sometimes plain corny jokes was inextinguishable:

Lest old Aquinas be forgot.
A Jung man is easily Freudened.
A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what’s a metaphor?
Though he might have been more humble, there’s no police like Holmes.

That doesn’t mean these utterings (“outerings’) are all silly. Whether you believe the medium is the message or the medium is the massage, McLuhan never lost his deep revulsion for the banality of his age. For him the mass-age was ultimately a mess-age.

As the 1970s waned, so did McLuhan’s reputation, a phenomenon not unknown among the famous. But in the 1990s his star began to rise again as things like tribal wars, cyberspace and globalization emerged in fulfillment of his predictions. He declined the title futurologist. What he wanted was to stop looking at history through a rearview mirror and to probe the meaning of the present. Whether he liked it or not, however, he was a futurologist, if only because he never stopped repeating that with information travelling at the speed of light the present is the future. ... "

From: 'In the Garden with the Guru-Adventures with Marshall McLuhan'