At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan and the Modernist Writers' Legacy

Marshall McLuhan and the Modernist Writers' Legacy ELENA LAMBERTI /VFTER ALMOST TWO DECADES of more or less oblivion, Marshall McLuhan is back in vogue. Looking through the rear­ view mirror of knowledge, the new generation of media scholars has finally decided to resurrect him, turning the "media guru" into a powerful icon, enhancing new high­tech speculations: today, the gospel of Marshall McLuhan, the "Patron Saint" of the "Information Era," is evoked to support new theories, interpretations, and ideas. To a skeptical observer, the proselytes of the World Wide Web look like the new prophets eager to explain what McLuhan said, what McLuhan foresaw, and even what McLuhan would say if he were here today. The fastidious impression is that despite the good will that presumably lies behind the retrieval of McLuhan's ideas, in the long term the result of this renewed interest will be but one: the archetype will be retrieved through little cliches and, once more, the whole ground will be fragmented into confused and blurred figures. The point of this paper is to suggest that, in order to retrieve and make good use of McLuhan's analysis and thoughts, it is important to move a step further and approach his galaxy in a new way: we should move, in fact, from the literal (what McLuhan said) to the structural (how he said what he said) and try to carry out a different exegesis that, in time, may recompose the cosmogony and reassemble the fragments. To ap­ 64 proach the structural may, in fact, open the way to new questions, in turn leading to a new epistemology that may provide new strategies for facing and mastering the increasing overload of information. We should start to question not only what McLuhan said, but how he said it; the "why" and the "what isit all about" are the big issueswhich inevitablywill follow, and which new critics will set to investigate, therefore perfecting a yet­to­be accomplished exegesis of McLuhan's works. First of all, however, it is important to reset the balance and ap­ proach McLuhan's ideas starting not from the various interpretations and commentaries that interpreters have given us, but, rather, from his own books, from his own prose; in other words, we must leave aside the misused cliches and look for the archetype. To start with McLuhan's form of writing may reveal, in fact, what is perhaps his greatest legacy: a different forma mentis, a new frame of mind, that leads to a different approach to knowledge, something that he perceived as a continuum, a complex paideia to be investigated in toto. This, in turn, is an idea that McLuhan retrieved from his literary and philosophical studies and con­ solidated through the setting up of a new form of writing: the mosaic. It is not an exaggeration to state that McLuhan based all his media analysis upon a precise literary paradigm that he found in Edgar Allen Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition": the idea is that of starting from a given effect to then retrace, a rebours, the formal cause. It is, as we all know, the technique employed in detective stories.At a merely formal or structural level, however, it is also the technique underpinning most modernist literary and artistic experiments: the formal aspects of narrative discourse become crucial to the making of the narrative itself. Form and content overlap, and words become tools carefully orchestrated by con­ scious writers who pursue a precise goal, since they want to induce a precise effect upon the reader. In the experimental works of modernist writers, the medium (writing) is somehow the message, as new technical devices are developed to convey a new world vision. McLuhan, himself a scholar of the modernist literary and artistic movements, learnt this lesson and, in turn, applied it to his critical analysis of the new media­induced environment. Nevertheless, to apply a new approach to a consolidated phenom­ enon requires, first of all, setting one's mind free from previous party biases, and then starting all over again. For this purpose, I shall now use 65 literature as a sort of Trojan horse to suggest a new exegetical model to be used to approach the phenomenon "McLuhan." To this intent, I have chosen a short passage from Umberto Ecos renowned novel The Name of the Rose, a novel that combines the technique of the detective story...