In an essay written for a new volume on modernism,1 I suggested the advantages of cross-reading media studies and literary studies in order to better understand certain aspects of cultural phenomena pertaining to the early twentieth century. In that essay, I offered an overall approach to some modernist poetics in the light of the study of the new communication technologies of the time (telegraph, telephone, radio, as well as the new journalism and the press approached as objective correlatives of electricity and of electric media). I adopted an interdisciplinary approach inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of both literature and society. The underpinning intention in my essay was to convince colleagues that not only was McLuhan’s literary criticism quite good and still neglected, but that the Canadian thinker had also fully explored the pivotal role both literature and the arts have to play within a high-tech society. Remember: from subject to function. I wanted to discuss how, in McLuhan’s hands, the humanities had regained a gnoseological function outside of their most traditional domain, something which is particularly needed at a time of information overload. As well, I wanted to demonstrate that McLuhan had not only read and understood Pound or Joyce, but also, most importantly, he had turned their aesthetic achievements into effective tools to explore and grasp the implications of [their] action and of new knowledge in [their] own time. I hope I struck a chord there.
In the following chapters, my goal is somewhat similar, as I hope to convince not only literary scholars, but also media theorists, of the literary origins of McLuhan’s ideas on media, that is, of the literary origins of media studies as per McLuhan. This does not simply mean recalling McLuhan’s training as a professor of English, or his love of literature and the arts; instead, it implies a deeper understanding of the role that literature played in the making of McLuhan as a ‘media oracle/guru/modernist/fan’ (your choice, of course, but if you stay with one mask, you will miss the whole persona). In particular, it implies a different take on avant-garde literature: to understand it as a tool conducive to the development of a new way to approach and perceive both the history and the actuality of McLuhan’s media studies.
To someone from outside, as I am, media studies, as both a field of research and a discipline, still appears to be a work in progress. As recently as 2003, in the very useful volume A Companion to Media Studies, editor Angharad N. Valdivia defines it as
the dynamic interdiscipline of Media Studies … Media Studies is a relatively new interdiscipline, roughly dating back to the 1920s as a set of studies and the fifties as a ‘formal discipline’ … The contemporary situation is such that as an interdisciplinary field, Media Studies has no easy boundaries or parameters. It draws on some of the more established disciplines both in the humanities and the social sciences such as history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and literature. Media Studies also has great overlaps with newer disciplines and interdisciplines such as cultural studies, popular culture studies, film studies, American studies, journalism, communication, speech communication, education, and ethnomusicology, to name a few.2
To many, the above might sound like an evolving epistemological chaos. To others, it might appear as the final accomplishment of cross-hybridization inside the humanities. Somehow, it seems very much in tune with some of the dynamics pertaining to our own global village today, at least in terms of overlapping of previous boundaries, cross-fertilization and contamination of cultural phenomena, as well as – why not – marketing of new approaches to old issues. And yet, such a blurred situation needs to be translated into university curricula, syllabuses, and all that makes media studies a popular but also a recognizable field of investigation, production, and expertise within higher educational systems. Bravely enough, some scholars have in fact started to canonize texts in media studies, trying to provide a historical view or some kind of order to the magma. The works of Marshall McLuhan are often quoted among the reference sources, accompanied, in turn, by praise or criticism.
As stated in the Prologue, this book is not about what McLuhan said, and I will not venture into an analysis of the fortune of his media investigations by providing a gallery of the most recent takes on his work. However, I will make a single exception and quote from the volume Canonic Texts in Media Research, also published in 2003, as a good example of the way in which McLuhan is often read: his literary roots are fully acknowledged but not investigated as a staple of his media theories, and even though Joshua Meyrowitz’s essay on McLuhan certainly is the most articulated one written in recent years, it nevertheless is introduced and simplified by the editors through the specific approach of technological determinism. In general, what the above mentioned volume does offer is a good and an interesting (I imagine that some critics would instead use the word arguable) overview of the texts and the schools that have created media studies in the twentieth century: the Columbia School, the Frankfurt School, the Chicago School, British Cultural Studies (or the School of Birmingham), and, of course, the Toronto School. What interests me in this study, however, is the way in which the editors introduce the work of Marshall McLuhan since it enables me to tackle the most famous interpretation of McLuhan’s approach to media studies – technological determinism – and to try to deconstruct it in and through literary terms.
In their introduction to the section dedicated to the Toronto School, the editors of Canonic Texts in Media Research recall that
Marshall McLuhan entered media studies through a side door and stormed onto center stage. A scholar trained in English literature, he shifted from an initial interest in media content to put all his weight on form (of which his Cambridge mentors might approve) and on technology. By ‘the medium is the message,’ the best known of his aphorisms, he meant that the dominant medium of each age uniquely constrains the ways in which our brains process information, which, in turn, shapes our personality and our social system.3
I will later engage with the idea that McLuhan entered media studies ‘through a side door.’ Although in principle I agree with this statement, which recalls McLuhan’s humanistic background as a starting point of his media studies, what bothers me here is the word uniquely in the sentence discussing the famous aphorism. If not otherwise commented upon, it inevitably reinforces the idea of McLuhan’s technological determinism. In principle, I resist this association, as I have discussed elsewhere.4 What I want to add here is that, in the particular case of McLuhan, that label does not convince me for several reasons: it reduces the complexity of his works to a linear interpretative cliché; it appears as a strategy developed by critics in response to the lack of a direct political engagement in McLuhan’s media analysis, so that his neutral works can be used for different causes (not a negative strategy per se, but one which might encourage misinterpretations); it implicitly creates a persistent bias of seeing McLuhan as a media or techno-fan, convinced of the goodness of technological progress. Instead, I think that McLuhan was more an artsy-fan or even an artsy-geek, not at all in love with technology but a skeptic. He employed his literary studies as a counter-environment to better focus on both the functions and the side effects of a too much celebrated technological progress.
Come to think of it, the very idea of technological determinism draws upon a mechanical vision of the world based on a clear and direct relation between cause and effect; that is, it draws on an assumed linear progression of knowledge and understanding. For a man who was developing a new field approach to knowledge based on simultaneity and inclusiveness, a man familiar with the works of Heisenberg and who appreciated his principle of indeterminacy, technological determinism appears as a definition that is too reductive. Certainly, McLuhan based his grand narrative of media on the analysis of the impact of the so-called dominant medium – generally a technology of communication – as a leading factor which conditions both individuals and society; and yet, if we carefully read his explorations, that simply cannot be considered as the factor uniquely shaping both our personalities and our social system. The fact that he considered communication in terms of transformation and not transportation could be interpreted as encouraging a deterministic approach to technology; however, McLuhan himself often repeated that it is the environment that changes people, not the technology.5 Technology is one of the factors (a figure) which constitute the environment (the ground), the environment being a dynamic setting for interrelated processes.
The case of the printing press – the medium which dominates McLuhan’s observations in The Gutenberg Galaxy – is, in fact, quite an interesting one with which to assess the idea of a dominant medium and therefore question how technological determinism works. For instance, the same applied technology, the printing press, led to different effects in the Eastern and in the Western worlds due to their different societal constructs; that is, it led to the existence of different environmental settings, each employing a different approach to literacy. In China, paper was invented and used earlier than in the Western world, and, similarly, the first mobile type were created in China in the eleventh century. But the nature of the Chinese alphabet characters conditioned the reception of such a technology, and it never became a ‘dominant’ medium as it did in the Western world, where a small number of letters of the phonetic alphabet could be easily combined into clear-cut words suited to the printing press. The complexity of the thousands of ideograms and symbols in Chinese, whose combination required a different strategy and interplay, did not contribute to making the printing press a popular technology for quite some time. A different type of alphabet and a different type of societal construct created a different environment, in turn affecting the development of a new technology (the printing press).
The idea of a dominant medium is therefore relative and not universal; it depends on the society in which a given technology is used, as well as on which other technologies are already in use, something which per se undermines the idea of technological determinism tout court. In addition, even when a medium becomes dominant inside a given society, that medium is not necessarily what uniquely constrains us as individuals and as a group. A technology, even when it is the dominating one, acts in synergy with a series of factors which, in turn, condition its reception and affect its permanence as a dominant medium. It seems to me that, more than a linear cause/effect approach, McLuhan used the technological variable to discuss what might be termed as the grey or hybrid zones, that is, the areas of passage from one given model of society to another. His idea of interface is in fact associated with the idea of ‘hybrid energy’ released by the meeting of two or more old/new media. (Remember? ‘The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.’)6 In particular, he investigated the moments in history when two or more dominant media overlapped and inevitably changed each other. He also used art and literature to work out such grey or hybrid zones by showing how, through their work, artists and writers had often anticipated the complexity of change in relation to the wide spectrum of potential side effects associated with a new technology operating inside a given environment. Again, his was not a linear approach, but a field approach to situations, that is, an approach which is characterized by the ideas of networking, complexity, variables, and accidents or chance. His explorations were ‘a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation – particularly in our own time.’7
As I have discussed when introducing the mosaic, McLuhan’s field approach was translated into probes which were conceived to condense the complexity of observation into a brief statement which is, in fact, based on a broken knowledge. However, probes can be (and often have been) read, not as portable thought or knowledge, but as linear statements and, therefore, as absolute statements.8 If we read a probe as an isolated figure, we can certainly translate McLuhan’s thought in terms of cause/effect and therefore apply a deterministic bias to it. Again, much depends on our approach to the text, as well as on our approach to knowledge. Even when discussing what he defined as ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy,’ McLuhan did not pursue a direct and logical discussion of the effect of print on humankind; his ‘absolutist statements’ are in fact probing aphorisms. He discusses the processes which led from orality to literacy, the way such processes affected thoughts, politics, and imagination through time, and the interesting in-between zones bringing together different models of society. He approaches the latter consistently as complex environments which in part integrate and in part overlap, until one becomes more successful, consolidates, and is fully visible – a fact which does not imply that the other necessarily disappears, as it can instead adjust or adapt to the new one.9 Technological evolution is perhaps a better word than mere determinism; even though it is a process of selection (which, in the case of technologies, combines natural and artificial factors), evolution also accommodates various possibilities, from adaptation to co-evolution, from co-operation to speciation. These are terms which suggest a broader interplay and networking than mere ‘determinism.’
At the core of The Gutenberg Galaxy there is, then, the intention to probe evolving environmental situations, starting with a new and complex paradigm of investigation: technology. But technology itself is here understood, not as a thing or as an object, but as a process deriving from and presenting all at once various communicative, social, and political variables pervading the human domains. Technology so understood becomes a dynamic concept which does not exist in a vacuum but pertains to society at large, depending on time-and-space factors. The concept of technological grey or hybrid zones therefore constitutes a counter-environment to the idea of technological determinism, as it encourages the idea of the cross-reading of technological discoveries and cultural matrixes. For instance, when discussing the passage from orality to literacy (in The Gutenberg Galaxy, as well as in all his later books), McLuhan focuses on the role played by manuscripts to accommodate an old medium (language, speech) in the new one (literacy), in turn, translating the development of different forms of society (pre-literate/literate, Middle Ages / Renaissance). McLuhan’s observations are based not only on the object per se, but also on the services it engendered as an innovative form of communication and knowledge. The manuscript is therefore presented as an example of a communicative tool merging two environments: a written text (literacy) was read aloud (orality) in monasteries or at courts, to educate or entertain people. And yet, the manuscript also created a more intimate approach to reading, as individuals could also be introduced to the pleasure of intimate readings, to a private interaction with this medium. The printing press made this possibility (private reading) available on a larger scale, accelerating a process which had already started in the Western world. Through time, the interplay of this technology with other environmental situations is what brought long-term effects on both individuals and groups. Literacy became a powerful instrument inside religious and secular institutions alike; as Innis wrote in his Empire and Communication, means of transports and new infrastructures contributed to the spread of literate empires through either space or time; in modern times, in commerce and war alike, literacy was a crucial element. It’s a complex network of forces, not just a medium, which shapes, through time, personalities and social systems, mentalities and sensibilities. Always remember that, as a grammarian, McLuhan used language and words as ‘complex systems of metaphors,’ that is, as an evocation of experiences and processes. To forget that leads to a flattened understanding. As he wrote in The Gutenberg Galaxy: ‘The oral polyphony of the prose of Nashe offends against lineal literary decorum.’10
McLuhan’s investigations appear to be even less deterministic when applied to the electric era, presented as a passage in progress in which he himself was living at the time, conscious of the fact that individuals were now crossing another grey zone: new environmental patterns (post-orality, electric age) were approached through old and more familiar ones (literacy, mechanical age). In his works, McLuhan introduces the new perceptive modes brought by the new technologies which were quickly becoming the ‘dominant’ media of his time, but he does not explain them in terms of cause and effect only. On the contrary, he often points out that he was simply probing the effects, which, he insisted, always precede the cause.11 It is both a provocative thought and one which undermines the idea of technological determinism. If the dominant medium (a given technology) was what ‘uniquely constrains the ways in which our brains process information’ and then determines our personalities and social systems, we could easily foresee in a clear linear way what comes next (we know the cause and anticipate the effects). Instead, the technological variable assists in introducing new environmental situations. We can only understand these by probing a complex network of forces which we perceive first in terms of effects (what is immediately visible) and, only later, in terms of their hidden pattern. The oracle of the electric age offered his own explorations, his own intuitions, through a form which was often interpreted as ultimate or absolutist, that is, through clear-cut, provocative concepts. He wrote and spoke as a grammarian, but was read and interpreted as a dialectician: from archetypes to clichés, that is, to commonplaces understood as ‘collections of sayings (in effect formulas) on various topics.’ As in the case of the oracle’s audience, the process of interpretation is no longer in the hands of the seer. As McLuhan himself stated in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, it is the audience that must choose a side and decide if his ‘whole fallacy is wrong’; and, rightly so, in that movie his pun was addressed to the character of a young professor at Columbia who is trying to impress a young lady with a linear interpretation of McLuhan’s acoustic probes. Can you square a circle?
To define McLuhan’s media studies in terms of technological determinism could also be interpreted as a way to classify someone who never associated media research with political thinking in an explicit way, at a time when politicization was generally assumed. Not only ‘love’ but also ‘ideology’ was in the air in the 1960s and 1970s. From the beginning, media studies were associated with a broader take on society in relation to political agendas or interpretations. The media industry was at the core of the different approaches, be it to investigate the new social systems in terms of audience attitude and behaviours, mass impression, propaganda, or societal bonds. Ideology was often at play, and media studies were a way not only to assess the making of the new world societies, but also to position or support in political discourses across the political spectrum. As we saw, McLuhan himself was tempted to take sides when he began to apply ‘the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society.’ In his preface to The Mechanical Bride, he introduced a moral approach to his explorations, as he sets out to reveal the way in which various agencies ‘manipulate, exploit, control’ old and new audiences. The confession is encapsulated in a few initial pages, but thereafter he never returns to the topic in such an explicit way, as many critics acknowledge. In all his later volumes, and especially in those which made him famous worldwide (The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media), McLuhan simply ventured into the new media world with no clear party bias as an intellectual. His approach to media was as neutral as possible, as objective as possible: from Dos Passos’s political commitment to Joyce’s universalism. His strategy of exploration took into account the humanistic tradition, not to win consent, but to invite his readers to enquire, as Bacon said, farther. Biographers and critics agree that McLuhan never discussed his political ideas nor his religious beliefs in front of an audience or in his works. The only exception is perhaps to be found in an essay written in 1934 when he was a young student at the University of Manitoba, of which Philip Marchand has offered an account.12 Later in his career, when pressured to comment on political issues or on political thinkers, McLuhan twisted his comments more to communicative issues than to ideological ones. For instance, he mentions Karl Marx, not to discuss if he was right or wrong, but to compare two modes of observation: ‘Marx was looking in the rear-view mirror of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I’m looking in the rear-view mirror of Joyce, Carroll, the Symbolists, Adolph Hildebrand. They related the sensory life of metamorphosis and transformation in contact with new technology.’13 As on many other occasions, he avoids discussing political or economic issues in detail, using instead his literary roots to counterbalance all possible implications and shifting his focus to the environmental analysis. Needless to say, the so-called ‘engaged critics’ never forgave him.
Despite biographers’ acknowledgment that in private McLuhan’s ideas were close to those expressed by conservatives, in recent years some North American scholars have attempted a sort of methodological reconciliation between Marxist thinking and McLuhan’s. For instance, in his seminal book Method Is the Message, Paul Grosswiler suggests some similarities between McLuhan’s explorations and Marx’s dialectic; in particular, Grosswiler has presented ‘some points of convergence between McLuhan and the Frankfurt School,’14 something which, as we will later see, Umberto Eco also postulated when reviewing the Italian edition of The Mechanical Bride. Grosswiler positions both experiences inside a type of intellectual continuum which brings together authors as diverse as McLuhan, Marx, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Mark Horkheimer, as well as the new generation of postmodern critics in the wake of Jean Baudrillard. Among the many merits of Grosswiler’s volume is the working out of the ‘serendipitous collision of McLuhan and Marxism,’15 as that opens up new and refreshing critical discourses that our time perspective now allows. However, Grosswiler insists that in his last volumes, McLuhan’s approach to Marx appears to be more articulated than what was normally understood, and that McLuhan’s judgment on Marx’s political thought is never entirely negative. But if there is not an assessment of Marx’s ideology in McLuhan’s writing – in Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, McLuhan does not discuss Marxism as an ideology, but as a historical product of a series of dynamics of which technology is one – it is not so important to speculate on McLuhan’s political take on Marxism; it seems more interesting to focus the investigation on possible points of convergence of their ‘visions’ of environmental processes so as to work out more refined patterns of ‘causal operation in history.’ Marshall McLuhan did not go political in public; as a result, he remains a challenging battleground for all those who want to win him for one cause or the other post mortem. We continue to put the masks we love best on him. And, after all, this is also what explains why he still is a fascinating figure.
When I first approached McLuhan’s writings, I myself was not comfortable with the lack of a clear and open political discourse in his media observations. It simply did not seem right precisely because of the complexity of the historical background in which he was living, and also because of the tremendous role media had been playing in conditioning both public debates and the agendas of various establishments worldwide. I also thought that McLuhan’s neutrality could damage his own fortune among media scholars and a general audience alike, not only because everybody might try to claim him as the champion of very different causes simultaneously, but also because it might foster the accusation of nihilism, with negative consequences for his own studies on media and for media studies at large. What is the point if you do not demonstrate how to use media to foster a cause, settle societal processes, or encourage active participation of audiences and citizens? I myself got trapped into various McLuhan masks and lost sight of his whole persona. Taking a step back and assessing McLuhan’s works as a media scholar through the literary variable has helped me reconcile with his ‘apolitical’ thought and to realize that he was taking another road, maybe a much more needed one – so much so that, at present, I think that McLuhan was, instead, very political, but he never was ideologically so. I’m retrieving here the Greek origin of the word ‘politics’: ‘politiké,’ meaning ‘pertaining to the city,’ and combining the terms polis – city – and tèchné – art. Originally, to be political meant embracing the art of taking care of the public sphere, a social commitment of encouraging participation and pursuing the public good.
McLuhan was a Thomistic Catholic; he knew St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica very well. St Thomas pursued his faith, and his search for truth led him to various traditions: Roman, Greek, Muslim, and Jewish philosophers are all part of his network of references. Aquinas was never ideologically biased because he considered himself on a mission transcending human materiality. McLuhan followed a similar approach when venturing into media studies. Contrary to most intellectuals of the time, he did not pursue media studies as an area encouraging ideological speculations on public uses of media (and especially of the newest medium of his time, television). Rather, his definition of media is based on their intrinsic operational aspects, their function, and not on the relationship between medium and power (be it political, consumerist, or sociological). I am convinced that this neutral approach has contributed to the reading of McLuhan’s works in terms of technological determinism. The way I see it, to think of technology primarily in terms of operative processes, of function and functionality, is not necessarily an apolitical or an ahistorical operation. It is, instead, a preliminary and fundamental step towards assessing both its potentialities and limits for then employing the acquired knowledge to achieve public good. It is, therefore, an epistemological approach preparing the ground for a deeper understanding of the possible short- and long-term usages associated with a given medium.
Understanding the characteristics of new and old technologies and their mutual interplay may also lead to speculations about the related psychodynamics involving individuals and groups sharing the environment reshaped through those very technologies. In this context, to probe means to work out hypotheses which can be either proven or disproven, especially if one acts, not as a technological determinist, but as an explorer of environments. It is a way to be with it, to be with the situation you are exploring with no a priori bias. You do not impose an abstraction on the situation you are probing; nor do you impose a preconceived notion or a point of view or an ideology on it. What you do instead is an interchange, as your point of view is modified by the interplay with environmental dynamics. Remember? ‘If you have a point of view, it means that you have already mastered the situation … You have already abstracted it, and angled it.’16 When dealing with new technologies, you must be prepared to accept the approximation of your viewpoint, its incompleteness and indeterminacy. As a media theorist, McLuhan accepted such an approximation and used language to probe a network of possible side effects, to be later experienced, tested, exploited, or rejected. By so doing, he established a strategy which might prove useful to envisage a set of technological and cultural possibilities inside a society. To assess them by analysing which ones were in fact adopted or refused, as well as by whom, how, when, and for what purposes, might become another way to add a dimension of insight to the whole process.
To fully understand the nature of technology also puts one in a better position to evaluate the invisible aspects linking dominant media and political, cultural, and sociological agendas. First, learn the structure and operational mechanisms of the medium (meaning that you do not take sides pro or against, but rather acknowledge its existence and functions), then set it against its social and political context and decide how to employ your knowledge. ‘When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.’17 We need to master both that shift and that translation. It is a process comparable to learning a new language: you need to learn some basic principles (sounds, vocabulary, grammar) in order to master it at your pleasure and in your own original way. The development of new media modifies our environmental langage in terms of new potentialities as well as new limits; each time, we have to agree on the langue translating the new set of communicative tools and mould our own parole, as individuals, as well as groups:
Nobody yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.18
This very statement is more consistent with the idea of indeterminacy than with the idea of determinism. We know that new media will affect society, but we do not know how, when, and for how long that will happen. As in all evolutionary processes, we know that our predictions might be either confirmed or disproven, the variables being innumerable. And if this is true for the natural world, it is even truer for the hybrid and artificial worlds which human beings continue to forge, the human factor always being the most unpredictable of all variables, especially when acting in a more and more complex technological setting.
While remaining on a neutral ground and avoiding explicit political judgment, McLuhan nevertheless played with the political variables by relating them to the new media language and function. He elaborated provocative and playful statements which make more sense today than when they were uttered. We are looking at them through the rear-view mirror and can historicize them in the light of our experience with some of the media which McLuhan approached as a pioneer. Just one example will help to better understand what I mean. Imagine that it is 1954, the year of Joe McCarthy’s official defeat but still a time when a lot of people were seriously working to keep the Western bloc safe and the Red Scare under control. How would you then react when reading what McLuhan wrote that very year in his first version of Counterblast, namely: ‘We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx.’19 And how do you react now?
The idea of McLuhan’s objective detachment as a media explorer still puzzles critics, and even more so if his works are not interpreted in terms of technological determinism. McLuhan lived through at least four complex decades which changed the world (he witnessed a world war, the Cold War years, the 1960s and the 1970s with all what those years implied). Could it really be possible that he did not have his own political agenda as a media phenomenon, as well as a media theorist? Was it really possible to stay neutral and detached given those political, cultural, and social revolutions and counter-revolutions? Consider this well: nearly all the modernist writers whom McLuhan took as his masters had in effect been engaged with the politics of their time, and often in a very direct if not disturbing way. So why cannot we deduce that McLuhan had an agenda of his own? After all, he was a converted Catholic, and he wrote about religion and religious issues in relation to social issues in private letters, as well as in several essays now collected in his posthumous The Medium and the Light (1999). He considered God a constant presence which resonated within him. As a converted atheist (that is, as someone who has followed the reverse path, from inborn Catholicism to rational secularism), I would welcome an investigation of the religious subtext of McLuhan’s literary and media writing, as well as its impact on his world vision. Certainly, it would not be an easy quest, though, due to McLuhan’s sophisticated understanding of theological issues and the complexity of his network of analogies.
In particular, McLuhan admired the work of thinkers who, even though they were writing from inside the Church, still had a controversial relation with it, precisely for their intellectual challenge to dogmatic issues. Apart from St Thomas Aquinas, McLuhan appreciated the writing of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his attempt to combine theology and evolutionism, that is, religious and scientific thought; consistently, he also was a great connoisseur of Jacques Maritain’s philosophical thought, clearly rooted in St Thomas Aquinas. And, most importantly, McLuhan understood media as processes long before others. All these elements could work well to introduce not only the idea of McLuhan as the chief evangelist of the electric (and TV) age, but also the idea of an electric (and TV) evangelism underpinning his various probings. Cronenberg’s representation of McLuhan as Doctor O’Blivion in Videodrome hints at that, through a powerful though deceiving rendering of the media guru mask, as we will see in the final section of this book.
Yes, if I bring religion into the picture, I do have some doubts about McLuhan’s neutrality, because he was a truly political Thomist; however, I cannot find any explicit political (nor religious) commitment or judgment in McLuhan’s work after those two early pages introducing his Mechanical Bride. What I do constantly find instead are endless references to all sorts of books – sociological, historical, economical, anthropological ones – with a clear preference for literary texts. William Shakespeare opens The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Alexander Pope ends it. Also, all these writers do not stand as clever decorations to a text discussing the impact of new technologies on the making of either the mechanical or the electric age; rather, they stand as key sources for understanding the complex processes underpinning cultural and technological passages. If thinking of McLuhan as a technological determinist counters our puzzlement about his non-ideological commitment, thinking of him as a humanist retrieves the heuristic potentialities of literature. To me, it offers a broader understanding of both the messenger and the message.
Finally, to define McLuhan in terms of technological determinism also permanently casts him as an enthusiast of media or techno-fan; while it might imply political neutrality, it does not imply technological neutrality. Most critics seem, in fact, to assume that, being a technological determinist, McLuhan was in favour of technological progress. He was not, but the assumption is that if you discuss something again and again, you are in favour of it. We have obsessions and we have passions. New technologies were one of McLuhan’s obsessions, but they were not one of his passions. On the contrary, he often repeated that he did not favour change, especially technological change. He was not on good terms even with those daily commodities and technologies which have consolidated the North American dream; he did not even drive. His interest in technology was a consequence of his interest in literature (especially of modernist literature), that is, of his curiosity as an intellectual who had consciously chosen to explore what there was outside a safer ivory tower. Those who interpret such an interest and such a curiosity as enthusiastic responses to technological change are seeing McLuhan through their own eyes: no matter whether they read it as a positive or as a negative thing, it never was a fact.
McLuhan’s encounter with new forms of communication started with Mallarmé and the symbolist poets, and continued with Joyce and the other modernist writers. He was fascinated by their attempts to elaborate words to render their own reality so as to match the new spirit of their time, a spirit inscribed inside an unprecedented and overwhelming technological change. New scientific discoveries were unveiling exciting possibilities, and they were blasting most established certainties. New applied technologies were triggering other ways of being together, offering a wider audience the possibility to be at the centre of the communicative process as both senders and receivers, as never before. In other words, the world was moving on, and the avant-garde writers and artists were trying to master what they perceived as a lasting schizophrenic situation, an uncanny dissociation of sensibility, as Eliot put it: change was quicker than its acknowledgment (at the individual level as well as at the environmental level), not to speak of all the possible reactions or adaptations to it. When McLuhan discovered the works that the modernist masters had written a couple of decades earlier, his own actuality was already a different one; he had his own epiphany while at Cambridge, where he started to connect the former to the latter in order to explore the ensuing perceptual schizophrenia (which we might read as reflecting the grey zone in which mechanical and electric media interfaced). Those literary works became not just ‘the object’ of his studies on media; they became operative models defining his future investigations as a professor of English and as media scholar.
It has been said many times that McLuhan’s pronouncements sound clearer today than when they were first stated, each time in relation to new interpretations of his works. A similar statement is often made when dealing with the works of the great modernist masters, whose complex works are constantly juxtaposed to new critical epiphanies in various fields of research. Through time, all clear-cut interpretations of the former and the latter are questioned and turned upside down, each time triggering debates, controversies, and new understandings. As John Nerone writes, ‘We will be reading McLuhan … long after diligent scholars have disproven or complexified all of his factual conjectures.’20 I agree. But why is it? I think that it is possible to say that McLuhan’s works, like the modernist works, are by now twentieth-century classics of media studies literature, the way Italo Calvino defines classics:
The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious … A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classic cannot exist without. A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.21
In other words: ‘A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.’22 Marshall McLuhan’s works continue to talk to various audiences through time and space no matter how scholars, critics, or curious readers interpret or dismiss them. Also in this sense, McLuhan’s works, just like other modernist works, are open works, both in terms of authorial design (form) and reader’s response (reception). They break previous canons and encourage formal explorations, in turn combining different codes, genres, styles. They no longer offer a unique and absolute vision of the world they portray; they accept uncertainty into their epistemological approach. Precisely because of the formal complexity, each act of reading can lead to new truths and new epiphanies that will be challenged again and again, as they progress with new knowledge through time. McLuhan’s nonsensical language is instead full of diverse meanings, as various interpretations of his messages through time continue to affirm. But if we focus on the architecture which shapes those messages, we soon realize that the most important and lasting effect of reading his books is in the continual challenge he poses to our rational thinking through his non-linear form. The medium, once again, is the message, and it offers us a way to keep awake and engage in a critical exploration of our own cultures and technology. This is the original contribution that McLuhan’s literary roots can bring to media studies.