The New Science of Communication: Reconsidering McLuhan's Message for Our Modern Moment by Anthony M. Wachs (review)

For those who are really into the works of Herbert Marshall McLuhan—or for those who want the inside scoop—Anthony M. Wachs's The New Science of Communication: Reconsidering McLuhan's Message for Our Modern Moment is a must-read book. It is a serious and meticulous piece of scholarship, and much of the book stitches together quotations from McLuhan himself. In that sense, it represents McLuhan's orientations and conveys important sensibilities informing his thought. The careful documentation of McLuhan's actual phraseology and self-appraisal are the main merits of Wachs's book.

Those lauds said, the book left me with mixed feelings. Wachs seeks an authentic understanding of McLuhan as a whole, one that spans McLuhan's dissertation on the trivium and his later development of the tetrads. Along the way, Wachs accepts McLuhan's self-appraisals most uncritically. Additionally, in seeking to capture the essential McLuhan, the text downplays important relations and differences between: (1) trying to understand the whole of McLuhan, (2) trying to understand what McLuhan was trying to understand, and (3) trying to understand the larger context that made McLuhan's insights widely intelligible. As one example, depending on who is drawn upon and how they are given voice in accounting for it, General Systems Theory might not be aligned with the first point, but it certainly is with the second and third points.

Regarding point one, understanding McLuhan as a whole, The New Science of Communication is a kind of imagined reconstruction along the lines of "this is how McLuhan really understood things" or "without grasping McLuhan's early training, you can use him but you will not be getting him right." Wachs insists that McLuhan can be read, in the proper way, only as an "ancient" and as a "grammarian." Part of my question is: how much do authors need to be taken at face value in their self-descriptions of their work? Freud, love him or hate him, was a genius like McLuhan, and he often questioned the lucidity of people's self-understandings. In this case, can McLuhan routinely make appeals to contemporary neuroscience, claim that he relies on perception rather than conception, and yet, also, claim to be a "realist" in the ancient sense of the word?

In other words, Wachs teases out some of the most idiosyncratic and odd parts of McLuhan's stated beliefs. For example, according to McLuhan, both Plato and Aristotle are moderns, whereas McLuhan himself is an ancient. Moreover, ancients practice new science, whereas moderns practice old science. Who does not find it odd that someone could tout himself as an ancient grammarian and, simultaneously, as the promulgator of a "new science"? Gazing on such eccentric linguistic contortions, we see McLuhan attempting to make sense of the modern world through an increasingly ill-fitting set of ideas. Perhaps it is worth recalling that McLuhan once said, "I don't pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult."

Regarding point two, trying to understand what McLuhan was trying to understand, Wachs has, if inadvertently, enabled subsequent scholars to see how McLuhan's thought, brilliant as it is, remains caught in ancient/medieval sensibilities. It cuts to where McLuhan seems most confused and stymied by his early training. A major part of the hang-up here is that in the Aristotelian and/or Thomistic view, there is no account of the emergence of new forms. This is part of the gummy ambiguity deeply implied in the tetrads. Nothing new ever comes into being; anything and everything is always already a kind of retrieval. This conceptual baggage occurs in McLuhan when he speaks of the electric age as a kind of "return," or when he equates "pre-Euclidian" space with "post-Euclidian" space. Additionally, where and when McLuhan talks about the implications of non-Euclidian geometry, about Heisenberg or...