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Our Cause is Effect: Practical McLuhan

Andrew McLuhan · Follow
18 min read · Apr 26, 2021

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The McLuhan Institute’s ‘Winnipigeon’ x Sputnik by Duane King

Text of a speech delivered on the occasion of the opening of the

Media Art Centre for Research and Methodology: Moscow,
Director Natalia Fuchs

November 17 2020

©Andrew McLuhan 2020.

Our Cause Is Effect: Practical McLuhan

“Perhaps the largest conceivable revolution in information occurred on October 17,

1957, when Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time, the
natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment
that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born.
‘Ecological’ thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the
status of a work of art.”

-Marshall McLuhan, ‘At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in
which there are no spectators but only actors,’ 1973.

First Things:

I am going to talk about Marshall McLuhan, who was my grandfather. I am going to

talk about my father and myself as well, and I will do it from my own perspective as
son of and grandson of these people. I’ve learned that it’s inescapable, and so I
prefer to confront it head-on, and use it as a point of strength, a starting point, a
perspective no one else has, which has its own value.

Different people will comment on McLuhan and McLuhan work differently. As has
been observed, there are ‘many McLuhans,’ so there are many ways in. I will offer
McLuhan as I know it from my lived experience.

I delivered a lecture similar in nature to this two years ago. ‘The Past and the Future
of McLuhan Studies’ was delivered in 2018 in Munster, Germany — it was supposed
to be my father’s last public engagement. He was going to retire. Travel no longer
agreed with him. However, he died rather suddenly while he and I were in Colombia
together on what was supposed to be his second-last engagement. The night before
he died, he delivered a speech entitled ‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century’ which
was, in my opinion, one of his greatest achievements. It is available in print and
online should you care to read or watch or listen.

Though I’ve spoken on this subject before, I chose not to review that speech in
preparation for this one, and instead start anew. Two years later, I’ve learned a lot.
I’ve tried a lot. I’ve refined my approaches. I am grateful for the opportunity to re-
present, and thanks are due to Natalia Fuchs for the invitation and also to the
Canadian Embassy in Moscow for their support.
McLuhan, Then:

Probably the most succinct phrasing of Marshall McLuhan’s method is as quoted in

Life magazine of February 24th 1966:

“I don’t explain, I explore.”

He also said things like ‘I don’t have concepts, only percepts.’ ‘You don’t like that
idea? I got others.’ He said that he didn’t see any point in making statements which
weren’t controversial. ‘I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.’

He courted controversy, probed poetically, played with paradox. He was accused of

many things: being a technological determinist, an agent for the Vatican, an
irresponsible or shoddy scholar, drinking too deeply from Joyce’s well, and being
just plain wrong.

The funny thing is that, so many years later, we find that he was so often on the
money. Instead of being forgotten, as was predicted by many critics, the man and
his ideas find relevance today. And why is this? The reason is, that while he was
more often than not commenting on his own time (‘I’m very careful,’ he’d say, ‘to
only predict things which have already happened’), there was a method to his
seeming madness.

Methods age better than prophesies.

Further Back:

If we go back further, we find a young Marshall McLuhan enrolled in the University

of Manitoba for Mechanical Engineering. This speaks of a person interested in how
things work. The nature of things. Practicality. There’s not a lot of theory in
mechanical engineering, or if there is, it takes a backseat to applied knowledge.

Sometime in the late 60s, in a short document titled ‘autobiography,’ he types: “I had
begun my University studies as a student of Engineering, because of my interest in
structure and design.”

In the summer following his first year in Mechanical Engineering, Marshall worked
as ‘rod man’ on a survey crew in the north of Manitoba, the central-Canadian
province he was raised in. It is said that he ‘read himself into English’ that summer. I
would imagine the mosquitos and black flies played a role as well.
But Marshall was raised in English Literature and the performing arts. His mother,
Elsie Hall McLuhan, was an ‘Elocutionist’ who traveled and gave readings and
performances. She was well-known and acclaimed in her time, and would read
Open in app
poetry and perform plays, playing all the characters herself.

Search
Marshall’s father was in real estate and insurance, and is remembered as a man of
good humour and conversation.

I brought up Marshall’s initial course of study to illustrate that this was a person
interested in doing things. In practicality. Marshall didn’t go in for philosophy.

As a digression, it is personally interesting to note that my father left home to join

the US Air Force, but ended up taking up the family business, getting several
degrees in English. Myself, I avoided the academic route altogether (except for a
very short stint in a community college for print journalism which I quickly dropped
out of) but ended up here somehow anyway. I suppose certain things are
inescapable, try as one might to avoid it.

So I come at this all a bit from the side, which is I think appropriate given how
Marshall came at it himself.

Marshall graduated from the University of Manitoba with a degree in English, and
won a scholarship to Cambridge University. He and his longtime friend Tom
Easterbrook went together, working their passage across the Atlantic on a cattle
boat. You can imagine that was not a pleasant experience, but funds were short and
‘needs must.’

Cambridge was a most significant turning point for Marshall.

Here are some words from Marshall, found in the 1969 collection of his literary
criticism as compiled by Eugene McNamara:

“In the summer of 1932 I walked and biked through most of England carrying a copy
of Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ … Cambridge was a shock. Richards, Leavis, Eliot
and Pound and Joyce in a few weeks opened the doors of perception on the poetic
process and its role in adjusting the reader to the contemporary world. My study in
media began and remains rooted in the work of these men.”
“When Joyce quipped to a critic, “Some of my puns are trivial and some are
quadrivial,” he was being, as always, precise. When my critics imagine I am being
vaguely metaphorical, I, too, am trying to be literal and precise.”

“The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new
poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world.
All this is merely to say that my juvenile devotion to Romantic poetry is closely
related to my present concern with the effects of media in our personal and political
lives.”

-Marshall McLuhan, 1969, forward to ‘The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of
Marshall McLuhan 1943–1962.’ Eugene McNamara, editor.

In the ‘autobiography’ I mentioned before, he also said:

“My study of literature became an aid to the perception that led me to undertake the
task of understanding the relation between culture and technology.”

The influence of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce is fairly obvious. Marshall would be known
as an expert in ‘the Moderns’ and their poetry, well before he became known as a
communication critic, and eventually for being a pioneer of ‘media studies.’

He used their work, and wrote a fair bit on all three. (There’s even a manuscript for
a whole book on Eliot which may someday be published.) Soon after getting into
Pound’s ‘ABC of Reading,’ someone familiar with McLuhan’s later work will see many
connections.

James Joyce is certainly the most influential writer for Marshall. While Marshall
McLuhan called his work ‘a footnote to Innis,’ he also called it ‘applied Joyce.’

Indeed, Marshall would have little to say were it not for the many writers and their
works which he studied and mined and reimagined and reworked. He did this in the
manner of a poet. No author was more consulted and quoted than James Joyce, and
a look at almost any of Marshall’s works will bear that out.

In that quote from his introduction to ‘The Interior Landscape’, Marshall also
mentions — and, mind you, mentions first — Richards and Leavis. I.A. Richards and
F.R. Leavis were teachers at Cambridge in the early 1930’s when Marshall was there,
and they were responsible for a new type of criticism they called ‘Practical
Criticism,’ also referred to as the ‘New Criticism.’ (With Richards publishing the
book on it in 1929).

It is hard to imagine now, but Practical Criticism caused quite a stir when it was
published. It was scandalous. Richards was looking for ways to evaluate literature
and he did so by concentrating on effect. His method, and what caused the
controversy, was to take several poems from a mix of well-known and well-regarded
authors, and those of lesser reputation and acknowledged value, and he would
remove their names and distribute the poems for comment.

The scandal was that people could not agree on which were good or not — even why
they were good or not. And the commentators were scholars and professors who
ought to have been relied on to have refined judgement and skill in evaluating
poetry. Not knowing who the author was, for Richards chose lesser-known works,
authors of high reputation were cast down. The book remains worth looking at
today.

As a result of his study, Richards came up with four categories for evaluating the
worth of poetry, or literature, and his aim was to find a dependable set of criteria
which could be used to judge the value of poetry. They were:

Sense (what is being said or presented), Feeling (how we feel about what’s
presented), Tone (the speaker’s attitude to the listener), and Intention (the author’s
intent, aim, effect they are trying to achieve.)

This emphasis on effect is I think what stayed with Marshall. Marshall took it a step
further and removed not only the author from the equation, but the content, in
order to evaluate media, because as he said his interest was in structure and design.
His interest was in what these things do.

Some years later, in his popular 1964 work ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man,’ Marshall put it this way:

“For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar
to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

-Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964.
Marshall was, as was his custom, paraphrasing (appropriating?) from another
author — in this case T. S. Eliot, who said:

“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here
again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the
reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him:
much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the
house-dog. “

-T.S. Eliot, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.’ Harvard University Press, 1933

You might ask, as I did, just what the distraction was for? What is this work being
done? For McLuhan, the medium is the burglar; the ‘message’ is what happens when
you’re busy with the content, busy nibbling on that juicy piece of meat while being
robbed blind, deaf, and numb. The message is the ‘personal and social
consequences.’ The message is total change.

It is interesting to note the difference between Marshall’s take and the reason
behind Practical Criticism — to just the value of literature. Marshall McLuhan
famously avoided moral judgement, because when you judge whether something is
‘good’ or ‘bad,’ you stop exploring what it is, what it does.

As he put it, ‘first diagnosis, then prescription.’

ToC (Theory of Communication):

One other extrapolation from Practical Criticism, perhaps, is a notion which

Marshall came up with in determining various people’s ‘Theory of Communication.’
Early on, Marshall set about determining various figures’ ‘theory of communication’
by asking who their intended audience, and what their intended effect was.
Audience plus intended effect equals theory of communication.

(Marshall did note that there’s a difference between intended and actual effect. In
1971 he wrote to Ashley Montagu “What a man is saying is far from the effect he
may wish to have, or that, in fact, he does have. Personally, I consider the effect the
writer wishes to achieve as his theory of communication.”)

This was, in the late 70s, pitched to a publisher, but wasn’t published until 2011,
when Eric McLuhan published it through Peter Lang in New York.
‘Theories of Communication’ is a fascinating publication, and to dwell on it here is
beyond the scope of this talk or the time allotted, but I wanted to draw your
attention to it should you be interested.

For me, the most valuable part of the book is a piece Eric wrote on Marshall
McLuhan’s Theory of Communication, which begins:

“As he often said, Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication. Of
course, he did have definite notions about what constituted communication and
what did not. He insisted regularly though that he didn’t have A Theory of
Communication, and that he didn’t use theories in his work. Instead, he would aver,
he ‘used observation,’ he ‘used probes.’ It is a matter of how you begin. If you begin
with theory, then one way or another your research winds up geared to making the
case for or against the truth of the theory. Begin with theory, you begin with the
answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions. A theory always becomes
a scientific point of view, and a way of seeing the job at hand. Begin with observation
and your task is to look at things and to look at what happens. To see. That
necessitates detachment, and training of critical awareness.”

-Eric McLuhan, ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg,’ in ‘Theories

of Communication’ Eric and Marshall McLuhan, 2011

Moving On:

As is always the case, there’s more to say than one can reasonably expect an
audience to pay attention to. Especially in today’s circumstances, when we’re either
here or there or perhaps everywhere at all.

The theme of this talk is practicality, and that is a word which maybe is not the first
people use to associate with Marshall McLuhan and his work.

After all, he was called many things: Oracle of the Information Age, Prophet, Guru,
Maestro, not to mention Huckster, Charlatan, and less generous terms. Something
he wasn’t often called was ‘practical,’ or ‘methodical.’ But he was both those things.
In terms of his own criteria for a ‘theory of communication’ he definitely had an
intended effect, and I believe over the years we’ve gotten closer and closer to
achieving it though he passed almost 40 years ago now.
When he was 40 years old, just about my age (though I am two years past 40)
Marshall wrote to Ezra Pound:

“…I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal
with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the
character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. Lewis
saw that years ago. His “America and Cosmic Man” was an H-bomb let off in the
desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to
compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much
more fun. Lewis clears the air of fug. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is
necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our
preparations to this.

I am not of the “we” party. I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by
starting a dialogue on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the
somnambulists. In London 1910 you faced various undesirable states of mind. Since
then the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be
used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and “news”-casts? I am
working on *that* problem. The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.

-McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound, June 22/51.

Just over ten years later, following the release of Understanding Media, he let this
slip to a reporter:

“McLuhan said that ‘fame can frame you into a static image,’ and that this was
possible with himself because of his book. ‘Perhaps my next step is to create a new
image of myself,’ he said.”

-‘Fame can frame you — McLuhan’ in the Toronto Star, June 9, 1964

Marshall did have an effect he wanted to achieve. He developed methods to do it. I

think it’s fair to say he went to extremes. I don’t think many people consider how
deliberate he was. He was a very thoughtful person, extremely quick-witted. This is
seen or heard in the many hours of interviews and debates available on YouTube. If
you haven’t, watch his ‘debate’ with Norman Mailer, easy to find.

But — there are the methods he used to reach his audience — which I would suggest
includes us today — and there are the methods he developed to study the effects of
technologies.

The former are quite interesting and even worth study, but the latter are where I
believe ‘the relevance of McLuhan today’ rests, because a tool is timeless, a sharp
tool ever useful. As any craftsperson knows, there’s nothing like the right tool for the
job to save you agony and wasted effort, and even an old tool can be dusted off,
honed, put to use again.

People marvel that Marshall could see the future — see the world we live in today.
Well, for the most part, he didn’t. What he did, and this should cause you to pause
and reflect on the implications, and perhaps lose some sleep, is use his tools, his
sharpened perceptive faculties, and apply them to his day. That the result should
appear to us as prophecy of our present should be disturbing.

As my father used to say, ‘he wasn’t ahead of his time, but ahead of his
contemporaries.’

TMI:

In the summer of 2017, I was travelling with my dad as he was speaking at the
annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, that year at St. Mary’s College in
Moraga, California. I was about to turn 40, and was married, had two small children
(still small, but getting alarmingly larger) and was trying to figure out what I was
doing, if not with my life in general, with my family’s work in particular.

I was getting too old, gathering too many responsibilities, to be playing around at
things. I had been getting more involved with the work for the better part of a
decade. I’d been travelling with dad, and listening to him speak — having
conversations about fascinating things from the time we left home to the time we
returned. I had spent over a year exploring, documenting and inventorying my
grandfather’s library.

In short, I was hooked, but I also had responsibilities and so I felt I had to come to
some sort of decision. Because my father had a hard time. As you might imagine,
growing up as Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son was not easy. Going to university as
Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son, was not easy. Getting work at a university as
Marshall McLuhan’s eldest son proved effectively impossible. He ended up teaching
the last part of his career at a private college in Toronto which taught people how to
record music and manage artists.
When not doing that, he toiled in his office, ‘the Scriptorium,’ mainly away from a
spotlight — which was really fine with him. He poked around and prodded at things.
He followed his own interests while also plugging away at unfinished projects left to
him by his father. He did some very impressive work. Made, and left behind, a
valuable contribution to scholarship and media studies.

By this point I was immersed in the work and my heart knew what I wanted to do,
but I didn’t have so much as a bachelor’s degree — how could I do anything?

There, at St. Mary’s College in the early summer of 2017, I decided I’d give it a go. I’d
fully commit, put everything I had into it, and if it didn’t work out, at least I’d know I
gave it a truly good shot and could (hopefully) move on at peace.

By this point, I’d been active. I’d given many talks on my work with Marshall’s
fascinating and quite valuable annotated ‘working library,’ sometimes tacking on a
talk of my own when travelling with dad. And I had been teaching as well. I gave
workshops on entry McLuhan subjects like understanding ‘the medium is the
message;’ the four laws of media, the tetrad of media effects; ‘figure and ground’ I
taught to classes from grade five up to undergrad and at the local library.

I was finding my way through the material and finding ways to present it to others,
but I didn’t have any sort of organization.

The other thing was that my dad was getting older. His health had always been a bit
dodgy — I travelled with him for that reason, and there were a few tricky moments
abroad over the years. I knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and there was nothing
in place to carry on the work he had carried on all those years.

The McLuhan Institute (TMI) was born. I decided that my focus would be on
practicality — what’s useful in the work today and tomorrow. That we don’t need
monuments, but methods. Tools.

I’ve realized since that it’s quite in keeping with the work to take what’s useful and
set aside the rest — that’s essentially what Marshall did with other people’s work,
though he did it with poetry and style. Marshall even stated various places that he
was quite willing to scrap any of his methods when they ceased being useful.

And I realized also that not being an academic actually was a fine situation because
most of the world isn’t in academia, and we’re all in the same boat when it comes to
the effects of technology, we’re all sinking together. I may not have degrees, but I
also don’t have the baggage and could maybe speak to people in plainer terms — at
least, I try to.

Past Time:

In Marshall and Eric’s work, one gets a sense of urgency. As the scale and pace of
innovation exceeds our ability to adjust, it becomes more and more imperative that
we get a handle on the effects of our ingenuity. We’ve lost the luxury of time to
adjust to things. This situation is only increasing in urgency.

Marshall had hope, and not just as a consequence of his Christian faith. To be sure,
he said “our only hope is Apocalypse,” and “I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist —
I’m an Apocalyptist.” Let’s face it, he said a lot of things. Deliberately provocative
things. Things with which to “needle the somnambulists.”

Now I have hope. When Marshall first said ‘the medium is the message’ back in 1957
people were confused and/or thought he was crazy. Of course, the message is the
message. What are you talking about? Today, I can say that technologies create
environments that, regardless of what you or I do with them — this could be a
speech about how to build a better chicken coop — our world is changed by the
introduction of technologies. We are altered in our senses and our brains, in our
concepts of self and relations to one another, in the way our society is structured.
That it is this environment, this medium, which is the message. And instead of
being ridiculous, it’s obvious today.

That’s why I have hope.

I have hope because the more people who understand that the message is anxiety,
no attention span, crises of identity of all kinds and the fallout from that, the more
people will realize it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way.

There was a time drug companies were largely unregulated. It was within the last
century that people revolted and governments said that drugs and foods had to be
safe and effective. It’s the ‘side effects’, the ‘unintended consequences’ which get
you.

It’s almost a given that our technologies are like drugs, causing changes in our
senses, bodies, minds. (Essentially, the definition of ‘drug’.) And yet we regulate
frequencies and radiation, and the most surface of things while letting the major
changes go unchecked.

Forgive my soap-boxing. I’m almost at my “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take
this anymore” point.

I am not exaggerating or hyperbolic when I say that the emergency in our

technological environment is as existential in nature as that of our physical climate
emergency. It’s not much of a stretch.

Where Do We Go From Here?:

As I said, I have hope.

I have hope because I feel that people are waking up. Whether this is from
concerted needling or not, I can’t say, but I feel that we are slowly coming to
understand the mess we’re in and that we don’t necessarily need to be in it. And
maybe we can do something about it. And maybe we should do something about it.
Maybe we can consider the effects before we finalize the design and ship it. Maybe
getting it right should be prioritized over shipping — and maybe we should figure
out what ‘getting it right’ means, like Richards did. Consider the effects beyond
capturing attention and maximizing interaction in order to maximize someone’s
profits. Make smarter choices.

I think we can. We can sure try.

The physician’s golden rule was ‘first, do no harm.’

Goggle used to say ‘don’t be evil.’ Almost as if they knew they could.

Where is the Greta Thunberg of Media Ecology?

Where McLuhan comes into this is that McLuhan work is full of tools with which to
explore the nature and effect of all human innovation. It’s not simply about
communication technologies, and it’s not about analyzing the past but anticipating
effects of today’s technologies on tomorrow.

We can do this.

Thank you.