Lost Prophet: Why Did the World Forget Marshall McLuhan?
Catholic convert, professor of English, patron saint of Silicon Valley: Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan was without a doubt one of the most famous and idiosyncratic public intellectuals of the 20th-century Anglophone world. Yet most now know little of him beyond a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall.
During an academic career spanning more than forty years, McLuhan produced work containing theories of history and social change. His teachings on the impact of media communications on human societies had deeply political implications, even if McLuhan was publicly ambivalent about politics. In private, he struck up a rich correspondence with the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and liaised with President Jimmy Carter, of whom he was an enthusiastic supporter. Despite his popular appeal, McLuhan was a voracious reader and trained as a scholar of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
McLuhan’s work instructed on the impact of electronic media on human societies and the future world that such technology might shape. McLuhan’s two most popular books, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), became foundational texts of communication and media theory, and were referenced by the US editors of Wired magazine when canonising McLuhan as its 'patron saint' at launch in 1993. Wired’s cultural import in the San Francisco-based tech world was noted early on and the magazine went on to be highly influential among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Perhaps it should come as little surprise, then, that in June 2018 Elon Musk saw fit to post the Canadian’s headshot on his Twitter and Instagram profiles, commenting 'He had a way with words.' McLuhan’s unwitting posthumous contribution to the Valley’s intellectual DNA is discussed in Adrian Taub’s What Tech Calls Thinking and remains an intriguing feature within recent histories of technological thought.
McLuhan preferred to think of his contributions to discussions on media and technology as 'probes' rather than concepts, seeing the latter as too fixed to deal with the complex, ever-changing environments created by modern electronic communications. Keen on playing with language in order to stir his audience, the definitions were not always stable and the sources sometimes misquoted. However, McLuhan’s contention that academics, educators and politicians – let alone human populations as a whole – generally failed to appreciate the paradigmatic transformations wrought by technological revolutions until it was too late was grounded in reality. The stubborn inability of successive White House and Pentagon teams to understand why they were losing the media battle for Vietnam by the early 1970s would have been seen by McLuhan as an example of their failure to appreciate the impact of brutal news images beamed directly to millions of watchers. Indeed McLuhan claimed that his 20th-century electronic age presented the most profound paradigm shift ever for the human condition as it meant information overload to a cosmic degree. He thought that the newly televised delivery of such information was destined to involve audiences so intensely that shared understandings would break down and a reversion to pre-literate tribalism would result. Of his various ways of expressing this idea, the notion that electronic communication technologies were rapidly turning the world into a hyperconnected 'Global Village' fatal to privacy and the rationalising stability of the written word is perhaps the most recognisable for contemporary readers.
The popular interest in his work that rose to such a crescendo in the 1960s was not always shared by McLuhan’s scholarly colleagues. He was not a retiring figure and thus polarized academic opinion. The 1967 television documentary This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage demonstrates this, with one art critic interviewee describing McLuhan as a mere 'popularizer'. Her disparaging tone made clear that the viewer was supposed to understand this as an insult. Others were even less kind; the English playwright Jonathan Miller published a book under the Modern Masters banner in 1972 that presented McLuhan as a charlatan – and, as the author was keen to note, a Catholic one at that!
It is true that McLuhan sometimes came across as thinking too highly of himself. In particular, the self-confident way in which he proclaimed authority over myriad disciplines seemed almost designed to irk academics. McLuhan had a habit of describing his intellectual development as a series of eureka moments, as though entire disciplines had been waiting for him to tell them what was really going on – one letter from 1971 to a PhD student reading, 'Have just discovered that the user is the content of any and all media.' McLuhan often presented these so-called discoveries as having occurred after a period of intense solo observation on the world around him with little support from other scholars. Yet his huge library and the vast correspondence now kept at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa attest against this perception; McLuhan was a man of letters, in constant contact with leading figures from society, and read widely. That this diligence was not always appreciated by contemporaries was in part a product of an occasional inability to reign in the ego and graciously credit those whose ideas had inspired him.
Yet McLuhan’s observations on his rapidly changing world, while not always original, often appear uncannily prescient to the 21st-century reader. Understanding Media’s observation that forms of media constitute and produce novel environments as opposed to simply existing as neutral conduits between people was groundbreaking at the time. This is attested to by that book’s massive popularity; along with The Gutenberg Galaxy it established McLuhan as the media philosopher for North American audiences. After this commercial success, Corporate America and Trudeau’s political operation were but two such willing buyers for McLuhan’s observations – although the Trudeau project was pro bono.
Perhaps it was also this willingness to get out into the world – or, for critics, turn himself into a product – that made McLuhan some enemies in academia. Yet he was always honest about his belief that thinkers should use the mediums at their disposal to enhance perception. McLuhan had little time for cloistered university departments and thought that the established Western model of education was woefully unprepared for the information revolution that had already arrived. In this, he sometimes resembled the errant professor-turned-prophet Nietzsche, who also thought that a university education was not worthy of the name. Despite McLuhan’s fervent Catholicism, references to Nietzsche crop up surprisingly regularly among his correspondence and overall corpus. The famous Prussian’s aversion to industrial modernity and idiosyncratic approach to philosophising clearly appealed to the enfant terrible of the Prairie Provinces.
The McLuhan mania had somewhat died down by the 1970s. Hungover from the social tumult of the previous decade and now more fully integrated with their television sets, Western audiences became less attuned to McLuhan’s observations. Yet the 1970s saw some of McLuhan’s most interesting work published as he pursued projects on media education, urban ecology and, perhaps most intriguingly, the survival of Catholicism in the electronic age. The latter was written up in French by associate Pierre Babin in 1978’s Autre homme, autre chretien a l’age electronique but was never translated, McLuhan suffering a stroke and later dying while American companies inquired into its availability for publication in English. This quirk of history may go some way to explaining why McLuhan’s role as a Catholic thinker has been underappreciated in the Anglophone world, despite the deep intellectual impact that his religion had throughout his career.
After McLuhan’s death on New Year’s Eve, 1980, the University of Toronto was quick to wind down his beloved Centre for Culture and Technology, much to the dismay of McLuhan’s widow, Corinne. It must have seemed that the world was ready to leave McLuhan behind, even as the 'Global Village' was becoming ever more interconnected.
The question of why some thinkers have moments and some do not is a perennial one in intellectual history. However, McLuhan’s was far bigger than most and his cultural impact should not be understated. Today, when Western democracies creak and unpredictable electorates rebel, we might return to McLuhan’s contention that sociopolitical revolutions are always preceded by communication revolutions. As we anxiously travel on Tik Tok trains and struggle to navigate a world of simulacra, we might feel as McLuhan did that our media have become extensions of the human nervous system. We might concede, after this, that McLuhan is worth a revisit, for history and for posterity.
James Dilley is a second-year PhD student at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he researches the ideas of Marshall McLuhan in context and studies themes in 20th century technological thought.
