There is a series of recorded conversations between Marshall McLuhan and Nina Sutton, consisting of 38 parts, totaling about 25 hours, that took place in the Fall of 1975 at McLuhan’s CENTER FOR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY.
These are my notes for Parts 10-18:
- FIRST 13 MINUTES ARE SPEEDED UP AND HARD TO DECIPHER
five parts of rhetoric in creativity and performance applied to Bach and his era at 13:05
“Western man requires all his information be subliminal”
the end of Freud’s “subconscious” at 29:10
modern painting pushes the non-visual up into the visual
visual man is schizophrenic from the beginning (“R. D. Laing doesn’t understand why”)
“No, I’m practically the only person who knows that – phonetic spliteracy” at 31:45
why there are so many books today (“Like anything else, at the end it’s always biggest”)
MM refers to when he first said: “The medium is the message” – in 1957 at a radio conference at 33:23
speed reading helps the semi-literate today (“motorcar drivers are very bad readers”)
“good readers are very bad motorcar drivers” (“they are stuck with tunnel vision… they don’t use peripheral vision”) (”most of the horrible accidents are caused by highly literate people on the highway – because they don’t look to the sides because of their tunnel vision”)
all games are peripheral vision (“coaches tell tennis players not to read”)
“golf is better for readers than any other game – it’s tunnel vision”
how MM works and how he got 35 of his students to proofread all of “The Gutenberg Galaxy” laid out on 16 tables at the library (“one student would read with the eye while the other student read aloud”) (“they proofread all the cited books and the whole text in one afternoon”) at 37:00
“I can’t think of any reason to reread my books”
the bookkeeper goes to the top level of the company once the computer comes in
more on the strange effects of xerox on management (“the committee with position papers doesn’t make decisions, only recommendations – nobody knows who’s making the decisions anymore as shown by Watergate {a monument to the xerox and the committee}”) (“Nixon is the executive as dropout – he was forced out/fazed out by his own medium/the media”) (Nina says: “If anything, Watergate has been the best proof of your observations”… and McLuhan agreed) - MM says he and Ted Carpenter dealt with the Watergate world/problems in “They Became What They Beheld” (1971, but MM co-wrote the earlier serialized version in the Los Angeles Free Press throughout 1969)
“you can’t say, ‘no’, in pictures”
“the literate man is the only one who thinks of reality as something ‘out there’” (“to the ear man there is no ‘outside’ – it’s all here now”) (“the oral man can’t see a picture at first – the parts of the picture have to be named to the oral man”) (“for the oral man and the child, a drawing is tactile and kinetic – it’s a symbol, an icon”)
“animals don’t have cones in their eyes so they can’t see colors – a bull can’t see the matador with the red sheet”
more on the detective (“only works with the GROUND”)
“the meaning isn’t in the thing at all”
the iconoclastic wars (“realism is anti-God”)
Marg Stewart says: “Have Bob Logan on the phone” at 8:52
MM reads from Sherlock Holmes
how we became “human”
more by Sherlock Holmes
the symbol is the FIGURE minus its GROUND
“Charlie Chaplin as symbol cannot exist in a European GROUND, only in an American GROUND where you go outside to be alone”
“the cowboy is a Spanish gaucho” (“plot and subplot is the key to a meaningful popular art form”)
going outside to be alone (“I’m the only one who’s ever made the discovery” at 21:24) (“Frank Lloyd Wright reversed spaces for the private American house but it never caught on”) (“TV does {brings the whole outside world now inside our homes – which is a big revolution} what Wright did too soon”)
more on the gaucho (“most American westerns are made in Spain”)
“crime is an art form”
“realism is a contradiction in terms” (“fake real”)
Lord Byron (“the aesthete becomes a criminal in the 19th Century”)
“the Romantic movement is itself alienation from the world they had around them on a quest for the Spirit”
“today the outside is going inside – it happens to be a lot bigger than the outside – the inner trip, the quest for Spirit, by acoustic means – you tune in”
“’Take Today’ is the most significant book”
how MM writes his books (“until he reaches Mahler’s ‘last wave’”) – his books could have been a lot longer
“the Third World is really now the whole planet” at 35:13
“the audience is the force that releases the writer’s interests, shapes them… the audience is, by definition, an area that needs help…”
“in the electric age the artist becomes enemy”
“the artist has never ever needed help from the audience – always the culture hero… in all fields”
“the artist (the seer) vs. the ad man” (“popular art administers to the disease rather than to the cure – they don’t try to increase awareness, they’re tranquilizers”)
“the serious artist hurts us” (“actually, everybody needs an awful lot of pain in order to survive”)
“Bach had many enemies” - “at the speed of light, the visual model won’t work” (Oct.14/75)
“my Baedeker is the study of the interplay of the arts and sciences – I started it when I was working with Sigfried Giedion – I met him in 1940”
“I must read Sartre on Flaubert” (“all these people are great big windbags – things that you could put on one page, they use a whole book for – he’s Goebbels – that’s somnambulism”
“Heidegger is another windbag – endless repetition – like a broken record. I agree up to a point, quite a big point”
“They’re afraid they’re gonna lose their public or something – the whole bunch, they’re windbags”
“The Germans introduced this verbosity into our world now – very big books – think of Hegel and Kant, enormous tomes in which they say very little – I think it’s kind of an inner trip – they’re talking to themselves”
“I make most of my discoveries while talking”
“I always discovered that the most valuable thing in the world is the anecdote” (MM gives the story of Mallarme {“My dear Degas, poetry is made with words, not with ideas”} and Degas as an example) at 6:45
MM quotes Ezra Pound (“The job of the teacher is to save the student’s time”) (“These great big books do not save anybody’s time”)
“The object being to stop people – when I see my students taking notes, I always stop them and say: ‘Don’t, I have something to say.’”
“I am more a man of the spoken word than the written word”
“Now the ‘medium’ – it took me a long time to find out what that meant – it took me quite a while – I was right but I didn’t know why”
color photography caused tremendous changes in advertising
George Thompson (McLuhan’s assistant) speaks at 12:17
black and white TV between 1949 and 1966 in the USA
“I use collage all the time” (“I’m not making a point – I’m trying to discover a new pattern”)
“motorcars create distance, don’t make things closer”
“once I’ve said it, it’s obvious – people resent the obvious – this resentment is something I have to study now”
“real news is bad news – a newspaper has to have bad news – good news is not news”
“I’m studying the law of the situation – “law” means a pattern, a structure, it’s formal cause, that is, it’s the whole environmental change, it’s not a single efficient cause, I do not study just the effect of one thing on one thing, I study the effect of everything on one thing – now this is the Sherlock Holmes method by the way” at 19:13
“the heroes here are not cops – we instinctively distrust the ‘functionaire’”
“the ‘Pink Panther’ is a superman… and always wrong”
“another reading I’m taking all the time is the hot and the cool”
“I do have the view that there is a homeostasis or equilibrium, that the total situation will compensate, will correct itself”
“American management is very hot (‘very sharp, very keen, very goal-oriented’), and it’s already old hat – European management has been taking on American management when it was already…”
“If Mao takes in Western forms of printing, he will be destroyed – it will destroy his whole culture” (“they don’t know why”)
“the ‘global situation’ means over-all power”
MM says to Nina (who mentions CIA interference in Cuba): “You are making political judgments, you’re paying no attention at all to media, these are all political judgments – typical French approach – this is political theory and political power structure, but you’re isolating politics and power from other factors – anyway, I study the whole situation, I don’t study just this political one – by the time, by the way, people reach a certain level of intense specialization, then they enter the political sphere as a power – now China has entered…”
MM says more about Cuba’s specialization in sugar production (“which is fatal – it destroys the whole balance of their economy – this happened before the Spanish-American War (1898) – they were already specialized”
more on MM’s method at 31:54
marathon dancing in the 1930’s
Karl Popper’s observation that a scientific hypothesis is one that can be disproved: “And because everybody was so eager to disprove everything I said, I thought I will proceed to make statements that anybody could disprove about the media. Then I discovered to my amazement that they were absolutely watertight. Absolutely provable and undisprovable. However, it means they’re unscientific. They’re so strongly structured that they don’t have that necessary disprovable quality.”
“I resent, avoid, hate making a resume of what I have already said.”
“After ‘Understanding Media’ I found FIGURE-GROUND a more convenient way of handling media. I thought that way but I hadn’t used it consciously. I now mean that the medium is not the motorcar, it is the services created by the motorcar. As a matter of fact, that came out of ’Take Today’.”
“Media are frontiers. They create new frontiers in human experience. And the frontier is a gap – and the gap is another discovery we make. Because the gap is where the action is.”
“getting uptight is the hotting up of the medium – narrowing the interface to a point where it becomes unbearable, unusable”
“‘cool’ simply means widening the gap or increasing the number of interfaces… and multi-sensuous”
“specialists today are multi-job oriented – that’s why every housewife can have a job out in the community – in North America now nearly every family has two people working – this is a big revolution by the way – so the wives say one of the main causes of inflation in the world today is the second job – the average income of the community has doubled – everyone in North America is loaded with lectures” - “wealth creates the GROUND of poverty, work creates the GROUND of unemployment, knowledge creates the GROUND of ignorance, youth creates age – this is literally a basic principle of the media”
“the generation gap is in sensibility – it is an unbridgeable gap (Eye vs. Ear)” (“Gertrude Stein said ‘you are all a lost generation’ – a gap caused by radio, the Jazz Age”) (“there was a generation gap at the time of printing in the 16th Century”) (“the railway line and the telegraph created a generation gap in the 19th Century”)
“television pushed our sensorium back together – we’re more like pre-literate man but also post-literate – bookkeepers are the closest to the old print culture and the most literate in the worst sense of the word”
“the book, ‘The Medium is the Massage’, is a non-book” (“I got attention and notoriety but no success – my books have never sold very well” – they’re not interested – they always assumed it was an attack on people”) (“the post-literate book exists in another GROUND”) (“in a multi-directional world you can’t have ‘progress’”) (“you progress by abandoning the situation”) (“this is why we have pollution – all our sins have caught up with us now and we can’t leave things behind anymore at the speed of light”) (“India is an empty country”) (“when I cycled through England in the 30s, we wouldn’t see a person for days, nobody in the fields”) (“crowding has very little to do with space, it has much to do with speed of movement – population explosion is an illusion of movement due to jet speed, it’s not numbers – the whole population in the world would have enough spaces to live in Canada”)
“only one or two of my books had any effect: ‘Understanding Media’ and ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’
“’The Medium is the Massage’ was put together by Jerome Agel, not me – it’s a pamphlet, not a book – Agel gets 50%, Fiore gets 25%, I get 10% or less – it still sells – the royalties are very small even though it gets used everywhere as a textbook – I always tend to start with other people’s ignorance – you move in as a therapist of some sort
“The Mechanical Bride” (Assembly Line Love Goddess) was finished by the forms since television and the computer in the USA
‘camp’ explained
Jazz is not an electronic music but retrieved in the GROUND of Rock
the microphone – ‘S/O’ (sensory orientation) means inside-outside at 26:16
the North American doesn’t go for liturgies (rather goes to church to be alone)
more on Charlie Chaplin (brings the American GROUND with him)
“I verbalize the chapters utterly different from the way they are in that book (’Take Today’)”
the De Kerckhove “translation” was a complete rewrite of “From Cliche to Archetype” - MM and Nina discuss the complications for making their book
old villages in the new supermarkets 14:19
making guide books
“death gives people a feeling that they were real” (“the car clubs of the 50s playing ‘chicken’”)
“the man of the crowd/the big city/the big sports crowd is a nobody who wants death to prove his own reality to himself” 25:10
the new phrase is not “what’s going on” but is now “what’s going down” = “everybody is being brainwashed – no FIGURE-GROUND interplay”)
“Marxism, any ideology, is pure brainwashing” (“all science is ideology”)
“one thing that isn’t brainwashing is teaching people how to see and how to get hold of the situation around them – and that cannot be done by theories”
more on “what’s going down”
teens, as they get older, tend to stop watching TV
MM tried to get students at Fordham to observe their younger brothers and sisters, but they wouldn’t do it
MM predicts that there are very strange new eating habits in the schools
Alice Cooper, the Rhinestone Cowboy (“Mae West was impersonating a female impersonator”) - “transparency (“the super fake”) = one world through another world through another world = super-real, the surreal (“what’s going down”) (Oct.15/75)
“what’s going down is the fake: especially in fake food, the real food is tossed into the garbage, McDonald’s hamburgers is absolutely the lowest form”
“you have fake music, fake heroes, and they must appear fake, they must look fake”
American Graffiti had no parents (“the unbrainwashed reality which pays the bills – the kids weren’t real, they were mythic – the kids did no work of any kind, at all”) until the last scene
the mythic: more on two working parents so the kids are rolling in affluence and spending money (“work is so far away they gotta have motorcars”)
“Parkinson’s Law actually is a repetition of the old medieval idea that nature abhors a vacuum” at 7:28
“International Motley is jeans” (“the clown’s costume is worn by the alienated man”)
“Camp ‘goes down’ (‘loss of identity’) because it is costume – and it is now daily – you invent a new form of camp every single day of your life, in music, in dress, in food, and entertainment – everything is all camp”
more on the Rhinestone Cowboy
“entertainment is the gory and the sad”
“how would you discover or define ‘sanity’ in the city (see “Human Nature Industry” – the whole quest for non-meaning)”
churches and cults
“night clubs (new in the 20s) are a form of cult”
“religious guide to the city” (“fake religions”)
“cities and big office buildings depend on artificial lighting”
“very important chapters to come out of ‘Take Today’ for ‘Understanding Media Revised’”
more on FIGURE-GROUND
“the ‘word of the year’ disappears into management which means it’s finished” (“acts as a GROUND for one year, then it’s out”) at 20:30
“the updating of awareness by fashion is an attempt to tune in on new GROUND” (“the hula hoop {’software’} and the mini skirt {‘hardware’}”) (“costume is tribal and dress is civilized”) (“the ‘word of the year” is the linguistic equivalent of dress or fashion”)
more on the wheel and the axle and other gaps (“no connections in touch”) such as the dropout
more on FIGURE-GROUND interplay (“they can change roles, they flip all the time, anything can become FIGURE to a GROUND, and any GROUND can become FIGURE to another GROUND”) - “people went Protestant overnight” (“the Protestant ‘thing’ has two facets”) (“the tribal German never has had a democracy”) (“paradoxically, the extreme form of the ear man is an army man”)
more on MM’s conversion (“my motives are entirely supernatural, not cultural”)
Max Weber
“the real church is totally invisible” (“it’s simultaneous, instantaneous, total community”)
“at the beginning Protestantism appealed to tribal people as a way out – it was an accident, at the beginning” at 7:42
“the capitalist must work against the community because he’s working for himself” (“the Catholic thing has always favored working for the community and for the group – for centuries this was true, but with Gutenberg the thing burst to pieces”)
“the poet is a corporate function” (“’high priest of Art’ – he’s a priest”)
“the newspaper man has no room for individuality, however, they dream of writing a great individual work”
“Lenin and Marx worked in different GROUNDS”
MM’s four worlds (“the moment you mention the electric world, they say, ’yes, yes’”) at 12:36
MM mentions the different preface in the “Culture is Our Business” paperback
MM suggests to Nina to look at the DEW-Line newsletters
the Baudelaires, the Kierkegaards, and the Nietzsches are acoustic writers and come in fast with the telegraph
Tony Schwartz’s “TV uses the eye as an ear” (“TV is already an anticipation of the hologram – you sit in the middle of the image, you don’t sit and look at it”)
“the occult is always the GROUND but now it becomes FIGURE” (“drugs are the chemical version of the new electric thing”)
“Cocteau said the grand opera was created by opium dreams” (“in the opium dream, time seems endless – those arias that go on and on and on belong to the opium world”)
“the dentist is about to be a dropout – Chinese preventive medicine is coming to our world” (“cancer and cardiac disease are a way of life”)
“the teacher’s job is to drop out and to just provide the student with the necessary clues to get on with it”
MM uses the Marxist term, “reaction”, to describe the new “old fashioned kids” (“we’re not going anywhere”)
Nina insists on being a “moral” individual
“the Third World is experiencing loss of group identity” (“there will be a horrible backlash”)
more on existentialism
more on angelism (MM mentions how we are “super angels” (“not the Cartesian subjective, philosophical angel”) via radio) - media ecology (“to create the optimal conditions of survival like in cuisine”)
Herbert Krugman
“streaking” (“just a passing fanny”)
Spinoza’s multi-level exegesis
Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels, 1710” (four books as multi-level exegesis)
Mallarme
Saussure
Brazilian students of McLuhan who went into semiotics
MM comments on how the New Critics secretly came out of linguistics
Wimsatt worked with Beardsley
more on Kant and Hegel negatively influenced Europe (“painful, barren, and sterile – they’re intensely visual people via Hume who pretend to be acoustic” – British empiricism saved us from them”) – “they are inheritors of Descartes who reduced rhetoric to 2 parts via Ramus, squeezed everything into dispositio (very limited form of method)” at 16:28
from “blowing your stack” to blowing a fuse”
more on “tunnel vision” (“diachronique”)
more on teens stopping watching television
“books became an art form with radio”
“telephone is an art form in other media”
MM bought a typewriter a couple of days before he met Corinne so he didn’t learn to type
“I wrote ’The Gutenberg Galaxy’ and ‘Understanding Media’ entirely by hand” at 31:09
how MM used his knowledge of rhetoric in his study of media (“as Joyce did, and he knew more about media than anybody”)
how semioticians became interested in McLuhan
Tzvetan Todorov
“I’m going to publish my PhD thesis during my sabbatical this year”
Toynbee’s “etherealization” (“software”)
Benedetto Croce
how FDR became an emperor (via his polio)
more on Nixon vs. JFK
Yeats’ “emotion of multitude” - la langue vs. la parole (“there are two kinds of structure”) (Oct.16/75)
“madness is hot/logical and sanity is cool/playful/illogical”
MM’s anecdote about the fake “insane”
Hamlet and Pirandello
outside/visual world is “hot” and the inside/acoustic world is “cool”
real world is hot and the dreamworld is cool
the new question is not moreness/quantity/hot but quality of life/cool (“the consumer is obsolesced”)
TV makes people go out more
more on McDonald’s hamburgers
the Latin Mass vs. the folk Mass
double plot = metamorphosis and involvement
more on the Apocalypse (“which way is it coming from?”) 12:28
SST transport was stopped because of the “sonic boom” (“cooled off the project”)
“soap is secret propaganda”
audience as actor (“the flip in the criminal trial where the audience begins to sympathize with the criminal very suddenly”) (“the audience thinks it’s on trial”) (“Lt. Calley” (the Rosenbergs)
“there is no longer a private sector to be defended against socialism” (“accepting socialist services totally at all levels”)
real estate ad in the L. A. Times: “even if they drop a bomb on it, you will still own the hole” (“hot and cool”)
more funny ads and one-liners (“media jokes are a way of cooling hot grievances”)
comparing JFK funeral on color TV vs. black and white TV
Mao Tse-tung is a tribal man surrounded by private worlds of capitalists (“First World”)
Russia (“Second World”) is a tribal world surrounded by the First World (“the Russian is not civilized”)
Dostoevsky’s characters are “group people”
“Bloomsbury is sentimentally attracted to the tribal world” (“Dostoyevsky is sentimentally attracted to the West”)
“aristocrats and peasants are tribal” (“Anna Karenina vs. Madame Bovary”)
“the Russians modeled their ballet on French classical dancing”
“why are the greatest discoveries so simple looking back at them but so difficult when you are looking forward into the opaque and the unknown?” at 26:51 (Oct.17/65) (MM presents his answer to this question: use the ignorance of the masses presenting the problem on TV) (“all the great discoveries in the world have been made by ignorant people”) (“organizing ignorance for discovery”)
more on the Apocalypse (“there are no atheists at foxholes”) at 31:51
“How could you be worried about a thing like death? It’s total.”
MM’s “AAP” = shorthand for “automatic amputation or self-amputation”
MM only likes his ideas as tools (“I have no pride of authorship – none at all. I feel no possession.”) (“Nearly all my students have been people who become my rivals because, instead of giving them a point of view, I give them these tools. And they begin to use the tools but they become rather nasty because they don’t have my detachment. They begin to think, “this is my stuff,” and they begin to use it egotistically. I could even name them but they’re quite well-known people, in fact, some quite big people. They’re twenty years younger than I am, sort of thing.”)
“It’s always play – all the work we’re doing, for me, is pure play. That’s why it’s so hard for me to go back on anything I’ve done. Then it becomes work. I’ve never worked in my life. All my teaching is play.”
“Joyce and Eliot are stylists, completely different role. I’m more of an engineer than an artist, that way. The best style in the world does not help most people. The user will always corrupt – he will corrupt language. The user is always engaged in corrupting whatever he uses. He is an inadequate person, in regard to language. He’s lazy, he doesn’t look into the language.”
Narcissus as narcosis. (“It’s hypothesis.”)
more on amputation
more on jokes as alleviating grievances
Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas
