McLuhan and Talk to Publishers
Marshall McLuhan’s 36 minute
lecture, “Address to Author’s Luncheon,” a talk delivered to members of the
book publishing industry on Dec. 7, 1966 at the Shoreham Hotel in New York
City, provides a window to understanding his principles or probes, as he
preferred to call his mental explorations, and the discontinuous speaking style
he employed as a reflection of the nature of electronic media itself. The
program’s host assures the audience, though some might have expected a “whiff
of brimstone” around McLuhan, the media theorist is a most “relaxed
controversial figure.” McLuhan opens his remarks in a hick-sounding Canadian
accent. He hails from the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line and invites the
audience to visit: “the whole bunch is welcome.” McLuhan switches to his
natural speaking voice and pokes fun at academia including the man who signed a
legal document with two X’s and later explained one was for his name and the
other for his PhD. McLuhan’s biggest laugh from the writers, including cookbook
authors, comes from his double entendre joke about the Virginia gourmet who
visited Boston and asked his cabdriver to “Take me where I can get scrod.” The
cabdriver misunderstood the request saying “I haven’t heard the pluperfect subjunctive
in many years.”
McLuhan continues in the
joke-telling vein for at least ten minutes. He describes a mishap at airport
security with custom agents confusing his possession of honorary LLD with an
illegal stash of LSD. The humor emphasizes pun and miscommunication:
·
LSD? Greatest
president we ever had…
·
Marijuana? Spent a
week there and it’s terrific…
·
Vietnam Position? Okay
by me, but it gives my wife the hiccups….
In the following paragraphs, I
number each McLuhan point verging on the remarkable, revolutionary or
earth-shaking. McLuhan’s use of language, his discontinuous language mixing
jokes and anecdotes with argument and insight, his word choice for maximum
impact rival the content of his speech—another case of medium and message
working together.
1) McLuhan makes his first serious
point, an observation on the nature of comedy: “Humor is grievance.”
Jokes in Canada revolve around
bilingualism and the problems of French Canada but a new round of jokes
resulted from “a new interface, a new irritation area” and led to “great floods
of Newfie jokes.” Throughout his career, McLuhan credited Steve Allen and his
book Funny Men (1956) with correctly
charectirizing the comedian as “a man with a grievance.” McLuhan expanded the
concept to jokes of all kinds, saying every joke is an expression of grievance.
Humor, he explains, is society’s means for dealing with irritation and sore
points. Much as the court jester brought bad news to the king by serving his
insights with a large dollop of wit, the comedian nudges society to an
examination of its discomfort and sore points to the present day.
2) McLuhan’s talk swings quickly
to TV viewing and its relevance to an audience of publishers: “ the near point
resulting from television, the average reading distance for a grade two child
is 4.6” from the printed page.”
He continues “the printed page you
provide is useless for TV child, the TV child is a Cyclops, only uses one eye,
he’s a hunter, he’s not a reader.” McLuhan has ventured to a favorite line of
reasoning—technology’s ability to transform the use of the human senses. Print
media heightened the visual sense and resulted in an emphasis on individuality
and an isolated viewpoint. Electronic media engages multiple senses and causes
the television viewer to a combined use of eye and ear. The sensing working
together results, McLuhan states, in a tactile experience. The tactile
experience of watching television is characterized by involvement. Television
viewers want to be engaged. The electronic media distinguish themselves by high
levels of participation. Participation and deep engagement explain television’s
hypnotic hold over the audience.
McLuhan related his time as a
resident of New York City and his connection to a former Tonight Show host, “I was the neighbor last year of Jack Paar in
Bronxville.” He commented on the difficulty in getting Paar to laugh and their
shared observation on the rarity of getting a comedian to respond with
laughter. McLuhan unfortunately does not venture further into the talk show
genre. He reveals his conservative brand of Catholicism with a quick jab at
Vatican Two, comparing church’s attempt at modernization unfavorably to a
popular scotch whiskey: “Vatican Two I
think is inferior to Vat 69 myself.”
McLuhan uses lightheartedness as a
method for preparing the audience for heavier material and drops famous names
possibly for a similar effect. He mentioned Timothy Leary and Jack Paar and
then describes Ann Landers racing up to him at an airport. She called, “Marshall McLuhan, I am your fan.”
3) He switched directions quickly
to make, connecting point #1 to point #2, and makes the publishers aware of
their own medium: “You have a big grievance; you don’t know how to get off the
hardware hook into software. Xerox is software, and you’re still in the
hardware business.”
McLuhan’s choice of language, his
confident tone in pinpointing the future of the publishing industry as the
battle between hardware vs. software goes beyond mere prescience to the
oracular. McLuhan emphasizes electronic software decades before Amazon
arrived on the scene and the computer screen to obsolesce the bricks and mortar
bookstore. A tech savvy publisher at the
Shoreham Hotel might have pushed his company ahead by grasping the significance
of McLuhan’s insights, though the 1966 audience, still creating on IBM
typewriters, can be excused by history; Jeff Bezos, only two years old at the
time of McLuhan’s talk, founded Amazon.com in 1994.
4) McLuhan steps further out into the ether by anticipating
the electronic revolution in its full force: “Put a satellite around the
planet. All arrangements around the planet disintegrate. Planet becomes
garbage.” His colorful language depicts
a future as imposing but somehow elegant. For McLuhan this vortex of electrons
circling the globe was already the present:
Let me tell you… when a fast one goes around a slow form and the
slow one collapses. Any speed up in a part of your enterprise and it will
destroy the…Put a satellite around the planet. All arrangements around the
planet disintegrate. Planet becomes garbage. Garbage is clothing.
Any speeding up of any part of your enterprise will destroy the
slower part. Moving info at speeds. Global theater now, not global village.
Satellites surround around the planet, are moving information
around the planet the planet cannot contend with, jobs are over, roles have
taken over.
Doing his thing—means involvement. Having a job means moving to
your level of incompetence and settling in.
6) All funny books are about past-times.
You can be sure it is nostalgic. Quaint law of the 19th century.
7) Peculiarity of print… I am a
professor of literature, I defend at all times, the only origin and cause of
civilization… results from one alphabetic—the phonetic alphabet. Hebrew does
not do this, Arabic does not do this. Literacy consists in separating the eye
from the other senses, creating Euclidean space, creating illusions of
rationality. Nourished by Greek or Roman world letter. Anything that undermines
the phonetic alphabet and releasing the dominance of the eye… ends
civilization. Dominance of the eye over the other senses. We live in an
electronic age.
8) Interval, resonance, the bond
of being, the thing that holds the world together is sound. Resonance. There
are no connections in matter, only resonance. Quantum mechanics people do not
know that resonance is a peculiar kind of space.
9) NASA is a very old-fashioned
bunch, semi-literate. Stuff they put out is cheap science fiction; it’s
hardware. Thanks to their ignorance of literacy, in its full sense, and
auditory space. Auditory space is a very peculiar thing. And We live in
Echoland now. In a simultaneous, instantaneous all-at-once world, that is
echoland. Auditory space whose center is everywhere and margin is nowhere.
Totally non-visual and non-visualizable.
Try to visualize space. Never make
value judgments. My own values are entirely with civilization.
Probe the world I live in, an
auditory Echoland.
Beatles echo a Kafkaland. Man who
woke up and discovered he was a cockroach. Our TV generation are Beatles,
crawled out from under the rug.
Our TV generation are Beatles, no
means of communicating with their parents.
Yellow Submarine and longhairs.
accepting the movie as the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment