I loaded up Windows 3.1 in order to run a 1995 interactive CD-ROM called Understanding McLuhan and there was an interview section full of interviews! Here is second never-before-posted-online interview, this time with McLuhan’s student and translator, and long-time director of the McLuhan Center at UofT, Derrick de Kerckhove. Unless you bought this CD two decades ago, you haven’t read this!
Q: What influence has McLuhan had on you? Was there a flash when you realized the importance this man would have in your life or in the work that you would do?
A: Yes, the influence of McLuhan on me, and I am saying on me, not just my work, was pretty radical. Very strong, and very continuous. And it happened in stages, deepening stages. The first time was just coming into his room for the first class and being astounded at the completely different sound I was hearing here; the completely different kind of teaching I was getting here. Teaching—I am not even sure if the word applied. I didn’t have any clue about gurus or the ’60s. I didn’t come from the ’60s and I didn’t go through the ’60s revolution like an American would. I came from Europe. And though I met McLuhan in ’68, at the time when Europe was going through a revolutionary stage “mai soixante-huit,” and all that, I wasn’t prepared for that at all. Because I was not in the fermentation period in Europe and I was not in the fermentation period in North America.
So, coming on McLuhan after having listened to Frye and to Robertson Davies and to French professors in the French department, was a radical departure. This man was a complete surprise. He was saying things which had an authority in them that carried some kind of persuasive power. And I was just very flabbergasted when I first heard him talk. I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t understand his method. All I knew was what he was talking about was worth paying attention to, and was worth working for—trying to understand what he had to say was really worthwhile. That’s what I found in my first class.
I bungled along. I was one of his worst students. I got a C- in his class. I don’t think he paid a whole lot of attention to me. Except that one day, a year after the first year. I came back for more, because I didn’t understand anything in my first year. When I came back, I was one day standing here next to this table. And he had a paper in his hand from Le Monde. Le Monde Diplomatique—it was an issue. A special issue of Le Monde of Paris and there was an article of an interview of him, or something that had been translated about education. And he asked me—he had this very kind of autocratic way—he had inspirations and he would just, without considering anything else, would simply say “What if I would just follow up on my inspiration? Here is a French-speaking person who knows a bit of my work. Well let’s see if this paper is well-translated.” I mean, he could have very well had not done it, but he gave me this and said “Hey, you are—you speak French. You tell me what you think this is worth.”
So I took it. And I must tell you that at that time I was really not at all cocksure about anything. So I would say, in fear and trembling, but I took the paper, I sat down and I began to read it and I found that there was lots of stuff in it that didn’t seem to jive with what I understood. With what I was beginning to understand, because I can’t claim I understood anything, really. But I pointed out three different areas in that paper which I didn’t think were very well-translated and I said so to him.
He was sitting on that side of the table and he looked at me with genuine surprise. McLuhan never personalized his contact with anybody. Very few times do I remember when he actually noticed me as me. I was just another student. But he did look at me at that time and he said “Wow, you know my stuff!” And I said “Oh, I don’t claim that at all, you know. Can I suggest an alternative for this, this is what I am saying.”
He had a regal, another regal gesture. He turned to his collaborator on the book at that time, Barry Nevitt, and he said to Barry, “From now on de Kerckhove will be our translator.” It was like being knighted, literally. It felt like the flat of a sword was hitting my shoulders. This didn’t make me friends with his previous translator, who didn’t like it one bit. We had even a discussion about whether, you know, one should translate the spirit of the letter. The man was a letter translator and I was a spirit translator. But that actually helped a lot. Translating McLuhan was an education to McLuhan that no other way could have given me.
So that was a second big moment in my encounter with McLuhan. My third one was after having done a translation of his book. After having in fact spent more time trying to understand McLuhan, than to really write my thesis. I found myself stuck after a six and a half or seven years of useless reading of uselessly boring plays from the 18th century, trying to write my thesis on the decadence of tragic art, and 18th-century France. What a topic! I was really quite unhappy. And again this table seems to have played a big role in my life. Because I was leaning on it looking very miserable and again McLuhan sort of talked to me, as me rather than just a student. And said “You look very glum today. What’s your problem?” And I said “Well my problem is I am going to leave my PhD studies. I will never finish this thesis. I can’t stand it. I am not going to be able to keep my job, I’ll just leave university. I’ve had it.” And he said “Oh, this is ridiculous. You should know, that if you are bored by what you are reading and what you are doing it’s because you don’t know what you are looking for. This is your problem. You don’t know what you are looking for.” And I was ready to admit to that, as to anything else. And I said “Yes that is correct. So what should I be looking for?” And he said, “What’s your theme?” And I explained that it was on tragedies. And he said “Well, do you know what tragedy is?” And I said “Well, yes it’s an art form.” “Oh, it’s not an art form, it’s a medium, it’s a communication strategy. It’s a medium of commune—it’s saying something. It’s communicating something.” I said “Oh, what does it communicate?” “Oh,” he said “very simple, Quid.” “Quid?” “Quid is quest for identity. That’s how I mark in the margin of the books I read, where I see the theme concerning the quest for identity. The Greeks invented theatre to recover from the disastrous effect that the phonetic alphabet has had on their society and their psychology. And tragedy was a remedy.”
That was an amazing moment. It really was, because I understood something right then and there, immediately, and yet it would have taken me another five or six years to get to the end of that, what I understood. But it only took me three and a half months to finish four hundred pages of thesis, which is a record, because I write slowly and it is for me a very difficult thing to do. Anyway, I finished my thesis. He was the only person who came to attend the defense besides the people who had been named to it, which was a very great honor. By the time I was through with that thesis I thought, I must write another one, because it was not, I mean I had just gotten to the edge of the issue. The issue was “How does theatre incarnate, externalize the effect of reading inside a person.” In other words, when you read you translate those meaningless signs into a meaningful sequence of gestures and events and images, which are a little internal theatre. So a novel could be the internalized form of theatre, just like theatre could be the external form of a novel. I found a kind of a law that we see retaining today with virtual reality for example, that any new technology that has any real impact on society first goes to an external stage where it is very evident, almost obscene. You know, very obvious and then quickly internalizes. And I am predicting that VR is going to internalize in some interesting ways. But anyway, that was a moment of theatre. Theatre was the externalized form before the appearance of psychological integration and strategies of reading. Very interesting theme to work on. Very interesting from many angles.
But also, Marshall was so manic about everything. You know, prophetic in some sense. And he really couldn’t care less about the fine tuning of some connection between, you know, the premise and his conclusion. Being brought up in the French system I was much more cautious about these things, because—the Cartesian spirit and all that, you know—I had to, I had to somehow satisfy myself. And even though I felt like what he was saying was absolutely correct, I still had to look for the, the right of that. He thought it was ridiculous. Anybody trying to look for a connection had to be out of his mind. But I did it anyway. And so I thought that the only way to really, seriously put this question to the test—that the alphabet really did change our psychology—you would have to go to physiology and the nervous system and information-processing, using the brain. And I did a really serious work on finding what writing systems were like. How different they are from each other? What categories could you find in the writing systems, in a huge variety of writing systems? How they connected their own language; what were the basic rules of language that expressed themselves in the writing system? And how did that then in turn affect physiological predispositions? For example, the left to the right as opposed to right to left reading, vertical verses horizontal. Basically, did that have an effect at all?
And I’ll spare you the details, but I went to do some research in that and I came to the conclusion, which for me was very satisfactory. Which can be resumed is simply this: that if you write a complete sequence of signs where each sign is a discrete unit, which is a phoneme, not a syllable—a syllable is not a discrete unit; a syllable is a full human voice pronouncement, but a phoneme can be pronounced without support, so it’s a very very abstract kind of sign—and you combine these phonemes to create the one that is not abstract, a concrete sound. If all the phonemes are represented—which is not the case in Arabic or Hebrew writing system or Phoenician, but in the case of Greek and Latin it is—if all the phonemes are represented that means that the brain has to actually read them in sequence, in a linear sequence. Rather than seeing them once. Like seizing them like the visual field, which is what the left visual field does best, hence the right brain I mean. Right and left brain don’t phase me really. What really interests me is left and right visual fields because those are really anatomical realities. The brain—we don’t know what kind of real collaboration goes on between the right and left. But we know—and we know this from like hundreds of experiments—that the right visual field and the left visual field see the same thing, but differently. That is, the analysis of the field or the seizing of that field by the whole thinking and perceiving being are different.
It’s a bit like holding a bread knife if you are right-handed. You hold the bread with your left hand and you cut it with your right hand. Well, the same thing we do with our eyes. We have four fields. Two left half fields which are controlled and that’s anatomically known by the occipital area of the right part of the brain. And then two right fields which are controlled counter-laterally by the left part of—the occipital area of the left part of the brain. The opticasm is the optic nerve going in crossing at that level.
If you fill the gap between the consonants of Phoenician—that’s what the Greeks did. Because they could not just use consonants, their language had to have vowels to distinguish between certain words. Whereas Phoenician and Semitic languages don’t need vowels, the words themselves are constituted by consonants. And it is their relationship that is constituted by the vowels. If you put in those vowels—because you could not do otherwise—as the Greeks did, then you turn what was a configuration of letters into a sequence of letters. And if you did that then the dominant process was the analysis process and not the seizing process. Both are necessary for any writing, but it is a question of dominance. Which is the most important. Which is the one that is the most urgent for the brain to discover. So, what happened to the left in Arabic and Hebrew and Phoenician, once it had actually been changed in the actual nature of the script, would then move to the right. It’s a complex story, but the upshot of it is that analysis became the prime processing strategy of the mind—of the Greek reader and of the Latin reader. And then that affected rationality. Rationality was a form of measuring proportion between objects. It affected the proposal to the eye of how the world looked. Instead of the dominant symbolic environment, the seizing of the reality of the medieval mind, for example, is a configuration. But the Renaissance eye looks at things in their proportion and looks at objects in their relationship with each other as opposed to their relationship to you. The point of view in fact ceases to be a part of the scene. And the scene has objectivity of its own. And the objectivity is guaranteed by the exact measurement between the objects. That’s what objectivity is.
Once you have objectivity, there is also subjectivity. Both are born together—they are mutual complimentary parts of a single process of unfolding. So the individual rise in the Renaissance—the sense of itself which is expressed by people like Montaigne, you know exploring himself or Erasmus—all these people basically writing a diary of the future man which is what we became. That was a very interesting aspect.
Q: Was this investigation on your part done in coordination with McLuhan?
A: Collaborating with Marshall was a wonderful and fun thing. But it was on his stuff that we collaborated, not on yours. It was entirely owed to him, but just as the McLuhan program today is filled with technology which is something Marshall would not like. Marshall just didn’t like technology. He didn’t mind talking abut it, but he didn’t want to use it. I think that I had—that I am just the same about technology as I was about that alphabet and the brain.
For me hands-on experimentation is key. Of course, McLuhan was one of the most honest intellectuals I’ve ever met. It’s just that my way of looking at things is that I have to have some proof. This is my Belgian upbringing, you know. We are very much our feet on the ground in some funny way. I have to have a sense that what I am talking about is experimented on right here. And that we can have proof for it. And the same goes for the alphabet and the brain. I went through the physiology because it, that was something solid to rest any theory, any observation on. Once I had done, it was like Picasso’s Blue Period, you know. I learned to paint and I could go on and do what I wanted with painting. But until then, until I had done this, I would not have been satisfied myself to simply talk McLuhanism. And sort of get away with it. That is intellectually dishonest, and I wouldn’t do that. But I thought it was a proper way of using my own resources to continue McLuhan’s work and to do this. So it is entirely owed to him, but he would not like it and he would have not liked either my scientism, you know my connectism, he would have considered me as being not perceptive, as opposed to people that had insights. This was not insightful. What I was doing was not insightful. What I was doing was plodding. And so, fine, you can’t change your own nature. So it was entirely owed to him.
And the book that I put together after that is called Brain Frames —quotes Marshall every page, you know. I feel just like the standard McLuhanite. A little bit silly in not bringing many many more voices to my own writing. But then I don’t have anything to prove anymore. And I’ve done it. And the proving was the alphabet story. Right now all I want is to explore and discover more. And so McLuhan is enough for me.
So I would say those were the three big moments. And I had a lot of fun moments with him too. But these were the moments I will never forget, because they really did change my life. There were a lot of aspects of McLuhan that changed my life. He gave me a sense of disregard also, irreverence, which I think is oh, so healthy.
I remember, enormously fondly, his sense of humor, including the most biting, sometimes he could be very cutting. I remember one time I had spent months trying to understand the other side. Because I had been married for some time, and, you know—though I was married to the same woman and absolutely thrilled with it. And you know, a man always finds a woman different. So I went to feminism in a big way. I really tried to understand what feminism was all about at the time; in ’75, ’76. And I came up with this big paper and I was really proud of it. And I saw Marshall and I said “Marshall, what do you think of feminism?” After obviously holding the paper in my hand wanting him to read and to comment on it. And he sort of, just passed me, said “Feminism is the sound of one hand clapping.” That was the end of that. These kind of put-down remarks—I got a few. More than my share I think.
But, but he was such a delightful fellow. And he was really, constantly—his mood was always elevated. I’ve never seen him even in an ordinary way. I don’t remember him being ordinary at any level at any time. He always was humorous and elevated. Sublime and ridiculous. Ridiculous, because he could be ridiculous. Ridiculous in a totally charming way, but ridiculous, you know. He’d burp. He’d burp all the time. And he’d come up with the same old jokes all the time. And they were very enduring. Another thing about McLuhan which I found so important to me—and everyone that has given me evidence of that has been attractive to me—he lived in what I call the absolute present. Absolutely there. Entirely in the moment. In a way that I can’t even imitate. I have to live with all kinds of preoccupation. I feel like a sort of, an air traffic controller in my own head. But I like this plugging into present part, and that’s the way Marshall was. And it was something that I found so attractive. Artists are like that. Great artists are, they have this quality of just being there.
Q: Did McLuhan have artistic genius?
A: Well he was a lousy wine taster. I don’t think his taste in painting was all that great. I think he had an extraordinary sense of poetry and language. He had language like the best poet and the best philosopher put together. And that was his art, I think. And I made the mistake of two or three times bringing him a bottle. And finding that he would taste it the same as the ordinary Canadian beer. So I didn’t do it anymore. And in music—oh, you know, I don’t think he had an exceptional music sensibility. He had a good ear. A good ear for other things. A good ear for language.
You know, beyond a certain point it’s very hard to say what is an artist. I think McLuhan certainly was an artist. But he hated aesthetics. He hated aesthetes. He hated the people for whom the art state was real. He felt that art had a job to do, and as long as the artists did that job—which was to update the culture, upgrade his or her contemporaries—then it was worth looking at. But anything to do with ornamentation, making a life a little more comfortable, was just pure consumerism, nostalgia, you know.He had some pretty cutting words for your standard, academic approach to art, and aesthetics. I found that very healthy too. I had been brought up very strongly in an artistic environment. I dealt with decor and all that stuff. But that was not it.
Q: Why haven’t there been more Marshall McLuhans?
A: Boy, I’ve asked myself that question many times. I can’t answer the why of it, but I can talk to that issue, talk to that question. I think that being promoted by the media and being successful certainly helped him on the way, because he was given a certain level of confidence, like the actor is given confidence on the stage. He put on his audience. Found that his audience liked it and played back to him throwing trust and emotions—approval that encouraged him to continue in a very honest quest. I don’t think, as some critiques have said, Marshall was jealous after rhetorical seduction. That has nothing to do with it. Marshall was nowhere close to that kind of level of motivation. I am sorry, none whatsoever.
I mean, he certainly was not obscurantist. None of these things that had been leveled at him, or looking for power or rewards. He was very different than all that. However, I still believe that a certain kind of dialogue—beyond the academic world—with an audience that the academic world had not been seeking before, finding relevance for an academic in this world—these were encouraging features of McLuhan’s relationship to the public. That does not answer why there aren’t any more McLuhans. I think that the one thing that prevents other really intelligent people from being closer to how McLuhan dealt with things is that they have a tendency to moralize very quickly. The moment they’ve got a system they want to sit on it and impose it. They want to sit on a throne in the middle of it or they want to make issue judgments, condemnations, praise, whatever, on the world. It’s a temptation that comes to anybody that starts thinking about how the world is going.
Marshall resisted that temptation after The Mechanical Bride. He explained that to us, in this classroom here many times, saying the experts and the moralists are the people who stay put. They say “Stop the world, I want to get off.” They cease to really perceive what’s going on. They have ceased to really understand what’s going on. So I think that moralism is a very big temptation that cuts you at the past. You make decisions about the world before the world has had time to mature. You jump to conclusions and make judgments about the good and the bad. And you lose your sense of perspective, your sense of humor, your distance and your ability to perceive. You start falling into a kind of a trap of your own making, you know, that creates, “les oeillères,” as we say in French. So I think that is why there hasn’t been more McLuhans. Because if you think of Marcuse for example, he could have been an incredibly interesting person like McLuhan. I don’t see the reservation of Marcuse. There is nothing that Marcuse has left that we need anymore. There is a lot that McLuhan has left that we still need. But the same things go for the big thinkers that came later. Habermas? I don’t see Habermas. I don’t see Lyotard, I don’t see Derrida, I don’t see any of these people ever getting to that level of freedom. Or Eco. Perhaps Eco, Umberto Eco is probably closer.
I know some of these people. And I am extremely aware of the brilliance of many of them, and am respectively aware of it, without hesitation. But that one thing is that they cannot be like McLuhan, because most of them tend to stop somewhere in some kind of political decision, judgmental approach. Stop going anywhere, you know.
I think there will be more McLuhans in the future. The reason I am saying this is because the power of the alphabet to constrict us in a specific way of thinking has been enormous and has conditioned our rational mind in a very powerful way. McLuhan was somebody who was born into an alphabetic mode very strongly. His mother read to him, every day, some part of English literature. He himself read from the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, every day, at least the definition of three words. That could be several Bible-page small-print columns of very very complex information. So he was into print, and he was into writing and reading in a very big way. But it’s perhaps because of being so incredibly readerly, and at the same time being, you know, that other way, that other thing. There must have been constantly a tension of dialogue between the reading McLuhan and the perceiving McLuhan. So Marshall was into concepts up to his, you know, eyeballs. And yet his body must have helped. I have a feeling that he must have somehow had a strong physical contribution to perception, physical contribution to understanding, because he certainly was never ever caught in a conceptual mode. Which is what nobody reading does. Now, why do I say the future will have more, because I think that multimedia, I think that interactive systems—I think that the relationship with all the media and technology that are now processing information both inside and outside us—are in fact providing this other thing that McLuhan had naturally; are now bringing in this more complex multiprocessing kind of response to the world, because reading is basically a single processing work. There is no co-processing in reading. You’ve got one machine that—I am using one horrible comparison of the brain and computer. I know, I apologize, but the fact is that’s easy to understand. If you read you are processing the information on one modality only. Even if you translate it in your mind to the multisensory stuff. Basically the passageway forces you in a very narrow vision of reality. And it’s a vision of reality.
McLuhan was interested in touch. He felt that the tactile sense was completely overlooked by our society. And he understood very well that the young people were trained by TV to rediscover their body and rediscover their tactile sensibility. So there is that.
He was extraordinarily interested in the ear. Not for music, not for art, but for him hearing was the deeper sense. So his touch, his hearing, his understanding of senses was very strong. And so I think that the future is probably going to let us have more people who have multilevel physiological participation to information processing, so all kinds of co-processing going on. Why is McLuhan being resurrected and not Marcuse and boy, I’ve forgotten the names of some of the other gurus at the time. Because, a lot of people are coming into this mode. I mean, I have been working at this now for, you know, decades. And I feel more and more that it’s the body coming back into play in the information processing that makes the big difference, that if you have an idea or an understanding of what the ear actually hears. If you know things—like the difference between perspective and perception. Perspective was the world out there fixed and the self in here mobile, the actor on the fixed stage.
You know, that was it, the point of view. Marshall called it the fixed point of view. It shouldn’t be called fixed. There is nothing fixed about the point of view, except that it is mobile and it can displace itself anywhere in a fixed world. The point of view guarantees that the world stays stable. In multimedia, on the Internet, you can imagine, nothing is fixed there. The only thing fixed on the net is the information that is there, both published and oral at the same time. Well in that condition, in that environment, the room for more McLuhans is absolutely—it’s more than possible, it’s almost like an actuality.
And as I move into a world of art and technology now, and talk about this with more and more people I find a very intelligent and informed and renewed understanding of McLuhan. Even without talking about McLuhan it is happening. A lot of these people don’t even know McLuhan or haven’t even read him. They may have vaguely heard about who he was, but they talk McLuhan, because they are in some ways, in that kind of thing. And in particular from the world around the research centres and universities, because precisely you do need the academic or you do need the literate training to give some kind of discipline to this incredible amount of insights and perception that you really have. You need to have some funneling. Marshall was the first to have both. And really in high, high voltage tension, you know, very exiting.
Q: How will history see McLuhan? Will his theory remain in the fore and be taken seriously?
A: I mean Marshall was out of fashion in the late ’70s. I never thought that fashion had anything to do with the value of his work. I thought it had a lot to do with the way he had been promoted. And up to a point perhaps in the way he saw himself after a while, because if you are given so much attention by the media, it has to get to you at some point. But I didn’t think that you could measure the relevance or the pertinence of McLuhan’s work to the amount of information that was about McLuhan on the media, or the amount of talk about him. I didn’t think so. I always felt that what McLuhan was working on was fundamental, was essential. It could be transitory to the extent that our own period of life and our own period of history is transitory, and we are in a very big transition, but if anybody was to chart the course of that transition, it was McLuhan.
And so there are two things that are worth exploring here. One of them is, why is it that he is coming back to the fore now, and why not before? And secondly, is the fact that he’s coming back to the fore now permanent, or yet another wave of fashion? These are good questions to ask oneself. The first question, as to why he fell out of fashion, and why he was pretty well abandoned—and I don’t mean by that the rejection that he was getting all the time and has and still is getting from Canada—that’s different. Or particularly from U of T. That’s not the problem. No, I’m talking more of who has any use for McLuhan? Over what period of time? And why do more people have use for him today? Well, I have a theory, the volcanic theory of art that actually may apply to McLuhan. There is something in the collective consciousness that maybe has a pattern, maybe has a law of operation, where the initial thrust of an idea or an invention of some sort gets a fair bit of attention and is instantly in the culture, only to slip into oblivion for a gestation period—it’s like the seeding of the culture, literally like a form of fertilization where the seed actually has to “die,” “transform,” “mutate,” get into the bowels of consciousness, get into the magma of this constant churning subconscious reality that underlies a culture. And then when it’s ready, and when the culture itself has seen some of the transformation that the seed actually prefigured somehow or reflected, then it comes up again. And it comes up as this is nature for today.
I see that as a very big possibility. I see it as a possibility regarding particularly McLuhan because his vision of the global village was entirely appropriate for an era run and ruled by television, because television is based on space, not on time—well it has time too, it deals with time, but really it is based on space. Television deals with the spatial continuum of the planet, and every television station in real time or a repeat or a rerun, all the spaces of television are contiguous, coextensive—they make one universal space which is our global village. It’s villagy to the extent that everybody gets in on everybody else’s business, everybody else more or less knows everybody, may not like everybody, and clearly the business of what’s happening anywhere in the world is your business, as well as your business being there. That’s globally about it, but it’s also television. I don’t think enough people today when they talk about the global village realize how much that metaphor is pertinent to the world of television. But not so much to the world of computers and even less to the world of network computers.
I don’t think that we’re in a global village. I’m absolutely certain we are in a global mind. I like the fact but I don’t like the term. I don’t like the metaphor, I think it’s, you know, hokey, but I don’t know any better for the moment. We are in a global mind, if only because getting on the net is a summoning to your attention, you the individual member of a thirteen million strong force of organic co-processors. You, that tiny point in a thirteen million sea of thoughts and presences, is summoning at that time the information that’s there available to all. It’s like calling to mind an idea and having it front and forward in your own mind, so this is not a village, but the village metaphor works very well because what should have been obvious to anybody who was thinking about anything back in 1962 when the global village idea was promoted—which is that we are a unified planet—is now obvious because we are through with the era of television, so we know everything about television. The moment we are through with a certain era, we know everything about it.
Now it’s obvious, the way it was obvious to people who really knew about the power of television, that books were very, very different. It’s now very obvious to people who know more about the Internet and computers that television is very, very different. So I think the thoughts of McLuhan are now coming along with the same evidence that television did have a fundamental role. And what TV did was to give us a global village, and also a public space. TV was a public, a common mind, a public space, not the same thing as the common mind of Internet at all, more like the space of one’s mind. So it is normal for McLuhan to come back to the fore to this point. Part of the same churning subconscious imagery, the power of that particular thinking, the fact that it was very well adapted to an understanding of the absolute presence of the media around us and our connection with it. That was very, very important for anybody to provide and McLuhan was the, pretty well one of the—I don’t even know off hand anybody who could—I mean who talks about Marcuse today, Marcuse is a big man, at the time of McLuhan, he was actually more famous than McLuhan. You know, who talks about some of these—who talks about the greening of the American guy, mind you there was nothing greening about America really, but still, you know, nobody talked. I mean people never gave Toffler the amount of attention that McLuhan was given. Well no, he probably—Toffler did receive the amount of attention but not the same quality, not the same, you know this, and this brings us to the last part of the question; which is, is McLuhan here to stay now, or are we having another wave?
I think he is, to the extent that the transition will have made a difference to most people’s lives. The fact that somebody was there to interpret the transition and in fact to spawn further interpretation of that transition, and bend the thinking in that general area, even though the method is not available anymore, nobody can think like McLuhan anymore, we don’t know that aspect anymore, though we certainly know what he was thinking about. And the bending of that thinking is definitely part of the transition we are going through. Where are we going is a big question, past the transition itself. Will we still need to refresh our memories of how the transition occurred, at which point we will need McLuhan the way we will need Freud forever. Or, the transition will be self-sufficient and completed, to the extent that it becomes kind of transparent and we are onto something else. Something really very different. It has to be really very different for us to forget the past.
I can’t answer that question readily. I know that at some time I will be able to answer that question. I’m fascinated by it. The reason I say I cannot answer it is that I have to be perfectly honest about this. There is too much at stake for one to venture now some kind of foolhardy hypothesis and theory about it. There’s just too much. It’s enormous. That’s how I answer the question. My hunch is that McLuhan will remain. It would be better if somebody could pick up his method. If I can find somebody anywhere with that method, I will pay attention and promote that. But I haven’t seen or heard anything with close to his approach. People have tried and not succeeded. Don’t fool around trying to be McLuhan, because you have to be really good.
Q: What are McLuhan’s flaws?
A: It’s the very thing I was talking about—it’s his method. Nobody can grab him. There’s no place where you can handle that stuff. Because he refused to have a theoretical body, and everything came out as aphorisms and insights, it’s non-usable material. There are two things about that. One thing is that it is not re-usable except as is, and then it’s mouthing McLuhan and that becomes a dismal game that is played by some McLuhanites who I don’t want to name. Or what you had is a bunch of poetic or mantic pronouncements that are open to piles of interpretations and fail the very first law of scientific investigation—they cannot be disproved. The rule of scientific reality—if we still have that around because of this big transition—is that whatever you state or propose has to be disprovable, not provable, but disprovable. It is more important for something that you state to be open to complete destruction only to be rebuilt.
This is Karl Popper’s big discovery—he was a great mathematician who just died— he’s the one who made that law: that if you can’t disprove it, you can’t prove it. So whatever you say is really not relevant in scientific terms because you cannot disprove it; and a lot of what McLuhan said couldn’t be disproved. So there is a flaw at least with the scientific community. Marshall didn’t pretend to be a scientist, but he did pretend to talk about the truth. And there is a contradiction. In our culture, in the culture that Marshall invaded and raped, it was a culture where the scientific proof was the guarantee and the ground of any aspect of reality. But we are into morphing, into virtual reality. We are into every possible manipulation of the evidence, even historical, even socio-geographical evidence. Marshall himself made the point beautifully when he said, “I wouldn’t have seen it, if I hadn’t believed it.”It’s exactly what the problem is today. He came into a world where this was already happening. Television reality was not scientific reality. He knew that. That method, until now, has not been repeated by anybody else. If it came in some guise, it would be Zen, it would be a poet, a prophet, it would be all kinds of stuff that we don’t associate with the truth. We associate it with great fabulation, with brilliant idea, but the Italians have a great phrase for this, “E bien trovato ma non e vero.”
That would be a flaw. I don’t consider it personally a flaw. But it is an Achilles heel because you rise and fall on this particular sort of thing. Now, what would happen if we did change things around and we suddenly realized the truth about reality—that it is consensus.
Q: Do you mean we would need a paradigm shift? Does this relate to the ideas of chaos theory, for example?
A: Yes and no. I don’t see James Glake, who wrote Chaos being a great fan of McLuhan. I don’t see Mandel Brozian and fractal theorists, as being great fans of McLuhan. As a matter of fact among the great fans of McLuhan now, I can see more artists that scientists. So, no, there is no direct connection between the chaos theory and dissipative structures and fuzzy functions and digital agents and neural networks and McLuhan. I can see the occasional clip about Bart Kosko rereads McLuhan, I can imagine a connection being made, the way people wrote about the I Ching and the computer. But there is an indirect resonance between the freedom of McLuhan’s thought and the comprehensiveness of that thought. That fact that it covers so much. But just as much as bringing McLuhan back, I can see Robert Sheldrake becoming important again, morphogenesis becoming very important in this new environment again. So, the indirect connection is that we have been screwed by the hard-core systems, but the hard sciences, the hard evidence and so on, we cannot trust science anymore than we can trust the banks anymore. It’s not that we don’t trust the banks, we just don’t trust them with everything anymore, just as we don’t trust everything to science. Somehow, a healthy dose of doubt and skepticism has been instilled in the culture now. We have gone through so many waves of ideologies, each one cancelling the other one, or very fiercely fighting the other one in the name of the truth, which wasn’t there after all. The Berlin Wall did fall, and many walls fell with that one. There is that too. We are not grasping at straws and McLuhan is our last-minute man, but we are ready to explore alternative ways of thinking. That which Einstein recommended decades ago, that the invention and discovery of the atom would revolutionize everything, that would require that we revolutionize our way of thinking is actually happening.
Q: What was McLuhan like as a person, as a human being? Is the work he did a function of his personality, of the way his brain worked?
A: I don’t know if I can judge that.
Marshall always struck me as being exceptional. Not just because of what he was saying. I think it’s the level of the plane of existence that he had settled in once and for all. I range from the familial, the professional, the chummy friends, all the way to moments of illumination, and reflection. I see—I don’t want to be falsely modest about it—on a fairly high level. I have never seen Marshall step below the fairly high level business. That was the lowest depth for him. What I call fairly high-level of thinking, and involvement with reality that I am experiencing—that was the ground floor for McLuhan. He could only see up from there. Below, he was incompetent. It was made painfully clear in the media how he dealt with the wedding of his daughter as a family man. Or how his brother described Marshall as being completely out of it. He was the proverbial idiot-savant. His head was elsewhere. That is a function of personality. It has to be.
I only knew McLuhan after the operation. Some people say he was brighter before, but I think what they are really saying is that he was more normal before, he was more multi-levelled. Not that he was uni-dimensional, he was uni-level. Marshall was really always on a very high plane. Just the way he would treat any occurrence: an invitation, a suggestion, a problem. He didn’t land, he never landed. I never saw him land. Maybe he did at home. But I saw him at home. We would look into the fridge to see what we were going to cook. It was like bringing a Martian to some domestic appliance. He would look into it, searching his brain to remember what all of this meant, what function all of this played in reality. He was perfectly capable of handling a beer, or a Coca-Cola, and he knew what a lamb chop looked like. I’m sounding foolish, but it’s true. There was something extraordinary about the way he behaved in domestic life. It was a great waste for example to go into the detail of looking for the perfect wine and bringing it to him and saying, this is really great wine. Marshall drank wine the same way he would drink Coca-Cola. A big waste of money. But he was quite adorable anyway.
Whenever people ask me how he related to me, when we talked, for me I can remember practically every moment that when he talked to me, he remembered who I was, because most of the time, talking to McLuhan was talking at that level where your personal problems, and his for that matter, had nothing to do with the situation at all. So, connecting with a person was not something he felt was necessary most of the time. I’m not saying he couldn’t do it. We’re not talking about a mental case here. We’re talking about somebody who really had not a lot of time to waste on domestic details and the nitty-gritty of daily life.
Q: Was McLuhan a strong Canadian?
A: He was a very strong Canadian. He actually instilled in me a sense of pride of being a new member of the Canadian nation. He really was a devoted Canadian. That really was an aspect of normal behavior that I had not brought up. It is true and whenever he had a chance to speak in the name of Canada, or make a reflection about Canada or to associate to identify his role with some Canadian concern, he was there front and forward. Wonderfully. I’m not patriotic or nationalistic, but I’m very grateful to Canada for the way it has treated me. And to see the country respected by this man was extremely important to me. It was a big example. I still feel very strongly toward the whole Canadian scene. Not just through my life, but through McLuhan’s respect for the country. I saw that very strongly.
He wrote about Canada and was concerned about Canada. When he was in touch with Trudeau, for example, I don’t think he had the slightest personal gain in mind. He was going straight to the jugular. You go to the guy who has the most to say for the country that you want to see succeeding. So I am going to address myself to the head of the country. He happened also to be a very intelligent man so that made the conversation easier and more exciting. That is the way he related to Trudeau, but not proud of himself because he was talking to the head of the nation. He would have done the same in Toronto. He really fought to repeal the Spadina expressway. He called it the cement kimono. He had a strong sense of these things.
Q: Do you have any insight into where McLuhan’s ideas came from, into what kind of young scholar he might have been?
A: I have no evidence, but I can imagine him as a young student. I can imagine him being high-minded the way he really was. He was born that way and I think his mother helped him to stay that way. She would read to him the whole of English literature in little bits every morning. That must have helped. He was bred on high-minded thinking. He would be at University of Manitoba and at Oxford, he would be constantly questioning the moral underpinnings of any decision, of any event. He started out very moralistic, he was very aware of the moral re-armament movement in England, and he would defend moral positions in economic issues and political issues. I think he came to intellectual matters from that route—trying to figure out not only what was true, but what was right to do. He would engage in philosophical debates on issues of that nature. When he went to England, he began to research the history of thought.
He wanted to know how thinking was done, and he was very interested in the impact of the alphabet and literacy on the trivium. I think he was always interested in the medium being the message but he didn’t know this until much later. His thesis was on the history of the trivium from classical antiquity to Herbert, the English poet. That thesis was the study of the impact of literacy on the shape of knowledge. And the trivium was philosophy or logic, grammar and rhetoric. Today they are represented in semiotics by semantics proper, which would be structure and philosophy of logic, and then, pragmatics would be the rhetorical side, and then syntactics would be the rhetorical side. There is a continuum of the trivium from classical antiquity to this day, taking different guises. But they were also the source of tremendous rivalries and quarrels between universities and various groups of intellectual societies. He was interested in these quarrels and he was very detailed about it, a real erudite Greek or Roman scholar. Which you find in Eric McLuhan today. Eric has continued that and he is really brilliant on the issues of classical antiquity and the trivium. And that is McLuhan’s intellectual grounding, this churning of the history of the word and how it was applied in various fields. And I think that what happened to him is that he was fresh from English university with the high-level, elite kind of European approach to literature and criticism.
Though he had been made aware of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, who were the new critics, Richards more on the rhetoric side and Leavis more on textual analysis side. But basically, they were the new criticism which was going to spread all over the United States and Canada. And when he came to his first job in St. Louis, I think, he realized his students did not understand what he was talking about, and they had no interest at all in Matthew Arnold. That’s what he told me. They were not interested. They were interested in the folklore of the industrial life-which became The Mechanical Bride. I think he went for the rhetorical end of the trivium. He realized that with philosophy and logic there would be endless discussions around the interpretations of things. Grammar was important, it was the storehouse of the notions and understandings, it was all the definitions of the world, it was everything to do with classifying and storing and organizing the given. But rhetoric was human communication, human relation. He took the good side of rhetoric. It’s a double-edged sword. Rhetoric is either a bunch of lies, or a bunch of ornaments to seduce an audience into believing something that is patently untrue. That’s the negative side of rhetoric. The other side is a skill promoting the best way you can, an understanding of what it is you want to talk about. Which is what McLuhan was interested in.
He certainly was no charlatan. He certainly never used language to fool people in any dishonest way. He used rhetoric to make people understand what he was talking about. In I.A. Richard’s Practical Criticism, which was a very big influence on him, he found the method by which one would look at a poem for effect, not like Leavis or other new critics who would look at the poem as the evidence and studying the evidence independent of the use of that particular thing. He found the poem was important in terms of the communication medium. And he applied that to advertising and that’s what became The Mechanical Bride. He applied the methods of the impact or the intended effects of the poem, right against what the rest of what the New Criticism was saying. He was putting the reader forward. He was 40 years earlier than reader-response criticism which became fairly well distributed near the end of the ’70s. But reader-response criticism was practised by Richards and McLuhan 40 years before and very well practised by them.
And that is important because advertising—and especially television—is so intensely laden with rhetorical devices that anybody who knew a lot about rhetoric for using it in being a good professor, addressing one’s class knowingly and pertinently, would be able to analyze some of the most telling artifacts of our culture by applying the old skills of rhetoric and seeing how they worked. So that was one area of his intellectual development.
He wrote The Mechanical Bride in 1951. He met Harold Innis about 1949-50. They didn’t get along at all. They had a fight about the Spanish Inquisition. McLuhan was a Catholic convert and Innis was an atheist. They picked that theme and they didn’t agree on it obviously. I would have liked to have been there. So they didn’t connect really, except that one day McLuhan had found that Innis had put the MB on the reading list of his students, this was a year before he died. He felt that if a man put his book on the reading list of his students, I should really read his books. So he picked up Empire and Communications and it absolutely floored him. He said he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy straight from that book. He found out later that Innis had put it on the reading list. Within six weeks he had finished The Gutenberg Galaxy, which was a footnote to Innis.
He said every line of Innis is like the condensation of a single book. There is so much reading behind every line, it is a kind of condensation of all that reading. Innis did that naturally, and McLuhan said “I just unpacked some of Innis’ stuff.” And that’s what The Gutenberg Galaxy was about. So Innis had a very big influence on McLuhan in the sense that what Innis was doing was recognizing the fundamental role of communication media in patterning of social behavior. Innis had taken care of issues of time and space, Marshall would take care of issues of sensory modes, sensory modalities, without forgetting time and space. Innis was interested in how certain materials would increase or decrease the spatial control area of a ruler or social system. So that, stone would be heavy to carry, but parchment would allow you to send your emissaries much farther afield, and hence create much larger empires. And you would have to keep in touch with regular relays, you would have to have an infrastructure of communications to keep your empire together. So Empire and Communications is a study of Babylonia and Persia and the Roman and the Greek empires, and a succession all the way to modern times, including Hitler, interestingly. And then The Bias of Communication, which came out posthumously I think, was more theoretical and specific and contemporary analysis. Empire and Communications was more historical and The Bias of Communication was more contemporary. Both books influenced McLuhan enormously, and both books were talking about the role of technology of communication on social organization. That’s what floored McLuhan, because he had never found anywhere else—just as I’ve not found a new McLuhan—Marshall had never found another person capable of handling the issue of the impact of technology on culture the way Innis had. That was a very, very big thing.
After that McLuhan was very influenced by individual writers. He would then pick and choose. The way he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy was at the old library at St. Michael’s College. He had the books of people he had read or heard about open at the appropriate page and a couple seminarians running from one book to the other taking those quotes down, and he would string them together with blurbs or commentaries of his own. That was the way he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy. And he was reproached for doing that. People said that is general plagiarism or a rip-off of other people’s ideas. He didn’t see it that way at all. He saw that by using these chunks, these gems, these fragments that you shore up against your ruins, as Eliot would say, by doing that he would actually give them a different kind of content and meaning. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, said, don’t tell me that what I am saying is nothing new, that you have seen it before. You may have seen those things before and the order in which I am putting them before you is entirely new and the thoughts that come out the exposure to this order is entirely new. I think Marshall would have bought that just the way it is. For the very good reason that he really did a tremendous service to the people he quoted. Far from taking anything from them, he was really giving them back hundred-fold what people said he had been stealing. People really are very small-minded sometimes.
Q: Is there a right way to interpret McLuhan?
A: McLuhan is like Picasso. He said “I always paint fakes. I have painted 200 paintings and 5,000 are being sold in the States.” I don’t like to use the word correct, but there is an appropriate and agreeable positioning in terms of what McLuhan was saying. It’s freedom, you have to have a certain freedom of mind. You read The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media or the later books and in fact, the more Marshall achieved this kind of playful freedom with his own thinking, the less consistent and substantial the books became. For the precise reason that he was playing more and more with this idea of chunks, of facets of stuff instead of landing on the theoretical, heavy-duty kind of stuff. He suggested when we were working together on From Cliché to Archetype—he said basically you are the content of any medium you are using. The user is the content. So when you get into From Cliché to Archetype, what you are doing is playing your experience and knowledge against the new combinations of thoughts that arise from these new bits and pieces. You are the bond of the thoughts, you the reader. The substance is provided by the reader. That method left a lot of academics uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, because that’s not an academic method, it’s like poetry. Marshall—he was very fond of Dada, of absurdism, fond of the interplay of things that were not meant to be connected at first. He was fond of cutting loose the connections in systems. He often said you have to have a certain play between one and the other parts of whatever it is you’re playing with. It has to give. If you don’t have enough distance between the two objects of your attention, then there is not play, no place for the mind to make a discovery. It’s so vacuous, there’s nothing to play about. I do know a lot about how he was doing those things. I can’t apply it, but I know it.
Q: Can McLuhan be learned?
A: I don’t know. I’m sure McLuhan is coming back into fashion. I don’t think it’s because he is understood any better, but because the attention that he gave to certain objects is the same that we are giving to those objects today. McLuhan is bringing into focus areas of concern that have become not only pertinent, but urgent. And who else talked about this? McLuhan. So for lack of a better one we take McLuhan back. But it’s not because people are understanding him. The number of people who understand McLuhan hasn’t changed. Certainly not among the McLuhanites. Frankly, I think McLuhan is still difficult to understand. Understanding McLuhan is not a given. Certainly not any more now than it was in 1968.
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