At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan (review)

Having studiously avoided making any of my own pronouncements on Marshall McLuhan out of ambivalence or terror – or both – reading these essays and reflections on McLuhan put me at ease, chiefly in the knowledge that the only certainty about McLuhan is our inability to encompass him. McLuhan emerges here as virtually all things to all people, an inspiring yet often insensitive teacher, and as a talented synthesizer and troubled savant. His intellectual shadow is long, especially in Canada, as is the list of ideas and frameworks with which his thought resonates or clashes. This collection of essays demonstrates the multitude of ways McLuhan has influenced, and continues to affect, the study of literature, media, culture, and communication, never necessarily in that order. Accordingly, his work and the exegesis of it – 'McLuhan as he was and is' in editor John Moss's words – justify reappraisal. Such a reappraisal was overdue, probably because, as Elena Lamberti suggests in her essay, a new generation of scholars first needed to 'resurrect' him. Does the need to perform a resurrection mean that McLuhan's tendency to speak in aphorisms – noted here by at least one author – had placed him in a kind of purgatory of unhip theorists? These contributions emerged from a conference on McLuhan, and the authors come at McLuhan from a variety of angles, not unlike the blind men and the elephant, but with more satisfying results. They generate and attempt to answer some big questions: What hath McLuhan wrought? How did someone grappling with how it all fit together deal with people? Where did he stand in relation to others considering similar phenomena?

The contributions themselves range widely, from fiction to memoir to analyses of McLuhan's take on particular concepts to a clever poem-inventory of McLuhan's Wychwood Park residence in Toronto. John Moss's short story features a man whom McLuhan inspires (indirectly) to give up books. Tom Dilworth's memoir of his sporadic dealings with McLuhan strikes the sort of balance between the academic and the personal that enriches our understanding of McLuhan's influence on his students (a few of whom contribute here), and complicates our understanding of him in the same way that Philip Marchand's 1989 biography did. Robert Babe's illuminating comparison of McLuhan and a constellation of Canadian communications thinkers (Innis, Grant, and Smythe among them) includes an especially helpful section positing a kind of ontological agreement among these observers on the critical utility of values. Elena Lamberti gets at the mystique of McLuhan by showing how modernist writers prompted him to consider newer media and thus to 'open up his "academic mind."' Although McLuhan was interested in both labyrinth and landscape, he fades into the background in Dominic Manganiello's short piece, which is rather more concerned with Dante and Joyce. Paul Tiessen's study of playwright Wilfred Watson's long involvement and collaboration with McLuhan illustrates the way in which McLuhan came to be seen as the heir of figures such as Eliot and Pound and could deeply affect the creative choices of someone like Watson, a formidable writer and thinker in his own right. P.P. Ajayakumar's application of McLuhan and hybridity to the South Indian art form of Kathakali places McLuhan among some influential company (Bhabha, Spivak, Bakhtin), but might have more extensively explored ways McLuhan can be linked with post-colonial thought. Mario Neve, Richard Cavell, and Gordon Gow each take on McLuhan and the concept of space, Neve by relating mapping and the uses and abuses of maps to the sort of cultural transformations that profoundly interested McLuhan, Cavell by seeing space as the umbrella ('broader interest') under which McLuhan's entire oeuvre can fit, and Gow by pointing out how important space was to the production of McLuhan's metaphors. The longer of Brian Fawcett's two contributions evaluates McLuhan's 'record...