McLuhan: Hero or Heretic?

H. Marshall McLuhan has been variously described as a Canadian Nkrumah who has joined the assault on reason, a very creative man who hits very large nails not quite on the head, and the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein.

The phenomenal growth of communications tools and techniques has inspired much comment, particularly since the launching of communications satellites. Earlier discussion tended to be quantitative. Some writers, however, foresaw the hidden qualitative implications of new media. McLuhan is the foremost of these.

Born in 1911 of Baptist parents in Manitoba, McLuhan was converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge. Some accounts trace the impetus for the conversion to his reading of G. K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World.

McLuhan has concerned himself chiefly with three areas: first, the typographic revolution which had its start in the fifteenth century when Gutenberg invented printing with movable type; second, the electronic revolution and its implications; and third, reduction of the world of electronic circuitry to the terms of “the medium is the message.”

McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) continues many emphases found in his 1951 work, The Mechanical Bride. He argues that the invention of printing eventually changed not only man’s way of acquiring knowledge but his whole thinking process and way of life. Before then, man is said to have lived in an ear-oriented world. With the advent of Gutenberg, the ear was replaced by the eye as primary receiver of communication. The wide dissemination of printed matter produced “the typographic man,” McLuhan says, and ushered in a “linear-mechanical era” of five centuries’ duration.

McLuhan attaches great importance to the fact that in reading printed matter, man is exposed to ideas or concepts one after another, in sequence rather than simultaneously. In this literate man, the sense of sight predominates. People are less dependent upon one another than they were in the old tribal society, in which information got around primarily by word of mouth. He feels that the differences between the literate (post-Gutenberg) and pre-literate (pre-Gutenberg) societies are enormous. The kind of thinking that proceeds out of a pattern of reading—taking ideas one at a time, sequentially—affects virtually every facet of human existence, he says.

McLuhan sees the dominance of printing as we know it as the culmination of a process that began with the Greco-Roman period and was continued to some degree during the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the fifteenth century, the struggle between the visual and aural-tactile ended with a victory for the visual. Participation of the other senses was minimized.

But the technological era that grew out of the typographical culture has led to an electronic revolution that, ironically enough, has reversed the drift. The new media like telephone, radio, and television are bringing us back to the old tribal method of getting information primarily by hearing it. These media tend to invite a great deal more involvement and participation by the human senses. Therefore, McLuhan says, people today using these media gain knowledge in more depth. They have a broader outlook on things in general, and are said to reproduce what prevailed in ancient tribal villages, where things were known in depth by all members of the small society, and at virtually the same time.

Television is said to reproduce this on a global scale. It demands in-depth participation of the whole being, McLuhan says—“it engages you.” Moreover, it makes possible “corporate participation”; a whole nation at once can be involved in the funeral of a national leader, for example. Mankind can return to the supposedly wonderful world of the auditory. McLuhan sees a new form of tribalism emerging.

With the emergence of the new world of juxtaposed modes of perception, there is said to be appearing also a new form of human consciousness in which patterns of such responses as guilt are radically altered. Guilt becomes something that everyone feels; in a world of total involvement, a mass culture in which everyone is profoundly involved with everyone else, private guilt is a thing of the past. McLuhan acknowledges gratefully James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where he finds new insights into the collective consciousness. He is persuaded that when there is a change in the ratio in which men use their senses, men themselves are altered. Thus he envisions a new type of humanity, fashioned along the lines of pre-literate men, in which the acoustic (and olfactory and tactile) modes predominate over the visual.

The theme “The medium is the message” appears variously in The Gutenberg Galaxy and in Understanding Media (1964), and a pun on that theme became the title of his 1967 volume, The Medium Is the Massage. This formula encases the thesis that all modes of communication are but extensions of our physical organs and physical capacities. For example, clothes are the extension of the skin, the telegraph the externalization of the central nervous system. Electric circuitry is thus seen to be a projection of man’s entire cerebral-neural structure.

McLuhan is persuaded, further, that for all practical purposes, the medium is identical with the message it transmits. As extensions of the human sensory equipment, which is intimately related to the knowing process, media for communication subsume that which they bear. This is especially true, he says, when linear sequence gives way to juxtaposition or to simultaneous presentation. McLuhan’s example here is cubism in art, by which all sides and dimensions are presented, without attempt at perspective. The centralism of the linear era gives way to sensory, “mosaic” forms of apprehension. The “cinema-literate” person seldom sees pure data but finds meaning and pattern in the communication process itself.

Thus television, for example, simply as a result of its mosaic pattern, is held to structure not only new types of perception but also new forms of motivation. The demonic possibilities here center in the ability of such a medium to hypnotize through the isolation of one of the senses. This seems to be the rationale of McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message.

McLuhan thus far has not ventured into traditionally religious categories, but one of his well-informed students speculates that he may do so in the third of a trilogy of books he is now preparing.

His system, an ambitious one, seems to be open to several serious criticisms. It seems clearly to overwork the concept of historical discontinuity. At times McLuhan seems to suggest a sharp division of history at about 1460, the date of the popularizing of printing with movable type. At other times he makes allowance for a more gradual type of detribalization of Western man. It seems clear that this attempt at a philosophy of history is open to two major objections: first, it is too simplistic and narrowly based; and second, it uses a questionable category, namely detribalization, for understanding the course of modernization.

Again, this system seems to overwork one aspect of Western culture, typography. Although printing did tend toward uniformity and repeatability, cultural change is far more complex than McLuhan would have us to believe. It is far from clear that typography is a determining factor in the fixing of language, to say nothing of thought-forms.

McLuhan may be challenged also at the point of his deterministic view of human history and culture. We are far from certain that it is technological discovery that invariably shapes man’s physical environment and unerringly guides its modifications. His system is not less deterministic because he makes information and its transmission the initiator of cultural change. If the medium is the message, then man is still determined by technology.

This form of deterministic thinking minimizes or neglects the shaping role of other forces known to the historiographer. Can a writer seeking to trace a philosophy of history afford to neglect the shaping role of strong personalities, or of geographic or economic factors? One gets the impression that McLuhan is so enamored with the role of a particular mode of presentation that he overlooks all other causal factors.

His system is open to further criticism for impoverishing the human psyche. There is a richness in man’s inner life that is far too great to be a prisoner of the media of expression. McLuhan’s psychology seems to this writer to be as simplistic as his understanding of history.

His view of the phonetic alphabet seems exaggerated and doctrinaire. He opens himself to question when he asserts that the alphabet is a simple construct of symbols that are semantically and epistemologically meaningless. Certainly some phonetic symbols have more sensory power than others; such expressions as “Alpha and Omega” were more meaningful in the early Church than, for example “Chi and Tau.” But to regard the alphabet as semantically and sensorially meaningless is to overlook such usages as the onomatopoeic and the metonymic. Here McLuhan is overly entranced with a theory.

Again, does not McLuhan fall into the error of supposing that electronic media have a univocal use—that is, that they have no other function than that which they now serve? In maintaining, for example, that television does at present produce a given type of person, he ought also to recognize that this medium has both beneficial and demonic uses. No harm would be done if he were to regard its present use as in part a misuse.

Finally, McLuhan seems to be doctrinaire in his depreciation of structure and rational discourse. Mental processes are not necessarily faulty because they are linear, analytic, and low-keyed in sensory involvement. It seems to this writer that McLuhan is completely unrealistic in assuming that a message of articulated and logical form (such as that of the Christian Evangel) is no longer meaningful in a world of multi-medium presentation. Nor can one agree that it was only the use of linear type that made the Bible a credible book, so that it is meaningless in a context of other presentation forms. Religious determinism is as difficult to defend as cultural and linguistic determinism.

Let the Christian Church ponder well the meaning of available electronic media for the articulation and projection of its message. It will do well, further, to take the most serious note of the changes in the public climate as a result of electric circuitry. But let the Church not forget the demonic possibilities latent in media that drain presentation of content and produce only formless and unstructured impressions. The age of literacy will without doubt be with us for a long time, and an Almighty Heart seems still desirous of projecting Jesus Christ into the mentality of man as the Eternal Word.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

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