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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
http://www.columbia.edu/~log2/mediablogs/McLuhanPBinterview.htm
1969
Marshall McLuhan
In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his
English students at the
University of
Toronto--and a coterie
of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation
quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books-- "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962)
and "Understanding Media" (1964)--and the graying professor from Canada's
western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco
Chronicle as "the hottest academic property around." He has since won a
world-wide following for his brilliant--and frequently baffling--theories about
the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as
mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop
culture.
Though his books are written in a difficult style--at once enigmatic,
epigrammatic and overgrown with arcane literary and historic allusions--the
revolutionary ideas lurking in them have made McLuhan a best-selling author.
Despite protests from a legion of outraged scholastics and old-guard humanists
who claim that McLuhan's ideas range from demented to dangerous, his
free-for-all theorizing has attracted the attention of top executives at General
Motors (who paid him a handsome fee to inform them that automobiles were a thing
of the past), Bell Telephone (to whom he explained that they didn't really
understand the function of the telephone) and a leading package-design house
(which was told that packages will soon be obsolete). Anteing up $5000, another
huge corporation asked him to predict--via closed-circuit television--what their
own products will be used for in the future; and
Canada's
turned-on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engages him in monthly bull sessions
designed to improve his television image.
McLuhan's observations--"probes," he prefers to call them--are riddled
with such flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms as "The electric light is pure
information" and "People don't actually read newspapers--they get into them
every morning like a hot bath." Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: "I don't
pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." Despite his
convoluted syntax, flashy metaphors and word-playful one-liners, however,
McLuhan's basic thesis is relatively simple.
McLuhan contends that all media--in and of themselves and regardless of
the messages they communicate--exert a compelling influence on man and society.
Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses,
perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But
technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that
alter this sensory balance--an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the
society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three
basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which
jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the
introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this
process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an
electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan
has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this
electronic revolution.
For his efforts, critics have dubbed him "the Dr. Spock of pop culture,"
"the guru of the boob tube," a "Canadian Nkrumah who has joined the assault on
reason," a "metaphysical wizard possessed by a spatial sense of madness," and
"the high priest of popthink who conducts a Black Mass
for dilettantes before the altar of historical determinism."
Amherst professor
Benjamin De-Mott observed: "He's swinging, switched on, with it and NOW. And wrong."
But as Tom Wolfe has aptly inquired, "What if he is
right? Suppose he is what he sounds like--the most important
thinker since Newton,
Darwin, Freud,
Einstein and Pavlov?" Social historian Richard Kostelanetz contends that "the most extraordinary quality of
McLuhan's mind is that it discerns significance where others see only data, or
nothing; he tells us how to measure phenomena previously unmeasurable."
The unperturbed subject of this controversy was born in
Edmonton,
Alberta, on July 21,
1911. The son of a former actress and a real-estate salesman, McLuhan entered
the University of
Manitoba intending to
become an engineer, but matriculated in 1934 with an M.A. in English literature.
Next came a stint as an oarsman and graduate student at
Cambridge, followed by
McLuhan's first teaching job--at the
University of
Wisconsin. It was a
pivotal experience. "I was confronted with young Americans 'I was incapable of
understanding," he has since remarked. "I felt an urgent need to study their
popular culture in order to get through." With the seeds sown, McLuhan let them
germinate while earning a Ph.D., then taught at
Catholic universities. (He is a devout Roman Catholic
convert.)
His publishing career began with a number of articles on standard academic
fare; but by the mid-Forties, his interest in popular culture surfaced, and true
McLuhan efforts such as "The Psychopathology of Time and Life" began to appear.
They hit book length for the first time in 1951 with the publication of "The
Mechanical Bride"--an analysis of the social and psychological pressures
generated by the press, radio, movies and advertising--and McLuhan was on his
way. Though the book attracted little public notice, it won him the chairmanship
of a Ford Foundation seminar on culture and communications and a $40,000 grant,
with part of which he started "Explorations," a small periodical outlet for the
seminar's findings. By the late Fifties, his reputation had trickled down to
Washington: In 1959, he became director of the Media Project of the National
Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of
Education, and the report resulting from this post became the first draft of
"Understanding Media." Since 1963, McLuhan has headed the University of
Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology, which until recently consisted
entirely of McLuhan's office, but now includes a six-room campus
building.
Apart from his teaching, lecturing and administrative duties, McLuhan has
become a sort of minor communication industry unto himself. Each month he issues
to subscribers a mixed-media report called "The McLuhan Dew-Line"; and, punning
on that title, he has also originated a series of recordings called "The
Marshall McLuhan Dew-Line Plattertudes." McLuhan
contributed a characteristically mind-expanding essay about the media--"The
Reversal of the Overheated-Image"--to our December 1968 issue. Also a compulsive
collaborator, his literary efforts in tandem with colleagues have included a
high school textbook and an analysis of the function of space in poetry and
painting. "Counterblast," his next book, is a manically graphic trip through the
land of his theories.
In order to provide our readers with a map of this labyrinthine terra
incognita, PLAYBOY assigned interviewer Eric Norden to visit McLuhan at his spacious new home in the
wealthy Toronto suburb of Wychwood Park, where he
lives with his wife, Corinne, and five of his six children. (His eldest son
lives in New York,
where he is completing a book on James Joyce, one of his father's heroes.) Norden reports: "Tall, gray and gangly, with a thin but
mobile mouth and an otherwise eminently forgettable face, McLuhan was dressed in
an ill-fitting brown tweed suit, black shoes and a clip-on necktie. As we talked
on into the night before a crackling fire, McLuhan expressed his reservations
about the interview--indeed, about the printed word itself--as a means of
communication, suggesting that the question-and-answer format might impede the
in-depth flow of his ideas. I assured him that he would have as much time--and
space--as he wished to develop his thoughts."
The result has considerably more lucidity and clarity than McLuhan's
readers are accustomed to--perhaps because the Q. and A. format serves to pin
him down by counteracting his habit of mercurially changing the subject in
mid-stream of consciousness. It is also, we think, a protean and provocative
distillation not only of McLuhan's original theories about human progress and
social institutions but of his almost immobilizingly
intricate style--described by novelist George P. Elliott as "deliberately antilogical, circular, repetitious, unqualified, gnomic,
outrageous" and, even less charitably, by critic Christopher Ricks as "a viscous
fog through which loom stumbling metaphors." But other authorities contend that
McLuhan's stylistic medium is part and parcel of his message--that the tightly
structured "linear" modes of traditional thought and discourse are obsolescent
in the new "postliterate" age of the electric media.
Norden began the interview with an allusion to
McLuhan's favorite electric medium: television.
Tipo di risorsa: documenti e rapporti ufficiali
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