Transcription
Some of you may have been surprised, as you came into this room, that no whiff of brimstone came floating down from the head table. Such surprise may be understandable, in view of some of the messages that the media have sent out about Mr. McLuhan. But the fact is that he is not a denier and destroyer, but an affirmer and creator, whose message, like that of many teachers before him, has been subject to diverse and contradictory interpretations, both by his supporters and his detractors—in person, if not always in print. Mr. McLuhan is, with the exception of John Kenneth Galbraith, perhaps the most relaxed controversial figure in America today. This may be due, in part, to their Canadian background.
It's my pleasure to present the author of *The Gutenberg Galaxy*, *Understanding Media*, and the forthcoming *Cliché to Archetype*: Mr. Marshall McLuhan.
Before I begin to speak, I'd like to say something. I—I want Pig Breer to know that I simply gravitate toward anything in skirts. That's for cookbooks, and also a gal's reach has got to exceed her grasp, or what's a metaphor? I'm bringing you a message from the DWL way up North. You built a—a fine place up there. Anytime you want to come and occupy it, you—the whole bunch—is welcome. But before I begin to speak, as I say, I want to say something, and let's take into account all available assumptions to begin with. The—um—man who made two X's on his legal form was announced by the lawyer. Why two? He said, "Well, one is for my name, and one is for my PhD." You can see what's ahead of you there.
Speaking of cooking, there was a gourmet from Virginia who went to Boston, and the first thing he said to the cabby was, "Take me where I can get scrod." Now, Boston scrod is famous, but the cabby didn't get the message, and he turned around. He said, "You know, I haven't heard the pluperfect subjunctive in many [Applause] [Music] years." Actually, true stories are far funnier than anything—anything that's been concocted by a joke-smith. And this happened to me last year. I was coming back from Vancouver, and I landed at Kennedy Airport and was met by the Narcotics Division. And they said to me, "Do you know LSD?" And I said, "I do." "Well, where's—where is it? Where's the LSD?" I said, "It's in my bag." Open it. They examined my LSD, and they said, "You were heard on the plane to say that you had gone to Vancouver to pick up an LSD. Where is it?" They didn't know the difference.
You may have heard of the reporter who was sent out to gauge a cross-section of popular opinion on big subjects like LSD, and his first customer or interlocutor was asked, "What do you think of LSD?" Well, he said, "I know some hate his guts, but I think he's the greatest President we ever had." Uh-huh. "And what do you think of marijuana?" "Well, as for marijuana, my wife and I spent a week there last year, and it's terrific." Uh-huh. "And what about the Vietnam position?" "Well, it's okay by me, but it gives my wife hiccups."
Now you see, way up in the land of the DWL, where we have no personality, no national identity, and no commitments and no involvements, humor—humor reigns supreme. Humor is grievance. I heard Peg say—or saying something to that effect. We have many grievance jokes up there, mainly related to—uh—bilingualism and the problems of French Canada. However, there's recently a new flock of grievance jokes coming from Newfoundland, because there's a new interface or irritation area in Newfoundland, because the fishermen have begun to move into the cities and create irritation. You know, yokels moving into the city, and so there's great floods of Newfoundland jokes. Like the great scientific breakthrough in Newfoundland: the first hernia transplant. It's like that—c—the—the chap who overcame this problem by practicing so hard that his hernia became his strongest organ.
I have a friend by the name of Professor Verges at the University of Montreal, and he was standing at a lectern, somewhat like this—incredibly complicated and useless for all human purposes—and he said he laid down his script, looked around for the lectern light, pressed a button, and the thing shot down below the stage, and he disappeared with it. Strike the set! The chairman sprang to his feet and said, "Our speaker needs no introduction. He's gone!" It's only a few days till they invent something for the audience to match that one—the speaker will remain, and you will be gone.
Dr. Gross and I were having a ball during lunch, talking about things like near-point and speed reading, and the effect they have upon the publishing industry. I suppose you all have research men working on the effects of near-point resulting from television. The average reading distance of the—the grade two child at the present time is 4.6 inches from the page—the printed page which you provide for schoolchildren is useless for the TV child. The TV child is a Cyclops; he only uses one eye. He's a hound; he is not a reader, but the near-point child—all TV children read at 4.6 inches from the page—and you have not put a single researcher on this subject.
Another little area that we were investigating during lunch was speed reading, which calls for total revolution in the printing process. However, let's get back to humor. Dr. Dol—Dolbeer and I were discussing the joys of nomenclature. I received a book the other day from Mr. Harold Stammer, called *Speak That I May See*. Mr. Harold Stammer was the author. I received another book from Russell Hoban, called *The Common Sense of Smells*. Delightful; it's full of such items as this: "If you spray a lion—an African lion—with catnip, it'll die of convulsions." Which reminds me that I was a next-door neighbor of Jack Paar last year in—in Bronxville, and we had a lot of fun—uh—discovering why humorists hate jokes. I couldn't help telling him funny stories. The only one I got him to laugh at all year was this one: "Some of my best friends are Jesuits, but—uh—wouldn't want my daughter to marry one." Now, Jack Paar is a staunch Presbyterian. He thought that was funny. Now it's a—every daily threat that some Jesuit may marry your daughter. Vatican II is—I think inferior to V69 myself. But Dr. Dolbeer and I were talking about labels, and there is a famous book on chemical solutions—I collect these strange titles and names—um—by W. C. Dampier—Dampier Wam, who lives at Upwater Lodge, Cambridge, England. The world authority on chemical solutions is W. C. Dampier. And you know what that is? Dampier—Dampier wet them. And Dr. Gross told me he has a cousin called Dampier—Dampier wet and bottom. You know what diaper spelled backwards is? Just try it. It means repaid with interest.
One of the most amusing things that ever happened to me was recently I was at the YPO—Young Presidents' Organization—in Puerto Rico, and I heard this—this scamper of little feet up the stairs behind me, in a voice screaming, "Marshall McLuhan! I am your fan!" And she flung herself into my arms. She said, "I am Ann Landers!" [Applause] I understand she has a twin sister who looks just like her.
Well, um, as I said before—I said, "begin to speak"—I wanted to say something. I guess I've said it. But—uh—as I'm—I live on a pond in Witchwood Park, Toronto, and it is number three—the house is number—number three. It's the only house on the pond, and so I'm going to write a cookbook called *Walden 3*. Peg, you have given me an idea. We will call our cookbook *Walden 3*, and I hope you'll provide some helpful suggestions. Um—now—um—we heard from Mr. Salerno that crime does pay, and that does suggest that we have moved into a new epoch, because I grew up in the age in which crime didn't [Applause] pay.
Speaking of—loving thy label as thyself—did you know that the head of all American armed services and armed forces, whatever, is General Bonsteel—a civilian? You don't often hear about him, but you can find it out in the New York Times if you look up the files of last year. General Bonsteel is the head of all American armed services, and he is a civilian. I don't think this has anything to do with the Mafia, but—um—in all countries they have jokes that are grievances. And in East Berlin today, the current one is this: "Big Russian breakthrough in biology. They have cross-bred glowworms with body lice, and now everybody reads *Pravda* in bed at night."
You publishers have a big grief. I haven't heard any funny stories about it, but it's a big grievance. You don't know how to get off the hardware hook and into software. Xerox is software—information—electric information—and you're still in the hardware business. You can get a pretty good level on this ridiculous situation by—um—remembering that an ordinary first-class letter coming out of any office costs $4.50 more than a good paperback, and you can pretty well measure where you are in terms of hardware-software hang-up when you realize that an ordinary one-sheet letter costs as much as a good book.
Now I don't have very much time. I thought I was going to have a full speaking engagement here, but apparently I've allowed 20 minutes, and—um—I've got enough here for hours and hours, including an awful lot of jokes. But—um—let me tell you a simple principle that you can all use in your business: When a fast form goes around a slow form, the slow one collapses. Any speed-up in any part of your enterprise will automatically dissolve and destroy the slower parts of the enterprise. Put a fast rim spin around a slow one, and the slow one disintegrates. Put a satellite ring around the planet, and all arrangements on the planet disintegrate. It becomes garbage. Garbage means clothing. Look up *Random House Dictionary*, and you'll find the fifth definition of clo—garbage is old nose cones and capsule boosters—the new clothing of this planet is that sort of garbage. This is nothing to—to do with the Container Corp—of America. I mean, Corporation. The Container Corporation of America has provided us with a garbage environment of clothing that is colossal and stacked. But the satellites, as a new garbage or climate surround—around the planet—are moving information at speeds that the planet cannot cope with and have created not a global village, but a global theater. I no longer use the phrase "global village"; it's "global theater" now. And everybody out here, and here, and me too—we're all out to do our thing. Jobs are finished. Jobs are over. Role-playing comes in; hence, sideburns and costumes. Nobody with a job would wear sideburns; he is playing a role, and you don't spell it "R"—it's "role"—doing his thing. Uh, doing your thing means involvement, as having a job meant—as simply having risen to your level of incompetence and settled down for full security. The job era is finished, and incidentally, the Peter Principle belongs to it.
Fifty years ago, all humor—all funny books—are automatically about past times. Past times. Past times are past times—always. So when a funny book comes out, you can be sure it is nostalgic. Like the Peter Principle, like Stephen Potter's *One-Upmanship*, like Parkinson's Law—these all belong to the quaint laws of the 19th century.
Now the peculiarity of print—and I am a professor of literature full-time; I defend it right and left and center at all times—I consider it as the only origin of civilization and the only cause of civilization—and it resulted from only one alphabet in the world. There is—there are not two alphabets; there is only one alphabet that creates civilization, and that's the phonetic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet does not do this. The Arabic alphabet does not do this. The Chinese and Japanese letters or ideograms do not create literacy in any sense at all. Literacy consists in separating the eye from the other senses, creating Euclidean space, and creating all the illusions of rationality and uniformity and the continuum of existence. This is an illusion nourished by the Greco-Roman world only. No place in the world, no time in the world, ever had this visual space except that nourished by the phonetic alphabet. Anything that undermines the phonetic alphabet and its dominance and its power of releasing the eye as the dominant organ ends civilization. There are lots of things better than civilization, but if you like civilization, that's the end of it. Civilization is a technical term based upon the dominance of the eye over the other senses.
We live in an electric age, which is non-visual and non-visualizable. And the chemical bond, as taught to us by Linus Pauling, Heisenberg, and others, is inter-atomic resonance. The quantum mechanics boys have been telling us for 50 years that the bond of being—the thing that holds the world together—is sound resonance. There are no—no connections in matter—nothing that can be called a connection—only resonance. Now one of the things that the mechanics—or the quantum mechanics people—and the NASA people do not know is that resonance is a peculiar kind of space. I'm simply mentioning as a simple fact that the NASA people are 18th-century types—pre-Jules Verne, pre-H. G. Wells. They live in a kind of nursery world, like a yellow submarine. NASA is a very old-fashioned bunch—semi-literate—never been through the real course. Anyway, the stuff they put out is cheap science fiction; it's hardware. And it's thanks to their ignorance of literacy in its full sense and ignorance of auditory space.
Now the peculiarity of auditory space—and I'm simply challenging anyone—one of them—to come forward—any scientist at all—I've met them on their own ground many times on this point—auditory space is a very peculiar thing, and we live in echoland now—in a simultaneous, instantaneous, all-at-once electric world—you—that is echoland, and that is auditory space. Auditory space has a very peculiar property: It has—it is a perfect sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. It is totally non-visual and non-visualizable. Our DNA boys and our NASA boys still try to visualize space, meaning they have no relation whatever to the science they talk about. However, I never make value judgments; I make probes. I poke away here and there and see what I can find. As I say, my own values are literary; my own values are entirely on the side of civilization. On the other hand, I don't live in that kind of a world, and so I do probe the world I live in, and it happens to be an auditory echoland and full of yippies and hippies and Beatles who've crawled out from under things like Kafka's *The Metamorphosis*. One of the amazing echoes or resonances in the word "Beatles" is Kafka's famous story, *The Metamorphosis*: the man who woke up in the morning discovered he was a cockroach and tried to—to establish communication with his family in this unfortunate condition. Our TV generation are very much like that; they are Beatles; they have crawled out from under the rug and discovered they have no means of communicating with their parents. Any of you who've seen *Yellow Submarine* will know the shy Tim is a great big, grown-up, mature human being compared to the—the world of *Yellow Submarine*. *Yellow Submarine* is about four years old, and I—I saw it the other night with an audience full of—uh—pot-smoking, big long-haired guys who were accepting it as the real world, full of cops and other horrible monsters.
Apropos crime, I see something coming up here: Affluence creates poverty—literally. That's why poverty is ineradicable. Crime is an attempt to establish identity, and it's only people without identities who engage in it—the nobodies. And today the nobodies are the upper-middle class of the suburbs. The new Marxian lumpen-proletariat are the rich in our world today. The activist, destructive, goalless, non-identity people are the rich. Go see *The Graduate*. See if it's the yuppie boys who blow up the establishment—not the Beatles. The poor still have identities and still have goals; they still—still think we're running a pretty good show. But the rich have had it; they know that there are no goals left for them, and so they destroy. Violence is a quest for identity. Crime is a quest for identity. Anybody who has lost his identity will take to crime, and it isn't to make money; it's to find out who—who am I? Remember the kid in *The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner*? He was asked in jail, "How did you get here?" He said, "I couldn't run fast enough. They caught me." But in our strange world, the affluent are the activist destroyers because they've lost their identity. All the rich countries of the world, including England and most of the European countries, are in the same position of having lost—lost their identity. Canada is the luckiest country; it's a utopia; it's the luckiest country in the world—never had an identity. We're the only people in the world who know how to live without an identity. We're nobody's. That is, you can be a French Canadian; you can be an English Canadian, but you cannot be a Canadian. And we do not have a flag. Now, in order to become Canadians, we would have to murder a few million of ourselves and have a nice blood bath and then unify. That is how identity is achieved—by violence.
My time is way over, and I haven't even begun my talk, said Mr. Duffy. He told me he would hush me up as soon as need be. Should I shut up? All right. Let me tell you one of the peculiar things about new technologies: They wipe out the preceding technology and recover or retrieve ancient ones. The computer has revived the I Ching—the Book of Changes—in China. It has revived some of the most ancient forms of medicine—4,000 years old—in Japan. It is revived in—your world. The coming year has been dubbed the year of the witch in book publishing, because it is the world of the occult—LSD, I mean—of the inner trips of numerology and general mysticism—ESP. The world of the witch. The book of the future. The inner trip. The outer trip of civilized man is finished, according to these—uh—developments.
Now the Japanese do not live in a visual world; they live in the world of what is called the *ma*—*ma*, meaning interval. They are the masters of electronic equipment because they understand the interval better than any human beings in the world. The interval is the world of resonance, and it is the world—world of jazz—the world of the hippies. When radio was new in the 1920s, the Negro—American Negro—unified for the first time since the Tower of Babel all the cultures of the world with a new form called jazz. It was a universal language, and still is. We talk about integrating Negroes; the Negroes integrated the entire blooming planet with jazz, and still holds. And it was not—it was a language of gesture and not of words. The Beatles are in a different position; they're lower-class English, and they are using some of the very oldest forms of Anglo-Saxon and some of the very oldest forms of philology as a basis for their music.
One of the peculiarities of new forms—electric forms—of retrieval is that they reach back for many centuries to grab things that man had forgotten long ago. In all of this, you can see yourselves in a very peculiar position. The United States is the only country in the world founded on literacy. All other countries had been going for centuries before Gutenberg. The United States is the only country in the world that began with the latest technology—Gutenberg technology. It is, therefore, having the hardest time of any country in the world in orienting itself in the electric age. The Negro can do it, but the WASP can't. Radio brought in the new criticism—depth criticism—penetrating the auditory resonance of words, ignoring the semantics in the dictionaries, going for the resonance—what T.S. Eliot called the auditory imagination—retrieving the most ancient, primal memories of the race by resonance. Now you can see that dictionaries drive words out of their senses by pinning them down to non-resonant and very visual definitions.
As early as 1830, Lamartine, the poet, said, "The book arrives too late." He should be around now. The thing that amazes me is how long it takes to get a book into print. *The Gutenberg Galaxy* was proofread from cover to cover in one afternoon by a group of my students, and with the same team we could have had that book printed in 24 hours—out on the stands. *The Gutenberg Galaxy* has a very large—number of long quotations, all of which were exactly and accurately proofread in one afternoon. You're not going to get very far without a lot of teamwork. But Lamartine, in 1830, was thinking of the newspaper when he said, "The book arrives too late." He was not thinking of the telegraph. It hadn't arrived. With the telegraph came a total change in the forms of writing—symbolism. Symbolism simply means pulling out the connections between parts of sentences. I write symbolism; I don't finish. I think of my sentences as telegrams to Australia—50 cents a word. You know, if every—every author had to inscribe every one of his words on stone and were allowed 12 words a year—uh—the levels of writing would go up—up—up. But one of the things that—one of the peculiarities and unexpected results of speed-up—of electricity—telegraph and so on—one of the strange effects on writing was an understanding, for the first time, of the creative process—from Poe and Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and onward to Joyce and Eliot. The understanding of the creative process has mounted and mounted, and we understand now that it is very closely related to sensory perception.
Let me reassure you people. I once spoke, in 1957, in June, to the radio car broadcasters, and at that time they were terrified of the coming effects of television, and I said—it was—on—in June 1957—I said, "The medium is the message. You've nothing to fear." I can say that to you. The book is a very special form of—of communication; it is unique, and it will persist. I would suggest that one of the main reasons for its persistence in the future will be scriptural study. From—from the third century A.D. till the Renaissance, the reason the book survived was scripture. With Gutenberg, the press reached out and grabbed antiquity for the first time. The Middle Ages had no way of printing ancient books. Gutenberg reached out and grabbed Greek and Rome—Greece and Rome—and dumped it into the Renaissance lap as a huge pile of garbage, and it kept creative minds very busy dealing with garbage for a long time. Uh, artists love garbage and slums; they hate suburbs and tidiness—no involvement. So the future of creativity is colossal in the world of garbage. We have—creativity will be king from now on, as we create successively new and massive planetary scopes of garbage.
I haven't even asked myself very much about the effects of lasers on printing—the laser beam and channel 87 on the cable TV which can print books and dump them into your living room very fast. The three Ps—Peter, Potter, and Parkinson—seem to be taking over from the three Rs, but I'm going to skip on and conclude very quick this afternoon. Jackie Susann's book, *The Love Machine*, is to be presented to you, and that's fairly soon. Um, I wrote a book in—of—like—actually about 1940, called *The Mechanical Bride*, and I know—can see very clearly that I was a little behind with the coming of the electric age. The Machine Age finishes; the mechanical forms of love are finished. We live in a—a new and very organic and involved—and the love machine is a thing of the past. The machine world is a thing of the past. That doesn't mean that it's going to disappear; it means that it's going to be carefully preserved in the Smithsonian and in other precious museums. But you can see from the miniskirt—which is—that the end is in sight. The miniskirt is a costume worn by all tribal people—men and women alike. The miniskirt means the end of sex. Unisex has come. Until—until 1710, the word "sex" was never used once to mean allure; it was used to mean gender. We're back at that stage. Sex as a lure has ended; sex is now a technical term meaning male or female, thanks to overdoing it—over—you know, I wrote this in *Playboy* some months ago—the reversal of the overheated medium. When we step up sex a bit—why—it ceases to be sex; it just becomes what it is for all tribal people—a mild and very—well—like coffee to us—very casual. Sex as an exciting, enthralling, alluring thing is finished, and the miniskirt can—is—is shouting that out very loud.
I was coming home from Denmark the other day, and on the plane beside me was George Balanchine. He told this story. He said he was talking with—
George Jessup and Dean Aeson, and Aeson was complaining about his sleeplessness. Jessup pulled some things out of his pocket and said, "Dean, try these." Dean took them. About 2 a.m., Jessup had a screaming phone call to the effect, "I can't swallow them!" Jessup said, "Man, those are earplugs."
Appropos the population explosion--just another funny statistic: the entire population of this world at this minute can stand on the aisle of White, a tiny little island off the South Coast of England. If you press toes together, all of us could stand--the whole planet--on that little island. Since the invention of elastic, the space occupied by women has been reduced by 1/3. We can now all sit down on the aisle of [Applause] White.
Now let me end on a cheerful note: the amount of booze consumed annually in this country cost $24,000 million--24 billion. That doesn't sound as good: $24,000 million. Staggering figure. You can you can see some of them now. Only a very literate country can absorb that much booze. I assure you that a non-literate country, like the Arab world or any other non-literate world, will find--like our Indians--a very little booze a very explosive Firewater mix. So as long as our liquor bill stays high, you're safe; you've got it made as masters of the print world.
Now UNESCO is planning radios for all the people in the world as a way of extending enlightenment. And when you put a radio in a pre-literate country