Relationship
Marshall McLuhan (December 31. 1980, age 69). What a night!
Tonight was a good night. Father Stroud said Mass. We had a good French burgundy for communion. Later when we finished the burgundy with dinner there was champagne and Father Stroud and I watched the news on TV with cigars lit. I must say it was a great way to end the year. Of course, as you know, I cannot speak or write for that matter. (Except on this blog. Thank God for small if fictional mercies!) This damn stroke has shut me down and got me down. Corinne pointed to my Order of Canada and told Father Stroud it is the thing I am most proud of. That’s not true, but it’s not like I can speak up to correct her. I do like it. But the thing I am proudest of is …
Me (January 2010, age 57). When did Marshall McLuhan die?
Marshall McLuhan died on the night of December 31, 1980. He went up stairs to bed after Mass, wine, dinner, and cigars and by all reports died peacefully in his sleep. That was the end of his life, but in a way it was not a particularly important event because in more significant ways he had died twice before already: the second time on the 26 September 1979 when he suffered a stroke that took away his power to speak, read, and write; the first time on the 25 November 1967 when he underwent a long and difficult surgery to remove a brain tumor. McLuhan survived the surgery but not, I believe, his genius. I do not say this lightly or without much soul searching and researching. In the months ahead I will make a case that this tragic event is the single most important biographical event in McLuhan’s life. Because if it is true, and there is a strong case to be made that it is true, it means that to understand McLuhan you must pay particular attention to things he said and wrote before 25 November 1967. And you must be careful to discount much of what he said or wrote after 25 November 1967.
Consider this a hint of things to come over the months ahead rather than an announcement that the end is here. Before signing off let me hasten to say this is not the end of McLuhan or this blog. We and the world are not yet done with Marshall McLuhan.
What do you think Marshall McLuhan was most proud of? What do you think he should have been most proud of?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p.p. 286-288.
Tags: Genius, Relationship
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1968, age 57). You can lead a Mailer to water but you can’t make him drink
This morning I had a chat with Norman Mailer on the CBC’s TV program “The Summer Way,” hosted by Warren Davis and Ken Lefolii. The program was called a meeting of minds, which is half right, minds were present, but not much meeting was going on.
Mailer was good on the give and take of conversation. He gave a lot compliments and then proceeded to take them away. For example, he described my ideas as “fascinating ad repellent, no not repellent, stimulating.” Can’t use that on a dust jacket blurb, can I? Mailer also said he agreed with almost everything I have said but only up to a particular point. For example, he said he agreed with the idea that electronic media are changing the planet, but thinks I err by not declaring this change a bad thing or a good thing. I suggested that declaring value judgments about things of this magnitude is both impossible and injurious to the critical faculties, but he didn’t see the value of the point. I wonder why?
Me (December 2009, age 57). Marshall McLuhan on objectivity
In only one of his books does McLuhan embrace the making of value judgments – The Mechanical Bride (1951). In that book, for example, He says about Professor Mortimer Adler and Dr Hutchins’ advertisement of their great books experiment at the University of Chicago that they have “come to bury and not praise Plato and other great men.” That the purpose of public opinion polls is not to discover facts but change people’s minds about themselves, and for the most part this is only a good thing for companies who want to change minds in order to sell people more of what they produce. Emily Post? For the “socially immature.” Reader’s Digest? For the “mentally exempt.” Mailer would have loved the this is good, that is bad Mechanical-Bride McLuhan.
McLuhan’s big idea is that calling things good and bad interferes with one’s ability to view the world objectively, to see the world as it is, rather than as you would like it to be or not to be. This is an idea worth pursuing even if Mailer did not want to pursue it. (More on the Mailer-McLuhan unmeeting of minds tomorrow.)
On what aspects of the world do you find yourself most quickly leaping to judgement? Politics? Religion? Sex? Money? If you’ve already made up your mind why bother looking? Isn’t it far more comfortable to praise or condemn rather than have to change your life if you discover the world is not how you thought it was?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Tags: Advertising, American mind, Books, Communications, Criticism, Mechanical Bride, Relationship
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48). The telephone blinds us to its power
The other day Everett Munro, a businessman here in Toronto, and one of my leading fans in the Hogtown business community, spoke to me about a problem he was having. Normally he said, “speaking to my boss is not a problem. But whenever we speak on the phone I’m gripped by fear. My voice shakes and I have difficulty breathing. I don’t understand it. It seems so irrational. I actually like my boss. We get along. Sure he’s demanding. Wants things right and wants them right now. But I’m the same way with the guys who work for me. Is there anything I can do to stop this? It’s driving me crazy.”
I was able to set him right. “Your problem, I said, “Is that you do not realize the power of the telephone. The telephone is such an intense auditory experience that it blacks out the visual. It blinds our power to see. You’ve got to work to involve the other senses, to counteract the power it’s having on the balance of your senses. Here’s the bottom line. Try to visualize to picture your boss when you’re speaking to him.”
Me (November 2009, age 57). What if he’s right?
This story is told by Philip Marchand in his 1989 biography of McLuhan. It is difficult to tell what Marchand himself thinks of the advice McLuhan gave to the nervous businessman. He writes matter-of-factly that Marshall McLuhan’s advice “doubtless would have sounded farfetched to many people, but the businessman tried it and it worked.” But we are left wondering whether McLuhan’s advice is really all that useful or is it actually something of a scam. Something that appeared to help but in actual fact was just a coincidence, or a placebo.
This is the story, however, that stimulated my own fascination with McLuhan. For like the nervous businessman I often found myself feeling nervous speaking to people on business calls. Curious, I tried McLuhan’s suggestion, and I found that it worked.
Does McLuhan’s advice sound far-fetched to you? Do you ever find yourself feeling nervous speaking on the telephone? Why don’t you try McLuhan’s suggestion too and let me know what happens? What have you got to lose?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989. P. 150.
Tags: Acoustic, Communications, Conversation, Listening, Relationship, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn (continued)
Today my students did their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. (Here are a reminder of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.)
Yesterday, recall, when they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things. Most of them succeeded in telling me something that they learned. As a result, joy springs eternal, we spent most of the class talking about new things rather than old things. And they found out what I meant by we’ll start at A and go from there. The first student who volunteered to be examined was given a grade of A. Enthusiasm and courage deserve to be rewarded.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read (continued)
Here is another example of reading by Marshall’s Rules. The book I will have a go at here is Abbot Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Inventions. Step 1 summarize the idea. Step 2 talk about what you’ve learned from it.
Step 1. In Chapter IV, The Emergence of Novelty in Thought and Action, Usher asks the question “Where do new ideas come from? He argues that what needs to be explained is not the final eureka of the long chain of thinking in the creation of a new idea (gold displaces a volume of water precisely equal to its mass), but the first weak groping for the new (gold is very heavy). What accounts for this initial weak groping is explained by previous writers as a result of (1) some external event that stimulates the thought (Newton’s apple), or (2) the mysteries of the sub-conscious. This, he says, is not a good explanation. But as yet he doesn’t have a better idea. Except he does underline this idea: If the world was a closed system says eventually all the new ideas possible to create by playing around with things – that is by experimentation, would eventually get created. And then invention would cease.
Step 2. New ideas appear every day. Therefore either the closed system we live in (city, nation, culture) is very large, rich in variety, and complex, or we do not live in a closed system. Every new idea has the potential to break open a closed system.
Where do you get new ideas? Where in your view are new ideas needed most? Who are the greatest new idea creators today?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Abbot Payson Usher. A History of Mechanical Inventions. New York: Dover, [1929; 1954] 1988.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1967, age 55). Read to learn
Tomorrow I will give my students their oral exam on books I asked them to select from my reading list. Here are a few of the books on that list: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965; E.T. Hall, The Silent Language, 1959, and A.P. Usher. The History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929; 1954.
Today they asked me what to expect I told them: (1) we’d start at A and go from there; and (2) Don’t tell me what’s in the book, I’ve read it. Tell me what you think now that you’ve read it. Then we can talk about new things instead of old things.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Learn to read
Marshall McLuhan was a master reader. He knew how to get to the heart of anything he read quickly and learn from it. And this power he tried to teach his students.
Can you and I learn to read like Marshall McLuhan? McLuhan, of course was a genius, so this may seem like a difficult thing to do. However, I do not think it is impossible. Here is my take on a book McLuhan refers to indirectly on his reading list: The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards.
The trick is to follow the spirit of McLuhan’s advice. Don’t only summarize the book or piece of the book: “The relationship between words and ideas and ideas and things in the world is direct. But the relationship between words and things in the world is indirect. That is you can always find words to express your ideas and ideas to match the things we see in the world, but you cannot reach for words to describe things. This is impossible. The only thing you can do is reach for words to express your ideas about the description of things.”
The summary is necessary but it is not thinking, it is repeating. It is step 1. Go to step 2: Ask yourself what new thing you’ve learned from it. For example, I’ve learned that to reduce misunderstanding I need to take the shortest possible indirect route between my words and the real world I’m trying to talk about. The shortest possible indirect routes are through pictures (look at this), pointing at something (there it is), putting my finger on the thing (see) or describing the picture or thing in plain English (it’s a house).
The next time someone starts telling you word for word, image for image, about a book, movie, or magazine article do you think you could ask them not to repeat it to you but rather to tell you what they learned from it?
Having read this blog post will you ask yourself what you learned from it? If so, what did you learn from it?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? Toronto: Stoddart, 1994, pp. 13 and Appendix A.
C.K. Ogden and I.A Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. Sixth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. 1943.
Tags: American mind, Books, Communications, Conversation, Education, Exam, Learning, Listening, Management education, Medium is the message, Reading, Relationship, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Producers are becoming consumers
What an inauspicious day, Friday the thirteenth. Thank God my flight was yesterday. I flew in from Winnipeg where I spoke to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club. I led off with one of my favourite anecdotes, “Whenever I fly, I always carry a powerful bomb with me. This absolutely insures my safety, the probability of there being two such bombs on the plane being infinitesimally low.” They also liked my Newfie joke: “What’s written on the bottom of a Newfie beer bottle? Open other end.” Liked is a strong word, let’s say they were appreciative.
The ad men did a double take when I told them in the electric age, which is the age in which we live, things are moving so fast producers are becoming consumers. It’s a complex phenomenon, but basically a simple idea. Things are changing so fast producers have figured out ways to speed up, to go faster than the wave, and one way to do that is to understand consumers so well that you know them better than they do themselves. And when you do that you can anticipate their wants. That’s why the Russians launched Sputnik and why Prime Minister Diefenbaker is making a serious error in canceling the Avro Arrow. The biggest investment business is making today is in research and development. They do this not to create a lot of new machines, products, services but to speed up to stay ahead of all the change that’s built in to the system.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The rule of 2
If Marshall McLuhan believed in the magical power of 3, he also believed in the logical power of the number 2. Pairs of concepts, the end points of a single dimension, opposites, either ors, this and that’s run through his work. Hot and cool, high definition and low definition, figure and ground, right brain and left brain, cliché and archetype, medium and message, visual and acoustic, eye and ear. So that even in his doctoral dissertation which he described as a history of the Trivium, the 3 disciplines of grammar rhetoric and logic which dominated schooling in the middle ages, for analytical purposes he reduced to a battle between 2 forces over time, the grammarians and the rhetoricians.
Twos are powerful precisely because they exclude grey middle possibilities. They force you to make clear distinctions, to make decisions, to avoid weaseling and waffling. All media he taught are hot or cool, not hot, warm, or cool. This bias for black or white bothered his quibble-prone academic readers, even those who viewed his work positively. For example, in his review of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Kenneth Boulding argues that to McLuhan the key dimension on which hot and cool media differed was “involvement.” But surely he argued other dimensions mattered too – such as “demandingness or effort,” “range in time and space,’ and,” “density or capacity.” These quibbles it’s worth noting all implicitly reject McLuhan’s starting point that what matters is the medium not it’s content.
For McLuhan, however, the power of a single dimension with 2 possibilities only was greater than the power of safer equivocating and qualifying multidimensional thinking. He believed in absolutes. Qualifications were for the intellectually weak of heart.
What other examples of 2s in McLuhan’s work are there? Which is the one you have found most stimulating?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 252-255.
Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Medium and the Message,” reprinted in McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. New York: New American Library, 1967, pp. 68-75.
Tags: Communications, Education, Gutenberg Galaxy, Hot and cool media, Relationship, Rhetoric, Superstition, Understanding media, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1962-1963, age 51-52). The good of talking it out
I am happiest talking. Talk is a technology to deliver understanding of what you think right now. Writing is a technology for preserving what it was you used to think. I prefer to talk about what I’m thinking now rather than what it was I used to think. The academic boys don’t get this. Plato got it. He has Socrates say that writing is a dangerous technology that allows you to deliver someone else’s thinking as if it’s your own.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). How Marshall McLuhan talked it out
To find out more about Marshall McLuhan and his methods of thinking and preference for talking over writing, a conversation I told you a bit about yesterday, I spoke with Professor Abraham Rotstein, professor emeritus in economics, at the University of Toronto, who was a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s. Here is what he told me about McLuhan’s methods for talking it out.
Rotstein: McLuhan worked as an oral man in research. He spoke through his books dozens of times. His monologues [it is said that McLuhan was a very polite listener, he never started to speak until he saw your lips had stopped moving) were his way of writing books. He had a hierarchy or stable of people called to whom he would rattle on. Basically there were four groups of people [he would phone to talk to in the evenings]: (1) 9pm-10pm graduate students; (2) 10 pm-11pm faculty; (3) after 11pm special people; and (4) up to 1 am [Tom] Easterbrook and other close buddies.
When McLuhan called he would rattle on at great speed. McLuhan presented orally work that later became written. He put down on paper what he had already thought out through extensive oral repetition.
Compare McLuhan’s style in his letters or interviews with his style in his books. Can you see the difference? How do you think the people in McLuhan’s stable handled being phoned and rattled on to? Is this the price they were willing to pay to be close to genius?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
See the pre-1968 interviews of McLuhan on www.digitallantem.net/mcluhan
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Conversation, Creating, Education, Listening, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology, Writing
Marshall McLuhan (March 14, 1951, age 39). Literature is dead
I wrote today to Innis. He has written a dazzling book, Empire and Communications. I shared with him some of the ideas that flowed from our meeting of minds, both in writing and in conversation. For example, literature today is in decline. (Innis shows in his book how few the ages of literature have been and how short.) The end of the present epoch of the book is evident in so many symptoms exhibited in our world today – for example the shortness of the attention span of young people.
A young man came to see me in my office today. He asked me what was the use of reading Edgar Poe. I decided to do a Euclid on him. I said, “Have you read ‘A Descent into The Maelstrom’?” “Yes,” he said. “Good,” I said, “here’s a dollar.”
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). With friends like Peter Drucker who needs enemies
Marshall McLuhan’s claim that literature is dead was one of many statements McLuhan would make over his career that drove his enemies and quite a number of his friends crazy. Consider for example what Peter Drucker, “the father of management,” said about McLuhan in 1994 when he was asked to reflect on what he had learned from Marshall McLuhan. “Not one of McLuhan’s specific predictions has come true and not one of them is likely to come true.” If Drucker meant this statement seriously, either it reveals his ignorance of McLuhan’s thinking or his willingness to engage in the slander of the reputation of a man who thought of him as a friend and colleague.
To give but one example of a McLuhan prediction that came true, consider this anecdote recounted by Professor Abraham Rotstein, Professor emeritus, economics, at the University of Toronto, and a member of McLuhan’s circle in the 1960s, in a conversation I had with him in August about McLuhan. “Mcluhan comes into class sometime in the 1960s and waves a plastic card at the students. ‘This, ladies and gentlemen is a new kind of credit card, it lets you pay in cash.”
Is Drucker right? Are McLuhan’s predictions all bogus? Is Drucker simply being a cranky old man?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, edited by Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, and William Toye. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 223.
Barrington with Maurice McLuhan Nevitt, Who was Marshall McLuhan? 1995, pp.122-126.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Education, Learning, Literature, Management education, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Wyndham Lewis’s sketch is insulting
Yesterday, recall, I said that great painter Wyndham Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. It upset me. Why he drew me this way I still do not know. The fact that it is insulting is obvious.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Why and how the sketch insults
The sketch, recall, shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you. McLuhan has one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, is missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be McLuhan was hurt because the portrait was unflattering, but that is unlikely.
Here is what I think McLuhan found insulting about the drawing. Lewis did not idly draw McLuhan as one-eyed. The one-eyed figure of Greek and Roman mythology is the Cyclops. A race of giants who work in mines deep below the ground, with lamps hung from their foreheads to light their labours, making iron for the god Vulcan to forge thunder bolts for Jove. In this poison-pen portrait McLuhan is the Cyclops, labouring away in the mines of academia teaching English literature and Lewis is Vulcan. Vulcan, if you look up the legend, fell from grace by conspiring with Juno in a plot against Jupiter and was cast off Mount Olympus. Vulcan landed on the island of Lemnos. (Lewis was cast out of London and landed with McLuhan in St. Louis.) Because Vulcan’s wife Venus had an affair with Mars, Vulcan is also known as the patron of cuckolds.
The portrait is a medium. And Lewis’s poisonous message is that Marshall McLuhan is an intellectual slave. [McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis's writings. In particular, his idea of the critical role artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them.]
Both McLuhan and Lewis were trained critics. For them this way of thinking in terms of ancient legends and symbols was not a leap, but a natural and obvious step to take.
Take a look at the sketch. (You can find it in Fitzgerald’s book on page 56.) What do you think? Is it insulting?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
“Cyclops,” and “Vulcan” in The Brewer Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
Tags: Art, Communications, Culture, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Why does Lewis want to hurt me?
This year Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. Why he drew me this way I do not know. I did make a comment about his self-portrait, but I meant no harm. His cranial profile in his self-portrait did look just like a tomahawk. Really, since his coming here, I have only tried to help him with his work, his painting, to find him people who will pay him cash to paint their portraits. He needs the money. And he insults me this way. I do not understand.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Lewis’s drawing is a medium of communication
Why Wyndham Lewis – a brilliant English painter and writer temporarily down on his luck that McLuhan admired and wanted to help – was angry with McLuhan is not known. We know he took offense easily, struck out viciously when angered, and was a social boor, and in 1945 would tell McLuhan he wanted nothing more to do with him. We can speculate on what it was exactly that caused him to flame out at McLuhan, but that is not I think very helpful. Instead I want to look at the ways Lewis’s drawing of McLuhan was insulting. That is to examine the way Lewis crafted it to spew forth his venom and have the effect that it did on McLuhan. Why? Because this is the method McLuhan learned from his teachers at Cambridge to analyse a poem or a novel, and which he employed to study media: Look at their effects. Understand how they are produced. Here is a charcoal sketch, a medium of communication. How does it have the effect that it does?
The sketch shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you, with one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be vanity, but that seems unlikely, for the portrait is quite arresting, and if say a Picasso drew you would you be upset if he made you out of cubes and didn’t make you handsome? (To be continued.)
Have you ever been insulted by someone you thought of as a friend? How did they insult you? In what medium or media? With what result?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Fritz, Robert and Rosalind Fritz. “R is for relationships,” a seminar. Robert Fritz Inc.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
*This is part of what Robert Fritz calls the “arithmetic of relationships”.
Tags: Art, Communications, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking