I never met the real McLuhan; I only met his many disembodied personalities, as many among you must have. We can, in fact, distinguish two main categories of discarnate McLuhan: the real – so to speak –and the mediated, that is, the various audio/video recordings of Marshall McLuhan, and the various literate recollections you find in all the books, biographies, or essays which have been dedicated to him worldwide. While the real discarnate versions speak to you and to your own imagination and ideas directly, the mediated ones have led to the various interpretations of both the man and the intellectual that critics or aficionados have popularized through time. We all have memories of McLuhan; we all have met him in one or more of his immaterial forms, consciously or unconsciously. Did you not meet him in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, where he interprets himself in one of the most renowned cinematic cameos? Or did you meet him as the Patron Saint of Wired magazine? Perhaps you met him on the air or on TV through the many slogans for the age he coined? Not to speak of those of you who certainly met him in class as a name attached to ideas and theories of communication and media. Depending on our age or interests, we have constructed our own McLuhan through a cross-reading of his immaterial presences.
As in the case of Vitangelo Moscarda in Luigi Pirandello’s last and famous novel, One, No One and One-Hundred Thousand, McLuhan has become what we have made of him; we have put various masks on him, and we have looked at him through those masks. But each of these masks only reveals one side of his more complex persona, which, in fact, we still have to bring together. Let’s start by bringing the discarnate McLuhan back to his materiality by allowing the man to return from his many avatars. In other words, let’s retrieve McLuhan’s existent body, his living persona. This is what I want to do in this part of the book: I want to invite you to transubstantiate his various masks into his written body, his mosaic. We will discover that while the substance, the key elements, and the function of the mosaic clearly relate to McLuhan’s humanistic roots, its form develops from various communicative strategies which in fact relate to four among the various masks we have put on him and which, after all, are those which represent his most famous avatars: the media oracle; the media guru; the modernist; the media or techno fan. The mosaic embodies them all at once; hence, the mosaic also transcends the whole of these four discarnate versions of McLuhan. The mosaic is the embodiment of McLuhan’s integral awareness; it is what makes us understand the function of his own storytelling; it is what engages us into a reading process which cannot be separated from our communal existence.
What is, in fact, a mosaic? If you think of it, we can associate different meanings with this term: the mosaic can be an art form (the Roman mosaics, or the Byzantine mosaics); or a multicultural approach to societal and cultural phenomena (the Canadian mosaic); or a type of pavement (a mosaic floor). These are just a few obvious examples pertaining to different domains: the artistic or the aesthetic one; the socio-cultural and the political one; the most pragmatic one of construction and applied design. And yet, if you think of it, they all have something in common: their operative structure. All these ideas of mosaic in fact translate into a material or conceptual form based on fragments – or tiles or tessere – that are discrete units whose assemblage creates a figure which acquires meaning through the interplay with its own ground. By so doing, a pattern is created, which, in turn, is revealed through our active observation. Pattern recognition is the way we approach all mosaics: we look for the overall design that the careful assemblage of the various pieces brings to light, something which transcends their sum. Pattern recognition engages us, requires our will to cooperate with the structure; it turns us into detectives capable of seeing the narrative of a Roman or a Byzantine mosaic, as well as of a multicultural one, or even of a mosaic floor. Engaging with a mosaic, we participate in the process of giving meaning to what we experience. This is true for all that we define as a mosaic, including McLuhan’s form of writing: it is a form which encourages an active participation from all seers, readers, spectators, who have to find the figure in the carpet, which is, in fact, what connects figures and ground.
While interfacing McLuhan’s various masks, we find that his mosaic also makes us experience knowledge, and experience both him and his context through knowledge; it makes us progress towards a meaningful overall effect. As we shall see, McLuhan’s mosaic cross-reads cultural traditions. It pursues a field approach to various problems and situations, and gives substance and materiality to its designer’s intellectual originality. In later chapters, I will unveil the role played by each of the four masks in the making of the embodied McLuhan, that is, in the making of McLuhan’s mosaic. Here, I introduce its substance (its hybrid conceptual structure), its tiles or tessere (the probes), and its function (how it operates and to what intent).
Doubtless, McLuhan was a great storyteller and a fluent orator. He enjoyed talking and lecturing about his process of discovery, and, when turning to literacy, he often elaborated on ways to render his ‘stories.’ This on-the-spot rendering was always based on a peculiar witty combination of his oral skills, his humanistic background, and his study of avantgarde art and fiction. Throughout his books, he probed the actuality of new media, but he also simultaneously reconceptualized these probes on the more traditional printed page, which he would turn into an original literate interface that recreated the electric orality he foresaw coming up in the immediate future.
McLuhan’s explorations of language were not driven simply by the will to charm and seduce his audience, or to attract a variety of readers; through his writing, he was seriously aiming to master and render the complexity of the ongoing changes he was probing. As mentioned in my introduction, his Laws of Media translate into a probing device – the Tetrad – which combines orality and literacy in an effort to address the up-coming effect of computers and their effective way of bringing about a new phase of orality. I will return to this idea later on in this chapter, as well as in the third part of this book. What is interesting to note at this stage is how both McLuhan’s mosaic (the final result of his experiments with form and language) and his laws of media (the final result of his media explorations) are conveyed as literate tools retrieving more ancient forms of communication, which are also apt in rendering the new electric interactivity. They both rely upon a hybrid substance which combines old and new educational and communicative strategies.
McLuhan’s mosaic is therefore a non-linear form of writing which reconfigures the linear alphabetic form in order to give the written page a tactile and multi-sensorial dimension. Such a page is designed as a ‘verbo-vocal-visual’ interface. The mosaic is a literate form capable of also translating the new ‘verbomotor culture’ of our time, to use an expression coined a few years later by the scholar who theorized about the effects of our secondary orality, Walter J. Ong (who himself was one of McLuhan’s students in the 1940s):
Much in the foregoing account of orality can be used to identify what can be called verbomotor cultures, that is, cultures in which, by contrast with high-technology cultures, courses of action and attitudes toward issues depend significantly more on effective use of words, and thus on human interaction, and significantly less on non-verbal, often largely visual input from ‘objective’ world of things … We are expanding its use here to include all cultures that retain enough oral residue to remain significantly word-attentive in a person-interactive context (the oral type of context) rather than object-attentive.1
McLuhan’s mosaic mirrors the new way people addressed their ‘courses of actions and attitudes towards issues,’ based more and more on collective interplay (person-interactive context) and less and less on solitary activities (object-attentive context). With that idea in mind, the modernist example, for McLuhan, was fundamental for at least two main reasons: it offered models of experimentation with new forms; and, yet, it also inscribed those same experiments inside a broader literate and cultural continuum. In this sense, the modernist literary roots of McLuhan’s media studies constitute a link between tradition and innovation, both when perceiving the traditional and when rendering it anew in his observations.
Therefore, we should not be surprised to discover that McLuhan’s favourite modernist masters are those who engaged with tradition and who combined old and new literary and artistic patterns into bold and original structures; that is, those who were not afraid to translate their own actuality, but who did not imagine it as existing in a cultural and historical vacuum. Certainly, he was fascinated by the explorations of late avant-garde movements, but his search also emanates from the study of those early proto-modernist writers who, at the turn of the previous century, started to question fictional and representative canons within a timeless literary and artistic ‘sacred wood,’ to use T.S. Eliot’s famous definition of what literary tradition is.
Henry James, as early as 1884, suggested that there is ‘no limit to [the novelist’s] possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes,’2 introducing the technique of the limited point of view as opposed to the more traditional one of the omniscient narrator. Following his example, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford developed new rhetorical devices undermining the ideas of unity and linearity still employed by more traditional Victorian novelists.3 A few years later, Ezra Pound’s imagism and T.S. Eliot’s fragments and objective correlatives further explored the potentiality of formal discontinuity to render their own reality. And yet, even though the motto make it new stays as a lasting mark of modernist experiments, the very idea of ‘new’ pursued by all these writers moved from a carefully chosen tradition of reading the best, and from a constant study of previous literary productions.4 Their discoveries were in fact the result of a continuous re-discovery of forgotten or other far-away traditions, the result of a constant dialogue between past and present literary achievements. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were great admirers of Italian literature of the origins, from Dante to Petrarch to Boccaccio; Ford Madox Ford wrote one of the first volumes of comparative literature, enlightening readers from Confucius’ day to his own in his The March of Literature (1938); Confucius and Eastern traditions were also part of Pound’s literary and philosophical interests; James Joyce prided himself of being a living encyclopedia. The works of these writers are pervaded by countless references to what was there before, the voices of the dead poets disguised inside new phrases, echoing in original works of art, and engaging their present.
In a similar way, McLuhan’s mosaic combines the need to experiment and open up a form of critical writing to new communicative devices pertaining to his own time (from ads to slogans to visual puns and other cultural devices); his knowledge of ancient rhetorical strategies and traditions acted as a catalyst. More specifically, he went back to the liberal arts of the trivium, which he retrieved through the study of both the Patristic tradition and the English metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. By so doing, as a hybrid, his mosaic combined various communicative codes and broke established academic canons. The mosaic no longer belongs to the school of method which, according to Francis Bacon, is ‘more fit to win consent or belief, but less fit to point to action’; the mosaic does not guide the reader towards the acquisition of an established truth, but it engages the reader in a process of discovery which can be fulfilled only through an active desire to cooperate with the text. Like most modernist writings, McLuhan’s writing is an open text, a sort of writing in progress which acquires always different meanings depending on the act of reading, and thus on the readers, who are thereby transformed into co-producers of meaning. McLuhan defined this process of continuous interplay and exegesis as a ‘do-it-yourself participation on the part of the reader.’5 It is possible to envisage here a similitude to an idea of learning pertaining to a different historical moment, the one beautifully captured by Raphael’s painting The School of Athens. Even though it dates back to the Renaissance – a period which McLuhan considered as the moment in history celebrating the eye and sight over all other senses, that is, the moment in which Gutenberg’s fragmented man was in his prime – Raphael’s painting takes us into the heart of an ancient educational system based, not on the passive acceptance or memorization of learning, but on continuous investigations and never-ending dialogues among pupils and masters. The painting contains several references to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and portrays almost all major philosophers together, sharing the same space and in conversation with each other: Aristotle himself, Plato, Diogenes, Socrates, Parmenides, Epicurus, to name but a few. Pagan philosophy and Christian theology are brought together through knowledge, and the new students are invited to ‘Seek Knowledge of Causes’: the ‘do-it-yourself participation’ on the part of the students is based on the direct interplay with the philosophers’ universal ideas, flowing in the air through conversations, preserved in books through time, and constantly retrieved and actualized through their study. Come to think of it, we can also find a parallel with our own actuality, at a time when the World Wide Web has become – for better or worse – our new School of Athens. When browsing the Web, we access knowledge in a direct way and freely assemble various data, news, ideas, and information available to us in the here and now; we are masters of our own interplay. In both the Athenian and our current learning situations, the responsibility to provide a meaning is ours: both the master philosophers and the Web give us a set of learning tools we have to investigate for ourselves. We decide if we want to stop at a first level of knowledge which stands before us, or enquire further. In both situations we are, in fact, interfacing with knowledge; as scholars at the School of Athens, or as surfers of the Web, we are the users reconnecting ideas, fragments, and various other bits we come across. We are the ones who decide how much effort we want to make to move forward in our knowledge. In a similar way, we are the interface between knowledge and ignorance when engaging with the hybrid substance of McLuhan’s mosaic. We decide how much effort we want to make to learn through its discontinuous structure.
Those of you who have some familiarity with more recent literary theories (from postmodernism to the evolution of the lyric essay), as well as with hypertext theories, will immediately appreciate the substance of McLuhan’s mosaic discontinuity. Those of you who have not, will nevertheless find it easier than in the past to grasp the same concept, since today most media surrounding us are in fact exploiting discontinuity as an operative form: the world of instant information is itself a mosaic of data that we have to connect somehow. Discontinuity, intertextuality, and juxtapositions are, in fact, well-known rhetorical strategies of postmodernist critical discourses and narratives, as well as of electronic and digital forms of communication. At the same time, they stand at the core of most communicative strategies typical of our own daily routines, as we inhabit real and virtual landscapes whose narratives are based on assembling discontinuous modes. We might not immediately be aware of it because of the way we now inhabit discontinuity, and not just in terms of ‘landscape’ (as in the case of the constant juxtaposition of messages we experience when walking along our city streets, one coming after the other in various disconnected forms: images, sounds, or smells); we have, in fact, put on discontinuity. Our life palimpsests are more and more based on shared multi-tasking philosophies that shift us from one role to the next without even noticing. We are constantly urged to connect to something or someone, to link or network; we are urged to overcome discontinuity by behavioural patterns based on juxtapositions and interconnections.
This situation, which we experience through our daily routine, brings together the above mentioned literary theories and the model of the hypertext, something which also connects to our investigation of McLuhan’s mosaic; in particular, it enables us to assess the latter’s originality as a precursor of would-be forms of communication, as well as of literary and technological theories and applications. In the latest edition of his most well known book, hypertext guru George P. Landow writes that ‘… over the past several decades literary theory and computer hypertext, apparently unconnected areas of enquiry, have increasingly converged,’6 precisely because of their elaboration of non-linear forms. This idea of a discontinuous form of writing, which today we accept and study as one mode of critical discourse, as well as a typical strategy of electronic communication, was still a novelty among scholars and university professors (though not among avant-garde artists) when McLuhan started to employ it outside the domain of the arts stricto sensu; hence, the strong reaction against a language which did not comply with the established rules. Glenn Willmott, for example, has convincingly discussed McLuhan’s works as a cross-road connecting modernist and postmodernist trends, so much so that today we can read his mosaic as a form which has anticipated later postmodernist forms of écritures. Contrary to later schools of criticism, though, McLuhan’s experiments with language do not respond to the need to address political or social vindications; instead, the goal is to remain detached and objective while exploring actuality as a complex ground resulting from the interplay of technological, sociological, and cultural factors. For instance, new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies, and postcolonial and gender studies have developed new formal structures in order to respond to established forms of literacy and discourse that are overwhelmingly biased historically, culturally, racially, or according to gender (ex-centricity being a clearly defined strategy employed by several postmodernist approaches).7 However, McLuhan’s new form of writing responds more to the need of conveying a new sensibility, a new environment as it is. His goal is, in fact, not to foster a political cause or to bring forward some criticism of the way new media or cultural and educational trends progress in relation to actuality. Rather, he wants to alert his readers to the new interactive psychodynamic processes induced by all technologies and forms of communication.
Similar also to computing, McLuhan’s mosaic is based on discontinuous rather than on continuous structuring. Even though, as I will later discuss, there are some substantial differences between the mosaic and the hypertext, these two forms share similar fortuitous patterns. As readers, we can decide how to orient our own reading, and we can decide if we want to follow the table of contents (the menu) or if we want to start in medias res. When approaching McLuhan’s books, we are free to direct our own explorations just as we do when navigating hypertexts. As I will show below, McLuhan’s mosaic is in fact built around probes, which are conceived as ‘verbo-voco-visual’ apercus, that is, hypertextual and multi-sensorial textual fragments; these probes operate as ‘lexia’ (to use Barthes’s definitions) or ‘windows’ (to use a term we all understand as Internet users) introducing a complex set of issues through a paratactic structure based on an aphoristic-like technique. His writing is therefore characterized by an overwhelming intertextuality (and hypertextuality) which forces readers to explore a much more complex ground, against which single words or probes are set as three-dimensional figures to be read in depth. Intertextuality acts both within the very text (variations and repetitions of the same original concept) and outside it (juxtapositions of quotations and images from other texts or domains, implicit links with a broader set of sources, as well as with a broader context). Also, the brevity of each probe perfectly matches the attention span of today’s readers, which – statisticians tell us – is decreasing constantly. However, the density of the probe, its aphoristic and paratactic structure, as well as its connection to the paradoxical, aims to counterbalance its brevity by encouraging a deeper and more engaging investigation. It is not by chance that McLuhan also called these probes glosses, employing a term used in biblical exegesis to explain passages in the text, a term which was also used to indicate marginal notes in manuscripts and printed versions of texts both in the classic and the vulgar tradition. A probe or gloss is a dynamic rhetorical device envisaged as a textual addition that creates a series of related patterns of knowledge inside and outside the text itself. If readers read through the probe – that is, if they see it as a window opening on a broader (textual and contextual) landscape – they read in depth, investigating and discussing possible meanings, links, and further implications. If they skip from a probe to the next one quickly, they can just have fun and use the mosaic as a form of amusing diversion which, nevertheless, can induce unexpected associations and, in time, even understanding and knowledge. After all, humour was a favourite tenet of McLuhan’s form of communication.
Hence, to my mind, the probe or gloss constitutes the fundamental component of McLuhan’s mosaic. The probe is used to convey a broken knowledge as in the aphoristic tradition; even if it often sounds like a formula, it forces you to become an active player. It is comparable to one of the many fragments modernist writers forged against their ruin to respond to the coeval chaos, the frightening change they were witnessing. The probe is in effect McLuhan’s rhetorical device aimed at triggering intertextuality and operating as a link to other textual and contextual situations. Each probe introduces a set of apparently unrelated questions which are often conveyed in a paradoxical – and therefore provocative – way, and which readers are asked to explore. In time, McLuhan developed different types of probes, moving from traditional aphorisms to paratactic constructions involving also images, but the function of the probe remains the same: to provoke and engage the readers, and to encourage a different approach to situations by turning readers into ‘active players’ interfacing a substantial discontinuity.
The probe constitutes the functional tile of McLuhan’s mosaic; it is the smaller unit which is assembled to convey a pattern, to turn the fixity of the printed page into an acoustic experience. Those of you who were born in the age of the Internet will immediately appreciate the multimedia dimension of McLuhan’s printed page; but only a few among those who confronted McLuhan’s writing as early as the 1950s or early 1960s did: when approaching McLuhan’s mosaic style of writing, readers were in fact confronted by a page which no longer reassured ‘literate people,’ as it no longer translated the act of reading into an ordered or rational process. McLuhan’s pages no longer assimilated ‘utterance to the human body,’ a metaphor which returns us to a well-known entity. As Ong noted, traditionally texts
introduce a feeling for ‘heading’ in accumulations of knowledge: ‘chapter’ derives from Latin caput, meaning ‘head’ (as of the human body). Pages have not only ‘heads’ but also ‘feet,’ for footnotes. References are given to what is ‘above’ and ‘below’ in a text when what is meant is several pages back or farther on. The significance of the vertical and the horizontal in texts deserves serious study.8
McLuhan undertook such a study, combining his literary and his media studies; he reconceptualized writing in the light of technological and environmental shifts. If you think about it, investigating the meaning of ‘the vertical and the horizontal in texts’ demands that we question the point of observation, the perspective we adopt when approaching things; it concerns our involvement as readers. The page that resembles the human body is a page which we can observe as an outer landscape while keeping our inner landscape detached. Even better, it is a page which separates the knower from the known and induces introspectivity. This works very well if we conceive knowledge and wisdom as progressive accumulations of data which we can store for later usage. In this way, reading becomes an act of epistemological stock-taking, an activity that fits literate civilization. But such a linear approach to knowledge no longer works as well in the electric or in the digital age, where information overload renders total accumulation impossible. Consistently, McLuhan’s pages no longer resembled a human body: they lost the head and feet, and they lost their traditional ‘physicality,’ just as the ‘discarnate human beings’ of the electric age were losing their sense of body by extending their psyches into cyberspace.
Acting at the forefront of new technological revolutions, McLuhan’s mosaic develops from a different metaphor, no longer a biological one, but a technological one: the probe, a flexible object through which we can carry out explorations not only outside but also inside different bodies. Pages written around probes incorporate readers into the text’s landscape: readers of the mosaic are no longer external observers; they are inside the evolving picture. This means that readers do not have to approach McLuhan’s printed page as a thing, but rather as an event in which the act of reading is integral to a participation in the process of discovery. From the late 1960s, the hippie movement ‘got’ and celebrated McLuhan’s form of communication better than other audiences, the idea of ‘happening’ being at the core of its life philosophy. Needless to say, the appreciation coming from the countercultures of the young rebels did not contribute to the appreciation of McLuhan’s scholarly work; it only gave more emphasis to one of his most ambiguous and celebrated masks, that of the media guru. Instead, the probe is an element which leads to a more complex interaction, as it is through the probe that we are invited to enter the text: it is the interface between us and the broken knowledge in the text.
While the rhetorical questions that open each chapter of The Mechanical Bride play a similar role, it is not until The Gutenberg Galaxy that the probe is introduced as a fundamental component of McLuhan’s mosaic. In that book, probes are explicitly defined as ‘glosses’ and are particularly recognizable since they are juxtaposed with McLuhan’s discussions and visually framed as if they are independent from the main written corpus. This is a visual strategy that places the probes at once both inside and outside the text. This mode of juxtaposition is paratactic and analogical and forces the reader to look for connections among probes/glosses and between a probe/gloss and the previous/following paragraphs, or the previous/following quotations. Readers can decide to stop at the probe/gloss and work with it as if they were probing a riddle, pouring over its potentialities in depth, trying to unveil the aphoristic lines before moving forward (or backward). They can also read it as a textual continuum, or even jump from one probe/gloss to the next, skipping the more discursive parts.
Readers are encouraged to approach the book at their own speed and pleasure: they are free to jump across pages; they are not required to read the text in a sequential way. In other words, the text works horizontally, but also vertically and in depth – as if it were a sort of alphabetically conceived 3-D. This is possible thanks to the evocative power of the text consciously assembled by McLuhan. Readers can also open the book at random and start to speculate on the probe/gloss they find, just as they might open a book of psalms, aphorisms, riddles, or meditations. In other words, we are invited to contemplate, or speculate, or entertain ourselves with the text we find on the page. The difference between a conventional sequential page and McLuhan’s mosaic page is that the reader is sent to a ground that is not the abstract world of linear logic, or religion, philosophy, or wisdom, but the evolving, and by now far more tangible, electric world – which is currently our own blurring actuality. Readers are induced to approach the mosaic page and the world it relates to analogically and by indirect means. Such a world is not described in a didactic way. It is not offered as the content of the explorations (and, surprisingly enough, in The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan discusses mostly the complexity of the printing age, not of the electric age); instead, the mosaic page triggers a participatory (that is, inclusive) process. Irrespective of the content discussed, readers are engaged in an act of reading which aims to replicate the interactive modes pertaining to their new electric/acoustic environment. They are forced to move their eyes and minds in a non-linear way while exploring the effects of the printing age through the dynamic probes of the mosaic. By so doing, they train themselves to become active players of the electric and acoustic environment.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan recapitulates the probes/glosses at the very end of the book, in a sequence which can be perceived as an imagistic table of contents for the whole book. Readers could, in fact, work just on the probes/glosses listed at the end, juxtaposing them in order to trigger new speculations, and new understandings and knowledge. By so doing, readers are promoted to the role of co-creators. The aphoristic probes/glosses contained in the end section evoke all that is discussed in the book. The insightful silent reader can act as a storyteller and extend McLuhan’s production of meaning and knowledge. In this sense, the probes/glosses can be perceived not only as idea boxes but also as imagist one-liners and contextual puns, in the sense that Pound meant his cantos to be read. What is first hidden in the clever musicality opens itself, upon reflection, to a concrete representation of an idea. Upon reflection, we find out that the probes are not being juxtaposed according to a linear subordination, but instead are aimed at triggering associations.
Here is an example of one of McLuhan’s probes/glosses – or one-image poems – from The Gutenberg Galaxy. Once you read through it, you find yourself digging out an idea that explores the historical interface of orality and literacy:
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electric world.
A typical McLuhan probe, it immediately renders the cyclic vision of human history, as expressed by McLuhan himself in his grand narrative on media. It offers a good example of how he retrieves the metaphorical structure of language and plays with it. The terms, barbarian or tribal man, civilization, electric world, immediately evoke three different social constructs; they imply three different relationships between the individual and the environment, also denoting a different sensorial order. One fell swoop is: the world before the invention of the phonetic alphabet; the world after the phonetic alphabet and the printing press; the world after the commercialization of electricity. The passage from ear to eye indicates the passage from the ancient acoustic mode of perception – inclusive and simultaneous – typical of tribal society, to a sequential and linear one pertaining to literate Western society, now obsolete or no longer adequate to (at odds with) the electric environment (which, through its re-tribalization, is rediscovering acoustic and tribal dynamics). This probe (as all others) can therefore be figured out in depth, and used as a way to access a more complex ground. Also, in the Gutenberg book, the juxtapositions of various probes enables one to reconfigure the galaxy the author is probing, digging out the network of analogies and links which, all together, reveal ‘casual operations in history’:
Thus the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation – particularly in our own time.9
The juxtaposition of probes results in a progression of effects through its modernist montage; the title, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, offers its formal cause synthesis; it encapsulates McLuhan’s operative project and poetics, his probing of various ‘environments.’
McLuhan continued to elaborate on the probe as the core element of his mosaic, as well as of his form of communication. As a storyteller, he loved puns and one-liners, another way to condense meaning and to turn his audiences on. Consistently, in some of his books, the probe is formally conceived as a pun. It is structured as a witty ‘caption’ to immediately convey the psychodynamics triggered by the interplay of a new medium being introduced into a given environment; it is meant to immediately engage, provoke, and plug his readers into the text. It is, for instance, the case of his most famous books, The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, or of a less well know but equally as interesting volume, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, where puns and word games aim to induce in the reader a different attitude to learning, often touching the responsive chord of humour. Here are some examples of this (Joyce-like) playful attitude from Understanding Media: ‘Telegraph: the Social Hormon’; ‘The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol?’; ‘The Phonograph: The Toy that Shrank the National Chest’; ‘Movies: The Reel World’; ‘Radio: The Tribal Drum’; ‘Television: The Timid Giant.’ Still others from Take Today: ‘Postures and Impostures of Managers Past’; ‘Tribal Community to Magnetic City: Irresistible Force By-Passes Immovable Objects’; ‘Households to World Shopping Centres: The Real McCoy and Genuine Fakes’; ‘Tribal Chiefs and Conglomerate Emperors.’ These provocative titles can be read and enjoyed as more or less successful headings, but they can also be explored as aphorisms that describe cognitive, societal, and cultural changes, involving the new medium or the new environmental situation discussed in each chapter. They also bring together popular and more refined forms of cultural discourses, which are further explored and clarified in the chapters through a constant juxtaposition of various registers: from academic dissertations to anecdotic storytelling, from commercial-like one-liners to verbose quotations.10 The juxtaposition of different registers therefore is a carefully chosen rhetorical strategy which leads to a polyphonic ensemble piece, at once including, addressing, and engaging heterogeneous audiences. It is not a casual pastiche. McLuhan was thus pursuing the search of the great fool. As Shakespeare taught us, you must be ‘wise enough to play the fool’ because ‘This is a practice / As full of labour as a wise man’s art.’11 McLuhan forged his practice at the school of Athens and at Cambridge.
The paratactic juxtaposition of the various probes is developed through language, but also through drawings, images, headlines, and photographs; hence, the mosaic not only combines different registers, but also borrows from different communicative codes. Several among McLuhan’s later volumes retrieve a cubistic montage which turns the reader on to a simultaneous awareness of several vanishing points; and yet, these books are designed as provocative artefacts in which ideas and intuitions are offered through a witty terminology and through absolutist claims – after all, the ‘mosaic is the mode of corporate or collective image and commands deep participation.’12 In other words, in these books McLuhan’s mosaic style of writing is either a satirical or a humorous rendering of the very change (from point of view to tribal perspective) which he does not truly like. But here is the genius of McLuhan: his literate goal remains the same; the form he conceives and employs is aimed at a renewing of the literate strategy he pursues. This is especially true for the acoustic ‘pocket-books’ that the by then world-renowned Canadian media theoretician co-wrote, often in collaboration with celebrated graphic artists, and which were published throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Medium Is the Massage, War and Peace in the Global Village, Counterblast, and other volumes, have often been labelled as witty marketing ploys – weird artsy-fartsy products – reiterating ideas already stated in McLuhan’s earlier books. I think that this is a way to oversimplify the genesis of these volumes. Certainly, these probing graphic-text interfaces must be assessed in the light of the profitable marketing strategies McLuhan, the English professor, designed to disseminate his ‘media guru’s’ status worldwide. However, in a way, they are foretelling the graphic novel’s potential of disguising serious intellectual considerations as ‘pop-art’ explorations. Look closely at War and Peace in the Global Village and you will find in it strategies of communication predicting a net of analogies and cross-readings, as well as theories of art and of mass communication, that offer the reader a chance to become aware of the new media environment displayed on any Web page today. How did he do it? By writing about the strategies that will demand the same intense participation that reading in general will put on readers of commercial computer screens in a few short years. It is a percept that McLuhan addressed on various occasions and explored as one of his most fundamental tenets, combining his passion for literature and his understanding of media effects. It is a tenet he clearly expressed in the introduction to his sole academic volume, The Interior Landscape, a collection of his literary criticism: ‘The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thought but the structure of our world.’13 As every art critic now knows, interfacing new media of communication with older forms of art through iconic juxtapositions or through an associative montage is also an act that contains its own heuristic function.
In a similar way, the playful twist of a word can trigger not only humour but also knowledge and understanding, as the Freudian slip clearly indicates. McLuhan never conceives the triggered twist for its own sake or as ‘art for art sake,’ but as a strategy to introduce a progression of effects leading to a form that renews one’s general knowledge. For instance, the celebrated ‘the medium is the message/massage/mass-age/mess-age’ is a shifting pun that for McLuhan, as for Joyce, is not just a banal word game conceived to entertain readers. Instead, it is a multi-dimensional poetical attempt to reveal the interconnected pattern of forces acting inside the electric word of Finnegans Wake. As McLuhan often said, paraphrasing Eliot’s idea: a poem works on you while you are distracted by its content. Therefore, form is as important as content, and readers are to be made aware of the structure (ground) containing the story (figure). Hence, the medium is the message (the form of communication has a lasting impact on content); the massage (individuals who are not aware of such a process are invariably numbed by media); the mass-age (mass society produces new media and new agencies to mould individuals); and the mess-age (those who cannot see through the form of a medium inevitably misread and make a mess of its mediation). Think, for instance, of the perennial question concerning how violence is supposedly transferred from films or TV to audience: it’s an oversimplified correlation which is not conducive to a full understanding of the complex interplay among at least three main actors: audience, medium, and society. Violence does not pass from a medium to us as does a vitamin when we drink milk or fruit juice. Violence is a behavioural response to various environmental issues of which technology is one among many; violence relates to questions of identity, culture, education, and much more. Do you think that we will no longer have gun-shootings in our streets if we no longer show gangster movies? Emulation of borderline behaviours is a serious problem, but it is not simply by censoring movies shown on TV, on the Internet, or in theatres that we can solve it. Living in a more and more invasive digital mass age, it is mandatory for us to better understand the message of old and new media, as well as how they interface with each other. We have no choice; rather than fear our mediascape, we must engage with it. It is our rational and playful way of counterbalancing the otherwise phenomenally numbing massage we constantly receive; it is our way of being active ‘digital citizens’ and avoiding making a mess of what we could, instead, achieve through media. McLuhan proved that literature, being a function and not simply a subject, contributes to knowledge and understanding of evolving mediascapes, that is, of our own actualities. The truly active digital citizen cannot but be a literary literate.
It is true, though, that McLuhan’s best-selling pocket books were conceived to attract diverse audiences by making use of what was at the time an avant-garde technique (derived from cubism, Dadaism, graphic novels, and the ubiquity of pop art). Reinterpreted in this light, they are a media-mosaic of various artistic languages, including advertising, because ‘advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.’14 But in all these mass-market paperbacks, the printed page preserves and retains its role as the interface between image and the word, overlapping and enlightening each other in ways that facilitate an understanding of new cultural patterns. For instance, take War and Peace in the Global Village, designed together with the much sought after book designer and artist Quentin Fiore: its word/image interface is conceived to offer ‘an inventory of some of the current spastic situations that could be eliminated by more feedforward.’15 In it, McLuhan and Fiore examine the inevitable clash between Eastern and Western cultures forced to meet on the global village’s stage, and give shape to a new cultural hybridization and syncretism both linear and ideogrammatic. To render (but not ‘narrate’) the new cultural interfacing, it combines sensorial (or emotive) and cognitive dynamics. Each of the pages of War and Peace in the Global Village has a different outline, but together they form an asymmetric collage that readers are asked to read sometimes from left to right (as in Western literate culture), at other times from top to bottom (as in Eastern culture).
The authors of War and Peace in the Global Village are recreating their contemporary sensorial split between eye and ear by feeding-forward juxtapositions inherent to the culturally polyglot situation in the global village; they recreate inclusive and acoustic modes of perception by playing with the traditional outline, for instance, by forcing the reader to rotate the book itself in order to read it. At first it appears like a simple trick, which might annoy some readers, while amusing others; but it is nevertheless a trick which immediately conveys the overturning of previous sensorial situations while inducing a tactile and participatory (that is, an interactive) experience. What is particularly interesting in this book is the juxtaposition of different modes of perception and fruition, revealing how the acoustic post-literate games retrieve previous forms of orality and knowledge pertaining to cultural matrixes of the past. In most of its pages, in fact, the acoustic effect is obtained by dividing the printed text into vertical columns whose margins are decorated with images, annotations, and quotes from Finnegans Wake, suggesting the illuminated effect of ancient manuscripts (which, as I will later discuss, are themselves a sort of schizophrenic form, as they bring together dynamics pertaining to both the literate and the oral worlds). In War and Peace in the Global Village the columns are not embellished with hand-painted drawings but with photographs, illustrations, and excerpts from the text itself now used as post-literate marginalia (on both sides of the page) to all at once emphasize or enlighten concepts discussed in the main text. In other pages, the ratio between images and words is totally inverted: the latter blur and almost disappear, becoming minute but subtler aphorisms captioning overwhelming images. In such a composite mosaic, appropriate quotations from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake are treated like leitmotivs or insights to connect the self-contained fragments and engage readers in the production of new meanings. These Joycean quotes provide the feed-forward element that the authors use to counterbalance ‘current spastic situations.’ The quotes from Joyce, which appear as aphoristic, playful, evocative, and complex linguistic boxes, become here a tool employed to encourage readers to recompose the textual fragments and read them simultaneously and in depth. They also alert us like a running commentary to ongoing cultural changes. In effect, it becomes apparent by the end of the book that the authors themselves are offering their readers an alternate thread out of the labyrinth.
Looking through McLuhan’s mosaic makes us perceive it as a hybrid which brings together old and new forms of knowledge and communication, develops around verbo-voco-visual (that is acoustic) units called probes, and has a discontinuous structure engaging readers in an active process as co-producers of meaning. As a form of writing, the mosaic interfaces literacy and orality and turns them both into a different perceptual experience. The mosaic embeds post-secondary orality: it merges the secondary orality of new electronic media with the orality of pristine forms of knowledge based on a language now mediated through a literate form. But contrary to linear writing, the mosaic is designed to preserve depth and participation, urging readers to take action and not to passively follow what is offered in print. Interfacing is, in fact, an idea to whose development McLuhan himself contributed in an original way. David Sobelman, an independent filmmaker and scholar, writer of the insightful documentary McLuhan’s Wake, stresses in an early draft of his screenplay that there are four citations in the Oxford English Dictionary which identify McLuhan as their original user: structuring, retribalization, interface, and, of course, mcluhanism. In particular, Sobelman points out that McLuhan was the first to employ the term ‘interface’ in a specifically mcluhanesque context: ‘Interface is the meeting of two structures, or cultures, or conflicting technologies and the way they change each other.’16 The way they change each other is a key idea that in effect provides us with a background to McLuhan’s own probe of the passage from the eye to the ear – that is, ‘from linear to acoustic space’ – and that also indicates how he forged his own mosaic technique of investigation. In the mosaic, McLuhan’s literacy and orality meet and change each other. Consequently, his books would no longer be readable in a traditional way; as he often repeated,17 more than for a final discovery, they would have to be experienced as continuous processes of discoveries. Unfortunately, released into the consumer environment, the depth of McLuhan’s modus operandi was often blurred and perceived mostly as a series of clever or fuzzy one-liners (such as ‘I have a small brain but I intend to use it’ or ‘I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it’), jokes, or slogans. Oversimplified interpretation of his ‘messages’ contributed to his presentation as a former artsy professor, now a media ‘guru,’ in love with progress, change, and technology. Most of his interpreters, those who shared and those who rejected his ideas alike, did not grasp the figure in the carpet: they saw each figure as a world in its own. They make me think of my student reading only some pages out of a novel: he would know a lot about … nothing (‘The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty’).18 It took two decades for the evolution of the World Wide Web to realize the potentialities of McLuhan’s linguistic probes, as well as the complex structure and function of his mosaic. Today, his language can finally be assessed, in book form, on various Web sites and on YouTube, detached from the excessive emphasis, rivalries, and polemics which always accompanied the phenomenon of McLuhan.
Many are still puzzled by the paradox of asserting that the media guru or the oracle of the electric age should be retrieved as someone who experimented with and developed a new critical discourse and who developed a new form of writing. After all, it is McLuhan who did not hesitate to proclaim the end of literate civilization, and therefore the end of the book! And yet, the paradox can be easily overcome by reconsidering McLuhan’s use of the terms ‘literate/literacy’ and ‘book.’ First of all, recall that McLuhan did not use words to represent the world in a mimetic way, but worked upon language in order to render the ongoing cultural and societal processes through it. He adopted an imagist approach to language, not a referential one. Terms such as civiliztion and book must therefore be read through, as semantic boxes containing a broader set of concepts. Following Pound’s teaching, McLuhan used both terms to epitomize ‘an emotional and an intellectual complex in an instant of time.’ He used these terms to render modes of interaction and communication relating to a precise and complex environment that in his grand narrative, he defined as ‘the mechanic or Gutenberg age.’
The term civilization immediately recalls the idea of a complex human construct characterized by given anthropological, social, and cultural patterns. If we take the above into consideration, then expressions such as literate civilization or literate society can be understood as verbal icons referring to a society dominated by a linear and cumulative approach to knowledge. The related environment is perceived in terms of linear and visual space, that is, an idea of space which is clearly measurable through sight, which traditional literate media encourage and embrace. Consistently, McLuhan uses the image of the line to symbolize the perceptive and organizational modes of such a linear or literate civilization, as opposed to the ancient oral society, rendered through the image of the tribal circle. The same image – a line – is used to define the ensuing models for almost all discoveries, inventions, and products of the literate age as they accumulated between the Renaissance and the late nineteenth century: the uniform lines of the printed page; the equitone line in literature; the linear perspective in the visual arts; the line of the assembling chains in manufacturing industries; the logic or linear reasoning of modern philosophy until Kant. In McLuhan’s thought – as translated in his writings – book and literacy/literate are therefore images that immediately render the environment he was probing – an environment which the new electric media started to remodel from the middle of the nineteenth century, slowly inducing a sort of cultural schizophrenia, which McLuhan rendered through the expression ‘from the eye to the ear.’ This image immediately translates the passage from the mechanic to the electric cultural mode, that is, from linear (implying an atomistic visual approach to space) to acoustic (implying an oral space-time-oriented approach to duration). ‘From eye to ear’ is a one-liner which invites us to read in depth and grasp the complex implications of the passage from an old to a new space-time sensibility projecting us into an acoustic space we have to experience through our five senses.
In the new global village, Gutenberg’s fragmented man must reconvert himself into the integral tribal man; if not, his environmental perception will be numbed or schizophrenic, that is, it will be only partial, not integral. The book, nevertheless, remains but as one among other means of communication. To counter-fight obsolescence, though, the written page must be updated to new patterns, restoring a multi-sensorial – that is, no longer visually biased – perception. As early as 1959, in a lecture offered to the American Association for Higher Education, McLuhan anticipated that the book must adjust to include different experiences, namely, that ‘the future of the book is inclusive.’19 On that occasion, he discussed the various forms that the book had assumed in his time, pointing out that ‘poésie concrète’ inspired different uses of old printing techniques; he set the book against the new electric ground formed by radio and television and suggested that in the near future, children and students would learn more and more through apprenticeship and less and less through study. He was right. Today we know that the new cultural and technological context (the new verbomotor electric culture) preserves literacy and the book, but encourages them both to respond to their new electric ground; literacy and the book are literate figures which must adjust to a clear sensorial and environmental change, to a different ground. Ong, himself a professor of English interested in cultural phenomena, set out to convincingly prove that, in time of secondary orality, people are inevitably also retrieving a different approach to knowledge which presupposes ‘a kind of corporate retrospection,’ a renewed involvement in the learning process.20 After all, aren’t we tempted to define ourselves in terms of ‘tribes’? For sure, commercials rely on that. Secondary orality interfaces writing and orality, juxtaposes inner and outer worlds. It turns each of us into both a consumer and a producer of meaning: the prosumer in us is the trendy specimen whose habits and characteristics are now studied by media scholars and sociologists alike.
As a young professor meeting the new kids born in the post-radio years and now experiencing TV, McLuhan was constantly reassessing the meaning and function of education. In his role as a professor, he questioned the tools education should employ, and he interpreted the relation between teacher and pupils in terms of a dynamic cognitive interplay: learning by doing – apprenticeship – and not just learning by studying. It is now quite an intelligible and a relevant idea, which we can easily apply to later pedagogical tenets, as we learn from various approaches to media education existing today. Also, we are all becoming familiar with different typologies of new tools now at our disposal. These days, the electronic or the digital book is the latest specimen on the evolutionary technological chain of book as an object. As McLuhan clearly indicated in his Understanding Media, in the electric age, analytical thought gives way to analogical and syncretic thought, and the sequential line is replaced by the electromagnetic field.
The old medium stays around, but it is reshaped according to the new potentialities embedded by the new medium. As many of McLuhan’s probes attest, the old medium becomes the content of a new medium, which adapts, changes, and evolves. In the early twentieth century, the Italian futurist poet and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti invented the expression parole in libertà, literally ‘words in freedom.’21 On Marinetti’s futurist page, words were free to move and combine in a myriad of ways, resulting in a colourful montage of forms, dimensions, and sounds capturing the ‘speed’ and the ‘accelerated pace’ of the new environment; readers were invited to plug in and play through all their senses, not only through their eyes. The printed page was no longer a one-dimensional feast for the eyes; it became the interface for a more involving tactile experience. McLuhan’s ‘words in freedom’ aim to achieve a similar type of experience, and his mosaic style of writing becomes an interactive tool that teaches you by un-doing your linear expectations, that is, by letting you experience his mosaic-montage process and refusing to let you study him and his texts in a linear way. Learning from previous avant-garde movements, McLuhan understood that the written page had to become the interface through which the new electric simultaneity would reveal itself, and that at a time when hypertexts were but a speculative possibility among a limited group of researchers. Bush’s essay ‘As We May Think’ (1945), which is acknowledged by media scholars as a founding text in communication studies, was not popular yet, even though McLuhan might have known it. McLuhan worked with the language at his disposal, which he started to deconstruct and reassemble in a new creative, even artistic, modality. As already stated, he did not elaborate a linguistic theory, nor did he develop models for textual analysis similar to those later conceptualized by other schools of criticism. Instead, he experimented with language in the wake of new avant-garde interfaces – all experiments mediated through his solid humanistic tradition.
The paradox underpinning the elaboration of the mosaic style of writing is how to open the old medium – writing – to new media in a way that preserves the thought processes of the old medium itself. But it is, in turn, part of another paradox which is implicit in the very form of the electric media. Acoustic perception must, in fact, be expressed through a form which is inevitably (and here is the paradox) visually rendered and shaped. The electric age comes after the literate age; by necessity, according to McLuhan, it must take the literate age as its content. Individuals cannot cancel centuries of literacy – even if they think they can – because the orality induced by the new electric media is itself a literate secondary orality. Instead of asking the old question, Can Dick and Jane read? we now ask: are they media literate?
The new electric and electronic media are still dependent upon the written medium. As Ong reminds us: ‘The electronic age is also an age of “secondary orality,” the orality of telephones, radio and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence.’22 Secondary orality is a sort of ‘impure’ and ‘hybrid’ orality, since both writing and printing stay as fundamental components of the new technological language. It is, in fact, a parole or spoken language determined by acoustic and tactile means. Secondary orality is so called because by its very nature or ‘physiology’ it is both spoken-as-written and/or written-as-spoken. It is the related interplay of speech and text, that is, the perceptive dynamics which take place between media and their users on the computer screen; or when text-messaging; or when activating applications through image and touch on i-phones. The acoustic aspect, as implied by McLuhan, means the remodelling of the environment by turning it from a visual bias to an oral bias even while using, at the same time, older media as fundamental components of the ongoing communicative process: old media integrate into new media and are re-elaborated into new combinations and hybrids. Old media don’t die; they just fade into the background of new media. Hence, an old medium does not disappear; on the contrary, the new medium often enhances the old medium’s subtler properties, which have so far been neglected because of standardized use.
This is another paradox which relates to McLuhan’s well-known idea of the rear-view mirror effect. A new environment (meaning here the complex set of interactions which take place between media and individuals) not only enables us to fully see the previous environment, but it becomes itself the ground upon which the old medium is then turned into a renewed figure. The old environment is therefore retrieved and turned into an observable content. The reverse of this coin is, of course, that because of the rear-view mirror effect, we risk seeing the old ground, now behind us, more easily than the new figure, until that figure itself becomes the old ground. Imagine it this way, as McLuhan did in his perennial best-seller, Understanding Media: thought is the content of speech; speech is the content of written words; written words are the content of books; novels (sequential narratives) are the content of movies; movies are the content of television.
Now imagine the kind of change digital access will bring to analog content, causing a convergence that will mediate the total mediascape into the content of thought. That is no longer the world of secondary orality. Electric media retrieve both the alphabet and the printed word and include them in the newly convergent post-secondary orality: this is, in fact, our new evolving ground. Through the digital, we are shifting from secondary orality to post-secondary orality. What is now done in digital hypertexts, McLuhan had already started doing on the printed page. His discontinuous mosaic form of writing was what showed me, in 1996 when I first read Gutenberg Galaxy, the new potentialities inherent in the old linear medium of print. Released and freed from a too rigid structure imposed by the mechanics of print culture, words can retrieve ancient heuristic properties linked to ancient societal constructs and systems of knowledge. Today, we are on the brink of these new heuristic potentialities, which are emphasized and retrieved by new forms of media that seem to enhance participation in process more than privacy and detachment, albeit in vicarious ways.
McLuhan was not around when the Internet turned planet Earth into a connected globe. But he read Norbert Weiner on cybernetics and understood that the electrified command and control of the computer age would preserve the book nonetheless. He grasped what the new form would do to communication studies, and reconfigured its effects and how it would launch the electric tribal circle. Adopting and adapting strategies derived from modernist explorers, he transformed his printed pages into crafty radars detecting and revealing the electric simultaneity. The mosaic style of writing is a form of writing that is an open skill. It encourages deep participation, whereby readers are asked to fill in the gaps, so that both knowledge and ignorance play a role in the process. McLuhan’s bold associations make resonate both what we know and what we do not know. It is the application of Bacon’s broken knowledge to electric simultaneity, mediated, in turn, through modernist techniques. The mosaic rhetorical strategies are employed to convey the complexity of generating knowledge. If we do not play according to the rhetorician’s intention, we behave like I.A. Richard’s mathematicians and turn the implicit paideia into a trivial version of Reader’s Digest.
A similar risk is always present when exploring the World Wide Web: we jump from a fragment to the next one, but if we do not make the interval resonate, we flatten our understanding and turn knowledge into information; we also tend to oversimplify complex issues, and neglect history or the nature of our stratified memories. We must look for the archetype in McLuhan’s communicative process if we want to preserve an independent critical attitude, something which is, in fact, the greatest challenge in a world saturated by hyper-reality and corporate simulacra. In the late 1950s, McLuhan suggested that in order to counterbalance the side effects of media already active outside the classroom and turning students into ‘consumers,’ the ‘co-authors’ of information and knowledge – teachers and scholars – should no longer be ‘the source of data but of insight.’23 Consistently, his probes do not translate data, but the dynamics underpinning the probing process, of which the mosaic is the interactive playground. While engaging with the mosaic, we learn by apprenticeship, by doing, that is, in an interactive mode.
Post-secondary orality is the world in which human beings are dematerialized and rematerialized, or, better, mediated through technological interactivity: touch screens popularize new ways of interfacing organic and inorganic components; digital design creates artificial landscapes we experience physically in 3D. In such an environment, to learn often means to also have fun. If we approach McLuhan’s mosaic as a post-secondary orality device, we realize that, in fact, it is the precursor of today’s interactive languages: through it we, too, can materialize and dematerialize ideas and environments. But, most importantly, through the mosaic we can also experience McLuhan’s own persona, while at the same time playing with all his masks at once: the oracle, the guru, the modernist, and the techno-fan. Depending on the mask we focus upon, a probe will appear as either a formula, or an interval, or a fragment, or a link to his material body, to his complex discourse. But, if you think of it, each of these terms is nothing but a synonym for a tessera, a piece of the mosaic which acquires meaning when juxtaposed with all others. Let’s now probe the mosaic through McLuhan’s various masks. In the end, we will learn that it is the written body which preserves McLuhan in the present, tying all his discarnate versions to the solidity of his own evocative verbo-voco-visual words.