Probing McLuhan  

"Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely 
alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand." - Ezra Pound  

The opening up of the new paradigm of media theory took place in a 
literary milieu at the beginning of the Cold War. In the 1930's Marshall 
McLuhan became aware that literature should not be appreciated on its 
aesthetic merits, but that it was to be understood as a scientific 
method. The analysis of poetry and prose according to the principle of 
"practical criticism" focused on the link between their social 
consequences and stylistic features. In the 1940's McLuhan applied his 
insights to written advertisements, expecting that future audiences would 
find these more interesting than the literature produced by his 
contemporaries. 

According to Robert Anton Wilson, the "most important idea ever presented 
by McLuhan" can be found on the first pages of "The Mechanical Bride," 
McLuhan's 1951 debut. These are dedicated to the collage aspect of The 
New York Times' front page, which McLuhan calls "a collective work of 
art." Newspapers are a "daily 'book' of industrial man, an Arabian 
Night's Entertainment." McLuhan defends the use of discontinuity as a 
basic concept against his contemporary critics, who saw incoherence as 
irrationality. "To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a 
superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies 
of a very high order." But people remain unaware of the newspaper page's 
rich symbolism. "Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite 
blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on his back." It is 
only several decades later, after the historical view gains depth of 
field, that we discover the beauty in advertisements, book covers, 
jukeboxes, the 1949 Buick Roadmaster with Dynaflow Drive, the comics in 
"Crime Does Not Pay" ("More than 6,000,000 readers monthly!"), the 
careless but equally helpless "Men of Distinction" sporting their "rare, 
smooth, mellow, blended Lord Calvert Whiskey," or the August 1947 
Reader's Digest table of contents ("Marriage Control: A New Answer to 
Divorce," "What Price Socialism?," "Laughter, the Best Medicine").  

"The Mechanical Bride" consists of crossovers between Blondie, Superman, 
Coca-Cola ("a kind of rabbit's foot"), Emily Post, Tarzan (an amalgam of 
noble savage and aristocratic detective), and horse operas, with John 
Wayne at one end and Margaret Mead, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier, 
Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Toynbee and Kinsey at the other. McLuhan 
is the one-liner's philosopher. Eventually, this worked to his 
disadvantage, because hordes of people never progressed much beyond 
stammering the slogan, "The medium is the message." "Have you had your 
literary hypodermic today?" Most of the slogans are questions: "How much 
behaviorism is needed to make a big mental proletariat behave?" In the 
"How to iron shirts without hating your husband" department, he wonders 
"if there is any known gadget for controlling a rampant Know-How." "In 
the beginning was montage"; "How often do you change your mind, your 
politics, your clothes?"; "Superman or subman?"; "You little culture 
vulture, you!" Finally, in the "Understanding America" section, he 
remarks: "Don't run but look again, Reader. Find the Mechanical Bride."  


Simultaneously with the publication of "The Mechanical Bride," his book 
on advertising, television was introduced and he was forced to admit that 
he had written a review of a historical era, rather than a critique of 
his own age. He decided he could only keep up with technological 
advancement by treating the "communications media" as a scientific 
method, much the same way he had done with literature. 

Art, to McLuhan, was an "early warning system"; he defined art briskly as 
a powerful style with powerful results ("Literature is news that STAYS 
news" - Pound). The technique of, say, Eliot or Joyce was to use the old 
medium of the written word as though it were already part of the new 
electronic age. The accelerated circuits made possible by electricity 
opened up a new environment to humanity, which till now had been caught 
in typographic settings. In the eyes of McLuhan, art consisted of 
"special artefacts for enhancing human perception." Like human antennae, 
artists were in the best position to develop an insight into the impact 
of technology and the media because they allowed for and tested its 
effects in their own literary styles. The function of art was to make 
humanity realize the psychological and social consequences of 
technological advancements. 

"Joyce is, in Finnegans Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of 
the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and 
postures during all phases of human culture and technology. Joyce could 
see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural circle as in 
a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in 
all cultural modes while quite conscious."   

In 1953, in his article "Culture without Literacy," McLuhan for the first 
time summarizes Western history in terms of media. In it, he also 
introduces historical tripartition, which he will elaborate on and 
diversify in all of his later works. The first stage he terms that of 
"preliterate man," who lived without a script in an acoustic environment 
that had no set points of reference. Preliterate man was completely and 
universally connected to his surroundings, in a mythological and 
unfragmented world. He translated his entire body into outward form: that 
of a ship, a home, or a roller ("the Incas did not know the wheel"). 

The second stage is that of "literate man," who connected to the 
surrounding world by renouncing certain bodily functions, which were 
transferred to technological devices. The spoken word represented the 
first fragmentary guideline in acoustic space. Next came written/printed 
language, which visualized acoustic space ("an eye for an ear"). The act 
of joining sentences produced linear logic, which came to its own in the 
book, filled with linear lines. McLuhan considers the book an extension 
of the eye, while all the printed works in the world together make up the 
comprehensive milieu of the "Gutenberg galaxy." The distance between man 
and the world expanded as more of his bodily functions were emancipated 
as tools. 

The third stage is the present one, that of electrical/electronic man, 
"manthefactfinder," who, like the man in stage one, is without script and 
externalizes and amputates his very being: The information network is his 
nervous system. He has regained a mythical understanding of the world; he 
has once more become tribal, all involved; and he does not require 
sequenced fragments in order to feel that he knows what he's doing. Man 
connected to electronic media is in a new acoustic space, where he is 
bombarded by signals. 

With this first and tentative proposition, McLuhan opened up the field of 
media theory. From then on, his own way of writing would enable him to 
remain enthusiastic regarding the effects of modern media. "Nothing ever 
printed is as important as the medium of print." There followed one book 
after another. As for media theory itself, McLuhan's universe is all it 
needs to fathom every artistic and technological revolution.  

Media theory is a Theory of Everything. As the medial terrain is by 
definition interminable, McLuhan prefers to step right in the middle of 
it. "There is no longer a single item that is not interesting." Media 
theory is a way of looking at the universal data archives with pleasure, 
without having to doggedly chase after some idea of an overview: What you 
see is what you get. Thus, McLuhan stumbles from one brilliant insight to 
the next. Since everything is related to everything, the important thing 
is to construct one's own quotation-magnet which, as a strange attractor, 
will cause the right sort of bifurcation on every occasion. Media theory 
establishes a temporary local center of global civilization in the form 
of an obscure collection of points. Now, take your scissors and cut out 
all the texts featuring pine trees, Doberman pinschers, formica tables, 
Inuit, tobacco, Stevenson and war babies. Combine these with a selected 
number of favorite authors, and presto: your very own full-fledged 
theory, something millenia to come will be able to sink their teeth into.  


"Media are artificial extensions of sensory existence. Language was the 
first outering of the central nervous system. In language we put all of 
ourselves outside. Then we retracted and began to hedge our bets by 
putting out single senses like wheel (feet), hammer (fist), knife (teeth- 
nail), drum (ear), writing (eye). But when an organ goes out, it goes 
numb. The central nervous system has gone numb, for survival, i.e., we 
enter the age of the unconscious with electronics, and consciousness with 
shifts into the physical organs, even in the body politic. There is a 
great stepping up of physical awareness and a big drop in mental 
awareness when the central nervous system goes outward. The one area 
which is numb and unconscious is the area which receives the impact."  

Organs moved out of man and into the world as technological devices go 
numb within man himself. Through this defensive reaction, the individual 
prevents the amputated organ within from being crushed by the onslaught 
of impressions suddenly released upon it. "Each extension alters both 
private and corporate images, creating great pain and alienation." Every 
new technology is a medium that topples man's former world view. 
Everything is changed in relation to the central nervous system's new 
technological possibilities. 

In this sense, media are new art forms: They enable new modes of 
perception. This led McLuhan to formulate his set of media definitions: 
"All media are fragments of ourselves extended into the public domain"; 
"A new medium is like the trumpet at the battle of Jericho"; "The new 
media are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature"; "Any 
understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a 
knowledge of the way media work as environments." 

"Europeans cannot master the new powers of technology because they take 
themselves too seriously and too sentimentally. Europeans cannot imagine 
the Earth City. They have occupied old city spaces too long to be able to 
sense the new spaces created by the new media."  

Media can be understood in their relation to the body, private or social. 
That is, not in terms of the transfer of messages but from an ecological 
perspective: they create a new environment. To McLuhan, the question was 
"how the medium affects the person, not how people affect media." The 
introduction of new media exposes the environment which would otherwise 
remain "virtually invisible and unnoticeable, subliminal." The 
environment exposes its characteristics during the transition from one 
medium to the next. The only one capable of perceiving environments is 
the artist who connects an old medium to a new environment: Joyce's 
stream of consciousness was already television. 

Art, like a sense of humor, is "anti-environmental": both liberate man 
momentarily from an invulnerable environment that imposes its 
restrictions as a matter of course. And that is precisely the point. 
"Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. 
Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. 
Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual 
and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can 
afford to lose." Media theory will be critical or not at all. 

"The children of technological man respond with untaught delight to the 
poetry of trains, ships, planes, and to the beauty of machine products. 
In the school room officialdom suppresses all their natural experience; 
children are divorced from their culture. They are not permitted to 
approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of 
technological awareness; this only possible door for them is slammed in 
their faces."  

McLuhan labeled the methodical part of his scientific method "pattern 
recognition." Typographical man, in need of chronological accounts and 
argumentation to understand certain processes, has been succeeded in the 
electronic age by enthusiastic youth whose thinking no longer follows 
trajectories such as "in for a penny, in for a pound." Homo electricus 
follows a nonlinear logic which seeks to grasp the pattern in a series of 
facts and events. Instead of shifting from one fragment to another, 
processes are now seen to be an aggregate of imperative combinations, 
links, collisions, repetitions, intersections, and manifestations. 
Pattern recognition is like that of preliterate man: mythical, tribal, 
all-involving. It is based on trial and rejection and yet more 
experimenting, rather than de- and induction. 

"Suspended judgment," in short - don't start all over, but consider the 
possible outcome instead. Until the nineteenth century, to discover meant 
to discover things. Nowadays, one discovers methods. Once the method has 
been found, there follows a series of inventions. "The method of 
invention is simply to begin with the solution of the problem." McLuhan, 
like Elias Canetti, wrote satirical theory. He described his texts as 
"observation minus ideas": Deduct your moral judgments from your insights 
and look again with what's left; ideas are sure to follow. "I grope, I 
listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences - 
until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open." The word used by 
McLuhan to sum up his intellectual activities was "probe." 

"My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand 
our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. 
But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of 
discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of 
insight, of pattern recognition ... I want to map new terrain rather then 
chart old landmarks. I'm trying to get my audience involved in 
perceptions. I expect my readers to do more work than I did. I am 
offering opportunities, roles of initiative."  

Whenever McLuhan got hold of a book, the first thing he did was to read 
page 69. If it managed to raise his attention he would continue by 
reading all the left pages. This way he hoped to avoid the redundancy in 
books. He took an "Evelyn Wood reading dynamics" course in speed-reading. 
This, he said, "revealed patterns, not data". Applied to writing, this 
library surfing provided a "redundant scattering of samples," a 
"wholesale use of quotations" - a mosaic. Which is exactly what McLuhan's 
books are: "Clear prose indicates the absence of thought." Time and 
again, McLuhan succeeds in reducing the patterns he discovers to a single 
brilliant slogan, so admired by him in advertisements and poetry, to 
mythical formulae, the somersault by which thinking suddenly breaks to a 
new level of insights (as he himself had experienced while working on 
"Culture without Literacy"). "Forcing thoughts into abrupt interface with 
each other." Media-conscious poets and ad makers try first of all to 
cause a reaction in their audience. Both work according to the brainstorm 
method, "serendipity through association." Advertising slogans are haiku, 
and the aphorism's modern equivalent is the headline. 

McLuhan's gay science aims to beat the media men at their own game, by 
inciting his readers to stop ignoring the environment which commands 
their lives in every detail without them ever realizing it. Time and 
again, he stresses that "literacy [was] a brief phase," that literacy 
belongs to the Gutenberg galaxy, but that we are now "beyond Jupiter." We 
are free to treat literary texts as casually as we are to take 
advertising texts seriously. Every "breakdown is a breakthrough." By 
leaving the past behind, we enter the present, where we can begin to 
charter the unknown, the "hidden dimension," so obviously close it 
remains invisible. "I predict only what has already happened. Anyone who 
truly perceives the present can also see the future, since all possible 
futures are contained in the present." 

Media theory is not looking for feedback, it's looking for feedforward. 
The present is a network of past analogies; the past is a toolbox open 
for plunder by those who wish to think further. Burglarize all the books 
in the Gutenberg nebula if you will; don't stop to wonder whether the 
present "tribal situation" is better or worse than the (il)literacy of 
past generations. "Help beautify junkyards - throw something lovely away 
every day." The secret rule of media theory discovered by McLuhan was the 
capacity to write with enthusiasm about everything one opposes. "Blast 
the Canadian beaver - apt symbol of our dammed-up creativity. Bless 
culture shock as dislocation of mind into meaning." Historical data are 
no more than material in which patterns may be discerned; they do not 
provide imperative conclusions concerning the question, "What to do?". In 
the network of the media, we are past such linearity. According to 
McLuhan, one had to proceed with utmost caution when dealing with the 
media; therefore, one must understand media. The only chance of disarming 
the media was - and is - to understand their laws.  

After extensive investigations, McLuhan had discovered four media laws 
and could find no more. He pictured them in the shape of a tetrad. All 
media cause four simultaneous processes: a medium enhances a given human 
function, restores lost practices, renders still others obsolete, and 
turns into a new function itself. McLuhan places this quadruplicity 
within a graphic image: a circle surrounding a cross, with each of the 
four parts of the circle representing one of the media laws. Thus, for 
example, the pipe as a "human artefact" enhances "group participation via 
environmental smell," brings back the "contemplative inner trip," renders 
the "individual nervous haste" outmoded, and may turn into the "solitary 
smoker; need for consideration of audience." In his series of "simple 
quadruplets" we find liquor, brothel, cigarette, mass, medicine, 
hermeneutics, high-rise buildings, kinetic space, microphone/PA system, 
perspective painting, refrigerator, semiotics, tactile space and xeroxes. 
Amidst these quadruple condensations, the page still has plenty of room 
left for brilliant ideas and quotes. All of this can be found in 
"Understanding Media"'s successor, "Laws of Media," published by 
McLuhan's son Eric in 1988.  

We now move to the higher tetrads. Here we find Aristotelian causality, 
cubism, the clock, the law of the jungle, washing machines, TV, cars, 
electric light, and new genetics. Thus, the satellite enhances the 
planet, brings back ecology, renders nature redundant, and turns into 
implosion: "The population as participating in their own audience 
participation." Under "the pollster" we read: "Who am I? Let's take a 
poll." And: "Does the president really have 17 per cent more charisma 
than Campbell's soup?" Under the "slang" entry, McLuhan observes that 
"Our current technologies are slang - tetrads explore their verbal 
character." Slang enhances new possibilities of perception and brings 
back "unconventional feeling." McLuhan uses this to indicate how language 
can raise the media to understanding - for every technology is lingual by 
nature and offers its own percepts: the outlook that enables obstinate 
perception.  

"I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest surfaces and 
human scale. I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it 
for my own survival. The effect of the new media on human society has 
never aroused the slightest enthusiasm in me. Only by understanding 
change can I ease the burden of experiencing it - and therefore the only 
extension of man I desire is that of awareness. I wish none of these 
technologies ever happened. They impress me as nothing but a disaster. 
They are for dissatisfied people. Why is man so unhappy he wants to 
change his world?"
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