This is not an easy thing to do. The writings of Marshall McLu han are so compounded of novelty, force of suggestion, vulgarity of mind, and sheer carelessness that one is quickly tempted to put them aside. Many aspects of his success represent modern journalism at its most obvious. The McLuhan cult is characteristic of those confidence tricks of “high journalism” which, perhaps more than any other force, deafen and cheapen the life of ideas. Yet all this is part of the point: the question of how to read McLuhan, of whether reading him is in itself an obsolescent mode of contact, is implicit in McLuhan’s own work. The crises of relationship between traditional literacy and the hypnotic mendacities of the mass-media are exactly those to which McLuhan himself applies his rhetorical, confused, but often penetrating attention. “Better written,” McLuhan’s books and essays would be false to their implications. A McLuhan too fastidious or ironic to make use of the advertising powers of the mass-circulation magazines or the television interview would be negating his own principal argument. He sets his readers a perpetual, irritating problem: that of reading any further. But that is his master stroke: by making of his manner a close representation of the anomalies which he observes in the act of reading, in the essential nature of human communication, McLuhan draws us into his argument. To put him down is to let that argument pass unchallenged.
Until now, The Gutenberg Galaxy remains his most important statement. Understanding Media, a good deal of which gives the impression of having been written, or rather jotted down, earlier is a set of variants on the Galaxy. McLuhan’s initial, often brilliant study of controlled imagery and messages in the mass-media, The Mechanical Bride, can now be seen as a preliminary essay. It is in The Gutenberg Galaxy that both the virtues and failures of his method can be fairly judged.
The book bristles with oracular assertions: “China and India are still audile-tactile in the main”; Russia, “where spying is done by ear and not by eye,” is still “profoundly oral.” The Chinese ideograph “is a complex Gestalt involving all the senses at once.” The Germans and Japanese, “while far-advanced in literate and analytic technology, retained the core of auditory tribal unity and total togetherness.” Numerous pronouncements have a majestic simple-mindedness:
The miseries of conflict between the Eastern and Roman churches, for example, are a merely obvious instance of the type of opposition between the oral and the visual cultures, having nothing to do with the Faith.
Some statements are slipshod; “the Koreans are reputed to have a phonetic alphabet”; others are false: “the Viennese musician Carl Orff.” The bibliography is eccentric. An accurate notion of the Babylonian and Greek treatment of volumes and spatial relations is vital to McLuhan’s theory; yet he discloses no awareness of Neugebauer. More disturbing is the nervous cheapness of McLuhan’s prose—language being the very matter of his concern. He tells us of woman’s “haptic bias, her intuition, her wholeness”:
What a fate, to be integral and whole in a fragmented and visual flatland! But the homogenization of women was finally effected in the twentieth century after the perfection of photo-engraving permitted them to pursue the same course of visual uniformity and repeatability that print had brought to men. I have devoted an entire volume, The Mechanical Bride, to this theme.
Referring to Professor Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, McLuhan questions “the quality of insight that causes a human voice to quaver and resonate with hebdomadal vehemence.” Used in this (non)-sense, hebdomadal is a real comic find.
It would be easy to anatomize The Gutenberg Galaxy in this way: easy and stupid. Many of the irritants, many of the crudities of presentment which exasperate or bewilder, are strategic. The Gutenberg Galaxy is an anti-book. It seeks to enforce, physically, the core of its own meaning. Its bearing on traditional modes of philosophichistorical argument is deliberately subversive. It is precisely part of McLuhan’s achievement that we should be irked and affronted by the strangeness or inadequacy of his resources. He is saying to us, in a verbal mime which often descends to jugglery but also exhibits an intellectual leap of great power and wit, that books—a linear progression of phonetic units reproduced by movable type—are no longer to be trusted. He is retreating rapidly from the word. And because the classic verbal medium is inimical or irrelevant to McLuhan’s purpose, his argument is difficult to follow. But the effort yields reward. Marshall McLuhan posits that Western civilization has entered, or is about to enter, an era of electro-magnetic technology. This technology will radically alter the milieu of human perception, the reality-coordinates within which we apprehend and order sense data. Experience will not present itself serially, in atomized or linear patterns of causal sequence, but in “fields” or simultaneous interaction. To offer a very crude analogy (and the process of analogy may itself be a vestige of an earlier logic), our categories of immediate perception will shift from those at work in an Ingres drawing to those we experience in a Jackson Pollock.
But we are unready to master the new spontaneity, randomness, and “totalization” of the electronic experience-field, because print, and all the habits of feeling and thought print has grafted on the Western mind, have broken the creative, primal unity of the senses. By translating all aspects of the world into the code-language of one sense only—the reading eye—the printing press has hypnotized and fragmented Western consciousness. We lie rigid in what Blake called “Newton’s sleep.”
Yet obscure promptings bid us wake. Hence the present malaise, that feeling as sharp-edged in Klee and in Kafka as it is in the ferocities or pointlessness of our politics, that Western man is no longer at home in the world:
We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medieval corporate experience and modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting an electronic technology which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the corporate interdependence mandatory.
McLuhan’s reading of ancient and medieval history is related to Nietzsche’s indictment of Socrates and Henry Adams’ vision of a golden age of unified sensibility. He argues that the phonetic alphabet began the fatal dissociation between the senses, that it splintered individual consciousness from the creative immediacy of collective response:
Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere.… Nor is this to give any new meaning or value to “civilization” but rather to specify its character. It is quite obvious that most civilized people are crude and numb in their perceptions, compared with the hyperesthesia of oral and auditory cultures. For the eye has none of the delicacy of the ear.
The printing press and the associated development of the conventions of perspective (precisely what is the correlation between these two great steps?) have made our apprehension and use of sense data explicitly linear, sequential, discrete. We are imprisoned in the unexamined assumption or unconscious illusion of a homogeneous, forward-flowing space-time continuum. Our notion of the categories of past and future is mechanistic, as if the universe were itself a printed book and we were turning the pages. The vast majority of literate men are unable to cope, sensorily or imaginatively, with the new “vitalistic” space-time concepts of Einsteinian physics and electro-magnetic field theory. Hence the widening gap between the picture of physical reality on which we base our lives, and the mathematical-statistical image proposed by the natural sciences: “The new physics is an auditory domain and long-literate society is not at home in the new physics, nor will it ever be.” The fascinating concomitant is the possibility that “primitive” cultures will find it much easier to work with concepts of indeterminacy or with the idea that space is altered by the quality of neighboring events.
Print helped to initiate and formalize the economic ambitions of Renaissance Europe. It gave spur to the new forces of nationalism and cultural arrogance. McLuhan conjectures that movable type “enabled men to see their vernacular for the first time, and to visualize national unity and power in terms of the vernacular bounds: ‘We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke.’” The world-image codified by typography made of Western man a unit at once impersonal and private, unique and repeatable. In that light the modern city, the warren of crowded solitudes, is a product and expression of the Gutenberg galaxy. We move through it scarcely calling on the manifold, subtle functions of ear, nose, or touch; when we die, our name survives for a spell in the typographical pantheon of the telephone directory.
By its exclusive stress on visual order, on Cartesian logic and abstract nomenclature, the Gutenberg mode of perception has divided and sub-divided the categories of action and knowledge. The Baconian dream of a total, rational classification, of a universal taxonomy, in which every art, science, and technology would have its distinct place, is emblematic of a typographic sensibility (Miss Elizabeth Sewell’s study of Bacon in The Orphic Voice, a profoundly exciting though neglected book, is relevant here). The dissociation of sensibility which T. S. Eliot discerns in post-metaphysical poetry was merely one tactical aspect of that larger intellectual attempt to conquer all knowledge through division.
But already, as McLuhan suggests, we are moving into a phase of creative disorder; everywhere the lines are blurred. Physics and biology have reached outside their classic bounds; the important work is being done within the shifting, undogmatic contours of “middlefields” such as biochemistry, molecular biology, or physical chemistry. A Calder mobile asks of us, as it might of Aristotle or Lessing, why statues should not move. Novels are presented as loose pages, randomly gathered in a folder; we may, if we choose, arrange the narrative in varying sequence. Elements of improvisation and calculated hazard are being introduced into modern music; an orchestral statement has been described as a “cluster of possible simultaneous tonal occurrences.” In the book of modern life (a Gutenberg simile) the hinges are loosening. But where Yeats saw the coming of “mere anarchy,” Marshall McLuhan speaks of “the greatest of all human ages” resulting from “this dramatic struggle of unlike modes of human insight and outlook.” Beyond the present chaos lies the possibility of “new configurations” of perception; man’s dormant senses, his powers of integration, the chthonic, magic fiber of his being, will be liberated from the closed, passive system of Gutenberg literacy. Else a great prince in prison lies.
These are the main lines of McLuhan’s case. The obvious objection is a matter of cart before horse. What evidence is there that printing and the typographical world-order were the cause rather than the technically inevitable consequence of the specialization and diminution of sensibility? Can we assert, except by Romantic, utopian convention, that the era of oral and manuscript communication possessed the gift of integrated perception? The Henry Adams-T. S. Eliot myth of a twelfth- or a seventeenth-century organic unity is not much more than a useful metaphor. It sharpens our alertness to some of our own difficulties and limitations; but there is no very solid evidence for it. In many respects the medieval community was as fragmented, as riven by doubt and economic antagonisms as any we have knowledge of. If Dante or Donne could extend their poetic reach to a more comprehensive range of experience, it was because the sum of available matter was smaller and because words could give a more inclusive, adequate map of reality. Today we confront a topography of experience in which the word occupies only a central precarious domain; on each side lie the provinces of number.
Historically it is likely that the phonetic alphabet and the development of movable type (a technical, not a metaphysical innovation) were themselves the end-process of a long evolution. The syntax and structure of the Indo-Germanic languages are strongly disjunctive; the bias toward logical stylization, toward linear progression and analytic delimitation, is rooted in the morphology of our speech-patterns. It obviously antedates not only Gutenberg but also the adoption, by pre-classical Greece, of the Phoenician alphabet. Moreover, it may well be that those forms of aural mass-communication which McLuhan regards as heralding the new age have, in fact, persisted beneath the surface of visual literacy. Where McLuhan assumes a Spenglerian sequence of historical epochs, there is most probably an overlapping simultaneity of mental habits and techniques.
But even if one balks at the general argument, the local insights of The Gutenberg Galaxy are rewarding. This book has a Coleridgean breadth. McLuhan points out that the notion of private ownership of ideas and words—the notion of plagiarism and the correlative of acknowledged citation—only evolve with the printed text. His own use of a cluster or mosaic of long quotations is meant to illustrate an earlier attitude, a “collectivity” of truth. He points acutely to the source of the characteristic problems and symbolic proceedings of contemporary philosophy:
As our age translates itself back into the oral and auditory modes because of the electronic pressure of simultaneity, we become sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visual models and metaphors by many past centuries.
An apt quotation from Hopkins’ letters leads to a discussion of how much major literature—poetry in particular—was never intended for silent perusal by the private eye, but demands recital and the live friction of voice and ear. Though Mr. McLuhan’s reading of King Lear is absurdly unconvincing, he has fascinating marginalia on Rabelais, Cervantes, Pope, and Joyce. He describes Gargantua, Don Quixote, the Dunciad, and Finnegans Wake as the “four massive myths of the Gutenberg transformation of society.” Looked at closely, the idea seems beautifully right. Might one add Swift’s Tale of a Tub and, as myth of the combat between ideogram and letter, Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé?
Indeed, it is often in the throw-away suggestion, in the local perception, that McLuhan is most interesting. Nothing is more Blakeian in quality of vision than the notion, hinted at in Understanding Media, of a world falling silent as electronic means of storage and appropriate selection replace the spendthrift chaos of traditional writing and human speech. Like Ernst Bloch, like Lévi-Strauss, McLuhan has the capacity to materialize his theoretic arguments in sudden myth. He too is one of those shapers of the present mood who seem to mark a transition from the classic forms of Cartesian order to a new, as yet very difficult to define, poetic or syntax of experience. It is quite possible that McLuhan’s own sermons will soon be rejected as chaotic and self-contradictory; but the process of rejection will almost certainly be creative of new insight. That, and not any academic canon of definitiveness, is the mark of significant work.