I began studying McLuhan heavily in 2017. Since I had no formal education—or even cursory introduction—to many of the subjects and fields he draws upon in his works, I had no sieve for separating his own idiosyncrasies from the mainstreams of thought within and against which he plays.

The larger part of the past five years, beyond reading and absorbing McLuhan’s primary texts has been, then, to also catch up on what everyone else has taught and learned regarding media, literary criticism, and so-called post-modernity.

That’s because reading McLuhan carefully is to read a guy who was always nitpicking whatever larger, impersonal current of thought everyone around him was being swept up in. Before the early ‘50s, he was always fighting to go against the flow.

In an unpublished polemic he wrote against public intellectual Syndey Hook in the mid-1940s, McLuhan wrote:

Because I am convinced, on many grounds, of the rational nature of man I hate Hitler and all related flotsam of the Zeitgeist. I hate anything or any attitude which even makes a show of diminishing the dignity and rational potency or act of man. I detest therefore the commercial spirit and also the consumer mentality since both are the negation of reason and politics. I hate fashion, the tonic of constipated minds. I hate fashion—the spirit of the Zeitgeist—whether it favors philosophy or science or despises philosophy or science, whether its for tradition or against it, whether it’s for “religion” and emotion or against it. Fashions in pants or ideas reflect only the inertia of clogged and muddy mentalities incapable of first-hand experience. (Snowballs or Tennis Balls Professor Hook?)

After the publication of his first book The Mechanical Bride in 1951, which opened with an analogy to Edgar Allan Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom, he took his own advice in that book and began learning to swim and operate within that flow, delicately manipulating its currents like the grid in a vacuum tube. This is how he maintained a personal identity and private self amid fame and constant immersion within culture and society. He stayed an individual in the age of the mass mind. That is, for me, the primary benefit in studying McLuhan, so we must take the time to analyze his approach.

Therefore, weighing and proportioning McLuhan’s perceptions within his time and traditions is essential for wringing any practical use out from the fabric of his work. So here is, in a nutshell, what seems to have been the case for his first major specialism, English and the field of literary criticism at large.

New Criticism

Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory is an extremely popular introductory text to the history of literary and critical theory which is assigned in many first-year courses today. In a few paragraphs it sweeps through Aristotle’s Poetics through Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (published 1798) up to Mathew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (published 1865) before landing us in McLuhan’s Cambridge University of the 1930s. Here, Barry tells us, the New Criticism of I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis was established.

Having spent several years reading McLuhan’s writings on and applications of his education from Richards, Empson, and Leavis, I recognize nothing in Barry’s book resembling the form of criticism McLuhan developed at Cambridge. A single book, Practical Criticism which owing its popularity once synecdochically stood for the whole, has come today to be mistaken as the whole of the Cambridge curriculum called New Criticism.

I.A. Richard’s Practical Criticism is based around an experiment he ran in his classroom involving students to judge anonymized poems. Some of the poems were by famous authors, some by random nobodies. Without knowing who wrote what, the students were left relying on only their own judgement to describe and criticize each poem. These student evaluations of anonymized poems make-up the first half of Practical Criticism.

The second half of the book is Richard’s evaluations of these student’s evaluations. Lots of students just lacked basic comprehension of what was going on in a poem, some just hated all sentiment and dismissed it always as mushy, some would always object to morals lessons or religious connotations they detected within poetry etc. So really, this “experiment” in anonymity is a way for Richards to, in this book, go meta. To teach fair-minded criticism and evaluation, he begins by performatively criticizing amateur critics who are deprived the cultural biases and prejudices which would have otherwise overridden their own personal taste and sensibility. Practical Criticism was, thus, an introductory text to introduce the reader to common pitfalls.

Everywhere you look today, this book Practical Criticism is said to have defined New Criticism as a technique, as Barry puts it, “isolating the text from history and context. Instead of having to study, say, the Renaissance period as a distinct historical moment… students could learn the techniques of practical criticism and simply analyze ‘the words on the page’.” Ummm… no. That’s just how the most popular introductory text to literary criticism in the ‘30s and ‘40s introduced the subject. If you’re going to start learning literary criticism, maybe you should begin by making sure you don’t projecting all your biases and distracting, irrelevant background knowledge all over the poem. Maybe you should start by reading—really, actually, very-closely reading—the poem first. Like, a dozen times, slowly. Maybe look up some words you’re unfamiliar with. But, like, Richard’s nor Empson nor Leavis never say you can’t go study the context or the author’s biography later.

This basic mischaracterization of the Cambridge New Critics as being defined by the pragmatic conceit of the anonymization experiment which structures their most popular introductory book—a catalogue basic beginner errors—is everywhere today. Thank goodness I learned all about New Criticism from McLuhan first, because apparently nobody understands New Criticism today, and those that think they do are going to be really, really handicapped in appreciating anything McLuhan has to say on the subject.

To sum it up: New Criticism is not a technique of close-reading without historical context. Rather, when you began learning New Criticism in the 1930s, the first thing you did was ensure you actually read the poem really, really closely first without distracting yourself with all the context you can bring in later. i.e. don’t skim. Pay attention to the text, then criticize it. If you just skim the thing once, half-paying attention, then your really just pulling your review out of your ass. Or you’re cynically giving the author a blurb for their book cover, or aiming to sink the career of a rival.

If you’re going to review something, read it first. Like, duh. This is so basic, so fundamental, to any criticism of anything that I can’t believe Barry and, doubtless, others use this as the definition of New Criticism to write off these Cambridge guys!

No wonder so many reviews and opinions today come from people who seem to not even-have read or watched or played the thing that they’re criticizing! We apparently threw “pay attention to the thing you’re criticizing” out along with New Criticism as it died out in the ‘50s!

So what actually was New Criticism? As you see, we will have to answer that question within the context of other approaches and beliefs about words and art which have been widely held at all times—not just a hundred years ago, and not just today.