Marshall McLuhan revisited: media guru as Catholic modernist

Marshall McLuhan, the literary critic who became famous in the 1960s as a theorist of the communications media, has been back for some time, at least in certain circles. The magazine Wired, written and edited for computer sophisticates, shows McLuhan’s continuing influence both in its design and content. Now Canadian professor W. Terrence Gordon has written a big biography about McLuhan, himself a Canadian and one of the most visible intellectual superstars in a decade of superstars. This star has surely dimmed, however. Once celebrated as “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov,” McLuhan is now remembered chiefly for a few of his slogans. ¹

It might be preferable to start with his main ideas. I begin with a little history of civilization according to McLuhan before moving on to his media theory. According to McLuhan, we are living through the end of the era of typographical culture. That era began with Gutenberg’s invention in the mid-1400s of the type mold, which revolutionized printing and by way of the mass-produced printed book brought about the end of medieval manuscript culture. Our new communications media differ in being electronic. Beginning with wireless telegraphy, the various new media—telephone, phonograph, cinema, radio, television, and so on—communicate information instantaneously. They also process reality according to codes other than that of the reading eye, thereby effecting a radical restructuring of the psyche. The Gutenberg revolution had substituted the reading eye for the medieval ear; the monks were accustomed to speaking the words as they copied and read their illuminated manuscripts. In our new electronic culture, according to McLuhan, the ear is having its revenge.

McLuhan was for communal participation as encouraged by oral-aural culture and opposed to the distanciation and separateness that he thought eye-dominance brought about. Moreover, in his view, visual technologies were responsible for the analytic fragmentation of consciousness and the denudation of sensory life. He believed that the aesthetic-perceptual superiority of the new electronic media will make for a return to a lost wholeness of apprehension. McLuhan had amusing and insightful observations about a host of media, leading up to radio and television, but his main point was that new electronic modes of communication are creating a “global village” that will restore some central features of the unified, interdependent, oral-aural culture of the Middle Ages.

The medieval world was unified, of course, not only because it was oral but also because it was Catholic. That detail can’t have been lost on McLuhan, who was himself a convert. He managed never to sound like an apologist for Catholicism, but it’s my opinion that implicit always in his account of the electronic world aborning is a desire to serve as midwife for an order that will restore the Catholic Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been. To change the metaphor, I see him as moved by an evangelical yearning to be a modern-day John the Baptist, except that the kingdom whose coming he prophesied belonged to the past. We can observe in his project the seeming contradiction of reactionary medievalism and technology-oriented futurism, but ultimately the vision—of wholeness, unity, totality—is the same. In McLuhan’s reading of history, the last time the world enjoyed such unity was under the aegis of the church. ²

The new cultural studies academics would seem to be the most likely promoters of a McLuhan revival that would extend beyond the specialist audience that tunes into Wired. English professors who have remade themselves as scholars of pop culture would need first to contextualize McLuhan. In his recent review of the Gordon biography, Mark Edmundson reminds us of McLuhan’s famous slogan “the medium is the message” and his distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (e.g., radio versus television), as if that’s all one needs to know. ³ He also refers several times to the difficulties of McLuhan’s style, without ever quoting McLuhan...