Holler for a Marshall

[mattd]

The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool
In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew. But if 
you think you know Marshall McLuhan, or what he stood for - think again.
By Gary Wolf
Where in the waste is the wisdom?" - James Joyce
In 1971, Marshall McLuhan announced a new product.
With chemist Ross Hall, his nephew, McLuhan patented a formula for the 
removal of urine odor from underpants. The unique advantage of McLuhan's 
formula, for which he registered the trademark Prohtex, was that it removed 
the urine odor without masking other, more interesting smells - that of 
perspiration, for instance. In the aural and tactile environment of 
preliterate man, McLuhan explained, BO had been a valuable means of 
communication. When electronic technology turned the world into a global 
village, tribal odors would make a comeback, too.
This prediction has yet to come true, but if body odor has not yet made a 
comeback, its prophet surely has. Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 and 
died in 1980. By the time of his death, he had been dismissed by 
respectable academicians, and he was known in the popular press as an 
eccentric intellectual whose day in the media spotlight had come and gone. 
By 1980, the transformation of human life catalyzed by television was taken 
for granted, and it no longer seemed interesting to ask where the 
electronic media were taking us. But in recent years, the explosion of new 
media - particularly the Web - has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more 
McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of new digital media has brought the 
conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us 
suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the 
digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again.
Conservative Christian anarchist
McLuhan's slogans "The medium is the message" and "The global village" are 
recited like mantras in every digital atelier in the world, despite the 
fact that hardly anyone who quotes McLuhan reads his books. Some of them 
McLuhan hardly wrote in the first place, trusting assistants and 
collaborators to cobble them together out of recordings and notes. As his 
biographer Philip Marchand explains, with wry sympathy, "writing books was 
not McLuhan's forte."
Neither was McLuhan very influential as a scholar or teacher. From the 
beginning of his career, the Canadian professor with a doctorate from 
Cambridge stood outside the academic mainstream for which he had little 
patience.
The natural incompatibility of originality and academia was probably 
especially difficult to overcome for McLuhan, who had received his early 
education in North American public schools, which, then as now, offered few 
advantages to their most talented students. By the time he arrived at 
Cambridge, McLuhan had acquired what is perhaps the defining trait of 
autodidacts - a kernel of personal crankiness and a resistance to 
established authority.
In his role as social, political, and economic analyst, McLuhan was a 
clown. His speeches and public pronouncements helped give rise to a 
generation of affluent futurists and business consultants skilled at 
telling executives what they liked to hear, but McLuhan's own predictions 
and business ideas were often hilariously ill-conceived. If his urine-odor 
remover failed to stimulate the instincts of business executives, perhaps 
McLuhan could talk Tom Wolfe into collaborating on a Broadway production of 
a play in which the media appeared on stage as characters. This aborted 
script followed two other McLuhan attempts at musicals, including one in 
which Russian Elvis fans were given a shot at governing America.
Even in areas where McLuhan was expected to be more dependable - say, pop 
culture - his pronouncements were often incredible. In 1968, for instance, 
McLuhan attempted to explain to readers of Playboy why the miniskirt was 
not sexy.
With McLuhan, the accuracy of his commentary was beside the point. "What is 
truth?" asked McLuhan in 1974, and he answered with a quote he attributed 
to Agatha Christie's iconoclastic investigator Hercule Poirot: "Eet ees 
whatever upsets zee applecart."
"You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet, or you would have no 
problems in understanding my procedure," McLuhan wrote to one detractor 
with whom he was especially irritated. "I have no theories whatever about 
anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of 
force, and pressures. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as 
nothing compared to the events to which they refer."
Gary Wolf (Wired.com"gary at Wired.com) is the executive editor of HotWired. 
He and Michael Stein are the authors of Aether Madness: An Off-Beat Guide 
to the Online World.