The Ultimate Non-Book

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. 159 pages. Banfam. $1.45.

"Good morning!" says a raw egg, lolling in a shallow dish, its yolk bearing an advertisement for a no-pressure printing technique, proving that the ovum can become a commercial. Noses nudge knowingly from a page dealing with psephology. Five pages of pebbled and scaly abstract photography resolve themselves into a closeup of human toes to make the point: "The wheel is an extension of the foot." One entire spread is printed in Leonardo-like "mirror writing," and another is set upside down just to show how absurd the whole concept of books can be. Indeed, the authors of this eye-stopping, mind-wrenching whatzis have created the ultimate in non-books.

Canada's All-Purpose Prophet Marshall McLuhan, soon to be enchaired at Fordham University, has argued for years that the book is obsolescent. Unfortunately, his major testaments (The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media), while full of ideas, were rendered virtually unreadable by soporific syntax and mastodonian metaphors. Now, with the artful aid of a graphics designer, Quentin Fiore, McLuhan gets his message across more appropriately by juxtaposing his text with pictures. The result is a punchy put-on, to be sure, but that only serves to make a point: McLuhan has never taken himself as seriously as his critics have; his cheerful objective is to stir up some fresh thought.

The book restates McLuhan's increasingly familiar argument: the introduction of the alphabet 3,000 years ago, abetted by Gutenberg's introduction of movable print in the 15th century, turned mankind into the alphas and omegas of a giant cultural alphabet soup. The "seamless" and communal thought processes of tribal, preliterate man were fragmented; perception itself took on the rigid, abecedarian character of writing. Letters led to the "idea," which required structure--beginning, middle, end--and forced the writer or reader out of immediate experience and into an abstracted, objective remove from "group reality." According to McLuhan, the advent of "electrical technology"--radio and records, television and telephones--has changed all that. Man today is returning, through the vacuum tube, to a tribal-type perception, and is no longer tied to rational, sequential modes of thought.

For those who have yet to understand McLuhan, this book is a provocative primer. In both text and pictures, it uses the zany Zen technique of shattering orderly thought with irrational accident. Even the title is a gag, deriving from McLuhan's earlier pronouncement: "The medium is the message." That meant, as any anthropologist might have put it, that technology predetermines social structure; hence, tools prefigure the psychology of their users. By punningly altering the slogan, McLuhan merely means that "all media work us over completely."

Aphoristic Armory. McLuhan himself works his readers over with aphorisms and jokes. "If we were to dispose of the city right now," he says, "future societies would reconstruct them, like so many Williamsburgs." Of Renaissance art, which he blames for placing Western man "outside the frame of reference," he says: "A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza." Telstar, movies and jetliners have generated "a worldpool of information"; the clash of cultures in the modern world is a "collide-oscope"; television programming is "the charge of the light brigade." As a result of the information explosion occasioned by modern technology, "all the world's a sage."

There is no denying many of the McLuhanian truisms. Mankind today is indeed caught up in a technological tsunami of unprocessed information and unrelated impressions, events and pseudo events. But the world is not quite yet McLuhan's "global village," nor can the sequential thought patterns of three millennia be totally dissolved in a burst of electronic energy, however it is harnessed. With the sweeping generalization that delights his followers but irks so many anti-McLuhanians, he compares present times with the late medieval era, when tribal thought was giving way to print-processed "linear" thought, and finds in both the medieval theme of the Dance of Death and today's Theater of the Absurd a similar fear of changing technology. Says he: "Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old." To a degree, the same could be said of this book. It is stimulating enough, yet for best therapeutic effect, McLuhan's massage should perhaps be administered via the neo-tribal TV tube.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.