Re: <nettime> Whatcha Doin', Marshall McLuhan?

[Newmedia@aol.com]

[Y'all:  

More reporting from the battlefield.  Having had the good fortune to meet 
most of the folks (and the phonies) who put on the McLuhan-telepathy-hat in 
our times, I have come to understand why McLuhan said, "The last thing I 
would be is a McLuhanite."  

However, one true McLuhan scholar stands out.  Donald Theall.  He was 
McLuhan's first PhD student and he's kept his sword sharpened all these 
years.  He introduced McLuhan to Wiener, Bateson and the cybernetics crowd 
and he did a great deal of the work which supported McLuhan's later probing.  
He's also a brilliant critic in his own write.  

If anyone can get us past McLuhan, it'll probably be Theall.  His new 
"Virtual McLuhan" promises to be da bamb.

The following was recently re-posted to our little Non-Linear Circle salon 
list from a McLuhan list and it foretells that much mystery is about to be 
re-solved -- if you have the lungs for it -- and if you can wait another year 
or so.  'Twon't be easy waiting . . . especially for the McLuhanites.

It also should give y'all time to read Theall's fine earlier works, catchin' 
up with,

Mark Stahlman]

Subj:    <nlc> Donald Theall's new book on McLuhan
Date:   11/25/99 5:48:55 PM Eastern Standard Time
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Here is Don Theall's description of his new book on McLuhan posted elsewhere:


     "Since there has been some discussion of my forthcoming book
and some request for information, the following is brief synopsis of
_The Virtual McLuhan: Poetry, Prophecy, Piety and Technology_.  It
will be published in late 2000 or 2001 by the McGill-Queeh's
University Press, having been awarded a grant in aid of publication
from the "Assistance to Scholarly Publishing Program" (ASPP), a joint
program of the Social Science and the Humanities Federations of
Canada.  A brief note about the book follows, since like any long work
with considerable factual material covering a wide range of topics, it
can only be properly reviewed and discussed when it is available.

     _The Virtual McLuhan_ contains hitherto unpublished
biographical information about the subject as well as autobiographical
information about the author in order to contextualize the emergence
of McLuhan's project in North American, and more particularly Toronto
(not then but which now considers itself the "big apple" of the North).
The book presents McLuhan as a very human and very charming
creative genius who like so many of his age vacillated between
tradition and modernity, between faith and anarchy.  It is both highly
complimentary and critical, since it challenges the making of "secular
saints".  Fundamentally, it argues that McLuhan following Vico and a
tradition within the human sciences [a term introduced by Dilthey and
used frequently since the 1960s to denote collectively the fields of
history, philosophy, religion, psychology, art, literature, law, politics,
economics, sociology, social theory and critical theory, and naturaly
the history of technology and science], is developing a new science
that is poetic and satiric - an alternative hermeneutic approach to the
human sciences's exploration of communication, culture and
technology.   After all, Carpenter and he both throughout the 1950s
spoke of art such as Joyce's _Ulysses_ as a poetic sociology (and a
dynamic, vivsective art)   an important refrain in his early seminars.

     There will be chapters: on the poetics of the tetrad and its roots
in the trivium (the subject of his Ph.D. thesis) and modernism; Marshall
as a correspondent; the professor among the publicists as a media
hero and pop guru; his fix on cultural production and power; the role of
the occult, the gnostic and cults in his writing; his role as a North
American precursor of French theory with reference to Baudrillard,
Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.; McLuhan as artist and shaman; his
use of Joyce as a guide on the road to digiculture; McLuhan, the
modernist avant-garde and the "chaosmos"; and on the role of satire in
McLuhan and its relation to Wyndham Lewis and the tradition of
Lucianic and Varronian satire (the Menippean satire which has
assumed a particular importance after Bakhtin and post-structuralism).
Throughout the book the importance of his commitment to the
modernist arts from 1850 onward -- including not only the symbolists,
Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Joyce, but visual artists and the new lively arts
-- will be stressed as forging for him an interdisicplinary link between
the social sciences and the humanities which marked his work.
Nevertheless some attention will be given to the interplay of this
background with the social scientific traditions of the Chicago School
and its aftermath.  An appendix will clarify various accounts of our
differences of opinion.

     It should establish McLuhan as a complex human being
attractive, valuable, egotistic and exasperating so often characteristic
of genius.  It should give a depth to his project as a precursor of a
necessary post-digital, para-human interdisciplinarity as well as
explaining his attractiveness to practicing artists, dissident academics,
proponents of new theologies, media practitioners and businessmen.
It will also provide an interpretation and critique that points to building
on and moving beyond McLuhan.

     My perspective is complex and unapologetically intellectual, as
it was in my earlier study of him, but I believe positive, since neither
uncritical adulation or demonization or exploitation for one's own
purposes does justice to such a unique figure as H. Marshall
McLuhan."

Bob Dobbs

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