McLuhan's Follies

...Richard Howard slips it in under the counter, as it were: "Newman's exploitation of what McLuhan calls a mosaic or field approach to the problem of fictional form" (NL, My 4...

...In essence, Galaxy uses the erudition ploy to conceal what one could guardedly call its thesis, namely, that Gutenberg's invention of type was the single most influential event in the history of Western man...

...Briefly stated, an obscure professor of English from the Canadian provinces has succeeded in perpetrating a hoax so gigantic that it shows every sign of becoming an international intellectual scandal...

...By inventing what might be called a method of incisive inarticulateness, he has managed to rope in a disturbing number of writers, critics and institutions-in short, a sizable segment of the culture brokerage game -and has persuaded them to believe that he has opened a new perspective on what he calls "the extensions of man.' Would you believe it, folks...

...His talk at the prestigious YMHA Poetry Center was said to be the hottest ticket in town, and he has been invited to return soon...

...2) McLuhan means what he says...

...It is a claustrophobia, engendered by the radio implosion and compression of space...

...Epigrammatic postulates take the place of exposition, and more often than not, heavy-handed and sweaty they are...

...He is now working on a history of genocide...

...In recent months, he could be found addressing scholarly meetings, honoring the august pages of the American Scholar with the premi??re of his full name, Herbert Marshal] McLuhan, parrying the exasperated but polite inquiries of TV interviewers, and causing a foreign participant in the PEN congress to proclaim after listening to his address that he hasn't been "shook up" so much since reading Spengler 30 years ago...

...It is difficult to quote complete statements from the text of The Gutenberg Galaxy, for it contains scarcely a single paragraph in nearly 300 pages that does not convolute with quotations from other, often dubious, works: Wrapped in quotations, one might quote, as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors...

...When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized...

...Blanket condemnations owe the reader documentary support provided in the most systematic manner possible...

...Arthur Miller is quoted: "Writers are usually the first ones to advocate change but the last ones to accept it, which accounts for their hostility to Marshall McLuhan...

...Thus, even writers who were unable to find McLuhan persuasive felt impelled not to close the door on him entirely and reserved the possibility that "newness" may lie buried under complexities...

...In the 1930s, by contrast, the German obsession was with lebensraum...

...This is not a visual concern, at all...

...All in all, McLuhan is easily the best thing to fall into the lap of the culture brokers since Andy Warhol...

...and "That Cosmopolitan Girl" also has observed on the back page of the New York Times: "A brain is one of the things that makes you interesting...

...The Museum of Modern Art also reported that it made a great many enemies when it could not fill the avalanche of requests for tickets to his lecture...

...Is one to assume on the weighty basis of this precedent that so many of our intellectuals are too lazy or incompetent to see behind wordage or, what is even more disconcerting, that they are mere careerists, engaged in "taste-making," sniffing around like truffle-hounds for the next chic movement...

...His books can be spotted in the hands of subway and bus riders and in bookstore windows so regularly (McLuhan would call this process "the frequency method of visual identification") that their sales must be counted by the ton...

...as for the erudition-the "packaging," he would call it-it is pungently indiscriminate and it swings...

...The construction of random "contrasts" is a characteristic device, and so is the personal use of historical events which are, as in the above citation, charmingly surrealistic...

...In Understanding Media the number of direct quotations is reduced in favor of complex-ergo-profound phrase constructions nimbly substituting for reasoned argument...

...A disinterested investigation into this curious fuss emerges with a conclusion so unequivocal that even the possibility of reasonable alternatives seems entirely remote...

...Oh, I don't mean you go around quoting Marshall McLuhan...

...In saying that a hoax is "perpetrated," the intention or at least the consciousness of the perpetrator is implied, but on this count, if on no other, one is in doubt...

...Both assumptions-and their combination-seem not only possible but probable and "la trahison des clercs," proclaimed by Julien Benda some 30 years ago, is upon us once more...

...Robert Meister, this week's guest Writers & Writing columnist, is the editor of the Journal of Existentialism...

...Until about a year ago it was restricted to the Madison Avenue scene, where McLuhan served as an astronomically priced consultant...

...The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness...

...but since the Wunderkind and the Magic Elixir are staples thereabouts, no one paid much attention...

...His fourth work, The Medium is the Massage, will be published in November, and a collection of pieces about him, Understanding McLuhan, is impending tremulously...

...Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography...

...Phrases such as "what McLuhan calls," "as McLuhan puts it," have become a widespread ploy whereby the writer clobbers the reader into a suspension of disbelief with a wave of hallowed texts, having previously hypnotized himself through laziness or innocence with the flicker of a mysteriously seductive new knowledge...

...Encirclement is a highly visual image that had great novelty for this newly industrialized nation...

...See the same device applied to a smaller setting: "Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light...

...Incisive inarticulateness, then, is not only method but, almost by definition, also content...

...Their neighbors had all developed elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of manpower resources...

...Richard Howard, Arthur Miller, and an army of McLuhan interpreters have taken the "newness" for granted, and then applied it for their own purposes...

...That such a cult is flourishing indeed is overpoweringly obvious...

...All that can be said of his motives up to this writing is that verification of the first alternative would be far more beneficial for all of us...

...McLuhan became an important public figure, the center of a sizable cult, and subject to only uncertain and perplexed criticism...

...We are in McLuhan's debt for preserving his editor's remark...

...Every cult has a common denominator, and in this case one finds it clearly defined in the ingenuously prophetic remark of McLuhan's editor: "Seventy-five per cent of your material is new...

...The way things are with McLuhan- namely, without a semblance of system or context, completely at random-documentation can only be random, though always delightful...

...The following paragraph is typical: "Just prior to 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the menace of 'encirclement...

...Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave...

...Beyond its obvious use in pinpointing the sort of mentality that dominates today's publishing industry, it serves the no doubt unintended function of helping to explain the McLuhan cult with its subordination of logic and substance to apocalyptic novelty and specious complexity...

...One can easily encounter McLuhan's name two, three times a day, without looking for it...

...For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning...

...Complexity has always served well as profundity's stand-in, and in McLuhan's case it has finally gained top billing...

...Two feasible alternatives are open: 1) McLuhan is a humorist and has plotted one of the best practical jokes of all time...

...Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic...

...He has them eating out of his hand, and they flock to his Center for Culture and Technology, a name so artfully or naively dichotomous that it is a dead giveaway...

...Following then are a few selections from the chapter glosses in The Gutenberg Galaxy: "King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translated themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs...

...read as a humorist, McLuhan is perhaps without peer, whereas taken seriously he is catastrophic...

...WRITERS & WRITING The McLuhan Follies By Robert Meister The McLuhan Follies, now playing to full houses in all the "media" and about to open in several new versions, had its first preview when a McGrawHill editor working on Understanding Media "noted in dismay," as recorded by McLuhan, "that '75 per cent of your material is new...

...Still, dismissing McLuhan as a "thinker" and reading him for humor- which is highly recommended-leaves the far more serious matter of his followers...

...Then, largely through the efforts of the Plutarch of the Underground, Tom Wolfe, the input to the public's central nervous system (McLuhan's most favored image) was activated, and before one could say "interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet...

...A successful book cannot venture to be more than 10 per cent new.' " Still and all, the editor went on, "Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour...

...No comment is needed on McLuhan's wafer-thin thesis...