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Reading Over Mcluhan's Shoulder

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Reading Over Mcluhan's Shoulder Reading over McLuhan’s Shoulder John Durham Peters Yale University ABSTRACT Background This article1 presents a reworked keynote address given at the “Many McLuhans” conference held at the University of Toronto in September 2018 on the occasion of UNESCO recognizing Marshall McLuhan’s library as part of its Memory of the World program. Analysis The article explores McLuhan as a reader and suggests that his greatest work might have been what he read rather than what he wrote. Conclusion and implications The library, as a genre, is one of the great media forms of modernity and antiquity and a marker of the fragility and majesty of the things that humans do with their large brains. Keywords Marshall McLuhan; Harold Innis; Library; Reading; Apostolic succession; Memory RÉSUMÉ Contexte Cet article consiste en la révision d’un discours principal donné au colloque « Many McLuhans » tenu en septembre 2018 à l’Université de Toronto, à l’occasion de la reconnaissance de la bibliothèque de Marshall McLuhan par l’UNESCO dans le contexte de son programme Mémoire du monde. Analyse L’article explore McLuhan en tant que lecteur et suggère que sa plus grande œuvre consiste en ce qu’il a lu plutôt qu’en ce qu’il a écrit. Conclusions et implications La bibliothèque, en tant que genre, est une des grandes formes médiatiques de l’Antiquité et de la modernité et une instance de la fragilité et de la majesté de ce que font les humains avec leurs grands cerveaux. Mots clés Marshall McLuhan; Harold Innis; Bibliothèque; Lecture; Succession apostolique; Mémoire Introduction I feel a lot of pressure as a Yankee trying to talk about a great Canadian treasure and a great Canadian trickster. Anthony Burgess once quipped that John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan were the two greatest Canadians that the United States had yet produced. So maybe I am playing the classic role as the American relay or amplifier.2 John Durham Peters is a María Rosa Menocal Professor of English, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Yale University, author of Speaking into the Air (1999), and The Marvelous Clouds (2015). Email: [email protected] . Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 44 (2019) 489–501 ©2019 Canadian Journal of Communication Corporation http://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v44n4a3715 490 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 44 (4) But I hope to do more. I recently came across a quote from one of my favourite poets, William Blake (1793): “I see a serpent in Canada who courts me to his love.” I too feel courted by a serpent in Canada. This might not sound like a particularly promis- ing way to win one’s audience at the beginning of a speech, but I mean no insult: the joke’s on my nation, not yours. The ever-renewable resource of American innocence can have dangerous effects. One of the things that draws me to the Canadian intellec- tual tradition is its recognition that we are out of the garden, that there is a serpent that gives you the gift of knowledge of good and evil, that the world of space and time is messy and conflicted. It can be good to be malevolently well informed as well as blithely ignorant!3 I also feel a little bit belated or of late birth compared to some of the company in this room, because I did not know Marshall McLuhan. I first started to read him the year after he died, so I have had almost four decades of engagement off and on, but I am definitely a latecomer. The debate in early Christianity about who could be a real apostle is relevant. According to the New Testament, Jesus chose twelve apostles before his own death and resurrection. Judas Iscariot’s betrayal and suicide left a vacancy in the quorum. Peter, acting as leader of the group, steps forward in the first chapter of the Book of Acts with two potential candidates who are to be picked by casting lots. Peter all but takes it for granted that the only possible candidates are those “men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us” (Acts 1:21, New International Version). That is, the only legitimate apostle was a (male) acquaintance and eyewitness of Jesus during his lifetime. If you did not know Jesus in the flesh, you could not be an apostle, because you could not bear witness of him. Along comes Paul of Tarsus and flips the qualifications on their head.4 He had not known Jesus as a mortal, and indeed had been a fierce antagonist of the Jesus movement. Paul’s apostolic call came instead by a divine vision on the road to Damascus. His brethren in the establishment quorum eyed him warily. He had not come up through the ranks or paid his dues and was slow to check in with the standing apostles in Jerusalem who seem to have thought him a freelancing showboat and loose cannon. The debate was not only generational but doctrinal, as Paul foregrounded ideas about race (you did not need to be a Jew) and gender (men and women were alike before God), which others might have thought peripheral to Jesus’s message. His letters show remarkably little interest in the life and teachings of Jesus: he is much more interested in the abstract fact of “Christ crucified.” It is almost as if Paul explicitly devalues firsthand experience; he almost seems to relish being “born out of due time” (1 Cor. 15:8). He claimed to be the prototype of all believers who come after, because instead of the flesh-and-blood Jesus, he knew the spiritual Christ. For Paul the path forward was precisely through the enabling distance of the Johnny-come-lately. The “follower at second hand,” as Søren Kierkegaard (1844, 89) put it, might have a better grasp than those who risked being blinded by concrete immediacy. The contemporary may have better access to the accidental features of a teacher’s doctrine, but has no advantage in understanding its essence. There was a genuine custody battle in that first generation of Christianity, and perhaps there is a custody battle about McLuhan. There are still many among us in Peters Reading over McLuhan’s Shoulder 491 this room who knew him and enjoyed at close quarters his oracular charismatic pres- ence: the orotund voice, the witticisms, that unique way he clipped his “T”s while talking. And there are many of the rest of us who come belatedly. Who has the best connection? Who has the authentic authority to speak of the great guru? Who is better positioned to interpret the work? I am obviously not comparing McLuhan to Christ, but considering a succession crisis. Obviously the debate between Paul and Peter was not only generational, it was about what mattered in the teachings of Jesus. The same is true for the heirs of McLuhan. Those who knew McLuhan in the flesh have an argument for a kind of interpretive privilege based on presence, but presence does not always yield the greatest insights. To quote another poet, W.H. Auden (1940), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” The Gospels disagree on all kinds of details about Jesus’s life and death, some trivial and some potentially significant enough to spawn a large num- ber of websites nervously explaining them away as insignificant to believers in biblical inerrancy. At dinner the night before this talk, Michael McLuhan and I discussed the fact that John Lennon never did visit the McLuhan home, although that story has be- come a legendary fixture in McLuhan lore. Lennon and Yoko Ono did visit the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1969, as a BBC video attests (YouTube, 2016), but there is disagreement even among the first generation about what happened otherwise. You can learn things about McLuhan from people who knew him—his preference for read- ing single pages on the recto rather than verso side; his pleasure in the music of Paul Whiteman, the aptly named “sweet jazz” conductor from the 1920s and 1930s; or his way of lying on the couch when he got home from campus. These experiences cast light on his thought in ways that the page and screen cannot. Thus, perhaps reading the right side of the page might help account for the herky-jerky style of exposition; perhaps his prone position helps explain McLuhan’s (1964) quip about the couch ex- tending “the integral being” in contrast to the more specialized chair, an “ablative ab- solute of backside” (p. 21). But very few people during his lifetime had access to his library. This belated gift may actually bring us closer to what he was thinking than his fleshly presence. The collection in this library favours the witness at second hand. One last New Testament story (one of McLuhan’s most read books!). The last chapter of the Gospel of John broaches the theme of this article: a fantastic library. First of all, this final, twenty-first chapter seems not to have been written by the same author as the first twenty, even though it is vociferous about its own authenticity. Second, the very last verse posits the wild idea that if all the stories of Jesus had been written down, the entire world could not hold them all. The Gospel of John ends with a fantasy of a world overflowing with uncontainable books. Even a cosmic library filling the planet could not sufficiently hold the stories of a single life.
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