McLuhan Made Simple(r)

Book feature, 2/10/99

McLuhan for Beginners

by W. Terrence Gordon; illustrated by Susan Willmarth

Writers and Readers Publishing

The Mechanical Bride:

by Marshall McLuhan

Beacon Press

The Medium Is the Massage:

HardWired

War and Peace in the Global Village

HardWired

In the late ’70s, the U.K.-based Writers and Readers organization helped revitalize the sub-genre of educational comics with its series of cleanly-drawn, rigorously-edited trade paperbacks, many on leftist political topics that had become the domain of ponderous academic verbiage. After a falling-out around 1990 with Random House, which had issued the U.S. editions of its early books, Writers and Readers set up its own Stateside distribution arm for what it calls its “documentary comic books” (which are really more like heavily-illustrated texts). The “For Beginners” line’s topics have broadened from Marx and anti-nuclear-power activism to include opera, architecture, pan-Africanism, and the history of clowns.

But what happens when you try to use the illustrated-text format to simplify an author/philosopher/sociologist who already tried during his lifetime to issue illustrated and simplified expressions of his ideas?

Not the total redundancy one might expect.

Marshall McLuhan’s own illo-books (the early The Mechanical Bride and the later The Medium Is the Massageand War and Peace in the Global Village) still hold up today as prime examples in the marriage of word and picture to express a sequence of ideas and critical arguments. Bride, the Toronto media analyst’s first, now damn-hard-to-find book (1950), used the word-picture interplay not only as its technique but as one of its topics. At the time TV was just starting up, McLuhan (1911-80) found most of the things later curmuddeonny media-analysts would blame on TV in the existing realms of radio, movies, newspaper front pages, comic books, and especially magazine ads. While his fellow academics were coccooned away in their ivory towers (perhaps in hiding from the hordes of GI Bill kids then invading campuses south of the Canadian border), McLuhan saw the forces of corporate culture using every persuasive trick, not to inform the populace but rather to keep it in a passive, sleepwalking state of production and consumption.

After his long, detailed, and pictureless Understanding Media (1965) brought him fame and a modicum of critical respect, McLuhan returned to the illustrated format with Massage in ’67, followed-up the next year by Global Village. The two mass-market-paperback sized books, co-written by Quentin Fiore and designed by Jerome Agel, can be seen as one two-volume work. McLuhan called them “mosaics,” possibly referring to the old adage that America was a melting pot but Canada was a mosaic of still-differentiated identities. The McLuhan-Fiore-Agel team mixed New Yorker cartoons, ads, found images, and news and documentary photos to accompany short, pithy, universal pronouncements (“Art is what you can get away with,” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”).

By chopping up his remarks into micro-essays (more about that literary form in a future week) on nothing less important than the essence of modern social interactions, with lots of sharp black and white pictures, it’s easy to see he was trying to use the techniques he’d observed in commercial media to new, more enlightening ends. Unfortunately, readers and critics sometimes didn’t understand the difference between McLuhan’s and advertisers’ use of such visual-verbal techniques, and incorrectly presumed McLuhan was celebrating or approving of the social changes he was actually trying to warn us against.

McLuhan for Beginners author Terrence Gordon (whose work here was admired enough by McLuhan’s family for him to bag the assignment to write his estate-authorized biography) makes clear, to the point of redundancy, that the old Torontoan was trying to keep up with the ’60s, not to wallow in the go-go-go zeitgeist but to warn us about it, as a reserved yet kindly Canuck gentleman dismayed by the U.S.A.’s culture of excess. An excess which not only sent Americans into space but into the horrors of the Vietnam war, into cloverleaf freeways and decayed ghettos, into ever faster, busier, and more manic existences.

Massage and Global Village were intended to only explore pieces of McLuhan’s worldview. Gordon’s book, written nearly two decades after his subject’s death and a decade since his last posthumously-published work, gets to summarize the man’s whole life, career, and teachings. That he does an admirable, cohesive job of it is due partly to his skill, partly to the finely honed instincts of the Writers and Readers editors, and in no small part to the head start given him by his subject.

At a time when so many self-proclaimed “communication” experts can’t write a simple declarative sentence (to the point where you need a “documentary comic book” re-interpretation just to get what they’re trying to say), McLuhan’s knack for breaking down a complex argument into solid bite-sized points, learned largely from the mass media he studied and often opposed, still points the way toward not just understanding media, but making yourself understood in the process.