Marshall McLuhan/Letters of Marshall McLuhan/Laws of Media:
Connolly, Paul
McLUHAN & HIS MESSAGE MARSHALL McLUHAN The Medium and the Messenger Philip Marchand Ticknor & Fields, $19.95, 320 pp. LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan,...
...a man of percepts, not viewpoints...
...some early letters to Wyndham Lewis, Walter Ong, Ezra Pound...
...Co-editor William Toye's footnotes and introductions to McLuhan's life add excellent indirect lighting...
...It is not a nice picture...
...He starts projects he quickly abandons...
...is ultimately the wrong response to Marshall McLuhan...
...4) "the content of any medium is an older medium...
...Paul Connelly Philip Marchand knows Marshall McLuhan well...
...Marshall McLuhan wanted to break the bondage not only of print but also of dialectical thinking...
...But there is little before The Mechanical Bride (1951) to assure that McLuhan would become more than another academic prima donna...
...First, principles are organized into "A New Science...
...Anyone who reads McLuhan must decide: Genius or quack...
...McLuhan wrote to scholars such as Eric Havelock, Margaret Mead, Hugh Kenner, and Barbara Ward, but also to Saul Steinberg, Hubert Humphrey, Pierre Trudeau, Ann Landers, Jack Paar, John Cage, Jimmy Carter, Rollo May, Duke Ellington, Clare Boothe Luce, Woody Allen, and King Carl Gustav of Sweden...
...the western prairies "provided him with a natural 'counterenvironment' to the great centers of civilization...
...Several letters McLuhan wrote in 1974 allude to his work in progress, now published as The Laws of Media...
...The McLuhans' "new science" is actually a new rhetoric that substitutes situatedness for viewpoint...
...There are some puffs among them, but more often the letters are heavy cream, best served with other reading...
...a satirist, not a moralist...
...His letters, however, are clear, alive with the free play of his mind...
...In fact, one-third of this book is tetrads: verbal icons, each composed of four words or phrases expressive of the four laws...
...A logical mind may despair of this book's analogical reasoning, but it is full of open space that invites thought...
...Nor did I find Marchand's analysis of these later years convincing...
...So did the Catholic church, to which McLuhan converted in 1937, influenced by G. K. Chesterton...
...What if he's right...
...his ideas...
...2) "because there is equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is heightened or intensified, another is diminished or numbed...
...massages money from the media he mastered...
...One thinks and writes in mosaics, galaxies, ideograms that involve readers in "a perpetual act of participation and completion...
...In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon...
...McLuhan considered himself an empirical scientist, not a dialectician...
...So did Cambridge, where McLuhan met the New Critics and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nash...
...In the first thirty-five years the student writes home, mainly to his mother, to test out ideas, relate news, seek money...
...asked Tom Wolfe in an early, admiring essay...
...LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye Oxford University Press, $30, 562 pp...
...This book started, explains Eric McLuhan-a professor of communications who completed the work begun with his father-as a revision of Understanding Media that would provide a more systematic, "scientific" understanding of both media and McLuhan...
...a full mosaic is unveiled...
...While The Medium Is the Message sold a million copies, most of McLuhan's other books baffle readers...
...3) "every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics...
...There are some courtship letters...
...mind...
...I don't believe in shoulding on people...
...His central insight was that the printing press created a "literal," linear, uniform mind and an individualistic and nationalistic society...
...But Marchand doesn't entirely believe in McLuhan and, doubting his genius, he misses it...
...McLuhan was born in Edmonton, raised in Winnipeg, educated in Manitoba...
...In 1967 a large, benign tumor was removed from McLuhan's head, "leaving his senses...hypersensitive...
...an arch-Catholic who "believed that hell existed, and...
...an invisible, workaholic father...
...He also describes McLuhan as a difficult husband...
...Louis University, and moved to St...
...In the final thirty years, however, McLuhan's genius erupts...
...was rather puzzled that the church did not play this supernatural trump card...more often...
...Marchand's reading of McLuhan's first forty years (1911-51) is sympathetic...
...McLuhan's widow selected 1,500 letters (from 800,000 pieces of paper) for her volume, making choices not only for biographical reasons but, as importantly, "for...
...His genius was for asking questions, not finding sufficient answers...
...fabricates his own genius...
...Michael's College at the University of Toronto in 1946, remaining (except for a year at Fordham) until his death in 1980...
...make some little trial...of the way which I describe;...correct by seasonable patience...deep-rooted habits of...
...LAWS OF MEDIA The New Science Marshall and Eric McLuhan University of Toronto Press, $27.50, 252 pp...
...His peculiar approach to all things modern, he rightly observed, was "to enter via the ground [of media] rather than the figure [of content...
...Second, the four "dazzlingly simple" laws are presented as "tetrads," as a heuristic for rethinking any human object or idea: (1) "every technology extends or amplifies some organ or faculty of the user...
...These letters are always cerebral, rarely intimate...
...When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on the single tribal drum," he explained to sociologist David Riesman, "the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible...
...mind...
...And the caveat it quotes from Bacon is worth heeding: "examine the thing thoroughly...
...What follows, is fundamental McLuhan-with radical novelties...
...According to Marchand, from this point on McLuhan is increasingly eccentric, exploitative, incoherent, conservative...
...I am an intellectual thug," he writes Pound in 1951, "who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it...
...flashes of wit...
...Marchand describes McLuhan's mother as "a difficult parent, spreading unhappi-ness about her like an aerosol," and suggests that because of her McLuhan held "outdated" views of women all his life...
...McLuhan taught at Wisconsin, then St...
...What If He Is Right...
...McLuhan himself read incessantly (as many as thirty-five books per week), and his readers soon experience the "learning by immersion" he loved...
...McLuhan lived on the edge of High Tech, and each new reader decides whether he falls...
...Electronic media, by extending the senses, create a "global village...
...McLuhan himself said: "Clear prose indicates an absence of thought...
...he was his student in the sixties, the decade in which McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), and he has examined thousands of items in the National Archives of Canada...
...rooted habits of...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
