McLuhan’s Wake – transcript

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Film Transcript

01:00:21WOMAN IN ADNow! The dream cars of tomorrow!

01:00:46MCLUHANThe huge vortices of energy created by our technologies present us withunfathomable consequences.

01:00:56MCLUHANPut a decent man in an aeroplane a few hundred feet above a village and he will killwithout compunction, inflict appalling pain and injury on men women and children.That bomber pilot is really like the person introducing any new technology. None ofthese people ever consider what will be the impact or the effect of what they dowhen they pull that trigger. We cannot trust our instincts or our natural physicalresponses to new things. They will destroy us.

01:01:26MCLUHANHow are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity? Edgar AllenPoe has a story called “The Descent into the Maelstrom”. Poe imagines the situationin which a sailor, who has gone out…

01:01:47MARINERWhen I was young, my brother and I fish out yonder, beyond the whirl of themaelstrom. Those cross-currents gave us bountiful fish, until the day the heavensopened and let loose a furious tempest. The heaving sea swallowed my brother. AndI was swept into the chaos of the maelstrom. I could only await my eventual plungeinto the abyss. With all hope lost… I found myself idly studying the action of thevortex. Some objects did not fall, but were whirled up to the level of the sea! Thereinlied my salvation!

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01:03:17MARINERI tied myself to my old steamer trunk … and I abandoned my doomed ship. Thus did Ifree myself from oblivion!

01:03:44MCLUHANThe huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilitiesof evasion, of consequences, of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effectsof this huge vortex of energy that, in which we’re involved, it may be possible toprogram a strategy of evasion and survival.

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01:04:11LAURIE ANDERSONMarshall McLuhan did learn how to survive in the vortex. And he wound up just likePoe’s sailor.

01:04:24MARINERMy rescuers were old mates of mine, and yet they would not believe that myexperience had been real.

01:04:53LAURIE ANDERSONMcLuhan called his discovery the laws of media. He said: they’re four simplequestionsthat reveal the future of all technology. But nobody took him seriously.Some said such prediction impossible, but most just assumed that the future wouldbe bright.

01:05:45CHORUS OF VOICES(indistinguishable)

01:07:27PHILLIP MARCHANDI believe that he always felt that there was some underlying order and coherence inthe universe.

01:07:48ROBERT LOGANNo field intimidated him. Everything he read, he sort of wove it into a picture…

01:08:04YOUNG MCLUHANWhen I was young, my brother and I fish out yonder, beyond the whirl of themaelstrom. Those cross-currents gave us bountiful fish, until the day the heavensopened…

01:08:10PATRICK WATSONWhat I saw was this great buccaneer of the word, sailing out, looking for islandswhere the spray was thrown up by an encounter of a hard word and a soft word.That’s why I think of him as a poet. As a creator of metaphor, who takes all thosechances, as a poet does.

01:08:40ROBERT LOGANHis joy was to relate things that other people thought were unrelated.

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01:08:48YOUNG MCLUHANAll of life, mental, physical, spiritual, is governed by laws still largely unknown tohuman beings. I am going to work out some of the great laws. I believe that it wouldbe the greatest step in philosophy if a hundred or so of these laws were to becarefully worked out and studied.

01:09:19MCLUHANThe laws of the media are observations on the operations and effects of humanartefacts on man and society. They are at least a hope that we can reduce thisconfusion to some sort of order.

01:09:34LAURIE ANDERSONThe first question to ask of any technology, any tool, is:What will this thing enhance?

01:09:52LAURIE ANDERSONHow will it extend you, make you bigger, lift you up?

01:10:05LAURIE ANDERSONYou begin with so little to help you survive, just your wits, and your senses.

01:10:31LAURIE ANDERSONYour eyes collecting detail

01:10:44LAURIE ANDERSONYour ears sweeping a sphere.

01:11:05LAURIE ANDERSONYour nose riding the wind

01:11:13HUNTER 1We’re in a good position, the wind’s coming at us.

01:11:28LAURIE ANDERSONEvery tool extends your body, senses or mind.

01:11:35LAURIE ANDERSONExtends, say, your fingernails

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01:11:43LAURIE ANDERSONOr your skin

01:11:50LAURIE ANDERSONThe things you make, they mimic you

01:11:59LAURIE ANDERSONThey’re like you, but a you that’s enhanced

01:12:24LAURIE ANDERSONContainers extend your arms

01:12:36LAURIE ANDERSONThe chair extends your bum and spine…

01:12:46LAURIE ANDERSONTools change the way you touch and are touched

01:12:55LAURIE ANDERSONIt’s all translation. It’s a loop

01:13:21MCLUHANAll of man’s artefacts of language, of laws, of ideas, hypotheses, tools, clothing,computers, all of these are extensions of our physical bodies.

01:13:40LAURIE ANDERSONBut they all extend, they all translate, in their own particular way.

01:14:09TEACHERThe letter V

01:14:12LAURIE ANDERSONThe alphabet, “mother of western invention”, extends the eye.

01:14:16TEACHERA is for

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01:14:18CHILDRENArmadillo!

01:14:25TEACHERD is for

01:14:27CHILDRENDolphin!

01:14:28TEACHERE is for

01:14:29CHILDRENElephant!

01:14:33CHILD 1Ca, Da, Ee, Fe, Ge…

01:14:38MCLUHANThe phonetic alphabet has a very peculiar set of characteristics. It is made up ofphonemes, that is, bits that are meaningless.

01:14:48CHILD 2I found it!

01:14:51MCLUHANThe 26 letters of our alphabet have no meaning at all.

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01:15:00LAURIE ANDERSONC is for caterpillar. Cuh ah ta eh rrr pillar

01:15:03CHILDREN:(singing. overlapping)A, B, C,D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U V, W, X, Y and Z. Now Iknow my ABC’s, next time won’t you sing with me?

01:15:19LAURIE ANDERSONYour eye follows from letter to letter, word to word, line to line.

01:15:39LAURIE ANDERSONThe printing press extends the alphabet

01:15:54LAURIE ANDERSONLetter by letter; Word by word; Page by page; Book by book by book; Until your eyecan fly through space and time across the known universe; Line by line

01:16:41LAURIE ANDERSONIt’s translation. It’s a loop. You shape your tools in your own image and, in theirturn,they shape you. Ssshh… Quiet in the library. It’s not a hockey rink!

01:17:41MCLUHANOne of the strange implications of the phonetic alphabet is private identity. Beforeliteracy, there had only been the tribal group.

01:17:59MCLUHANLiteracy marched steadily in the direction of fragmenting and segmenting andclassifying data, turning men into specialists who pursued individual subjects withindividual themes and goals, quite without relation to one another.

01:18:15MCLUHANPeople who are subjected to the arrangement of language, visually, in lines, highlysequential, and precise and rigid, develop the habits of arranging their lives,arranging their whole social existence in ways which are very closely geared to theseforms. They’re not especially aware of this.

01:19:29

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MCLUHANThe visual world has the properties of being a sort of continuous and connected,homogeneous, rational, logical, connected, private, individualistic, civilized world.

01:20:03LAURIE ANDERSON:The things you make, they mimic you. Though, frankly, it’s sometimes hardto see the resemblance.

01:20:17MCLUHANAnd this is the old myth of Narcissus.

01:20:21SALESMANAll our Jaguars come with tradition behind them.

01:20:25MCLUHANThe word Narcissus means narcosis, numbed, drugged. And Narcissus wasdrugged into thinking that image outside himself was somebody else. Narcissus didnot fall in love with his own image, he thought it was somebody else.

01:20:43SALESMANSimply, simply amazing.

01:20:47MCLUHANAnd the same with us. In our technological gadgetry, gimmickry and so on, we don’tthink that it is merely a part of our own physical organism extended out there, we’relike Narcissus, completely numb.

01:20:59SALESMANWhen you take one out for a drive, which you will do momentarily, then you will seewhy Jaguar will be your next purchase.

01:21:14MCLUHANNow when we put out a new part of ourselves, extend a new part of ourselves bytechnology to the outer environment, we protect ourselves by numbing that area.The more I looked at this, the the more difficulty I had in explaining why peopleignored it.

01:21:40PHILLIP MARCHANDHe was somebody who realized early on that something that made life bearable wasour ability to observe and enjoy this incredibly rich world that we live in.

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01:22:02DERECK DE KERCKHOVEHis mother reading to him ever day, most of English literature must have helped. Alove for language, a love for ideas.

01:22:11CORINNE MCLUHANI think she had every influence.

01:22:15PHILLIP MARCHANDHis mother was an elocutionist. She used to go on tours of Canada, reciting poems,doing dramatic monologues, and so on.

01:22:24CORINNE MCLUHANI’ve always said she was the most intelligent woman I’ve ever met, and the mostfrustrated, because there was no outlet for her considerable talents. His father wasnot a literary man. Perfectly charming, gallant.

01:22:46PHILLIP MARCHANDHis dad, I think, was very much, an amateur philosopher. He had a very high-mindedview of life, where you were always trying to grapple with the higher things,metaphysics and the Bible. He delivered a talk to the local church on a topic called“The Higher Plane”.

01:23:06PHILLIP MARCHANDMcLuhan was always kind of a serious young kid. He was encouraged to andeagerly memorized long passages from poets. I think for the young Marshall,literature was the higher plane.

01:23:27CORINNE MCLUHANNow, he went to Cambridge after he already had a BA and an MA from Manitoba.He felt that a BA from Cambridge was far superior to an MA from Manitoba.

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01:23:44PATRICIA BRUCKMANNIf you can imagine the excitement that Cambridge must have been. Now that’swhere he was the very brilliant young man, doing utterly good stuff.

01:23:57ERIC MCLUHANAll of my father’s work had its genesis really, in this PhD. Ostensibly he wasstudying Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan satirist.

01:24:09PATRICIA BRUCKMANNSo the first thing Marshall did was that he realized that if he wanted to talk about therhetoric of Nashe he had to go back and find out everything, from the beginning. Weall should do it that way, you read one text and that gives you a set of questions,“Where did this come from and what did it mean?” And you have to keep goingback and back and back.

01:24:39ERIC MCLUHANLooking back at the entire tradition took him back to Greece and Rome, and thestudy of the trivium. The ancient intellectual establishment, which hadn’t been donebefore.

01:24:52PHILLIP MARCHANDAnd the trivium was basically logic, rhetoric and grammar. Grammar was the studyof language. Rhetoric was how to present yourself, your ideas, your insights. And ofcourse, Logic was logic.

01:25:14PHILLIP MARCHANDMcLuhan came to believe that the history of culture was the history of the ongoingstruggle between these three alternate ways of looking at things. McLuhan wasfascinated by grammar and rhetoric.

01:25:34ERIC MCLUHANGrammarians weren’t just people interested in things like parts of speech, and syntaxand punctuation. But they looked at the world as a book. So, he trained himself as agrammarian, right there.

01:25:54PHILLIP MARCHANDIt’s almost as if he shared the medieval notion of the two books. One book was the,the written book, the Bible, the other was the book of the universe, and you couldalso read that book. Because the creator of both books had invested them with thatcoherence. And of course, when he became Catholic, that was solidified.

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01:26:34PHILLIP MARCHANDThe great philosopher of Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas says faith is consistent withreason.

01:26:45ERIC MCLUHANHe found in Aquinas a sort of a kindred spirit, another grammarian. A man who took,all knowledge, all learning as his province.

01:27:07PHILLIP MARCHANDThomas Aquinas says trust the authority of the senses. And then there’s the almostmedieval notion of the five senses as working together in a kind of workshop, to re-create reality in the mind of the individual. So McLuhan always believed that if youreally listened, and saw and felt, you could perceive correctly.

01:27:40MCLUHANA catholic has some assurance that all parts of the world will bear inspection. Thatthey’re all good.

01:28:22CORINNE MCLUHANHe was an intensely religious person. It was his very being. He was an intellectual. Irecognized that at once. During our courtship, the poetry Marshall read was, to me,difficult and devious, maybe Pound, maybe Elliot. And the poetry I read wasromantic poetry. And we climbed mountains together. Spouted poetry off to eachother. I didn’t have a chance. I mean, romance, wow!

01:29:06CORINNE MCLUHANWe got married in 1939, he was sure there wasn’t going to be any war. Well, Ilearned later he hadn’t looked in the newspapers or listened to any of thebroadcasts.

01:29:33CORINNE MCLUHANI often said that Marshall’s priorities. First, his faith. His second priority was hisintellectual life. And then I often said that I ran a third place in the race.

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01:29:51CORINNE MCLUHANHe did much of his work lying down on the couch, with the doors closed. Childrencouldn’t come in. Eric as a little boy, he was in grammar school, I remember oncehis coming in and saying “Dad, why don’t you get a job?”

01:30:07CORINNE MCLUHANHe worked all the time, which he couldn’t help. It was he, day and night gettingabstracted, even in company. The old brain was too active, I think.

01:30:26MCLUHANMy first teaching job was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And, when I gotup to face freshman classes, I realized I was in a strange country and that I had tolearn a good deal about it from the very ground up.

01:31:00FRANK ZINGRONEI think at a certain point in time, he realized that he was sort of – a bit of a dweeb,when it came to, relating to North American young people. He was trying to teachliterature to students in the States when he was a young assistant professor andthey don’t understand what he’s talking about. And he didn’t want to fail in that way.

01:31:29PHILLIP MARCHANDHe thought that the way to get their attention was to show them things that theythought they knew. Advertising. And show them that they didn’t know it. That theydidn’t pay attention to it. And if they did pay attention to it, that they’d realize thattheir brains were being massaged. And they were oblivious to this environment,even at the same time as they were sort of robotically conditioned by theenvironment.

01:32:11MCLUHANAdvertising is a vast, military operation openly and brashly intended to conquer thehuman spirit. The advertiser is a manipulator, yes. He plays around with humanbeings as if they were his pigment. He smears us. Students and historians of thefuture will pour over advertising world with a sort of intensity which we should havelong ago directed to it.

01:32:44PATRICIA BRUCKMANNHe calls it, yeah, “The Mechanical Bride” so that something that should be natural isno longer natural. It’s being created by the new language industry.

01:33:02ROBERT FULFORD

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What kind of a world would you rather live in?

01:33:05MCLUHANI’d rather be in any period at all, as long as people are going to leave it alone for awhile. Just let go! Just leave it. I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change,but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t chose to justsit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Now, this uh, many people seem to think thatif you talk about something recent, then you’re in favour of it. Well, the exactopposite is true in my case, anything I talk about is almost certain to be somethingthat I am resolutely against. And it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is tounderstand it and then you know where to turn off the button.

01:33:43PATRICIA BRUCKMANNThat, I think is the cornerstone of Marshall’s fascination with modern arts andcommunication. You had to figure out how these things were working. Rememberat the beginning of “The Mechanical Bride” when he says about Poe’s sailor?

01:33:54MCLUHANEdgar Allen Poe has a story called “The Descent into the Maelstrom”

01:34:01PATRICIA BRUCKMANNThe story itself is central to this thought.

01:34:13GERALD O’GRADYWhat McLuhan saw in the Poe story was that it was a place where you’re alwaysmoving because that’s what the environment does, you’re always in a process. And,since you’re being massaged, and you don’t even realize how you’re beingmassaged, you can’t step back, but by being with it, you realize its structure or itspattern.

01:34:41LAURIE ANDERSONThe second question is: What will this tool obsolesce? What normal waysare bound to fade in light of your new invention?

01:35:11LAURIE ANDERSONOld tools may hang around but if you want to get the job done you’re gonna wantthe latest thing…

01:35:36LAURIE ANDERSONAnd then, before you know it, You can’t seem to find a decent buggy whipor blacksmith.

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01:36:03LAURIE ANDERSONSomething ventured, something lost.

01:36:08LAURIE ANDERSONYour new silver wheels lend power to your feet and numb the rest of your body.

01:36:32LAURIE ANDERSONYour fields and farms must retreat from the rising tide of the city.

014:36:46MCLUHANThe new acceleration of travel tends to push the metropolitan membrane, or stretchit right around the planet. The urb orbs. So that, in effect, if not in theory, there reallyis only one city on the planet. The planet itself.

01:37:49LAURIE ANDERSONYou do away with the ancient rhythms of day and night every time you flick on anelectric light.

01:38:04LAURIE ANDERSONYou reshape the space all around you. New figures appear, new connections aremade,a new world arises out of the old.

01:38:31MCLUHANWith the kinds of power and energy now available, it is possible to createenvironments anywhere overnight just by laying on electric lighting.

01:38:53MCLUHANThese are environments that alter all human affairs, all human relationships in anypart of the world.

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01:39:04LAURIE ANDERSONDo you still recall the mystery of the dark? Can you still follow the light of the moon?

01:39:20MCLUHANElectric media obsolesce the visual, the connected, the logical, the rational.

01:39:34MCLUHANWhat the child encounters in the present school, is carefully bureaucratisedarrangement of seats, class schedules and subject matters, all separated from oneanother. They’re subjected to a curriculum of classified information, which they areexpected to record, memorize, regurgitate. In classified patterns. He comes in tothat classroom from a prolonged experience of integral participation in a highlyorganized global situation.

01:40:27LAURIE ANDERSONThe normal ways fade before the new. You shape your tools they shape you.

01:40:55MCLUHANWhat we have done in our time with our electrical technology is put our nervoussystem outside ourselves.

01:41:12MCLUHANWhen you extend, by technology your own inner central nervous system, you putyour nervous system outside, we put the nervous system outside, and we put itaround ourselves globally. We stuff our physical being inside the nervous system.

01:41:41MCLUHANThis means that every private operator can own a hunk of your central nervoussystem as if it were a wheel or a box or a piece of land.

01:41:54MCLUHANAnd he can stand on your nose, your eyes, your nerves, he can exploit and moveevery part of your inner being by these means. No Elizabethan had any suchresources.

01:42:19MCLUHANThis is a totally new information environment, of which humanity has never had anyexperience whatever.

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01:42:32MCLUHANNow, you see, we have a media that stress all the senses and we have no educationto cope with the media at all.

01:42:56CORINNE MCLUHANHe was a literary man, primarily. His interest in communications was secondary.Once he got involved with communications, he got fascinated by it. It was like thetentacles spreading out in all directions. And he saw the interrelationship ofeverything. He made the Understanding Media group, and he had representativesfrom the different disciplines.

01:43:31PATRICIA BRUCKMANNHe was interested in other disciplines. Now that kind of thing has become terriblyfashionable now, but it wasn’t fashionable then.

01:43:40EDMUND CARPENTERWe met most days in the museum cafeteria. People would be there and a phrasewould come out and boom, it would be taken and seized by everyone. Nobody tookanybody else’s ideas, we just took every idea. And used them, misused them, playedwith them. Pretty much the way the surrealists would do in art. McLuhan was theabsolute centre of a group of people doing that.

01:44:25PHILLIP MARCHANDAll of it really crystallizes in the seven or eight issues of Explorations that McLuhanand his friend, the anthropologist Ted Carpenter put out.

01:44:38GERALD O’GRADYHe was writing about Linus Pauling in chemistry, Werner Heisenberg in physics,Cervantes, jazz music, J.Z. Young in biology and quoting every scholarly book onevery subject.

01:44:54PHILLIP MARCHANDIt is in those articles, he finally, I think articulates fully that all technologies arelanguages. Language itself is the supreme technology that almost gives you theentrée to all the other disciplines and languages and technologies.

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01:45:16FRANK ZINGRONEThe people in those disciplines thought he was playing fast and loose, because hehad no credentials in any of those areas.

01:45:24MCLUHANAny specialist is going to see to it that his specialty is protected against any invasionfrom any quarter. (chuckles) They’ve got a very good thing. They’ve taken a longtime to acquire this specialist skill and they don’t see why they should yield one inchto people with different methods.

01:45:43PHILLIP MARCHANDWell, McLuhan started to make an impact with the Gutenberg Galaxy, which was in1962. And then Understanding Media came along a couple of years later. And thatled to what they subsequently called the McLuhan explosion.

01:45:59MCLUHANThe forms of entertainment that work best on television are ones which emit a greatdeal of casualness in which people can be introduced and dialogued with in thepresence of the camera at all sorts of levels of their lives. You capture them at allsorts of strange and offbeat moments of their existence.

01:46:21MCLUHANInstead of going out and buying a packaged book, of which there have been 5, 000copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, yourproblems, and they at once Xerox with the help of computers from the libraries of theworld, all the latest material just for you personally. Not as something to be put outon the bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This iswhere we’re headed under electronic information conditions.

01:46:49PHILLIP MARCHANDAnd then of course, there’s a whole other thing that happened in the business world.

01:46:53ANNOUNCER 1Thompson House. From here, Roy Thompson operates radio and television stations,magazines, newspapers and book companies in 20 countries. The king ofcommunications is told that he should meet the philosopher of communications. Thecontroversial Marshall McLuhan.

01:47:09ROY THOMPSON

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The dominant medium of communication of any age alters the way people think, feel,act, and react. Television is thus returning the viewers to the picture thinking ofprimitive men. Of course, I think this is all pie in the sky myself.

01:47:21ANNOUNCER 1Dr. McLuhan arrives.

01:47:23LEWIS LAPHAMSome of the critics of McLuhan made fun of McLuhan because they accused him ofbeing a bringer of doom and they thought they were impervious to doom.

01:47:34MCLUHANThis is a talk of the literate man. A literate man is all for absorbing things. The newsort of electric man doesn’t want to absorb things.

01:47:42ROY THOMPSONYou mean that in the future, people are not going to be as literate?

01:47:47MCLUHANOh yes, literacy is on the skids. Oh yes.

01:47:49ROY THOMPSONNow I understand why you got the reputation. I see. You’re a shocker – isn’t he?

01:47:55PATRICK WATSONOur own Marshall McLuhan has been labelled a poet, a philosopher, a prophet. LifeMagazine called him the oracle of the electric age. His critics are almost as lively ashis admirers. They call him a gadfly, spellbinder, a word merchant. But almosteveryone agrees, no one can make sense out of more than 10 percent of whatMcLuhan has to say.

01:48:16INTERVIEWER 2What kind of message are you trying to get across?

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01:48:20MCLUHANThe kinds that are indicated in what I’ve already said. Just anything that creates astate of awareness and makes life more exciting and wide awake, rather. The title“Finnegan’s Wake”, Joyce’s book, is one that fascinates me and has much to do withwhat’s going on in our time. Finn again – back to the old tribal cycle, that’s what’shappening in the electric age, we’re becoming involved in each other again, in atribal ways. Finn, the Finn cycle, Finn again. But this time, wide awake. Finnegan’sWake!

01:48:56INTERVIEWER 3Yet man in society must make some decisions about the rights and wrongs of certainissues. Only in this way can a society function without anarchy. McLuhan -

01:49:05MCLUHANI thought we had achieved anarchy very completely long ago. I didn’t realize that itwas something that remained to be done. And um, I think we’re going further inevery minute. It’s like the fish in the water. We don’t know who discovered water,but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive environment, isalways beyond perception.

01:49:22ANNOUNCER 3Tonight from London, the Marshall McLuhan Golden Probe show!

01:49:26PHILLIP MARCHANDThe journalists did him a service in the sense that they attempted to present to a verywide audience what McLuhan was all about. The journalists puffed McLuhanbecause a journalist, if he’s writing about something has to say this is worthwhile.But on the other hand, sometimes they didn’t understand him and sometimes theyaroused the resentment amongst the intellectual class that this guy, McLuhan is acharlatan who was suckering media and journalists and business and trying to makebig bucks out of it.

01:49:59ANNOUNCER 3Stand by for a McLuhan test probe.

01:50:05FRANK ZINGRONEA lot of people were very worried about him and his effect because he was so mucha part of the modern world, so un-professorial, in the way in which he flipped aroundwith these media people. They actually at one point decided to circulate a petition tohave him removed from the university.

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01:50:30ROBERT LOGANAcademics are a very mean group of people. Very critical. It’s mostly out ofjealousy. And they had a lot to be jealous about.

01:50:42GERALD O’GRADYIt then became, kind of a game. People would go to their area of expertise and findone or two factual errors, and others, and things that he had been brought down.

01:50:56LISS JEFFREYThen of course, there is the matter that he’s writing about a subject outside thebounds of proper scholarship. He was very excited about looking at this, whereasothers often saw it as the decline of Western civilization.

01:51:31CORINNE MCLUHANI was doing my best to get Marshall interested in the offers he had had fromuniversities in the States. We went to see Claude Bissell, president of the U of T.And Claude said “All right, Marshall, what would you think about having your ownbuilding, your own Coach house?” Marshall was in 7th heaven.

01:51:58PATRICK WATSONThat was the demonstration that he had managed to ride up over all the oppositionat the university. Without accommodating to it, to become recognized by theestablishment.

01:52:19HOST 1Tonight in Columbian Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York City, MarshallMcLuhan is recovering from protracted surgery yesterday to remove a growth on thecranium, not directly touching the brain.

01:52:35CORINNE MCLUHANHe lost 5 years of memory. That was a big blow to Marshall. He jumped right backinto teaching, and started a new book, and finished three. I’m sure feeling that hehad to justify himself. That he was still bright. After his operation, Marshall began tobe particularly interested in the bi-cameral effects of the right and left hemispheres ofthe brain.

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01:53:14GERALD O’GRADYHe was always interested in the senses. For him the environment was everything –and it’s interaction with the mind. So, he was involved in what now is known asphysiology and cognitive studies. Thirty years before anyone heard of it.

01:53:38ROBERT LOGANThe left side of the brain was linear and sequential. And the right side of the brainwas holistic.

01:53:45FRANK ZINGRONEMarshall saw that there was an internal truth there, in the way in which the mind is, ineffect split and is really two minds, trying to achieve balance.

01:53:59MCLUHANWe are now in a world which pushes the right hemisphere way up, because it’s anall-at-once world. The right hemisphere is an all-at-once, simultaneous world. So,the right hemisphere, by pushing up into dominance is making the old lefthemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our legal establishment,make it look very foolish.

01:54:23MARINERSome objects did not fall, but were whirled up to the level of the sea!

01:54:40LAURIE ANDERSONThe third question is: What will this tool retrieve from all the things you’ve lost?

01:54:59HUNTER 2The most memorable trip I’ve ever been on was when I went hunting by myself forthe first time.

01:55:11LAURIE ANDERSONSpeech retrieves old adventures, reshaped as stories, much more tidy, than theyever were when lived.

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01:55:19HUNTER 3This guy decides he’s going to, he’s going to have a crap in the bush and gets upand goes behind the trees, sort of thing, and puts his rifle there beside him and he’sdown there having an crap sort of thing, and then this big buck jumps in front of him,and he was just about ready to wipe his butt, so he goes like that, he sees that buckand he goes “Oh, shit!” (Laughter)

01:55:58ASTRONOMEROver here we have Taurus, the Bull. The head of the bull is actually an open clusterof stars, shaped like a V. Most of the constellations have Greek names. The Greeksused the stars to navigate. They studied their positions and came up with ways toremember where the stars were.

01:56:24LAURIE ANDERSONThe things you used, to just get by, come back to you as art; to help you to survivethe endless stretching of your heart

01:56:56MCLUHANIn the Renaissance, the image they saw very vividly in the rear-view mirror was amedieval one. What the middle ages saw in their rear-view mirror, what they thoughtwas the present was Ancient Rome. What the Industrial 19th century saw in the rear-view mirror was the Renaissance. What we see in the rear-view mirror is the 19th

century.

01:57:40LAURIE ANDERSONThe more you get, the faster you go, the more you strive to retrieve a time before anytime you’ve ever known. In the 19th century no one thought to rebuild outpost villagessimply for their charm.

01:58:22MCLUHANThe happy tendency of technological innovation tends to tidy up the old culture,whatever it happens to be, into a work of art.

01:58:42MCLUHANIf you really are curious about the future, just study the present. Because what weordinarily see in any present is really what appears in the rear-view mirror. What weordinarily think of as the present is really the past.

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01:59:09MCLUHANContent is always the previous medium and that’s all that we can see.

01:59:21MCLUHANModern suburbia lives in Bonanza land.

01:59:27MCLUHANIt is impossible for man to look straight at the present, he is so terrified by it. Westand on the stern of the ship, looking at the wake and saying we’re in very troubledwaters.

01:59:42MCLUHANAnd so, revivals on all hands in every phase of life today. Revivals of clothing, ofdances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival, it tells us who wereare, or were.

02:00:12LAURIE ANDERSONElectric media bring back the village from the distant past, where you kneweverything about everybody and news travelled fast.

02:00:43MCLUHANNow, this is what I call the global village. You no longer have to be anywhere inorder to do everything. The same information is available at the same moment fromevery part of the world.

02:01:10MCLUHANThe world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets themessage, all the time. A princess gets married in England and boom, boom, boomgo the drums. We all hear about it. An earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood stargets drunk, away go the drums again.

02:01:42LAURIE ANDERSONElectric media retrieve the forest, stirring all around you.

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02:01:51MCLUHANElectric information comes from all directions at once, and when information comesfrom all directions simultaneously, you are living in an acoustic world. The acousticworld has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections and no stasis, everything ischanging.

02:02:28MCLUHANIt’s the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made when she went through the lookingglass.

02:02:41LAURIE ANDERSONElectric media retrieve the old dark age of goddesses and monsters

02:02:58MCLUHANOur ancestors lived in a mythic world, because they had none of the literate meansof classification. A myth is a speeded up following of a process. We live mythicallyourselves, so that we understand their myths now for the first time.

02:03:19MCLUHANYou should know what the stakes are. The stakes are civilization versus tribalism.And it’s a considerable revolution to have been through 2500 years of phoneticliteracy, only to encounter the end of that road.

02:03:50MCLUHANPattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the wayout of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present uswith similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction.

02:04:12CORINNE MCLUHANMarshall was primarily the teacher, a professor, if you will, and the students lovedbeing in his classes.

02:04:22MCLUHANEveryone in this room is in costume, except me. I have on a dress. (Laughter) No,jeans are a costume, they are a tribal costume, and they are an expression of astrong corporate grievance against the establishment (Laughter) Why do you thinkyou wear a hick costume in an affluent business world?

02:04:47STUDENT

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Because they are comfortable.

02:04:48MCLUHANNo. You’re a bunch of affluent suburban kids and you’re not hicks, but you dress likehicks. Why?

02:04:55NEIL POSTMANHe was the only person, I think I’d ever known up to that time who could, in onesentence talk about the Hollywood westerns and Plato and then Elvis Presley and hewould connect it.

02:05:12PHILLIP MARCHANDMcLuhan drove a lot of students nuts because they were going to be tested on theirknowledge of Blake and Wordsworth. They weren’t going to be tested on theirknowledge of Batman and Pepsi Cola ads, and yet this is what McLuhan talkedabout in his class.

02:05:27LISS JEFFREYMany people describe their key encounter with McLuhan almost as a form ofconversion experience. It is a mystical kind of experience where one moment, yousee the world one way, the next moment you see it very differently. McLuhan made itvery clear that the young were among the best investigators of media environments,precisely because, as he put it, they didn’t suffer from a hardening of the categories.

02:06:07DERECK DE KERCKHOVEThe atmosphere around here was delightful and it was charged with, with a certainkind of excitement coming from the glamour of it all. McLuhan really was a glamourperson.

02:06:19GERALD O’GRADYFamily Circle, the little magazine that you could pick up at the supermarket, Iremember it saying he’s the most coveted after-dinner guest in America.

02:06:27FRANK ZINGRONEHe was on the most popular show on television at that time which was the “LaughIn”. And they had, this nerdish character, Henry Gibson, would come out and hewould say “Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?” So, like, 40 million people weresuddenly aware of his name.

02:06:47CORINNE MCLUHANAnd the children in the park would be “What are you doin’, Marshall McLuhan?”

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02:06:55NEIL POSTMANHe was going all over the world at that time. He was world famous, his name waseven a word, McLuhanesque.

02:07:04DERECK DE KERCKHOVEHe enjoyed every moment of his, you know, celebrity. He enjoyed not beingbothered by it. Marshall McLuhan was very casual about things like that. He wasdriven by ideas, absolutely, he was not driven by ambition.

02:07:16CORINNE MCLUHANMarshall never used the word celebrity. He was in demand, but a lot of crackpotsare in demand. The effect that Marshall would have wanted to have would havebeen to make people think. So they could see the connectedness of everything.

02:07:40MCLUHANTelevision is a serious medium, it is an inner-oriented medium, you are the vanishingpoint, it goes inside you, you go on an inner trip, it is the prelude, the vestibule toLSD.

02:07:53PATRICK WATSONA great deal of what he was doing was, quite frankly, throwing things out and seeingwhat they looked like the next day and how people would react to them. Many of hispronouncemente, they were not meant to be… they were not analytically structured,they were metaphors and he was convinced that the metaphors were worthwrestling with, but he was not always convinced that they were true.

02:08:20MCLUHANYou see, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumptyback together again, because they were bureaucrats. They weren’t turned on. Butwith electric circuits, Humpty Dumpty goes back together again with a rush.

02:08:56PHILLIP MARCHANDMost people did not get their understanding of McLuhan from his books. The books,particularly as the sixties wore on, became less and less coherent, and this is partlybecause McLuhan was not interested in writing books. His favourite mode ofcommunication was talking, talking ideas out.

02:09:07NEIL POSTMANHe wanted to get his ideas out to people, so he did appear on television all the time.And I think that it cost him.

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02:09:22MCLUHANWhen you see that juice being poured out onto spaghetti, that is good TV, glug,glug, glug. That is great TV.

02:09:30WARNER TROYERI’m going to read the book again. I still won’t understand it.

02:09:34MCLUHANTV itself is a kind of happening. Technically. And it tends to involve people in its ownvortex. The media themselves can now create events that are so much bigger thanpeople, so much bigger than the audience, that it really is a new mythic form. Thecoverage of the Vietnam war is done by more people than who are actually fighting inVietnam. The numbers of people covering Vietnam business around the world, andparticipating in it through newscasts, the numbers are many many millions. And so,the war then becomes a fiction, a colossal fiction.

02:10:16PETER GZOWSKYThe user of electronic services is largely deprived of his private identity.

02:10:21MCLUHANAnd his physical body. (Laughter) Remember the Cheshire cat that came onsmiling, minus his body?

02:10:26PETER GZOWSKYYes.

02:10:27MCLUHANThat is us.

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02:10:29PETER GZOWSKYReally?

02:10:30MCLUHANThat is us, just like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

02:10:32MCLUHANIt’s people who are sent, not the message.

02:10:34BARBARA WALTERSI must say, you do send me. I find whenever you’re on, we talk faster, and we do…

02:10:38HUGH DOWNSAnd think about it for hours afterwards.

02:10:40MCLUHANIt’s been fun!

02:10:41BARBARA WALTERSDo you know what’s going on in some great American homes? Let me tell you,Sears best interior latex paint.

02:10:50PATRICIA BRUCKMANNIt must be hard to be the almighty totem pole. I mean, what do you do if you’rebecome the media guru, but you’re aware that you’re being asked to give soundbites and God knows what else. And how do you get out of it, if the media is in factwhat you are talking about?

02:11:08LISS JEFFREYIt’s one of the most painful parts of understanding McLuhan, is when you read hisletters, beginning in the early ‘70’s, and he realizes his message has not gottenthrough. Nobody’s really listening.

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02:11:26TOM SNYDERWhat do you think is the most – I want to say effective, but that’s not the right word.I’m talking about television here. Uh, what has the greatest impact on an audience?

02:11:39MCLUHANFrom? TV programming?

02:11:42TOM SNYDERIs television best when it covers an event, like the space shot, or the Olympics, or abaseball game? Is it best when it tries to entertain with comedies…

02:11:53PHILLIP MARCHANDI am sure that McLuhan was not satisfied that he’d been understood towards theend of his life. My own feeling is that he felt that people had not bothered tounderstand. I think that he felt keenly that his academic colleagues were never readyto give him a hearing or to respect him.

02:12:27PHILLIP MARCHANDHe became involved in a club called the Best Club, at the University of Toronto. Andthis Best Club consisted of people who were heads of their own centres. McLuhanenjoyed these get togethers. This was obviously a select group of academics. Butamongst themselves, they, themselves, these people, could not come to aconclusion as to whether McLuhan was a really great thinker or a charlatan. Thatquestion hung over McLuhan until the very end.

02:13:02LISS JEFFREYBy 1974, a series of works have appeared, saying in effect, that either McLuhan waswrong, or that McLuhan should not be taken seriously because he has a hiddenagenda, whether as a Roman Catholic, or as a conservative in terms of his values.The chief charge against McLuhan was simply to say “He’s a technologicaldeterminist! What he says is the machines make the rules”.

02:13:41LISS JEFFREYMcLuhan’s enduring phrase is “Nothing is inevitable provided we’re prepared to payattention.” And he never gave up, to the end of his life. With Laws of Media,McLuhan was attempting to advance a new science.

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02:14:08DERECK DE KERCKHOVEMarshall is a tool-maker. He likes tools. He wants to give you tools. His probeshave been very simple up until now. Suddenly, he comes up with his grand unifiedtheory.

02:14:22ERIC MCLUHANI started working with my father in the middle 60’s. Ten years down the line, 1974the publisher of Understanding Media had asked for a revision, so we started there,and we ended up with this project called the Laws of Media.

02:14:45ERIC MCLUHANWe were looking for universal laws, and we found only four that everything does.These four questions ask you to look at what are the ripple effects. What otherareas are effected? Irrespective of the content. And you begin to realize, media arelike languages. That is, they are far more powerful than anything they are used tosay. The idea that media and innovations and so on are human utterances with theproperties of languages this is new. It is also extremely ancient. The grammarianused language as a metaphor, as a way of understanding the universe. He read theheavens as a text, he read the Earth as a text. He tried to discover laws. And ourlaws of media are a new foray into that very ancient way of understanding.

02:15:47MCLUHANThe laws of the media are quite simply this: That every medium exaggerates somefunction. Spectacles exaggerate or enlarge or enhance the visual function. Theyobsolesce another function. They retrieve a much older function. And they flip intothe opposite form.

02:16:47LAURIE ANDERSONThe last question is this: How will your tool reverse on you when it’s pushed to itsouter limit?

02:17:02LAURIE ANDERSONThe speed and freedom of your automobile starts to reverse the minute you leave thecommercial.

02:18:19LAURIE ANDERSONToo much of anything, however sweet, will always bring the opposite of whatever youthought you were getting.

02:18:48LAURIE ANDERSON

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Books, all those bricks in the castle of knowledge, reverse into bestsellers that crushall the rest.

02:19:10LAURIE ANDERSONPushed far enough, one becomes many; many become one.

02:19:41LAURIE ANDERSONSo it goes, over and over. Even the global village is coded, in the end, to reverse.

02:19:47MCLUHANDo you know what the satellite does to you? As an environment, when it goesaround the planet? It’s a proscenium arch. It turns the planet into a stage, makesyou want to be an actor.

02:20:05REPORTEROkay, I’ll give you – I’ll give you…

02:20:08LOCATION RECORDISTYo yo yo yo.

02:20:22LAURIE ANDERSONYou shape your tools and they shape you. It’s a loop. You start out a consumer andyou wind up consumed.

02:20:28REPORTERCan we get your reaction to what’s happened? The tragedy next door?

02:20:33WOMANIt’s terrible, it’s so horrible. I cannot even give it a name, you know? What kind oftragedy is this? How could you kill your own kids? I don’t know how she did thatand why she did that.

02:20:47MCLUHANWhen you’re on the phone or on the air, you don’t have a physical body, you’re justan image.

02:20:59MCLUHANA disembodied image. A disembodied intelligence, like an angel.

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02:21:06MCLUHANAny electric environment has the major characteristics of TV. That is, thecharacteristics of total involvement.

02:21:19MCLUHANWhen everybody becomes totally involved in everybody, how is one to establishidentity? Quest for identity is a central aspect of the electric age.

02:21:02MCLUHANViolence is the only method by which people have ever learned to assert or defineidentity.

02:22:11MCLUHANTerrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity. They are determined to make itsomehow, to get coverage. To get noticed.

02:22:45MCLUHANIt is simply fantastic the unconsciousness of our western world, with regard to theforces that we release upon it.

02:22:57MCLUHANNow, the laws of the media, they are at least a hope that we can reduce thisconfusion to some sort of order.

02:23:08LISS JEFFREYBy the time McLuhan formulated the laws of media, he had effectively lost hisaudience. His audience had moved on.

02:23:17MCLUHANSince these forms represents really huge extensions of our own bodies, and our ownnervous systems, we need a kind of ecology or equilibrium, a kind of balance of allthese services.

02:23:38CORINNE MCLUHANIt seems rather wicked to me, thinking back about Marshall’s stroke, that a man wholived by his brains and his intellectual life should be so stricken. You know, it’s prettycruel to be in Marshall’s state. Not being about to speak or read or write. And hewas in that state for 15 months.

02:24:24

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EDMUND CARPENTERMarshall spent the last part of his life with us on Long Island. And Marshall, at thattime, couldn’t speak. All he could say was: “Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.” Buthe understood, no question, he understood. So we were confining ourselves totelling jokes and he was laughing at each one and so on an so forth. Then Marshallwanted to speak, and his hands clenched like that, and he stood up, and he’d justscreamed. And then he got embarrassed, he smiled, and laughed and went ondown to walk along the beach. It must have been hell.

02:25:23ROBERT LOGANThe university poured salt on his wounds by closing down his centre.

02:25:33CORINNE MCLUHANWe came down one morning, to the centre and somebody had, helter skelter put allhis papers and things in a big pile to take them out to the trash.

02:25:44PHILLIP MARCHANDMcLuhan just broke down. This was his life. And he started to weep. So that wasvery sad. But it did epitomize that his work was not truly respected.

02:26:12EDMUND CARPENTERHe died not long after that.

02:26:30EDMUND CARPENTERYou know there’s so many things, I think… Oh, if some of these ideas had beenaccepted, not twisted around, not rejected or ignored…

02:26:55CORINNE MCLUHANThere’s a whole generation that – who scarcely knew his name, much less his work.I’ve talked to – not just students, but young people, “Marshall McLuhan? Well whois that?”

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02:27:14NEIL POSTMANIt’s almost impossible to go to a communications conference, any place in thecountry, and not hear someone say something that they never would have thought of,if not for Marshall McLuhan – but they don’t know that.

02:27:36EDMUND CARPENTERI think there’s a possibility now that some of these ideas may come back.

02:27:43GERALD O’GRADYHe was always interested in truth, and looking at how the world really looked, nothow we happen to see it. Very courageous. Yeah.

02:27:56LEWIS LAPHAMYou can always go back to him and find things. And different people will takedifferent things away from the oracle.

02:28:06ERIC MCLUHANWe have now, at our fingertips, the beginnings of a science of media ecology. But itmeans that we have to take charge of these things, to decide not to do things as wellas to just to go ahead and do them. However, this I think is, at least, part of thelegacy of Marshall McLuhan. He left us with the means of control. Not just themeans of understanding.

02:28:38CORINNE MCLUHANAnd he was very much, very far ahead of his time. He’s very applicable now. Andit’s a mystery to me how the revival began unless, perhaps people needed some newexplanation for old things. It’s a mystery to me, and I’m very pleased becauseMarshall does have the answers, to most of the problems. Not practical answers,but the theoretic answers.

02:29:19MCLUHANThe huge vortices of energy created by our technologies present us with possibilitiesof evasion of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex ofenergy that, in which we’re involved, it may be possible to program a strategy ofevasion and survival.

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02:30:29LAURIE ANDERSONHe said: The laws of media, they come in hope. But they only work as questions:What will you gain? What will you lose? What will return, from an ancient time?And what will come, of this thing you create, if you let it go too far? There’s no orderto the laws of media, all these effects are happening all the time. The trick is torecognize the pattern before it is complete.

02:31:11MCLUHANKierkegarde is a man of great relevance for this time. A man of the inner trip, theinner dialogue, the inner encounter. He has a wonderful quote: “Life can only beunderstood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”