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Escape Into Understanding: A Biography
Commonweal, Feb 27, 1998 by Frank McConnell
McLuhan could probably not have been, and surely was not, a systematic thinker. His books are hardly books at all, but collections of aphorisms, insights - "probes," he liked to call them. His lyrical ambivalence about the new media is, I think, his great value. He looked unflinchingly at new modes of communication that increasingly define our sense of self, and tried to read them as what they are, and what they imply for our common, and spiritual, life.
My main quarrel with Terrence Gordon's very fine book is that he elides the contradictions implicit in McLuhan's work. Gordon is an unabashed admirer of his subject, so naturally wants McLuhan to appear in complete control of his insights. But it ain't so. And thank God. A self-assured McLuhan is not a McLuhan I can use; his edginess is almost the content of his work (the medium being, after all, the message). And, when Gordon discusses the frequent critics of McLuhan's work, he - more hagiographer than biographer now - always assumes that they just "didn't understand" what the man was saying. Well: sometimes they did; and often their criticisms were right. You don't set off as many conceptual firecrackers as McLuhan did without having a lot of misfires.
Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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