Letters of Marshall McLuhan

by Marshall McLuhan, Corinne McLuhan, Matie Molinaro (editor)

Coiner of the famous phrase "the medium is the message" and author of two widely read, controversial volumes--The Guttenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media--Marshall McLuhan was one of the most talked about personalities of the 1960s. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek and The Saturday Review, was written about in Time, Life, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The National Review, was the subject of an hour-long documentary on NBC, and had an unforgettable walk-on role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, playing himself. A seminal thinker, he introduced popular culture as a subject for serious thought, and started people thinking about how technology--especially electronic media--shapes the way we perceive the world.
McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, from Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter to popular advice columnist Ann Landers. Indeed, his correspondents amount to a Who's Who of western culture, both high and low, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Bob Newhart. At times playful and at times profound, his letters offer an invaluable commentary on McLuhan's work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available.
A brilliant letter-writer and a genial man who made friends all over the world, Marshall McLuhan left behind a correspondence that brims with insight, good humor, and the love of language and word play. His letters offer an invaluable glimpse of the private life and inner thoughts of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marshall McLuhan produced so much work, and so much has been written about him that it can be difficult to know where to begin. This book was recommended to me as a starting point, but I myself would discourage a reader new to McLuhan to begin here. Instead, try Terrence Gordon's biography "Escape Into Understanding". He gives a good over view of McLuhan's ideas that will come in handy throughout this book, particularly when you encounter some of McLuhan's more obfuscated letters. On the other hand, I would recommend anyone starting out to read this book directly after that biography and before jumping into Understanding Media or his other major works. McLuhan consistently broadened his thought, his approach and his concepts over the course of his life. This book is a fantastic account of that and much more.

After reading these letters I understood key concepts in McLuhan's work much better. There are many letters where he's explaining the same ideas to different people across all kinds of disciplines and professions, from politicians (Pierre Trudeau, Jimmy Carter) to fellow academics( Walter Ong, Hugh Kenner, Sheila Watson) to critics of his work ( Jonathan Miller). There were a few times when an idea of his suddenly became clear to me in a way that it never had before after reading the 4th or 5th letter in which he labored to explain it yet again.

It's interesting to watch his thoughts progress over the course of his life and career. I closed this book with a much better understanding of his thoughts on metaphor, Symbolism and the huge influence of Modernist literature on his perspective. I doubt it would even be possible for a person of my generation to read as much as he did. He had an extensive literary background, but lacked the aversion to popular culture that seemed endemic to nearly all of academia. This placed him in a position to broker a conversation between the old media and the new without being defensive of either, and consequently he noticed things that no one had before.

His approach was mosaic, and his interests moved fast. He couldn't be bothered to waste his time trying to polish up a formal theory or systematize his ideas. He said repeatedly that he was deliberately trying to evade a "point of view". This point was misunderstood over and over again by his critics. He worked through his "probes", which were meant to root out new perspectives and reveal hidden connections in our environment and our behavior, but never to be hard and fast rules. Though he passionately defends his work throughout these letters, he never closed the book on his own ideas. They, like his aphorisms, were constantly evolving to undermine the automated responses of the public.

His famous and rather funny correspondence with Ezra Pound is included, as is his rather sycophantic (in my opinion) one with Wyndam Lewis. He had an interesting relationship with both men, and I wish this book had included their responses to many of these letters.

This book provides a portrait of Marshall McLuhan the human being that even the biographies don't quite capture. The many letters to his mother, the ones about his courtship and marriage, the many letters in which he expressed his concerns over the perils of advancing technology all reveal a very warm hearted individual. I'll confess feeling a little emotional reading Prime Minister Trudeau's letter to McLuhan's wife after his death.

This is required reading for those seeking a complete understanding of this guru of perception. I'll leave you with a couple of my favorite passages from the book.

"Quite unconsciously, the habit of perspective, or a fixed stance from which to observe a slice or facet of any situation, tends to breed intense emotional responses. When you try to figure out "what's going on", a point of view is not very useful. Within any organization, each individual tends to have a point of view. The consultant who is called in to diagnose has the advantage of not having a point of view. In an environment of electric information, a total field approach is natural, since all types of data are simultaneously accessible." pg.332

"At electric speed of information movement, for example, the individual ego and identity is enormously reduced in proportion as it becomes deeply involved in the social lives of mankind. Paradoxically, the diminishing of the private identity results, on the one hand in a great deal of permissiveness and laxity, while on the other hand, it leads to a great intensity of demand for moral absolution in the public sector. All of that is in the area of figure. The ground is in the new speed of information movement, for it is the movement at the speed of light that not only transforms our image of ourselves but involves us in the lives of others in a completely new way." pg. 478