Marshall McLuhan.pdf

The right-wing postmodernism of Marshall

McLuhan

Grant Havers

T RINITY W ESTERN U NIVERSITY , B RITISH C OLUMBIA , C ANADA

Until recently, Marshall McLuhan’s vast corpus of media studies provoked

little sustained commentary on the political subtext of his studies. What

likely explains the traditional lack of attention to the political implications

of his writings is the fact that McLuhan himself did not directly take a

political position on mass media. At least since the 1960s, McLuhan

famously avoided taking what he called a ‘moralistic’ stance on the

goodness or badness of the emerging electric media (1995/1968: 265).

Since McLuhan believed that any type of judgement (moral or political)

clouds or blocks the true understanding of the effects of media, it is not

surprising that there is little evidence of an explicit political position taken

in his media studies.

Additionally, the relatively little commentary devoted to explicating

McLuhan’s politics in his lifetime typically centred on the assumption that

his politics were a mere epiphenomenon of his fame in the 1960s. In his

heyday, when McLuhan eagerly dispensed advice to supportive corporate

audiences, the impression emerged among the left that he was a mere

apologist for capitalism. Among his detractors on the right, it was assumed

that his talk of constant social upheaval in a rapidly changing technological

environment was mere pandering to the counterculture. As McLuhan’s pop-

ularity waned in the 1970s, precious little attention was paid to the accuracy of

the traditional left and right views of McLuhan. Even sympathetic observers

such as Arthur Schlesinger or Pierre Trudeau concluded that McLuhan’s

work was not essentially political (Sanderson and Macdonald, 1989:

112–13). McLuhan’s ‘politics’ was simply not taken seriously.

Yet a new awareness of McLuhan’s politics has taken hold in the

scholarly literature in the past 15 years. This literature, as we shall see,

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tends to be far more sympathetic to the content of McLuhan’s politics, and

its authors are quite eager to tease out very radical implications of these

politics in his works. This new interest is not surprising, since many of

McLuhan’s prophecies about technological change are only now coming

true. McLuhan’s writings on the rise of tribalism in the television age and

the breakdown of homogeneous nationalisms certainly have relevance in an

age of conﬂict in the Balkans and the Middle East. Whether these

prophecies amount to an actual political position on the part of McLuhan is

another question, but, increasingly, the literature on McLuhan is attributing

such a position to his work.

Unlike the 1960s, leftist scholarship in particular now takes a far more

supportive approach to McLuhan. Indeed, this literature attributes to

McLuhan an emancipatory political agenda that would have been unthink-

able in the 1960s, when McLuhan spent more time giving speeches to

corporate executives than teaching in the classroom. In addition, the ‘new’

literature (since his death in 1980) stresses the postmodern dimension to his

thought, which purportedly discloses a more critical or postmodern

approach to media on the part of McLuhan than was previously thought. In

short, this new literature challenges the old ideas that McLuhan took a

neutral, apolitical stance to mass media, or that he was a mere lackey of

corporate capitalism.

In this article, I intend to build on the new scholarship that is devoted to

making sense of McLuhan’s politics. I agree that there is indeed an implicit

politics in McLuhan’s writings, and that the postmodern meaning of

McLuhan’s politics is worth exploring. However, I will critique the

assumptions of many leftist scholars that McLuhan’s approach is akin to

their own. Indeed, I shall argue that McLuhan’s politics are best described

as ‘right-wing postmodern’. It is well known that McLuhan in his personal

life leaned towards a very conservative (and pre-Vatican II Catholic)

approach to politics (Marchand, 1989), although he does not explicitly

integrate this politics into his work on media. I shall argue that a close

hermeneutical reading of McLuhan’s major writings reveals a type of

conservatism that anticipates the emergence of a more tribalistic, strin-

gently moralistic and technologically sophisticated age, succeeding the

liberal, modernist, individualist age of modernity. This I call a mythology

of right-wing postmodernism.

Is McLuhan a leftist?

In the 1960s, this question would only have been raised by McLuhan’s

detractors, who suspected his pandering to the counterculture and youth

protests of the time. Despite insisting that he neither approved nor

disapproved of the sweeping changes of the 1960s, McLuhan was often

Havers, The right-wing postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan

513

suspected of being sympathetic to the young rebels. As he argued in his

1968 Playboy interview, ‘It is not an easy period in which to live’ for the

‘television-conditioned young’ who, unlike their parents, cannot retreat into

‘the zombie trance of Narcissus narcosis’, which numbs any critical

response to the impact of the new media (1995/1968: 249). A comment

such as this provoked the accusation that McLuhan, despite his denials,

was on the side of the counterculture (certainly Abbie Hoffmann claimed

McLuhan as an ally).

Yet many on the left in the 1960s were just as suspicious of McLuhan

and would not dare call a visible adviser to corporate capitalism one of

their own. Indeed, Marxist scholars have accused McLuhan of lacking a

coherent social theory and of pandering to the cause of apolitical

conservatism, suggesting that McLuhan stressed the futility of changing the

status quo (Finkelstein, 1968). This impression sometimes persists to this

day. Genosko accuses McLuhan of being an indifferent apologist of

commerce, ‘a perfect example of Lukacs’s contemplative, bourgeois man’

(1999: 115). Freind (1999: 60) has deplored McLuhan’s indifference to the

reality of capitalist economics in the global village. Grosswiler (1998)

provides a useful overview of the traditional (1960s) leftist critique of

McLuhan.

Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, leftist scholarship has become more

sympathetic to McLuhan and more determined to mine the potential for

social critique and emancipation in his work. Despite McLuhan’s professed

personal commitment to conservative Catholicism, Arthur Kroker has

argued that McLuhan ‘expressed that which is most insightful in the liberal

side of the Canadian imagination’ by seeking to recover ‘the civilizing

moment in the processed world of technological society’ through the

development of a ‘critical humanism’ ﬁtted to the popular culture of North

America’ (1984: 54). Indeed, McLuhan’s liberalism is supposed to mesh

well with his Catholic faith by ‘releasing the reason in technological

experience’ (1984: 63).

Kroker is sufﬁciently cautious to admit that McLuhan suffered a

‘blindspot’ in connecting capitalism and technology, in that McLuhan was

ignorant of the way power functioned in a liberal capitalist society. Yet

Kroker believes that McLuhan’s insights into the ‘almost malignant

signiﬁcance’ of the corporate monopoly over electric technologies (1984:

79) are tremendously useful for leftist critiques of capitalism.

Kroker’s appreciation of McLuhan’s apparent critique of the effects of

capitalism has been echoed in the more recent literature. Judith Stamps has

argued that McLuhan’s understanding of visual technology (such as print

media) employs a ‘vocabulary similar to that of the Frankfurt School’, by

arguing against visual technology’s reduction of persons to things’ (1995:

131). Perhaps even more ambitiously, Glenn Willmott declares that

McLuhan belongs to a ‘radical culture’ consisting of a utopian rejection of

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technocratic society, consistent with the New Left (1996: 200). Paul

Grosswiler concludes his useful study of leftist appropriations of McLuhan

by observing that McLuhan’s media theories can help retrain the critical

focus of the left, and retrieve the human being from technological

structures (1998: 222). Perhaps singlehandedly revealing the intensity of

this sea-change, Donald Theall, one of McLuhan’s most visceral critics,

who originally accused his work of showing no awareness of Marxism

(1971: 204), now concludes in a recent, more sympathetic study that

McLuhan’s Catholic humanism is quite consistent with Marxism (2001:

124).

It would be tempting to argue that all of these writers are basing their

assessments of McLuhan as opponent of capitalism on his earliest work,

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), but little else.

For McLuhan is brazenly anti-capitalistic in this work. Every page is a

searing indictment of the dehumanizing and alienating effects of mass

advertising, consumerism and industrialism on the human psyche. McLu-

han certainly sounds like the Frankfurt School when he writes in the

preface about the industry of advertising, whose purpose is to ‘keep

everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting’

(1951: v). Elsewhere in this study, McLuhan darkly warns that corporate

executives, politicians and movie stars are ‘now puppets only vaguely

aware of the strings controlling their movements’ (1951: 125).

If Kroker, Stamps, Willmott and Grosswiler were indeed relying on The

Mechanical Bride to make their assessment of McLuhan as crypto-leftist,

that would be a mistake, since McLuhan claims to have rejected the

moralistic ‘Rousseauvian utopianism’ of his earlier work for the sake of a

more neutral stance on technology’s effects (1995/1968: 265). Yet these

scholars believe that the entirety of McLuhan’s works is anti-capitalistic in

tone, even during his heyday in the corporate boardrooms of the 1960s. As

Willmott contends, McLuhan never abandoned, from The Mechanical

Bride onward, ‘his central ideal’ of a collective dialogue, which might

transcend the totalitarian and monolithic “progress” of the technologically

permeated and extended, modern social body’ (1996: 99). In short, the

revisionist left literature on McLuhan would argue that his emancipatory

message exists throughout his writings.

I agree with these authors that there is a discernible political position in

McLuhan’s works, even after The Mechanical Bride. As late as 1977,

McLuhan was referring to the Industrial Revolution as a ‘bloodbath’ which

fragmented work and isolated individuals from each other (quoted in Nevitt

and McLuhan, 1994: 53). Such a claim harks back to the critiques in The

Mechanical Bride and certainly gives the easy impression that McLuhan is

a crypto-leftist. Needless to say, such comments also suggest that he never

actually abandoned the ‘moralistic’ judgementalism of earlier works

(Duffy, 1969: 49–50).

Havers, The right-wing postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan

515

Yet I believe that these writers are seriously mistaken in attributing such

a left-wing politics to McLuhan, even in his Mechanical Bride stage.

Certainly they are correct to pinpoint a sometimes brazen, sometimes

subtle, critique of capitalism throughout his writings. Yet these authors too

hastily conclude that this critique smacks of a greater liberating project on

McLuhan’s part. In confusing McLuhan with Herbert Marcuse, they imply

that the anti-capitalist sentiments of McLuhan must suggest a leftist

emancipatory orientation on his part. It does not occur to these authors that

one can be anti-capitalist from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

In fact, McLuhan’s opposition to capitalism and the individualistic

effects of the print age are spurred on by a more conservative political

orientation. Perhaps due to their North American backgrounds, these

authors are unaware that conservative orientations to politics (at least

outside North America) do not necessarily translate into support for

capitalism. Indeed, McLuhan’s critique of capitalism and print-inspired

individualism, as we shall see, is likely inspired by an older conservative

tradition that has little in common with the Frankfurt School.

An alternate reading

One of McLuhan’s earliest critics, Jonathan Miller, contended that

McLuhan’s work was heavily shaped by his experience of the American

South. This cultural antecedent is important to note, since it provides the

foundation for an alternate reading of McLuhan as a right-wing critic of

capitalism. According to Miller, McLuhan’s experience of teaching English

in Missouri in the late 1930s exposed him to a rich mythology which

romanticized the old agrarian South at the expense of the industrial

capitalistic North. This mythology, most famously articulated in the

writings of Southern intellectuals like George Fitzhugh or Henry W. Grady,

stressed that the South still possessed the old virtues of community,

honour, propriety and chivalry. By contrast, the North was individualistic,

dishonest, vulgar and acquisitive (Miller, 1971: 38–62). If Miller is correct,

this mythology meshed well with McLuhan’s Catholic suspicions about

modernity, liberalism and progress.

If it is true that McLuhan took this mythology as seriously as Miller

suggests, then The Mechanical Bride must be read not in the light of the

Frankfurt School, but in the context of the Southern suspicion of Northern

capitalism. This suspicion constitutes the only conservative opposition to

capitalistic individualism in the history of North America. As Louis Hartz

(1955) famously argued in his study of American liberalism, the United

States was almost wholly a liberal, Enlightenment nation from its founding

onwards. Unlike Europe, America lacked a conservative aristocracy hostile

to the rising industrial class. That is, America lacked such a movement

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