ORDER/SUBSCRIBE          SPONSORS          CONTACT          WHAT'S NEW          INDEX/SEARCH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviewer biography

Current Reviews

Review Articles

Book Reviews Archive

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

by Marshall McLuhan
Edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, with a Foreword by Tom Wolfe
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
344 pp. Trade, $27.95
ISBN: 0-262-13442-X.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

"He had the fastest brain of anyone I've ever met. I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage."——Norman Mailer on Marshall McLuhan

Like Mailer, today's reviewer finds a fast-moving and articulate public intellectual when revisiting Marshall McLuhan. He might be said to have begun popular cultural studies at the start of the 1950s with The Mechanical Bride, his witty analysis of magazine and newspaper advertising in form and content. Fifteen years later, this reviewer recalls his mother's friends, university professors' wives, poring over McLuhan's bestselling paperback The Medium is the Massage, which was cinematically designed by Quentin Fiore in rich juxtapositions of black and white imagery and text. The Gutenberg Galax: The Making of Typographical Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man systematized McLuhan's theories on communications from the book to the TV. The Toronto English professor was quite perceptive in analyzing television, for as a literary critic, he was able to see beyond the literary content of its mundane genres and interrogate the subtle attractions and effects of medium itself. He coined the utopian phrase, 'the global village," to mean the newly internationalized mediasphere that resulted from 1960s communications satellites like Telstar. Long a fave of Californian computer conceptualizers like Brenda Laurel and Howard Rheingold, McLuhan's pronouncements were revisited by Wired magazine in the 1990s as applicable to the Internet age.

Understanding Me collects vagrant transcripts of McLuhan's personal and electronic media appearances from 1959 to 1979. There is some repetition of themes and insights that gripped the professor at the time of these speaking engagements or interviews, and he uses these epiphanies as little hammers, percussively introduced into his discourse. He mentions how a wheel and axle need some play to function. He cites how Americans, unlike Europeans, go outside the home in order to be alone, accounting for the popularity of personal cars. He riffs on these aphorisms, as B.B. King might a familiar bluesy musical passage, in different lectures for different audiences.

McLuhan was often called confusing, though he reads like the cool sparkling water of a Canadian river after certain French obfuscators of the subsequent generation. He likened his shifting approach to the multiple viewpoints of Cubism and contrasted the brain's logical left-hemisphere thinking of his academic peers with the all-at-oneness of acoustic space, best experienced by the corresponding lobe on the right. It's fun to read his conference talks and panel presentations to academic audiences, including a respectful dialogue with traditional literary critic, Frank Kermode. McLuhan turned his own aphorism, "the medium is the message," into "the medium is the massage" and tested it out on an art gallery audience before developing it into his famous little book. Yet in Understanding Me, editors Stephanie McLuhan (his daughter) and David Staines (university colleague) do McLuhan a disservice only when they promise too much. To claim a 1966 talk on Canadian television is "Predicting Communication via the Internet" and title it thus, is overreaching. McLuhan describes customized or one-off book publishing, as did younger contemporary, Abbie Hoffman, with more subversive intent. McLuhan drops the offhand line, "If the audience can become involved in the actual making of the ad, then it's happy"——note present tense——but he might just as easily be talking about today's telephonic voting for one's favorite "American Idol" singer.

Understanding Me is a pleasant, perhaps final, addition to the McLuhan shelf. Like the 1960s work of his interviewer Tom Wolfe, who wrote this book's biographical introduction, McLuhan reminds us of a day when the popular press and mass media was willing to engage ideas in a wide-ranging, thoughtful, provocative yet still often entertaining manner. If today's similar thinkers, talkers and writers are out there, they're probably publishing on the Internet. They're surely not found in the banal infotainment channels that paper over our time's crimes, and that massage us into acquiescence in our corporate masters' unitary voice.

top

 

 







Updated 1st August 2004


Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org

Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info


copyright © 2004 ISAST