Marshall McLuhan
McConnell, Frank
tempted to betray her husband and her country. Despite the scenes of brittle diplomacy and the menace of future war, The Magician's Wife is not the most suspenseful of Moore's novels; the...
...Celia Wren is Commonweal's theater critic...
...the book is being replaced by the Commonweal 11 5 February 27, 1998 virtual reality of the Tube, but the Tube conveys, mostly, crap...
...McLuhan's Catholicism was strongly pentecostal, in the sense that he sought, and found, in the church the Real Presence in the sense of the community of believers, rather than in the--to him, Protestant--idea of an individual, intensely private relationship with God...
...but electronic man is "discarnate man," so what can the Incarnation possibly mean to him...
...TOO HIP FOR ITS OWN GOOD Eugene McCarraher ere's to the crazies," Oscarwinning actor Richard Dreyfuss shills in the latest Apple commercial...
...and often their criticisms were right...
...the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, his home school, was founded mainly as an adjunct to his personal and apparently inexhaustibIe, research...
...So McLuhan became a visionary Catholic pentecostal with a close, precise habit of attention to his subject, a prophet with scruples, and scrupulous prophets are rare, maddening--and of immense value...
...Some of the best of Gordon's book explains how his man's obsession with media was tied to his deep, ferocious Catholicism (McLuhan converted in 1937...
...But if that were the whole story, McLuhan would be simply an interesting crank with a few good ideas...
...And that's not what McLuhan was about...
...My main quarrel with Terrcnce Gordon's very fine book is that he elides the contradictions implicit in McLuhan's work...
...the medium is the message...
...Taking us into boutiques, boardrooms, and executive suites, Frank chronicles two contemporaneous transformations: the "Creative Revolution" in advertising and the "Peacock Revolution" in the menswear industry...
...He was a kind of genius, yes...
...Yet the robber barons also moved millions to join unions, form farmers' alliances, and vote for radical parties...
...McLuhan could probably not have been, and surely was not, a systematic thinker...
...Well: sometimes they did...
...He wrote, co-wrote, or edited over twenty books, plus hundreds of essays and speeches...
...It is largely a dreary exercise in discovering the ways media "disenfranchize" or--these guys' favorite word--"disempower" marginalized groups...
...Commonweal 2 6 Februamy 27, 1998...
...and otherwise resist the nailing of America to a cross of gold...
...Not that he invented the field: Plato, I think, did that in his distinction between speech and writing in the Phaedrus...
...For the contemporary reader, her apprehension gives the novel an ironic twist...
...his edginess is almost the content of his work (the medium being, after all, the message...
...And the central tenet of New Criticism is that the critic's job is not to indulge in moral or philosophical generalities about the work examined (novel, poem, or medium), but to attempt to analyze it as it really is ("close reading," now largely scorned in lit departments, is the new critic's one thing needful...
...Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they the status quo...
...and from the midsixties to early seventies he was, if not as inescapable as the Beaties, considerably more so than the Kinks (who were as good as the Beatles...
...A self-assured McLuhan is not a McLuhan I can use...
...And remember that "HCE," the name of the Wake's hero, means, among other things, "Here Comes Everybody...
...How did corporate Bourbons become our model Jacobins...
...Film, radio, and especially TV (first used in 1936, by the way, as Joyce was writing the Wake) were as world-making as the Gutenberg revolution just because they heralded the abolition of ~he privacy of the book and the reemergence of a communal, visual and aural and tactile space: a "global village," to invoke what is probably McLuhan's most famous phrase...
...And thank God...
...Gordon is an unabashed admirer of his subject, so naturally wants McLuhan to appear in complete control of his insights...
...So the Summa could be read as a "pre-Gutenberg" celebration of the faith of an immense and variegated community, and the Wake as a "post-Gutenberg" expectation of the return of that community at the end of Lhe era of printoriented, "protestant" individualism...
...On a fellowship to Cambridge, his Catholic enthusiasms expanded to, among others, Aquinas (he always described himself as a Thomist), Gilson, Eliot, and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake...
...It was the wimpy professor's dream (and McLuhan, whose work I venerate enormously, was, also, a wimpy professor) to have his erudite and/or vatic mutterings published and to find them celebrated in the Big World...
...Richards, among the founders of what would be called the New Criticism...
...Born in Edmonton, Alberta, to a devoutly Methodist woman, by his college years McLuhan was a voracious and intense reader--his first great passion being, significantly, Chesterton...
...Today's barons have recast themselves as democrats, philanthropists, revolutionaries...
...Electronic media may create for us a global village...
...but what is the message...
...The key move in Frank's study--one that also turns out to be its key weakness--is to look at business rather than the "counterculture...
...But it ain't so...
...Advertising then was, Frank tells us, a downright dreary business, staffed with ulcerated, creatively inhibited timeservers, and constricted by a corporate culture that dictated deference to clients and a rigid imaginative conservatism...
...McLuhan's two most influential teachers at Cambridge were F.R...
...Leavis and I.A...
...A montage of rebels, the ad pays homage to those brazen mavericks who have "challenged the status quo" and extended the bounds of possibility...
...And that--never mind that Leavis and Richards were materialists-is a distinctly privatized, "protestant" approach to reading...
...Moore does a particularly admirable job tracing the fluctuating warmth and chill of her prolonged, subtle flirtation with Deniau...
...the measured development of scenes, with their pellucid descriptions and delicate exploration of political dynamics, makes the pace seem cautious...
...Furthermore, he came to believe, with Innis, Max Weber, and R.H...
...Tawney, that the invention of print (1450), with its attendant results of privativization of reading, standardization, and "flattening" of cultural differences, was a prime occasion, if not cause, of both the Reformation and of the rise of capitalism...
...Where they envision expansive glory for the Second Empire, she foresees an Algeria tormented by oppression, ideological conflict, and violence...
...create a progressive tradition and preach a social gospel...
...His lyrical ambivalence about the new media is, I think, his great value...
...He's the CEO of the Virgin Group of companies...
...And in our century there were earlier and brilliant analyses, including Eric Barnouw's studies of broadcasting and Harold Innis's epochal work on the influence of print on the shaping of modern consciousness (work absolutely essential to McLuhan's own best writing, and oddly--characteristically-soft-pedaled in Gordon's book...
...Rejecting a straightforward "cooptation thesis"--the increasingly conventional wisdom that business "stole" an authentically oppositional movement against consumer capitalism--Frank argues that business itself anticipated and embraced the vaunted "counterculture" with the open arms of "hip" and "cool...
...But like Henri Lambert, Moore is a magician able to create an extraordinary vision with apparent effortlessness...
...You don't set off as many conceptual firecrackers as McLuhan did without having a lot of misfires...
...Emmeline's doubts, her moments of euphoria, her tortured meditations over scraps of conversation, her shrewd assessments of personality, her restrained anger and her more frequent resignation are all as convincing as any of the book's historical details...
...Most impressively, like The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore's new novel is a masterly portrait of a woman in uncertainty...
...and Methodist, private, close reader, is wonderfully present in these books...
...In the nineties--the 1890s, that is--the names of Morgan, Carnegie, or Rockefeller were as revered among the cigar-smoking classes as those of Gates, Geffen, or Murdoch are among their health-conscious descendants...
...Of all his books, the two that somehow are Marshall McLuhan appeared two years apart: The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and Understanding Media in 1964...
...And, when Gordon discusses the frequent critics of McLuhan's work, he--more hagiographer than biographer now-always assumes that they just "didn't understand" what the man was saying...
...And without his flamboyance, it's doubtful that "Media Studies" would have the cachet it currently enjoys in the universities...
...With her misgivings about French interference in Algeria and her respect for Arab civilization, Emmeline seems more astute than the conspiring diplomats who surround her...
...The ad suggests just how untrammeled the cultural authority of corporate business is at the end of the twentieth century...
...Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University qf California, Santa Barbara...
...strike the railroads and the coal mines...
...As Gordon, again, makes clear, there was more...
...McLuhan's mother had been a successful performance artist, and it rubbed off on her boy...
...Even though she only asserts herself at one, crucial point in the story, Emmeline never seems as passive as her actions might imply...
...The irony is that "Media Studies," as practiced now, has little to do with, and cares little about, McLuhan's crucial insights...
...Einstein, King, Gandhi, Branson, Isadora Duncan, Ted Turner--rewind that, please...
...Thomas Frank tries to explain in his brilliant, polemically charged, though ultimately unsatisfying account of business culture in the 1960s...
...Now, the Summa Theologiae and the Wake may seem an odd pairing--and McLuhan was to become famous for odd, outrageous pairings of ideas--but Gordon helps us see how it makes perfect sense in terms of the man's religious convicCommonweal 2 4 February27, 1998 tion and of the core brilliance of his work on media...
...And the creative tension between his "catholic" and "protestant" imaginations, the visionary of renewed communitas (or commonweal...
...But McLuhan made it all sexy, imbued it all with an aura of freedom and play...
...A contributing reporter to the Nation, In These Times, and other periodicals, Frank is also the editor of the Baffler, a Chicago-based journal that features some of the most biting and well-written cultural criticism of the present day...
...He looked unflinchingly at new modes of communication that increasingly define our sense of self, and tried to read them as what they are, and what they imply for our common, and spiritual, life...
...His books are hardly books at all, but collections of aphorisms, insights--'probes," he liked to call them...
...Ted Turner, mogul of CNN...
...but also a tireless self-promoter and a flamboyant showman (which does not mean "charlatan...
...I think that as a daily communicant, he would have loved the innovation of having the whole congregation stand during the Consecration: everyone, not just the priest, performs the act...
...The story begins in the gray-flanneled 1950s...
...Branson...
...MEDIUM WITH A MESSAGE Frank McConnell f "Media Studies" has a father or a godfather, it's surely H. Marshall McLuhan (1911-80...
...In the story of the Lamberts' brief, near-tragic adventure, he has concocted a bewitching portrait of an era, and a tantalizing tour through exotic locales...
...They "empower" us, they "provide" us with jobs, they even "'rebel" for us, encouraging our every "creative," "rule-breaking" act of material consumption as an assault on the Bastille of "conformity...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 4
