Master of the Vortex

I had been expecting more of a James Boswell and Doctor Johnson take on Marshall McLuhan's life. At the suggestion of his publisher, however, Douglas Coupland took his cue from McLuhan's appearance as himself in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall (1977) and the title of his biography from the rebuke—"You know nothing of my work!"—with which McLuhan cuts short a know-it-all standing in a movie line who pretends to understand his ideas. Allen's cameo of McLuhan in the film is comically and ironically correct. Misquoted and misinterpreted to the point that he was often mistaken for a guru of media culture who believed in its spiritual values, McLuhan warned of the dangers of "arduous interfaces and abrasive situations in the global village," and also of a possible de-civilizing process as men moved from an existing print culture toward an oral culture. He went so far as to suggest the ominous possibility that the rapid advent of too many new media at one time would "trigger identity collapses which could lead in turn to conflict, violence, and war." It is to Douglas Coupland's credit that he sets the record straight by examining the values which motivated the author of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) to write and publish.

Very much in the manner of Woody Allen, Coupland juxtaposes scenes in his biography and leaves on the cutting room floor materials which might disrupt the flow of the short sequences that he has chosen to recreate McLuhan's universe. He begins by deconstructing with irony and humor the McLuhan myth, or "brand name," so that we may form our own image of the man and his thought. His intensive reading of McLuhan's writings, even the most obscure, furnishes him with a myriad of elements with which to construct a mosaic of McLuhan's life as a Renaissance scholar whose love of sounds and patterns enabled him to live "on the frontiers of perception." His choice of the mosaic form for the biography would have pleased McLuhan, who believed that mosaics were the artistic link between the ancient and the modern.

Because he had an artist's perception of the forces at work in the world—"The man was foremost an artist, one who happened to use words and ideas as others might use paint"—Coupland believes that McLuhan was able to understand the importance of form for his century. From the outset, Coupland articulates Marshall McLuhan's deeply held belief that the work of the artist is to find patterns, for artists are the antennae of their race. What are the painters painting, and what are the poets writing? In which direction are their antennae pointing?

Coupland feels that his conception of what a biography should be has been influenced by his personal experience of media culture: "Before, say 1990, biographies were about how you really grew to know a person, but documentary filmmaking and the internet have closed the gap." In the creation of his imaginary documentary about the sixties, "Still Life with Airport," Coupland evokes the atmosphere of incomprehension surrounding McLuhan's media research during his lifetime. He addresses McLuhan as "you," tells him that he is "wearing a hat" and waiting in an airport terminal where the "air is silky blue with cigarette smoke...reading about art being made in New York that uses comic strips and magazine ads as its creative nucleus." The plane, Coupland tells him, will take him from Toronto to New York, where he will be driven in a limousine—"a machine that pumps large clouds of leaded blue smoke into the air"—to a skyscraper in New York City where "rich men are paying you thousands of dollars to say pretty much whatever passes through your mind." When the smoke clears, McLuhan has been delivered to executives who "had spent a fortune to strip-mine him for insights" and were hoping to find commercial uses for his research.

McLuhan's initial criticism of the power of the media...