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  • At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination: A Reapppraisal of Marshall McLuhan
  • John Fekete (bio)
John Moss and Linda M. Morra, editors. At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination: A Reapppraisal of Marshall McLuhan Reappraisals: Canadian Writers Volume 27. University of Ottawa Press 2004. 262. $24.95

Based on an annual symposium to advance the study of Canadian literary subjects, hosted in May 2000 by the University of Ottawa English Department, this collection, according to the editorial introduction, is expected to resonate in concert with McLuhan's brilliant and complex intellectual adventure, but without the imposition of any 'unifying perspective.' The book makes two strong offerings. The first is the remarkably intense and evocative material recovered by Paul Tiessen's preliminary work on the unpublished papers of Wilfrid Watson, which is amplified by Tom Dilworth's memories of McLuhan's teaching. The Watson notes, with Tiessen's commentary, are particularly compelling, taking the reader through the Watson-McLuhan collaboration and divergence, from their [End Page 571] contact under conditions of uneven celebrity to their separation framed by Watson's absurdist 'anti-McLuhan' play Let's Murder Clytemnestra according to the Principles of Marshall McLuhan (1969) and Watson's growing anxiety about technological overload and 'man becoming machine.'

The second is a cluster of theoretical papers on the subject of McLuhan's use of space as an organizing category which points to new ground in McLuhan scholarship by way of 'cultural geography.' An essay by geographer Mario Neve on the role of maps in the production of space as information, charting some of the ways that the geography of the mind underpins the geography of the land, and an essay by audio engineer and telecommunications policy analyst Gordon Gow on the structural, orientational, and ontological functions of McLuhan's use of space metaphors (visual space, acoustic space) to organize thinking about technology, both complement what is perhaps the most important essay in this collection: Richard Cavell's 'McLuhan in Space,' drawn from his subsequently published book of the same title. Cavell's argument, that McLuhan is best understood as a systematic theorist of space, properly locatable in the 'spatial turn of contemporary theorizing and artistic production' and traceable in the new French thought to Lefebvre's La production de l'espace (1974), may well open up a new phase of McLuhan discussion. Cavell's systematizing move displays a rich initial yield, succeeding in decisively distinguishing McLuhan's work on space from Harold Innis's, and in positioning McLuhan's treatment of visual space and acoustic space in relationship, not only to cutting-edge theoretical currents beyond the communications paradigm, but also to an established tradition in the physiology of the senses and the physics of perception.

The discussion of space in these essays is consistent with Robert Babe's brief and somewhat schematic treatment of McLuhan's visual space and acoustic space as the two foci of a 'dialectical' double vision, aligning McLuhan with other 'dialectical' thinkers at the foundations of 'Canadian Communication Thought' (see Babe's book of the same title). The discussion of space is contextualized further in Brian Fawcett's lively presentation of 'What McLuhan Got Wrong about the Global Village ...,' and in the disenchanted panel discussion between Fawcett, Babe, Arthur Kroker, and Leslie Shade, where the globalizing world of electronically accelerated information is viewed as neither 'village' nor benign, but merely a commercial phenomenon characterized by price dominating value until, in Fawcett's words, 'the emptiness of consumerism enfolds the competitive violence of tribalism.' A short story by John Moss, a poem by Fawcett, and three essays (Elena Lamberti, Dominic Mangianello, and P.P. Ajayakumar) rereading McLuhan's narrative and conceptual strategies with varying degrees of elegance and density, in relation to reference points in modernism and in postcolonial hybridity, round out the volume. [End Page 572]

An interesting feature of the collection is that it is not really a reappraisal in the customary sense. In contrast to more than forty years of debate about McLuhan pro and con, as a discourse-generating figure attended by controversies about the impact of technology, the value of popular culture, the role of the...

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