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 tensebut 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.