Mazes: Essays - Hugh Kenner

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Eye of the Beholder

Harper's, August 1983 .

The late Marshall McLuhan, media guru, personified an earlier array of biases. He fastidiously did not own a typewriter. A fountain pen, yes, because he liked the nib, but he wouldn't fill it, he dipped it. From the little pump on its glorified eyedropper, he shied as from the devil. Useless to cite the simplicity of the process. "That kind of knowledge," he would say, "has been so dearly bought it behooves you to have as little of it as possible."

And from still earlier: when a shutter goes schnick, does some devil not see to it that the ensuing photo can never be Art? Whether it can

(also what Art may be if it can't) has racked worriers for more than a century. Susan Sontag still inclines to think it can't.

McLuhan Redux

Marshall McLuhan was my first mentor. I met him in 1 946, saw him for the last time in 1 972, and in 1 984 was grateful to Harper's for an invitation to resurrect his memory. This appeared in November 1 984 .

"Computer literacy," we keep repeating, meaning doubtless something or other

Marshall McLuhan noticed long ago that the "content" of a medium is always a previous medium . He also remarked that we don't see a medium itself, save as packaging for its content. That helps ease new media into acceptability

Likewise, we sidle up to the computer, saying over and over that it's nothing but an electrified filing system

Yet something is altering. Here is ByteMag, a fat and glossy computer journal put out by no bunch of hackers but by staid McGraw-Hill . The July 1984 issue contains a long software review, tied to intricate fact in a way manifestly more responsible than anything likely to turn up in the New York Review of Books

This piece undertakes an overview of the difficult language LISP before comparing two "implementations," as they are called, in detail

So who wrote this paradigm? A computer-engineering major at Case Western Reserve, in collaboration with "a recent graduate of Sycamore High School" who designs relational database systems for a living.

Computerist, dropout: a not unfamiliar linking. No reader of newsmagazines will fail to remember how Bill Gates (Harvard dropout) founded Microsoft, how Steven Jobs (Reed dropout) and Stephen Wozniak (Berkeley dropout) founded Apple. No, the filing-system model lacks explanatory power.

Marshall McLuhan again: The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world . . . not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns . . . . At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated . They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means ofinvolvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the "mythical" world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted

In 1964 that seemed one of McLuhan's wilder remarks. No longer.

instances of his prescience multiply

Once brushed off by The New Yorker as a "pop philosopher," the author of Understanding Media is starting to look like a prophet.

That is all the more remarkable since "the oracle of the electric age" (a phrase coined by Life) wouldn't drive a car, never turned on a radio, barely glanced at television, and checked out movies by popping in on them for twenty minutes

He did indeed read books, and, other than talk and scribble, he did little else.

Such disdain for inconvenient fact could erode your confidence.

In those days he countered niggling by sheer assertion. It was after my time that he discovered a generic answer. People who raised objections were detailists, specialists, locked into local patterns

I have sometimes wondered if Marshall didn't evolve his whole theory of media as a way to explain why there seemed to be people who tried to interrupt his monologues

Much as Saul found a kingdom while out hunting for his father's asses, Marshall McLuhan found his skeleton key to the social psyche. Thereafter, he kept it hanging on a hook labeled "Media" and never bothered to explain what Media were.