McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (review)

Editor's note: Sadly, Nancy Shaw passed away in April 2007. We respectfully publish this review in her memory.

Richard Cavell's McLuhan in Space makes a unique contribution to the revival of Marshall McLuhan that has taken place over the past decade. These recent academic explorations of McLuhan's legacy are committed to putting his work back into circulation after a long period of dismissal in North America. Most of these works are intended to situate McLuhan as Canadian scholar of popular and international repute. In many cases, this occurs by linking McLuhan's writing to the literary, historical, and cultural figures who informed him as well as to those whom he influenced. Most laudable are efforts to contextualize and explicate McLuhan's aphoristic writing, which is often condensed and at times confusing.¹

Cavell's reassessment locates McLuhan as an important precursor to critical cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Geraldine Pratt, and Derek Gregory. Their work considers the political, economic, cultural, and social conditions shaping and shaped by the organization of space. In inserting McLuhan into this discipline of thought, Cavell provocatively suggests that McLuhan's conceptualization of space produces the overriding category through which his wide-sweeping range of work can be assessed, taking precedence over claims made for McLuhan in the disciplines of communications, Modernism, and media studies. To locate McLuhan within the trajectory spatialization studies, Cavell engages a comprehensive litany of McLuhan's sources and influences to create what he calls an intellectual archeology. His discursive study is sustained through extensive close textual readings of the works that influenced McLuhan while at the same time linking McLuhan's influence to a plethora of interdisciplinary artistic endeavours. To do this, Cavell revisits McLuhan's theories of space as they develop in The Mechanical Bride through to Understanding Media. He completes his study by exploring McLuhan's theories of space in relationship to Canadian and international artistic practice.

One of the most significant dimensions of Cavell's intellectual archeology is the important links he makes between McLuhan's work and its influence with Canadian artists, musicians, and writers—especially on the West Coast. In an almost encyclopedic fashion, Cavell etches the stamp of McLuhan's legacy across a wide range of interdisciplinary artistic practices including those involving the visual and media arts, performance, the book arts, concrete poetry, soundscape productions, music, and conceptual art. This section of Cavall's book exploring McLuhan's relationship to Canadian artistic creators is highly relevant and marks a unique departure from most other scholarly reflections.

McLuhan celebrated artists. He considered artists to be human antennae because he deemed them able to recognize societal changes wrought through media and technology. McLuhan's definition of the artist allowed him to qualify his own activities as artistically productive. While Cavell's documenting of the irrefutable influence of McLuhan on interdisciplinary practitioners in Canada is an invaluable effort, he tends to focus on similarities and likenesses between McLuhan and artistic practitioners. It seems to me that McLuhan's overall intention was to understand the changing relationship between media and society in order to make the necessary adjustments to maintain the status quo. This may have left him at odds and in critical contention with the intentions of artist that Cavell analyzes. As a result, Cavell's consideration of Canadian artists like Joyce Weiland, Michael Snow, N.E. Thing Company, R. Murray Schafer, Glenn Gould, and b.p.nichol would benefit further from a discussion of points of contention and controversy distinguishing McLuhan from these creative practitioners.

The primary intent of McLuhan in Space is to introduce concepts of acoustic space to critical geographers who like McLuhan contest static and idealized theories of Cartesian space. McLuhan characterized Cartesian space as linear, mechanistic, nationalistic, and fixed. He dismissed Cartesian space as a relic of the age of print media that was in the process of being eclipsed and incorporated by the coming of electronic media and the emergence of acoustic space. For McLuhan, acoustic space...