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Marshall McLuhan (1967)

Although recognition of Marshall McLuhan’s genius has been hesitant, nearly everyone, whether agreeing with him or not, acknowledges by now that his insights into contemporary experience are both genuinely novel and considerably perceptive. Because he customarily dictates rather than writes his books, I assume that his words in The Medium is the Massage (1967) were transcribed from lectures and conversations, for he is determined to be an oral prophet, repeating his messages over and over again. Whereas the world was once disinclined to listen, McLuhan is blessed nowadays with hordes of Boswells, both human and electronic, eager to copy him down, as well as nearly as many publishers to package it.

When McLuhan produces what is, by conventional standards, an outright “non-book,” the result is at least an original and beautiful example of its disreputable kind. Any reader with traditional conceptions of what a book should contain (or how much labor a supposedly serious scholar should pour into writing one) will find Massage appalling, but it is, just the same, a useful introduction to McLuhan’s major ideas—perhaps the best that we have—as well as an imaginative example of the literary medium’s presentational possibilities.

The Medium is the Massage is a cross between an art book and a comic—more precisely, a twentieth century version of the medieval illuminated manuscripts. Since the medium comprises a good deal of the message, I should note that the hardbound version, nearly three times the surface size of the paperback, and seven times the price, seems a more formal and serious work, which would be more suitable to the library or the coffee table than to the subway or bathroom, although the two editions differ not at all in text. The pictured messages of Massage are accompanied by McLuhan’s prose glosses and occasional quotations from other prominent sages, and the visual and printed dimensions have various degrees of relation to each other. The design, which is strikingly imaginative and yet a trifle incoherent, is the work of Quentin Fiore, whom the book’s cover lists as co-author. Since one of McLuhan’s postulates is that art imitates art, The Medium is the Massage will surely become the model for many hastily composed but probably less brilliant non-books.

McLuhan’s words here number less than ten thousand, if not only five, almost all of them presenting ideas available in other places. Nonetheless, scattered throughout are some of the most concise statements he has ever published of certain basic themes. The keystone to McLuhan’s style is the brilliantly illuminating sentence; for whereas most essayists organize their ideas into measured and coherently structured paragraphs, McLuhan offers a series of jerky sentences that relate to each other in diverse ways, that are split into paragraphs nearly at random and that attain widely varying degrees of velocity and insight. Whoever edited this text (his identity is not clear) simply paired away the verbiage to set (and sell) off the treasures.

The book’s title is itself an example of McLuhan’s essentially Joycean technique of discovering insights in the process of playing with English language. Whereas his primary aphorism was once “the medium is the message,” now McLuhan puns the last word into “massage” and finds another dimension of his original thesis—that the medium itself affects as much as the content, especially as it metaphorically massages our senses.

By inducing us to relax and absorb its stimuli, the presentation realigns our sensory balances. The massage of TV differs from the massage of a book, which in turn differs from that of a musical concert. McLuhan once said of his own primary medium, “I use language as a probe,” and merely in the juggling of words—“When information is brushed against information”—he finds magical perceptions that would probably escape less playful intellectual processes.