Putting Us On?

Perhaps one of the best ways to begin an exploration of McLuhan’s praxis is through the lens of the “put-on.” While touring the South Pacific in the late-1970s McLuhan was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission program, Monday Conference. The weight of the interview is taken up with McLuhan discussing dialogue as an alternative to violence, and his charge that the task at hand is to understand media because: “If you understand the nature of these forms you can neutralize some of the adverse effects and foster some beneficial effects.” [1] During the interview, however, McLuhan is asked: “If the world had not discovered your great thinking and writing how would you go about creating a demand for it?” McLuhan replies: “I’d put people on … putting people on means teasing them, challenging them, upsetting them, befuddling them; any comic puts on his audience by hurting them.” McLuhan continues, no longer talking about the “put-on” as a hypothetical possibility, but rather as a description of his praxis:

The technique of putting people on in my case consists simply in pointing to things that they [the audience] have ignored, the things that concern them very nearly but have been pushed aside as insignificant … A put-on is a situation that I study a great deal.[2]

It is probable, if speculative, that McLuhan’s appropriation and transformation of the phrase “put-on” was, to some degree, informed by Jacob Brackman’s use in “The Put-On,” in The New Yorker (24 June 1967).[3] Regardless of the source, McLuhan appears to have deemed the phrase adequate. One of the first recorded usages of the phrase by McLuhan is in “Pound: The Playboy of the Westend World” (1968). There, McLuhan takes up what is essentially a slang phrase, apparently in the common stock in North-Eastern America during the late 1960s, and applies it in his discussion of Ezra Pound’s sense of decorum, authorial praxis, and relationship to his audience. He also uses the phrase in the article to describe how the new tribal politics that came with the radio brought Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt — “tribal chieftains,” who put-on their people as their mask and transformed politics into a masquerade of images.[4]

The term “put-on” appears to have provided McLuhan with a way of talking with a general audience about the latest thinking about form and gesture. For example, in “Roles, Masks, and Performances” McLuhan uses the phrase to discuss the magazine as performance:

While puzzling over my role as commentator on this issue of New Literary History, I have tried to see the magazine itself as performance .… There is a sense in which a magazine is a vortex of energy, a mask which the reader puts on in order to perceive a field of action that would otherwise be outside his ken …. If a reader must put on a magazine as a mask or a pattern of energy in order to organize his perceptions, the contributors must also put on the public created by the magazine, creating a reciprocal and complementary action. It is especially difficult for me as an outside commentator to focus both aspects of this process simultaneously. Perhaps I will be permitted the role of “the stranger” used by Plato to promote the ends of dialogue and avoid the specialist exchanges of an “in-group.”[5]

Nearly a decade after his initial use we find McLuhan still employing the phrase, this time to point to what he considers to be the failure of Jacques Maritain: “At no point does Maritain understand formal causality in art or philosophy. That is to say, he is totally unaware that formal causality consists in ‘putting on’ the public proper to the activity involved.” [6]

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[1] McLuhan, “Television is Cool and Radio is Hot,” television, Monday Conference, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 27 June 1977.

[2] McLuhan, “Television is Cool and Radio is Hot.”

[3] Jacob Brackman, “The Put-On,” The New Yorker, 24 June 1967. McLuhan’s literary agent, Matie Molinaro, appears to have kept a close eye on the press clippings. In the article Brackman makes two references to McLuhan.

[4] McLuhan, “Pound: Playboy of the Westend World,” MS., 3. Emphasis mine.

[5] McLuhan, “Roles, Masks and Performances,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 12, 3–4. Originally published in 1971. McLuhan concludes, stating: “I see that assuming the role of a "stranger" provoking a dialogue has been an incitement to global thinking. Although I began with one role, I have played many parts in this "Commen­tary." The "stranger" has become the guide; the passenger, the driver. Since this multi-role-playing is inevitable in an electronic world, one hopes that the put-on has also been a turn-on,” (Ibid., 26). Here, McLuhan appears to be invoking the image of Plato’s “Athenian stranger” (often said to resemble Socrates) who appears in Plato’s Laws.

[6] McLuhan to Fredrick Wilhelmsen, 17 June 1975.