-TOM WOLFE
What if he's right What . . .if. . .he . . .is . . . right
W-h-a-t i-f h-e i-s r-i-g-h-t
W IF R H HE I A IS G ? T H T
There are currently hundreds of studs of the business world,
breakfast food package designers, television net work creative
department vice-presidents, advertising "media reps,"
lighting fixture fortune heirs, smiley patent lawyers, industrial
spies, we- need vision board chairmen, all sorts of business
studs who are all wondering if this man, Marshall McLuhan ... is
right.... He sits in a little office off on the edge of the
University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a
second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for
days on end, wearing-well, he doesn't seem to care what he wears.
If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the
plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your
neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go,
Pree-Tide.
But what if-all sorts of huge world-mover & shaker
corporations are trying to put McLuhan in a box or some thing.
Valuable! Ours! Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most
important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and
Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game suppose he is the oracle
of the modern times - what if he is right? he'll be in
there. It almost seems that way. An "undisclosed
corporation" has put a huge "undis closed sum"
into, McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the
University of Toronto. One of the big American
corporations has offered him $5000 to present a closed-
circuit-ours!-television lecture on-oracle!-the ways the products
in its industry will be used in the future. Even before all this,
IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from
Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, God knows where else, to talk to
their hierarchs about . . . well, about whatever this unseen
world of electronic environments that only he sees fully is all
about.
They all sit in these conference rooms, under fluorescent lights,
with the right air conditioned air streaming out from behind the
management-style draperies. Upward-busting hierarch executives,
the real studs, the kind who have already changed over from lie-
down crewcuts to brush back Eric Johnston-style Big Boy haircuts
and from Oxford button-downs to Tripler broadcloth straight
points and have hung it all on the line, an $80,000 mortgage in
New Canaan and a couple of kids at Deerfield and Hotchkiss-hung
it all on the line on knowing exactly what this corporation is
all about -they sit there with the day's first bloody mary
squirting through their capillaries-and this man with part of a
plastic neckband showing at the edge of the collar, who just got
through grading papers, for godsake, tells them in an of-course
voice and with I'm being-patient eyes, that, in
effect, politely, they all know just about exactly . . . nothing
. . . about the real business they're in-
-Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable
portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not
yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in
the business of moving information. Quite as much as A. T. & T.
Yes. Of course-I-am-willing-to-be-patient. He pulls his
chin down into his neck and looks up out of his ion'
Scotch-lairdly face. Yes. The electric light is pun information
it is a medium without a message as it were Yes. Light is a self-
contained communications system in which the medium is the
message Just think that over for a moment-I-am-willing-to-be
- When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making
office equipment or business machines
- but that it was in the business
of processing
information,
then it began
to navigate
with
clear
vision.
Yes.
Swell! But where did this guy come from? What is
this-these cryptic, Delphian sayings: Th e electric light is
pure information.
Delphian! The medium is the message. We are moving out of the
age of the visual into the age of the aural and tactile . . .
Oracle!-McLuhan sits in the conference room on the upper deck of
an incredible ferry boat that Walter Landor, one of the country's
top package designers, has redone at a cost of about $400,000 as
an office and design center. This great package design flagship
nestles there in the water at Pier 5 in San Francisco. The sun
floods in from the bay onto the basket woven wall-to-wall and
shines off the dials of Landor's motion picture projection con
sole. Down below on the main deck is a whole simulated
supermarket for bringing people in and testing package impact and
all sorts of optometric wonder wards for testing visual reception
of metribergiarglebargle and McLuhan says, almost by the way:
"Of course, packages will be obsolete in a few years. People
will want tactile experiences, they'll want to feel the product
they're getting-"
But!-
McLuhan's chin goes down, his mouth turns down, his eyes roll up
in his of course expression: "Goods will be sold in bins.
People will go right to bins and pick things up and feel them
rather than just accepting a package."
Landor, the package designer, doesn't lose his cool; he just
looks- what if he is right?
". . . The human family now exists under conditions of a
global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant
with tribal drums . . ." That even, even, even voice goes
on-
-McLuhan is sitting in the Lombardy Restaurant in New York with
Gibson McCabe, president of News week, and several other
high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the
millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market
research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how
it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five
years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: "Well . .
. of course, your circulation would have
risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the
people being what it is . . ."
Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear.
McLuhan is at the conference table in the upper room of Howard
Gossage's advertising firm in San Francisco, up in what used to
be a firehouse they're pretty great converters in San Francisco-
and a couple of newspaper people are up there talking about how
they are sure their readers want this and that to read-McLuhan
pulls his chin down into his neck: "Well . . . of course,
people don't actually read newspapers. They get into them
every morning like a hot bath."
Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this
even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb-with these
pronouncements-"Art is always one technology behind. The
content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous
age"- with all this Nietzschean certitude McLuhan has become
an intellectual star of the West. He is a word-of-mouth
celebrity.
Corporation executives are only the beginning of the roster of
people in America who stand to be shaken up -what if he is
right? The university establishments, the literati-McLuhan
has already earned the hostile envy of the New York literary
establishment- the artists-they like him-scores of little groups
of McLuhan cultists-thou sands of intellectuals are now studying
McLuhan. The paperback edition of his book Understanding Media
has been an "underground best seller"-that is, a
best seller without benefit of publicity-for six months. City
planners-
City planners are wondering what if he-McLuhan is the
prophet of the New Life Out There, the suburbs, housing
developments, astrodomes, domed-over shopping centers, freeways,
TV families, the whole world of the new technologies that
stretches out to the West beyond the old cities of the East. To
McLuhan, New York is already obsolete, on its way to becoming not
much more than a Disneyland discotheque for the enjoyment-not the
big business or the gawking wonder, but the playing around-of the
millions out there. They are already living the new life, while
New York sits here choking to death in its old fashion.
McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new
technologies of the electronic age, notably televi sion, radio,
the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. A new
environment; they are not merely added to some basic human
environment. The idea that these things, TV and the rest, are
just tools that men can use for better or worse depending on
their talents and moral strength-that idea is idiotic to McLuhan.
The new technologies, such as television, have become a new
environment. They radically alter the entire way people use their
five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their
entire lives and the entire society. It doesn't matter what the
content of a medium like TV is. It doesn't matter if the networks
show twenty hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in people's
teeth or twenty hours of Pablo Casals droning away on his cello
in a pure -culture white Spanish drawing room. It doesn't matter
about the content. The most pro. found effect of televi sion-its
real "message," in McLuhan's terms -is the way it
alters men's sensory patterns. The me dium is the message-that
is the best- known McLuhanism. Television steps up the auditory
sense and the sense of touch and depresses the visual sense. That
seems like a paradox, but McLuhan is full of paradoxes. A whole
generation in America has grown up in the TV environment, and
already these millions of people, twenty-five and under, have the
same kind of sensory reactions as African tribesmen. The same
thing is happening all over the world. The world is growing into
a huge tribe, a . . . global village, in a seamless web
of electronics.
These are McLuhan metaphors. He started out as an English
literature scholar. He graduated from the University of Manitoba
in Canada and then got a doctorate in English at Cambridge in
England. He wrote his dissertation on the rhetoric of Thomas
Nashe, a sixteenth-century English playwright and essayist. In it
he led up to Nashe with a massive study of rhetoric from the
Greeks on up. He got interested in the way different kinds of
speech,
written and oral, affected the history of different
civilizations. Gradually his field expanded from literature to
the influence of communication, all kinds, all the media, on
society. He started doing research in psychology, even
physiology, sociology, history, economics everything seemed to
come into it. McLuhan was sort of like John Huizinga this way.
Huizinga is a historian, Medieval history, chiefly, who
discovered "the play element" in history. He ended up
with a rather sophisticated sociological theory, in the book Homo
Ludens, that in many ways is a precursor of the mathematical
"game theory" that so fascinates Pentagon war
strategists today. McLuhan worked on his communications theory.
For about thirty years he was pretty much in obscurity in places
like the University of Wisconsin, the University of St. Louis,
and the University of Toronto. He published The Mechanical
Bride in 1951, then The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, and
with that one the McLuhan Cult really started, and what if
he-?
As McLuhan sees it-in the simplest terms, here is his theory step
by step: People adapt to their environment, whatever it is, with
a certain balance of the five senses: sight, hearing, touch,
smell, and taste. If something steps up the intensity of one
sense, hearing for example, the other senses will change
intensity too, to try to regain a balance. A dentist, for
example, can practically shut off pain-sense of touch-by putting
earphones on a patient and pouring intense noise into his
ear-sense of hearing.
Every major technology changes the balance of the senses. One of
the most explosive of these technologies was the development of
the printing press in the fifteenth century. Before that,
people's senses still had pretty much the old tribal balance.
That is to say, the sense of hearing was dominant. People got
their information mainly by hearing it from other people. People
who get their information that way are necessarily drawn closer
together, in the tribal way. They have to be close to each other
in order to get information. And they have to believe what people
tell them, by and large, because that is the only kind of
information they can get. They are interdependent.
They are also more emotional. The spoken word is more emotional
than the written word. It carries emotion as well as meaning. The
intonation can convey anger, sorrow, approval, panic, joy,
sarcasm, and so forth. This aural man, the tribal man,
reacts more emotionally to information. He is more easily upset
by rumors. His and every body else's emotions-a collective
unconscious-lie very near the surface.
The printing press brought about a radical change. People began
getting their information primarily by seeing it -the printed
word. The visual sense became dominant. Print translates one
sense-hearing, the spoken word-into another sense sight, the
printed word. Print also converts sounds into abstract symbols,
the letters. Print is or derly progression of abstract, visual
symbols. Print led to the habit of categorizing-putting
everything in order, into categories, "jobs,"
"prices," "departments," "bureaus,"
"specialties." Print led, ultimately, to the creation
of the modern economy, to bureaucracy, to the modern army, to
nationalism itself.
People today think of print as if it were a technology that has
been around forever. Actually, the widespread use of print is
only about two hundred years old. Today new
technologies-television, radio, the telephone, the computer-are
causing another revolution. Print caused an
"explosion"-breaking society up into categories. The
electronic media, on the other hand, are causing an
"implosion," forcing people back together in a tribal
unity.
The aural sense is becoming dominant again. People are getting
their information primarily by hearing it. They are literate, but
their primary source is the radio, the telephone, the TV set. The
radio and the telephone are obviously aural media, but so is
television, in McLuhan's theory. The American TV picture has very
low defini tion. It is not three-dimensional, like a movie or a
photograph, but two-dimensional, like a Japanese print or a
cartoon. The viewer fills in the spaces and the contours with his
mind, as he does with a cartoon. Therefore, the TV viewer is more involved
in the TV image than in the movie image, he is so busy running
over the image with his eye, filling in this and that. He
practically reaches out and touches it. He participates;
and he likes that.
Studies of TV children-children of all social classes who are
used to getting their information primarily by television-studies
of this new generation show that they do not focus on the whole
picture, the way literate adults do when they watch a movie. They
scan the screen for details; their eyes run all over the screen,
focusing on holsters, horses' heads, hats, all sorts of little
things, even in the fiercest gun battles. They watch a TV show
the way a nonliterate African tribesman watches a movie
But exactly! The TV children, a whole generation of Americans,
the oldest ones are now twenty-five years old-they are the new
tribesmen. They have tribal sensory balances. They have the
tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they
are "hot," they want to participate, to touch,
to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily
swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man
is an individualist; he is "cooler," with built-in
safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody
says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed
away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it
is something he can't look up and check out-for example,
some rumor like "the Chinese are going to bomb us
tomorrow"-his habit of mind is established. He has the
feeling: All this can be investigated- looked into. The
aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part
of the collective consciousness; he believes.
To the literate, visual, print man, that seems like a
negative quality, but to the aural, tribal man, it seems natural
and good. McLuhan is not interested in values, but if anything,
he gives the worst of it to the literate man who is smug in the
belief that his sensibility is the only proper one. The tribal
man-the new TV generation-is far more apt at pattern
recognition, which is the basis of computers. The child will
learn a foreign language faster than a literate adult because he
absorbs the whole pattern of the language, the intonations and
the rhythms, as well as the meaning. The literate man is slowed
down by the way he tries to convert the sounds to print in his
mind and takes the words one by one, categorizing them and
translating them in a plodding sequence.
In formal learning, in schools, that is, the new TV-tribal man is
at a great disadvantage, however, given the current teaching
methods. As McLuhan sees it-if people think there is a bad drop-
out problem in American schools today, it is nothing compared to
what it is going to be like in another ten or fifteen years.
There will be a whole nation of young psychic drop- outs-out of
it-from the wealthy suburbs no less than the city slums. The
thing is, all these TV-tribal children are aural people, tactile
people, they're used to learning by pattern recogni tion. They go
into classrooms, and there up in front of them are visual,
literate, print-minded teachers. They are up there teaching
classes by subjects, that is, categories; they've broken learning
down into compartments -mathematics, history, geography, Latin,
biology-it doesn't make sense to the tribal kids, it's like
trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it's
unnatural.
It's the same way with these cities the print-minded rulers keep
on piling up around them, more skyscrapers, more freeways pouring
into them, more people piling into them. Cities are still based
on the old idea of using space efficiently, of putting as many
activities into a single swath of ground as possible to make it
easier for people to move around and do business with each other.
To the new drop-out generation and the drop-out genera tions to
come, this idea of lateral space and of moving people around in
it doesn't seem very important. Even visual people have begun to
lose a little of the old idea of space because of the airplane.
When somebody gets on a jet in New York and flies to San
Francisco in four hours, the time is so short, the idea of the
space, the three thousand miles, loses its meaning. It is just
like taking a "horizontal elevator," McLuhan says. In
Los Angeles, with everybody traveling by car on freeways, nobody
talks about "miles" anymore, they just say "that's
four minutes from here," "that's twenty minutes from
here," and so on. The actual straight-line distance doesn't
matter. It may be faster to go by a curved route. All anybody
cares about is the time.
For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the
cars, says McLuhan. The car is still largely tied to the idea of
space, but the TV-tribal kids aren't. It even shows up in their
dances. The new American dances, the twist, the frug, and all
that, ignore the geography of the dance floor. The dancers stay
in one place and create their own space. They jerk, spasm, hump,
and bob around in one place with the sound turned up-aural!
tribal!-up into the hot-jolly hyperaesthetic decibels.
Eventually, says McLuhan, they will use the same sort of pattern
in the way they work. They will work at home, connected to the
corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by
television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way
TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour
flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every
day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping
will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will
disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars.
They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody
over at General Motors is saying-What if he is right?
Whole cities, and especially New York, will end too just like
cars, no longer vital to the nation but . . . just playthings.
People will come to New York solely to amuse themselves, do things,
not marvel at the magnitude of the city or its riches, but just
eat in the restaurants, go to the discotheques, browse through
the galleries-
-McLuhan is having lunch at Lutece, a French restaurant at 249
East 50th Street, with four of his admirers, three journalists
and a movie star. Lutece is one of the real high-powered,
gleaming toothed places in New York where the culturati, the
fashionati, literati, and illuminati of all sorts have lunch. The
Big Boys go there. It has real wine stewards. It is so expensive,
only the man who has to pay is shown the prices. Everybody else
at the table gets a menu with just the dishes listed. Eat 'em up,
gleaming teeth. So these people with gleaming teeth, glissando
voices, lazenge-shape cuff links, peacock-colored Pucci-print
dresses signed "Emilio" turn the gleams on each other
and sit in there and laugh, cozzen, whisper, bat the eyes, look
knowingly, slosh their jowls around at each other in the old
fight to make it or make it bigger in the biggest city in the
world-and McLuhan just sits out in the garden at Lutece smiling
slightly, oblivious to the roiling, wearing a seersucker jacket
and the plastic neckband tie, looking ahead as if . . . he were
looking through walls.
Well, of course he is! The city-
"Well, of course, a city like New York is obsolete," he
says. And all the gleaming teeth and glissando voices are still
going grack gack grack in the same old way all around, all
trying to get to the top of the city that will disappear.
McLuhan was in New York that time because two rather
extraordinary men from San Francisco, Howard Gossage and Gerry
Feigen, had just begun their ongoing "McLuhan
Festival." The original McLuhan Festival was a kind of
"happening" or "environment" in an armory at
the University of British Columbia, put on by some teachers
there. They were part of what is sometimes called "The
McLuhan Cult"-esoteric groups of intellectuals who have . .
. discovered McLuhan, in Canada and in the United States,
most of them over the past three years, since The Gutenberg
Galaxy came out. In the armory they suspended sheets of
plastic from the ceiling, forming a maze. Operators aimed light
projections at the plastic sheets and at the people walking
through them, a movie projector showed a long, meaningless movie
of the interior of the empty armory, goofy noises poured out of
the loudspeakers, bells rang, somebody banged blocks of wood
together up on a podium, somebody else spewed perfume around,
dancers flipped around through the crowds, and behind a stretch
fabric wall-a frame with a stretch fabric across it-there was a
girl, pressed against the stretch fabric wall, like a whole wall
made of stretch pants, and undulating and humping around
back there. Everybody was supposed to come up and feel it-the
girl up against the stretch fabric -to understand this
"tactile communication" McLuhan talks about.
McLuhan Temple! McLuhan in church-the Rev. William Glenesk brings
McLuhan into the pulpit of his church, Spencer Memorial, on
Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights, one week night in a kind of .
. . apotheosis of McLuhan cultism. Glenesk is the "hip"
Presbyterian minister who has had jazz combos, dancers, sculpture
graven images!-in church. He brought McLuhan in one night and put
him in the pulpit and it became . . . cult! like a meeting of all
the solitary souls, from the cubicles of the NYU Bronx campus to
the lofts of East 10th Street, who had discovered McLuhan on
their own. All these artists came in there in the great carved
oak insides of the church and sat in the pews, Stanley Vander
Beeck the "underground" movie-maker in an orange shirt
and red polka dot tic
"It is a hot night," says McLuhan, speaking from the
pulpit. "Therefore, I invite you to move forward. Heat
obliterates the distance between the speaker and the audience . .
."
But of course! The heat steps up the tactile sense, diminishes
the visual; the audience is no longer at ease sitting back and
watching the speaker as though he is separated from them like the
usual . . . visual spectacle. The artists, Vander Beeck,
Larry Rivers the painter, John Cage the composer-they are all fo
r McLuhan, even though McLuhan has a paradoxical attitude
toward the "modern" arts. On the one hand, he says
artists are geniuses who serve as "early warning
systems" for changes in society's sensory balance. But at
the same time, he says so -called "modern" art is
always one technology behind. In the early nineteenth century the
Industrial Revolution came in-the MACHINE age. The artist didn't
realize that this was a new age, but they se nsed that
some kind of change was taking place, and they resented it-damned
machine-cog life -so they reacted by coming up with the modern
art of the early nineteenth century: NATURE, all those
landscapes, grazing sheep -the content of the previous
technology, namely, agriculture. Modern! All these modern
artists, Constable and Turner, couldn't understand why nobody had
even painted these great spewy albumen cloud banks and shaggy
green horizons before. In the early twentieth century the
ELECTRONIC age began, and the artists, only fifty or seventy-five
years behind, as usual, suddenly discovered cubism and other
abstract forms, breaking up objects into planes, spheres,
component parts-the content of the MACHINE age, the industrial
technology of the nineteenth century. But in any case, the
artist's immediately obsolete "modernism" is a sign
that somethin g is changing in society's sensory balance.
The artists seem to like this idea that they are the "early
warning," the avant- garde, even if they are moving forward
backwards.
They also like his general "culture" orientation.
McLuhan started out as an English scholar, after all, and still
laces his work with references to Marlowe, Rabelais, Whitman,
Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Joyce. McLuhan's work is
really squarely in the area of biology and sociology now, but
artists can take to him-he talks their language. It was the same
with Freud. Pavlov never caught on with the culturati-all those
damned endless clinical descriptions of dog brains. But Freud was
"cultural," a lot of great business from Sophocles,
Aeschylus, da Vinci, King Oedipus running around, bare-breasted
Electra, all those classical lovelies. Freud wrote like an art
dealer prospecting in the forbidden lands of brain physiology.
McLuhan talks the same language, and people are willing to
undertake massive artistic expressions of his new science of the
senses. In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a McLuhanite
named Harley Parker is designing a "pure McLuhan"
gallery for displaying invertebrate paleontology, fishes and
things, "a gallery of total sensory involvement,"
Harley Parker says, with the smell of the sea piped in, the
tape-recorded sound of waves, colored lights simulating the
fuzzy-plankton undersea green, "not just a gallery of data,
but a total experience." In New York, Father John Culkin of
Fordham University is considering sort of the same thing, a
McLuhan architectural environment, only on a much larger
scale, a whole communications center at Lincoln Center, the big
culture temple.
But with the standard old line romantic-reactionary literati of
New York-that is another story. Old doggies like Dwight Macdonald recoil
from McLuhan. This man, this pop Guru McLuhan, asserts he
supremacy of technol ogy, the environment, over the romantic ego.
McLuhan says man succumbs to the new technologies, the new
sensory balance the technologies impose, no matter how hard he
fights it, even if he doesn't watch the idiot box -and I don't
pay attention to ads-no matter what. The old doggies put
their faces up in the air, with their eyeballs rolled back,
looking for God, and moan a few howls there inside their
parlor-floor brownstones at this big red fire siren going by,
Marshall McLuhan.
Get this man. But if they want to get at McLuhan, they
ought to forget the sanctity of the romantic ego, the last
godhead of the literati, and go after him where he is actually
vulnerable; one place is his idea of the sensory balance of man
and the dominance of one sense over another and so forth. McLuhan
is talking straight physiol ogy here, science and he has not
proved that the five senses are actually set up that way. Maybe
it can't be proved. As yet, there is no apparatus for measuring
just how intensely the human mind is attuned to this or that
sense. Knowledge about three of the senses, smell, taste, and
touch, is still absolutely primitive. The sense of smell, for
example, cannot be measured at all, currently. Perfume makers
have to use people they call "noses" to get the right
combination for different scents. They put a white smock on THE
NOSE and squirt one test batch of hair spray in a tin closet and
THE NOSE jumps in there, and then he jumps out of there, and they
squirt another batch in the next closet, and THE NOSE jumps in
there, and so on and on, with this NOSE in a white smock leaping
and diving in tin cubicles-this is sensory measurement in
the modern age.
The other place they might get McLuhan is in his crazy daredevil
weakness for making analogies. He loves the things. He soars
around making analogies. The Russians still have a basically
aural, tribal sensory balance, and they like to do their spying
by ear, hiding microphones in wooden American eagle seals in the
American Em bassy and so forth. That seems perfectly all right to
them, that's natural, but they are scandalized by something like
the American U-2 flights-that is visual spying, spying by
eye. Americans, on the other hand, are basically a visual people;
the U-2 flights seem like the natural way to spy, but a mike in
the eagle that's a scandal to the visual Americans. Beautiful
McLuhan rubric -but . . .
But, all right, he may have missed the mark on this or that, but
McLuhan will remain a major figure in the social sciences if for
no other reason than that he has opened up the whole subject of
the way the new technologies are changing people's thinking,
reactions, life styles, everything. One means, well, one is in a
supermarket and here comes some Adam's-apply carbuncled kid with
bad hair pushing a rolling hamper full of All Detergent Man
Mountain Giant Bonus boxes, and he is not looking where he is
going; he is not lo oking at anything; his eyes are turned
off and screened over, and there is a plug in his skull leading
to the transistor radio in the breast pocket of his shirt, and he
is blamming his free hand on the Giant All boxes, blam blam
ble-blam blam, keeping time to the Rolling Stones, Hey You
Get Offa My Cloud; somewhere inside of his skull, blam
blam, plugged into some kind of electronic circuit out there,
another world-and one knows, instinctively, that all this is
changing people in some kind of way. Sociologists and
physiologists have done practically nothing on the subject. They
have done practically nothing on the way the automobile has
changed Americans, as long as cars have been around. Every time
sociologists have a meeting, somebody gets up and says, why
doesn't somebody make a real study of the American automobile?
Not just the stuff about how they're choking our cities or how
they made the big housing developments possible, but how they . .
. well, change people.
Not even with cars! Much less with television, radio, computers
-McLuhan comes on like the only man to reach a huge, hitherto
unknown planet or something, and there is so much ground to cover
and so little time, all this unknown ground, mothering
earthquake, swallowing everybody up and they don't even know it.
That is the way McLuhan thinks of it, and he exasperates
A television executive is up in Howard Gossage's office in the
firehouse in San Francisco, talking to McLuhan and saying how a couple
of things he said don't fit together, they don't hold up; maybe
it is the part about the Russian hidden microphones or something.
McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck and opens his right
hand like a century plant-
"I'm not offering this as a self-contained theory; I'm
making probes. Probes. There is so much here that hasn't even
been gone into, I have no interest in debating it point by point
along the way. There is so much that hasn't even been explored."
Rather grand manner. He won't argue, he just keeps probing, he
spins off theories and leaves them there for somebody else to
debate, moving on all the time on his single track . . . but, of
course. The prophet.
A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet.
It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his
extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania,
of mission-He do esn't debate other scholars, much less TV
executives. He is not competing for status; he is . . . alone on
a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye .
. . TV executives. McLuhan even characterizes General Sarnoff,
Generalis simo of RCA and NBC, the most powerful man in American
communications, a god in the TV world, and the eyes of the
government, too, for that matter-McLuhan characterizes the good
General as one of the "technologi cal idiots." Sarnoff
is one of those people who thinks that television is merely a
wonderful tool whose impact is merely what a man chooses to do
with it.
McLuhan flies all over Canada and the United States to talk to
groups of five, six, twelve, well, not twelve, fourteen . . .
disciples. Numbers mean nothing to him. If a thousand people
suddenly turned up, it might be a bad sign-McLuhan sits in the
upper room at the firehouse at a round table with six or eight
people, Gossage, Feigen, Mike Robbins of Young & Rubicam, the
advertising agency, Herbert Gold, the novelist, Edward Keating,
editor of Ramparts magazine, not disciples-But what if he
is right-and somebody asks McLuhan what he thinks of the big
communications conference going on in San Francisco at that very
moment, at the Hilton Hotel, a thousand people, headed by the
great semanticist, S. I. Hayakawa.
"Well . . . they're all working from very obsolete premises,
of course. Almost by definition."
By definition?
"Certainly. By the time you can get a thousand people to
agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions
will already have changed, the principles will be useless."
McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck. The Hayakawa
conference . . . disappears.
McLuhan may get some of the normal chuckly human satisfaction out
of putting down the General Sarnoffs and the Hayakawas of this
world and bringing to package design moguls the news that
packages have had it and so forth-it is hard to say. More likely,
though, he is simply oblivious to the stake other people have in
the things he is talking about. He seems oblivious to all the
more obvious signs of status where he himself is involved. He
just snaps on that Pree-Tide plastic neckband necktie in the
morning and resumes his position, at the monoma niacal center of
the unseen world . . .
Unseen scholars. McLuhan comes out of a world that few people
know about, the world of the liberal arts scholars, the graduate
schools, the carrels. It is a far more detached and
isolated life than any garret life of the artists. Garret life?
Artists today spend all their time calling up Bloomingdale's to
see if the yellow velvet Milo Laducci chairs they ordered are in
yet. Liberal arts scholars, especially in McLuhan's field,
English literature,
start out in graduate school in little cubicles, known as
carrels, in the stacks of the university libraries with nothing
but a couple of metal Klampiton shelves of books to sustain them,
sitting there making scholarly analo gies-detecting signs of
Rabelais in Sterne, signs of Byron- would you believe it? in
Thoreau, signs of Ovid in Pound, signs of -analogies-hunched over
in silence with only the far-off sound of Maggie, a Girl of the
Stacks, a townie who puts books back on the shelves-now she is
all right, a little lower-class-puffy in the nose, but-only the
sound of her to inject some stray, sport thoughts into this
intensely isolated regimen. In effect, the graduate school
scholar settles down to a life of little cubicles, little
journals, little money, little chance of notice by the outside
world-unless his intense exercises in analogies, mental
combinations, bust out with something so . . . electrifying as
Marshall McLuhan's.
Even then there is no one in the . . . outside world able to
scout scholarly stars, it is all so esoteric. But McLuhan has had
Gossage and Feigen, two of the most imaginative characters in San
Francisco. Gossage is a tall, pale advertising man with one of
the great heads of gray hair in the USA, flowing back like John
Barrymore's. Feigen is a psychiatrist who became a surgeon; he is
dark and has these big eyes and a gong-kicker mustache like Jerry
Colonna, the comedian. He is also a ventriloquist and carries
around a morbid looking dummy named Becky and is able to get into
great psychological duels with strangers, speaking through the
dummy. Gossage and Feigen started a firm called Generalists,
Inc., acting as consultants to people who can't get what they
need from special ists because what they need is the big picture.
One thing that drew them to McLuhan was his belief in
"generalism" -pattern recognition. McLuhan, for
example, dismisses the idea of university
"departments," history, political science, sociology,
and so forth; he considers all that obsolete and works in four or
five of the old "fields" at once. It is all one field
to him. So Gossage and Feigen invested about $6000 into just
taking McLuhan around to talk to people, Big Boys, all sorts,
outside the academic world, on both coasts. Gossage says they had
nothing particular in mind, no special goal, they just wanted to
play it "fat, dumb and happy" and see what would
happen.
It all turned out kind of like the way the architect in Evelyn
Waugh's Decline and Fall describes life as being like one of
those whirling discs at the old amusement parks. You get on the
disc and it starts spinning and the faster it goes, the more
centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the
outer edge of the disc is so fast, you have to hold on for dear
life just to stay on but you get a hell of a ride. The closer you
can get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and
the easier it is to stand up. In fact, theoretically, at the very
center there is a point that is completely motionless. In life,
some people won't get on the disc at all.
They just sit in the stands and watch. Some people like to get on
the outer edge and hang on and ride like hell-that would be
Gossage and Feigen. Others are standing up and falling down,
staggering, lurching toward the center. And a few, a very few,
reach the middle, that perfect motionless point, and stand up in
the dead center of the roaring whirligig as if nothing could be
clearer and less confused-That would be McLuhan.
Gossage and Feigen were bringing McLuhan to New York last May,
and McLuhan was two days late getting there. He was in Toronto
grading papers for two days.
"Grading papers?" says Gossage. Gossage can see the New
York panoply of lunches at the Lombardy, lunches at Lutece, men
like Gibson McCabe, and God knows who all else high in the world
of communications waiting for McLuhan-and McLuhan holed up
imperturbably grading papers. "Listen," says Gossage.
"There are so many people willing to invest money in your
work now, you'll never have to grade papers again."
"You mean it's going to be fun from now on?" says
McLuhan.
"Everything's coming up roses," says Gossage.
In San Francisco, Gossage and Feigen take McLuhan to a
"topless waitress" restaurant, the Off Broadway, at the
request of some writer from New York in a loud checked suit. Herb
Caen, the columnist, is also along. Everybody is a little taken
aback. There they all are in the black-light gloom of the Off
Broadway with waitresses walking around wearing nothing but
high-heel shoes and bikini underpants, and nobody knows quite how
to react, what to say, except for McLuhan. Finally, Caen says
that this girl over here is good looking-
"Do you know what you said?" says McLuhan, "Good
look ing. That's a visual orientation. You're separating
yourself from the girls. You are sitting back and looking. Actually,
the lights are dim in here, this is meant as a tactile experience,
but visual man doesn't react that way."
And everyone looks to McLuhan to see if he is joking, but it is
impossible to tell there in the gloom. All that is clear is that
. . . yes, McLuhan has already absorbed the whole roaring
whirligig into his motionless center. And later in the day,
Gossage presents the piece de resistance of the McLuhan
Festival, a party in the firehouse. The first floor of the
firehouse, now the lobby, is filled, and yet in there Gossage has
put a twelve-piece mariachi band, with trumpets . . . En la
Bodega and the mariachi players stand on the tile in their
piped powder blue suits blasting away on the trumpets and Tout
San Francisco is filing into the firehouse into the face of
the what the hell is Gossage up to now, Santa Barranza, mariachi
trumpets, the trumpet announcement of the new Darwin-Freud
Einstein, Grack, En la Bodega. Then McLuhan himself
arrives, filing into the firehouse, and there before him is a
field of powder blue and . . . yaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh
trumpets-and Gossage sits on the stairway with his head thrown
back, laughing over the spectacle, but McLuhan-well, let one see
here, or, actually, not see, the auditory sense is sharply
stepped up, the visual fades, just the slightest haze of powder
blue-of course! one need only stop struggling with one's eyes,
roil, roil, well, of course, it is clear and . . why not? serene,
the new world.
from The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune