Marshall McLuhan

To Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands:

"It was good to be there. It is good to be back. As you know, I was a rather bad boy at Bilderberg..."

Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 372

<h2>Major works</h2>

During his years at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Louis_University" title="Saint Louis University">Saint Louis University</a> (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctoral_thesis" title="Doctoral thesis" class="mw-redirect">dissertation</a> and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar" title="Grammar">grammar</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic" title="Logic">logic</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric" title="Rhetoric">rhetoric</a>—collectively known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium_%28education%29" title="Trivium (education)">trivium</a>) from the time of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero" title="Cicero">Cicero</a> down to the time of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nashe" title="Thomas Nashe">Thomas Nashe</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#cite_note-36">[37]</a> In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages" title="Middle Ages">Middle Ages</a>, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance" title="Renaissance">Renaissance</a> was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and language. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism" title="New Criticism">New Criticism</a> of Richards and Leavis.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#cite_note-37">[38]</a>

In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture" title="Popular culture">popular culture</a>. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media" title="Mass media">communication media</a> independent of their content. His famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism" title="Aphorism">aphorism</a> "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extensions_of_Man" title="Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man">Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</a>) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#cite_note-38">[39]</a>

McLuhan also started the journal Explorations with anthropologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Snow_Carpenter" title="Edmund Snow Carpenter">Edmund "Ted" Carpenter</a>. In a letter to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ong" title="Walter Ong" class="mw-redirect">Walter Ong</a> dated May 31, 1953, McLuhan reported that he had received a two-year grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal.[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed">citation needed</a>]

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe" title="Tom Wolfe">Tom Wolfe</a> suggests that a hidden influence on McLuhan's work is the Catholic philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teilhard_de_Chardin" title="Teilhard de Chardin" class="mw-redirect">Teilhard de Chardin</a> whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere" title="Noosphere">noosphere</a>". Wolfe theorizes that McLuhan may have thought that association of his ideas with those of a Catholic theologian, albeit one suppressed by Rome, might have denied him the intellectual audience he wanted to reach and so omitted all reference of de Chardin from his published work, while privately acknowledging his influence.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#cite_note-TWolfe-39">[40]</a>

<h3>The Mechanical Bride (1951)</h3>

McLuhan's first book, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mechanical_Bride:Folklore_of_Industrial_Man" title="The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man">The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man</a> (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture" title="Popular culture">popular culture</a>. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.R._Leavis" title="F. R. Leavis">F. R. Leavis</a> and Denys Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada" title="Dada">Dadaist</a> artist, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp" title="Marcel Duchamp">Marcel Duchamp</a>.

Like his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order—what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.

<h3>The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)</h3>

McLuhan's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy" title="The Gutenberg Galaxy">The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man</a> (written in 1961, first published in Canada by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Toronto_Press" title="University of Toronto Press">University of Toronto Press</a> in 1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality" title="Orality">oral culture</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_culture" title="Print culture">print culture</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies" title="Cultural studies">cultural studies</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology" title="Media ecology">media ecology</a>.

Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_technology" title="Communication technology" class="mw-redirect">communication technology</a> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet" title="Alphabet">alphabetic</a> writing, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press" title="Printing press">printing press</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_media" title="Electronic media">electronic media</a>) affects <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive" title="Cognitive" class="mw-redirect">cognitive</a> organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#cite_note-40">[41]</a>

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McLuhan was influenced by de Chardin, but I'd have to read the book mentioned in the article to understand in what way:

<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard.html">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard.html</a>

“I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.”

― <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/455.Marshall_McLuhan">Marshall McLuhan</a>

Understanding Media regarding the trivium – “In education the conventional division of the curriculum into subjects is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and quadrivium after the Renaissance. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to others [sic] subjects. Arithmetic in grade three or nine, when taught in terms of number theory, symbolic logic, and cultural history, ceases to be mere practice in problems. Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live.” P. 460

The Jesuit Connection and Marshall McLuhan:

"I, as a Jesuit priest and by an unusual series of events, was brought into Marshall McLuhan's life to spend with him his last two days on this earth, saying Mass for him, reading to him, walking around the park with him, joking and laughing with him."

Here is J. Francis Stroud, S.J.'s memory of the time he spend with Marshall McLuhan just before he died, three pages which were found in Corinne McLuhan's scrapbook of clippings and obituaries.

For more along these lines, see "The incidental thoughts of Marshall McLuhan," by John Wain.

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Marshall McLuhan

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