Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- List of sigla
- I
- Re: Mediation
- 1 Beyond McLuhanism
- 2 McLuhan and the Question of the Book
- Embodiment as Incorporation
- 3 McLuhan and the Body as Medium
- 4 McLuhan, Tactility, and the Digital
- 5 Mechanical Brides and Vampire Squids
- Empathic Media
- 6 McLuhan: Motion: e-Motion: Towards a Soft Ontology of Media
- 7 Re-Mediating the Medium
- Determining Technology
- 8 McLuhan, Turing, and the Question of Determinism
- 9 Angels and Robots
- Being Mediated
- 10 Marshall McLuhan’s Echo-Criticism
- 11 McLuhan and the Technology of Being
- II
- 12 The Tragedy of Media: Nietzsche, McLuhan, Kittler
- Coda: On the 50th Anniversary of Understanding Media
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - McLuhan and the Question of the Book
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- List of sigla
- I
- Re: Mediation
- 1 Beyond McLuhanism
- 2 McLuhan and the Question of the Book
- Embodiment as Incorporation
- 3 McLuhan and the Body as Medium
- 4 McLuhan, Tactility, and the Digital
- 5 Mechanical Brides and Vampire Squids
- Empathic Media
- 6 McLuhan: Motion: e-Motion: Towards a Soft Ontology of Media
- 7 Re-Mediating the Medium
- Determining Technology
- 8 McLuhan, Turing, and the Question of Determinism
- 9 Angels and Robots
- Being Mediated
- 10 Marshall McLuhan’s Echo-Criticism
- 11 McLuhan and the Technology of Being
- II
- 12 The Tragedy of Media: Nietzsche, McLuhan, Kittler
- Coda: On the 50th Anniversary of Understanding Media
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Why are books the last bastion of analog?
Jeff BezosMcLuhan's reputation in the 1960s hinged to a considerable extent on his pronouncements about the book, which was considered the prime bulwark against the threat posed by television, and, more broadly, ‘the media’, a concept to which McLuhan was ineluctably connected. McLuhan's comments about ‘the end of book culture’ (Counterblast [1969], p. 48) were thus not well-received, and he was excoriated by critics for his ‘assault’ on the book. Dame Rebecca West, in her 1967 presidential address to the English Institute in London, asserted that The Medium is the Massage was designed ‘to cheer illiterates on their way, and this is not a petulant description, for the burden of Professor McLuhan's gospel is that illiterates should be cheered on their way’; such a person, she concludes, ‘should not have been allowed to establish himself as an authority, should not be treated respectfully, should not be a professor at a university of high standing.’ McLuhan replied generally in 1967 that ‘anybody who looks at [the book] in a kind of clinical spirit is regarded as hostile, and an enemy of the book’ (‘Dialogue with Stearn’, p. 275). He goes on to state that
attention to the book is regarded as unfriendly because it is felt that the book will not bear scrutiny any more. […] [I]n the same way, any attention to new media which are in the ascendant, whose gradient is climbing rapidly, is considered as an act of optimism. […] There are only two cases, you see, in classifying one's relation to almost anything in merely literary terms—you are either ‘for’ or ‘against’. It's as simple as that. So if you write about the book you must be against it because the book is declining in terms of its overall cultural role. If you write about new media in the ascendant, you must be in favor of it. Such is the Western devotion to facts that the mere stating of any case is considered a hostile act. The idea of stating without approval or disapproval is alien to the literary man who finds classification indispensable for order. (p. 276)
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- Chapter
- Information
- Remediating McLuhan , pp. 27 - 38Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016