The New Republic is today running my review of Douglas Coupland’s biography Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! Here’s the start:
One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a Canadian television show in 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the 60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”
Watching McLuhan, you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As Douglas Coupland argues in his pithy new biography, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of an apple from the base of his brain. A later procedure revealed that McLuhan had an extra artery pumping blood into his cranium.
Bonus: the YouTube clip:
You nailed it perfectly with this phrase, NIck:
“His books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat.”
BTW, when I anointed McLuhan as Wired’s Patron Saint, it was a sly joke about his Catholic-centric viewpoint, a joke few people got. Maybe Doug’s book will give Wired’s reference more points.
I have problems with the reviewed book and the review. Here:
From the review,
With only the video evidence I guess we have to agree to disagree but I would not describe Mailer’s baring at any point in this long talk as an “uncomprohending stare”.
The word that comes to my mind is incredulous. Mailer has sussed out McLuhan perfectly well, tries several tactics to wake up McLuhan and drag him out of his non-responsive pomposity into an interesting chat, and by the end of the three videos has clearly won over the interviewer. By the end Mailer is still addressing McLuhan in the second person, but in a seriously third person tone (which is the same way McLuhan speaks throughout towards Mailer). Mailer is not uncomprehending, he’s just boggled at how far McLuhan can get with some serious BS. (A key difference in style between the two, that helps make the interview a bit grotesquely fascinating, is McLuhan’s unrelenting and condescending certainty about everything — against Mailer’s more humble, first person, earnest but always tentative style).
From the review and apparently also the book is this temptation to medicalize McLuhan, or perhaps attribute much of his work to Catholocism. Huh? That’s not a helpful stance to take for analysis. Interesting trivia, sure, but…
Regardless of the specific organic origins of McLuhan’s proclivities, nevertheless his discourse stood on its own within his contemporary society. That resonance was not in any useful way “caused by” or “explained by” brain tumors, extra arteries, strange autism hypotheses, or thinly veiled shock and ridicule that an adult would convert to Catholicism. His resonance in society — his success — is a reflection of his context, not any recently understood disease he might have had.
We could just well “explain” McLuhan by looking around to figure out who’s body language he inherited / emulated; what his economic position was; yadda yadda. Perhaps he sold a lot of books by being a natty dresser.
It seems to me that from where we stand today in history we are enough removed that we can observe:
He had some intuitive insights into the huge profundity of technological developments. The propagation of information in various human-friendly forms surged in his lifetime. He correctly recognized that (as did many, many other thinkers … many of whom were more, shall we say, accuracy and detail oriented). He milked the f- out of that by using it as his “goto” place for a particular charismatic style and his sensitivity to BS in certain cultural styles. No serious contemporary or modern critic could look at his performance in, for example, that interview and try to hold him up as some kind of intellectual heavyweight other than via a lot of apology. And so there is the fascinating historical question of what function he did serve that propelled him to such fame and apparent importance.
He himself, I would guess, would respond to that question by casting his eyes dismissively downward, feigning a knowing “chuckle to self”, summoning his calmest tones, and stating some non-sequitor with an extra dose of pseudo-mystery.
Tom,
Coupland’s book – the one I was reviewing – is a brief biography of the man. It’s not, and makes no pretense to be, a thorough analysis of the man’s work.
As for your own analysis of McLuhan, I’d say it’s one-third right, one-third wrong, and I’m not sure about the other one-third and probably never will be (which, by the way, is one of the reasons I find McLuhan invigorating).
Nick
Does Coupland’s book go into all the marketing behind McLuhan? I found that fascinating when I learned about it. Especially how he started out as roughly a technology-is-dehumanizing bemoaner of the fallen state of the modern world, before becoming a Guru.
I think Tom Lord’s point is basically that it’s a mistake to ask “Why is this guru babbling” (brain tumor? autism? genius? etc.). It’s more productive to ask “Why is this babbling elevated to guru status?” (marketing? right-place-right-time? if so, who/how?)
Seth,
You have your hammer, and so you’re very quick to see McLuhan as a nail. The marketing of McLuhan (such as it was) came after the publication of his three core books – Mechanical Bride, Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media – and if your essential interest was marketing yourself, those are not at all the types of books you would write. They’re difficult, erudite, gnomic, and serious. Was McLuhan a bullshit artist? Of course he was. But he was not the type of bullshitter who is looking to pull one over on others. He was the type of bullshitter who sees in the playfulness of word-play and thought-play a means of approaching the truth.
Nick
Nick, I prefer to think of it as when I see a massive structure, I ask who was the architect, and how was it built, rather than simply ooh-ing and aah-ing over how pretty it is.
The problem is how one distinguishes, akin to “Emperor’s New Clothes”, bullshit from that supposed “word-play and thought-play a means of approaching the truth.” – as opposed to telling people what they want to hear because it taps into widespread anxieties. Being “difficult, erudite, gnomic, and serious.” is not in conflict there.
By the way, you didn’t answer my question, as to whether the biography does discuss all the marketing behind McLuhan. He didn’t just spring onto the scene with his mighty insights. As I recall, he was flacked by a high-powered marketing firm.
Odd to me is that I’ve become a bit more sensitive to visual signals of possible autistic tendencies — and without having read your piece, I started watching the video. What struck me first, were the visual cues of possible autistic tendencies that I noticed…coming from Mailer!
Indeed, as I continue to watch the remainder of the episode and watch at how well McLuhan can compose and contain himself with all of Mailer’s jerking verbal and physical antics spinning around him, it it quite clear that it is Mailer who has far more Autistic tendencies than McLuhan.
The difficulty I believe is in the ability to relate and understand. Not everyone can ‘tune into’ all of the nuances of what McLuhan says. When you listen to him, and understand the nuances, his thoughts are very fluid, connected and well crafted.
Does not the fact that he had more than a usual amount of blood steadily flowing through his brain, thereby upping the perceptual, processing and storage capacities, explain so much? Does the fact that media recognized McLuhan as a commodity worth banking on, in any way lessen his value to society? Being engineered to both perceive and emote in greater than above normal complexity, isn’t it to be expected that his colleagues; who all would have thought of themselves as at least bordering on genius, would have been sufficiently confounded by him to the point of defaming him?
But, who is the Marshall McLuhan of today?