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

Introduction

Introduction JOHNMOSS JL/ABOUR DAY EVENING, 2001; the CBC is rebroad­ casting a mosaic of interviews from "This Hour Has Seven Days," origi­ nally televised in 1966. There is Pierre Trudeau, a slightly effete and nervous intellectual coaxing the Liberal Rene Levesque into admitting the inefficacy of Quebec separation; actually, LarryZolf conducts most of the interview, but history intervenes, and the viewer sees the nearly silent Trudeau as key player in the discourse. There is Leonard Cohen making love to the camera, making love to the smitten interviewer,lovinghimself, making the viewer voyeur.And there is Marshall McLuhan, introduced by Patrick Watson with the warning that only ten percent of the interview makes sense, even to McLuhan; make of it what you will, the Americans love him. And then McLuhan speaks about things we now take for granted, and does so with clarity and wit; he does not have the terminol­ ogy or the technology, but he envisions the World Wide Web with un­ canny precision. He describesthe present with prophetic acumen, a futurist positioned by history to anticipate the past. His genius is confirmed not by how much his ideas now surprise but by how litde. It is like Newton and gravity. As a participant in the proceedings from which this book rose to its present form, my contribution was of small consequence. I offered up a short story, about which, as with most authorial commentary, the less said the better. Yet it has fallen on me to write an introduction. How do you impose an introduction on an intellectual mosaic that will not frame and fix the separate pieces in an arbitrary design? How do you avoid casting each piece into a common light that will wash out its metaphoric implica­ tions? Introductions normally endeavour to give the reader perspective, but mosaics resist or subvert perspective, and when the pieces are all concerned one way or another with Marshall McLuhan (in the same way that a landscape is concerned with nature, although the eye may see a stream, the sky, emotion, beauty), then perspective is an obtrusive impo­ sition. Introductions are generally conclusions placed at the beginning, usually of a discursive text to intimate coherence or an obscure text to imply lucidity. But here, the design is in the details. The only introduction possible is one that denies all initiative and begins with the end, which was to construct a mosaic resonant with elements of insight, scholarship, revelation, thought, memory, imagination, that taken together would offer a new version of McLuhan as an intellectual adventurer and cultural icon, of his ideas as complex architecture and brilliant lines. What follows is a mosaic in time, not space, unframed, like ornamental fish weaving colour in depths of clear, dark water. Take the pieces, one by one, as arranged in the following pages. Some are big and some are small, some exegetic and some confessional; some stand as major statements and others are sidelong glances; some resonate with the concerns of public discourse and others are private or privileged or impious and provocative. Several are offered in a language foreign to the speaker/writer but in which the reader resides. Each consists of many parts, each a design on its own. They speak to each other, and had they been arranged differently their conversations might have varied. This is one version. It begins with an ingenuous essay with the disarmingly ambiguous title, "McLuhan as Medium," by Thomas Dilworth. In a charged recitation of memories, discussions, lectures, and diverse encoun­ ters with a sadly deteriorating genius, Dilworth brings forward McLuhan's presence as an irascible nexus of great ideas and human foibles. This essay, at once learned and intimate, opens the parameters of the text to deal with the man and his work as implication, inspiration, foil. Dilworth's opening is followed by Robert E. Babe's massive and concise recovery of McLuhan as a dialectical theorist within the context of Canadian communications thought, elaborating on his holistic mode of 2 analysis with particular reference to Harold Innis, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Refuting notions of inconsistency in regard to McLuhans theorizing, Babe reveals McLuhans reliance on and illumination of the fundamental truth underlying human experience. Shirting context some­ what, Elena Lamberti and Domenic Manganiello both examine McLuhan in relation to modernism, with James Joyce as the key referent but to very different ends. Inevitably, when discussing McLuhan, the principal...