It's been a quarter century since Marshall McLuhan entered the popular culture pantheon inhabited by the likes of Einstein and Freud, but his work continues to fascinate and infuriate the scholarly world. No wonder - it explores a reality that had only partially come into view at the time of McLuhan's death in 1980. McLuhan referred to this as "acoustic space." In today's parlance, it is cyberspace.
According to Phillip Marchand, McLuhan first broached this concept in 1954 with the shocking point that what we consider normal or natural visual space is actually a technological artifact, a result of perceptual habits created by seeing through a phonetic alphabet. Acoustic space, in contrast, held sway before the alphabet - it brooks no boundaries and happens all at once - and returns via electronic media.
Thus we enter McLuhan's celebrated "global village" and "laws of media" or "tetrads," which suggest that every technology (1) amplifies part of our culture, (2) obsolesces aspects previously amplified, (3) retrieves elements previously obsolesced, and (4) eventually reverses or "flips" into something else entirely. So TV intensifies the audio-visual; co- opts acoustic-only radio; recovers pictures previously purged in radio's derogation of print; and reverses into holography, interactive television, computers - take your pick.
Picking computers, Bruce Powers tells us they accelerate calculations to the speed of light, erode mechanical sequences, reclaim numerical power, and reverse into simultaneous pattern recognition. Eric McLuhan says they increase calculation and retrieval speeds, erase approximation and the present, recall total recall, and reverse into bureaucratic anarchy. Eric McLuhan's approach is the more stimulating and difficult to immediately comprehend. Powers deserves praise for making McLuhan more palatable to the poetry-impaired.
The Letters show that McLuhan minded being misunderstood.
"You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet," he lectures a flattering author, "or you would have no problem understanding my procedure. I have no theories." This reminded me of a message from Marshall on my answering machine: "I've been reading through your [doctoral] dissertation, and you misrepresent me...." (I'd called him a philosopher.)
Given the acoustic/cyberspatial nature of McLuhan's thinking and writing, why bother with these books? Why squeeze the all-at-once into the fixed sequential confines of even the most liberated hardcopy? Why not wait for the hypertexts that will allow readers, coming upon McLuhan's mention of speed in a tetrad, to leap to 50 other places where speed resides? While we do wait, these books provide insight and pleasure to those of us on the cusp of the world of letters that was and the one that will be. Most of these worthy titles are now out of print, so check your library.
_Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger_, by Philip Marchand, $19.95, Ticknor & Fields: +1 (212) 420 5800. (Out of print.) _Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message_, edited by George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald, $17.95, Fulcrum: +1 (303) 277 1623. _Laws of Media: The New Science_, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, $18.95, University of Toronto Press: +1 (416) 667 7791. (Out of print.) _Letters of Marshall McLuhan_, edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, Oxford University Press: +1 (212) 679 7300. (Out of print.) _The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century_, by Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, $22.95,Oxford University Press: (800) 451 7556, +1 (212) 679 7300.
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