The following is a relatively good essay I have “borrowed” and recycled from Peter Montgomery (pacificcoast.net/~montgomery/mcluhan). Among other things, Peter’s treatment of McLuhan’s “debts” to Lewis and Joyce makes a contribution to the question -- to laugh or not to laugh. "Fragments Shored Against McLuhan's Ruin." By Peter Montgomery.
As time passes and Marshall's physical presence recedes from us the more, it becomes imperative that his academic and spiritual presence be more strongly affirmed. The importance of this awareness was underlined to the writer some few years ago when it became clear that one could no longer take it for granted that McLuhan was a household, or College-hold, or University-hold name. As a small gesture of defiance against time, it seemed appropriate to resurrect a haphazard collection of old audio tapes and assemble from them a collage of significant McLuhanalia. The immediate purpose was to build a concrete and sensory bridge for students to some awareness of this person of intensely kinetic mind. The collection of tapes was hardly a collection -merely random gatherings of bits of broadcasts and other recordings that had informally gravitated together over the years for no apparent purpose. They were not properly documented, and while their sources can be roughly identified, the fine details of documentation that research desires can only infrequently be supplied. The validity of the collage which this writer assembled from them is in its effect, rather than in its intellectual content, however, and that perhaps justifies its informality. The following is an attempt to translate the spirit of that collage into the print medium.
It became apparent from different attempts to assemble the material that the pieces had a life of their own and dictated an order based on a certain simple, prevailing logic in Marshall's thought. That thought was roughly as follows: the new electronic media create a programmed and programming surround that has and is drastically reshaping our sensibilities. We have moved from the logically ordered domain of a print-dominated culture to a randomly ordered domain of multi-sensory awareness. A dominant force in the new domain is advertising. The techniques of advertising surrender to literary/artistic analysis because some of the chief artists of our time, notably Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and P. Wyndham Lewis were among the first to probe and define the dimensions of this domain. These artists teach us to distinguish figure from ground and so allow a consciousness of the surround (ground) which shapes us. This new consciousness is a path to freedom from control by the new surround. The conclusion which this simple overview of Marshall's thought allows, is that he was in a unique position as an English teacher and personal friend of some of the above writers, to understand the new electronic world that was and is undergoing its genesis in our very presence. This genesis will be referred to as The Electronascence. McLuhan very clearly and unequivocally identifies the source of his inspiration as being the painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis. He does so in a plastic recording published by Arts Canada in November of 1967. He indicates that Lewis taught him to see the environment as "a programmed teaching machine" much the way the symbolists had done for themselves. Taking his cue from this insight of Lewis, McLuhan can be seen in his pre-Gutenberg Galaxy phase as examining the effects of industrial folklore-advertising on language, and advocating "intense training in language" and the arts ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). At this stage, McLuhan seems every bit the literary man of insights advocating strong scepticism about popular culture and its effects.
A distinct but very fine shift of position would seem to apply to his attitude circa 1962 and following, with the insights which are manifested in Gutenberg Galaxy. The character of this new attitude is one of non-judgmental detachment, almost an acquiescence in or acceptance of the inevitability of the changes. This is notably a public posture and has its contradictions in less guarded moments. Its main thrust remains, nonetheless, a desire to make manifest the dynamics of the Electranascence. The technique is that of the probe -- the uttering or outering of tentative half-thoughts as radar pulses that elicit multiform responses, depending on the mind and background of the responder.
Time and again the object of his probing is advertising. He detects in Advertising a form of warfare, organized on a vast scale and aimed at conquering and subjugating the human heart and the human mind ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). Time and again his probe reveals the artist in the advertiser-the creator of tremendous effects. The negative response of academia to this approach has been well documented. What has received less attention is the positive response of some segments of the business community. Tony Schwartz, advertiser par excellence, supplied, in his audio/visual presentation, The Sound of Sense, an excerpt of an address that Marshall gave to such an audience. The response to this address would seen to be one of mystified intrigue-a willingness to follow blindly, McLuhan's random logic of probing that exposes the simplistic values of that very audience and yet entices them to laugh at themselves and love the laughing. In the address, McLuhan cites the ability of the advertiser to present the effect of a thing without one having to have that thing. Advertising makes an object effectively present, even though the object is not there at all. This insight explains, says Marshall, why people don't really read through an ad until after they own the object it advertises. The reason they give this post factum attention is that that is how they get their fulfilment. The real experience is in the ad, not in the object. The artistically manipulated sensory experience is the true effect.
The key then, to Marshall's thinking as it presents itself in these auditory fragments, lies in the word EFFECT. Marshall indicates that the advertiser is like the artist in wanting-to get his effect across ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). Neither person is concerned with what their audience thinks, with theories or with changes of mind. Both are very interested in shaping sensibility, in molding the individual's manner of experiencing the world.
If the advertiser is the artist of the Electranascence and he has learned his techniques from the more "traditional" artists, then it becomes imperative to see what Marshall found to be important in the work of those traditional artists. In the world of Percy Wyndham Lewis, McLuhan found the importance of the eye in making the artist a cold, detached, objective observer. The visual field is a continuous one that has all spaces filled and leaves nothing for the observer to infer. It has an alienating effect. The importance of this detachment cannot be emphasized enough. For Marshall, a person whose bias is that of the visual culture of the Renaissance, is in a unique position as a detached observer to see, without being involved, the goings on of the new Electranascence venture. The Renaissance painter is very much in the position of the modern cameraman. The viewer of both picture and photograph sees not the maker of the scene nor his instruments, only what the maker makes -the visual effect. The modern advertiser, it may be inferred, has learned from the Renaissance artist to stay out of the visual field. Let the viewer confront the scene directly. The object to be advertised must be experienced as a natural part of the scene.
From James Joyce and Joyce's love of Thomas Aquinas, Marshall gets an insight into the importance of touch. Touch provides an interest- ing counterbalance to sight, because touch is all-engaging, all-involving. If the visual field is totally continuous, the haptic field is completely discontinuous. Every moment of touch is different. Touching is seen here in a broader context than merely skin connecting with some external object. Touch is the very experience of connecting itself. Touch is the interfacing or touching of the different senses with each other. When two senses combine, insight is achieved, or in Joycean terms, an epiphany results. From this insight, it can be inferred that the artist of the Electranascence has learned to bring the senses into contact with each other, to assault his audience in more than one way at a time to make the audience feel or touch a thing by experiencing it through more than one sense ("Saint Thomas Aquinas").
W. B. Yeats provided Marshall with the aesthetic of the emotion of multitude. Like the Joycean aesthetic, the emotion of multitude involves the experience of multiples. Unlike the Joycean aesthetic, the components of the emotion of multitude do not touch each other. The concept is, indeed, that they do not come in contact. Instead, they run in parallel, allowing the audience to perceive and create the significance of the parallels. It is the resonant interval between the paralleled elements that is significant here. This is the same resonant interval as that found between notes in a piece of music or between the lines of a haiku poem. The implication here is that the sense of sound has its own special role to play. Marshall indicates that the effect of the resonant interval created by running elements in parallel is one of realism. Just as the components of a stereo system, when brought properly into phase, can create the realistic ef- fect of sound being generated in three dimensional space, away and distinct from the speakers that generate it, so in a play such as King Lear, Shakespeare makes his audience experience the reality of political, social and family breakdown by showing that process of breakdown happening in the parallel situations of Lear himself and Gloucester ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").
In speaking about Ezra Pound, McLuhan focuses primarily on Pound's contribution as editor in the making of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Pound limited "The Waste Land" to those voices which define the character of the Twentieth Century. Material from the Georgians or other decayed poetic forces of the past was expunged. The effect of this work was to make the poem a collection of resonant fragments that brought all times and places past to bear on the present and so caused the present to alter the past irrevocably. This synchronicity that, in effect microscopes time and place to almost nothing, and that allows all times to exist equally in the here and now, is very powerful. It frees man from entrapment by forces of the past or the future that prevent him from seeing himself as he is ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").
The tape collection does not provide much in terms of Marshall's thoughts on Eliot. What is there, is Marshall repeating from "The Waste Land" the line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). That one line, however, reflects Eliot's concern (as in "Tradition and the Individual Talent") that the relationship of the past to the present, as being seen in the now, is crucial to any strategy of cultural survival. The line also points to the resonant intervals between all the fragments in "The Waste Land," and it reminds us that these fragments, like fragments of papyrus, or stone tablets, are voices that speak to the present. The poet assembles the responses through what Eliot called the auditory imagination, the sense for voices of the most primitive past that speak to the most immediate present. A phrase like "the racer's edge" used in modern advertising for motor oil, evokes the whole philosophical world of William of Occam. The Electranascence artist has learned well the things left in the legacy of Eliot and Pound.
Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and Percy Wyndham Lewis were Marshall McLuhan's beacons in the dark confusion of the modern technological explosion. Focusing on their aesthetics provides clues to interpret the miasma of modern experience. The guiding principle behind the use of these clues is enunciated in Marshall's favourite story by Poe, "The Maelstrom". A victim caught in a whirlpool notices that certain hollow objects are ejected by the vortex. He grabs on to one such object and is saved ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). These objects are the fragments of cultural vitality that manifest themselves at random, like the fragments of "The Waste Land." They are part of a process of transformation which takes the cliché, the empty and used up garbage of communication, and renders it an elemental constituent of consciousness.
At the time of the publication of his co-authored book, From Cliché to Archetype, written with his friend, the noted Canadian poet and playwright, Wilfred Watson, Marshall appeared on the David Frost Show and spoke extensively on the subject of cliché transformation to a bewildered Frost, somewhat unused, it would seem, to coping with that intensity of thought. There were two streams in Marshall's thinking at the time. On the one hand, he identified what might be called the rear-view mirror syndrome in which the present is interpreted only in the terms of the past. In such a mode we find that the content of any new medium is an old medium (see also Schwartz). The novel subsumes the play; the movie subsumes the novel; television subsumes the movie. The record subsumes the performance; the tape subsumes the record; the high density magnetic or laser disk subsumes the tape. There would seem to be an illusion of security in using the new technology to do the work of the old. This syndrome all the while buries the used up language and rituals of the old technology under deeper and deeper layers of new technology. Eventually, as coal is transformed into diamond, so the voices of the past reappear as the permanent cultural features that are identified with such images as the mother, the hunter, the seductress, and the wise old man. Or the garbage apocalypse of industrial man transforms into the ecologically coordinated gardens of electronic man ("The David Frost Show").
The rear view mirror syndrome is, in effect, a concomitant of the cliché/archetype process. When an old technology is dumped and be- comes the content of a new technology, as the main frame computer is in the process of becoming the content of the microcomputer, then that old technology becomes an artefact, an object of study rather than use, an art form or a museum piece. Before long, one might expect to see UNIVAC as part of the environment for a drinking lounge.
In particular, Marshall was concerned with the transformation of language, the process by which the cliché phrase becomes a poetic statement. This interest was one with his love of puns and, there- fore, of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The rhetorical device of paranomasia was his guide here. Like Joyce, he would give a cliché a twist and out would come an insight, an archetypal statement or epigram. So, as the writer remembers from one of McLuhan's lectures: "Girls are Jung and easily Freudened"; "Be he ever so proud, there was no police like Holmes"; "History is a series of thud and blunder"; and, "I Cain, but are you Abel?"
Perhaps more important than either cliché or archetype is the transformation itself, the idea of percept in flux, in a state of change that we used to mean by that now badly abused piece of new- speak, process. The importance of this sense of alteration lies in its compatibility with the Electranascence, the electronic culture, by definition a culture of dynamic, of flow. The significance of percept in flux is seen by paralleling it with the "concept in stasis" which, McLuhan constantly reminds his audience, is an outmoded sensory posture. It is outmoded because it is a direct descendent of that fixed sense of space -- visual, continuous space -- which was bequeathed to the world by Plato and his descendents, and which was intensified for European man in the Renaissance ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). The presence and dominance of fixed, visual space in Western culture was made possible by the Greek emphasis on the written word and the Renaissance emphasis on the printed word. The vast majority of information came to be processed through the eyes. To see was to under- stand. To see was to believe. Only Othello's "ocular proof" would suffice. The concept and sight, insight and vision, became one and the same. Sight provided a place for everything, and concept put everything in its place. A world of stasis. Such a world breaks down in the Electranascence, for all the senses compete as handlers of awareness. Insight comes to be "in touch", with all the senses con- necting. The world of marble columns and apollonian institutions, so solid that they are meant to outlast time (ars longa, vita brevis), shatters in the current of the wired, weird world. Capital succumbs to the barter of immediate electronic exchanges and so money becomes more and more scarce. Labour surrenders to the adaptability of intellligent electronic technology, and so jobs disappear. The industrial era recedes ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").
Breakdown, however, is also breakthrough ("The David Frost Show"). The collapse of a system exposes the functioning of that system. That epiphany brings man in touch with the new possibilities that present themselves out of the fragments that remain. If Poe's "Maelstrom" is the guide, then it is imperative to look for the positive, creative percepts that are ejected by the current vortex of economic, social and cultural breakdown. This awareness, perhaps more than any other, explains Marshall's refusal to be negative about electronic culture. He was probing (perhaps "is," for the probes continue to advance and resonate) for Horace's "disjecti membra poetae" that would become the ground for the new culture.
Works Cited
Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." THE SACRED WOOD. London: Methuen, 1920.
McLuhan, Marshall. "Wyndham Lewis Recalled." ARTS CANADA. Plastic. Recording, 33 1/3. No. 117 (Nov@ber, 1967).
McLuhan, Marshall. THE GUTENBERG GALAXY. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
McLuhan, Marshall, with Wilfred Watson. FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE. New York: Viking, 1970.
"McLuhan: What If He Was Right?" Written and presented by Prof. Derrick De Kerckhove.- Research Assis. Helga Heberfelner. Ideas. Prod. Damiano Katropaulo. Tech. Assis. Ken Barnes and Larry Mawry. Exec. Prod. Geraldine Sherman. Intro. Russ Germaine. CBC [N.D.].
"Saint Thomas Aquinas." Gathered and edited by Ann Hutchison. Plain Chant Dir. Giles Bryant. Concern. Prod. Diana Fowler. Tech. Assis. John Hollinger- Narr. Warren Davis.
Schwartz, Tony. THE SOUND OF SENSE. Slide/tape. New York: [N.P.], 1968.
THE DAVID FROST SHOW. Host David Frost. CBC (March) 1970.
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