A Partial Guide to Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy is a challenging book for a variety of reasons:

1. It is organized like a website, even though it is in print form.  McLuhan does not use standard chapter divisions to clearly organize or group his ideas, but you will see that he does end up more or less collecting related thoughts into a chronological sequence, with only a bit of jumping around.
2. McLuhan is an academic, writing about the ideas of other academics. While you have heard of Plato and Cicero, Shakespeare and Milton, McLuhan spends quite a bit of time talking about the ideas of people like Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and Sigfried Gideon (to name a few).  When you run across some of these names, realize that he is talking about these people either to say that he agrees with them, and is extending their ideas (he says the whole book is just a footnote to Innis, which is an allusion to Bertram Russell’s claim that western Civilization is a footnote to Plato), or he wants to disagree with what one of these scholars has said.  This kind of “conversation” is the most prominent feature of academic writing. 
3. The book is all text, no pictures.  McLuhan realized the implications of his own work and started producing visually rich books by the late 1960s.  He lost some academic credibility when he started to do this, but you might find The Medium is the Massage (1967) more approachable.
4. His prose can be dense—big words, slightly archaic words (this book is 40 years old!), long sentences.  But he also writes some sentences that will turn on a huge lightbulb for you.  I’ll list what I consider some winners below.  Look for the winners!

McLuhan’s Method

McLuhan reads all literature as a window into human reactions to technologies of print and communication.  This may seem like a peculiar obsession, but the invention of the alphabet, of the printing press, and the personal computer are generally accepted as three of the most transformative inventions in human history.  Writers, who work with words and the technologies of human communication, are understandably concerned with the wide array of effects these technologies are having on their lives, and the lives of the cultures they live in.  He believes that poets and artists are more "attuned" to these changes than the scientists, historians, and even (especially?!) literary critics. 

McLuhan's interpretive obsessions are by no means the only way to read literature, but they are especially important at this time in history because we are still going through the kinds of transitions he describes: from a print, visual, mechanical culture towards an acoustic, tactile, electric culture. 

McLuhan’s content

Although McLuhan’s method is to get cultural critics to look at mediums in addition to content, his body of work obviously became a “content”—a collection of ideas and observations.  Here are some key ideas I hope you get from The Gutenberg Galaxy. 

Dominant eras:  Oral Culture, Print Culture, Electric Culture.

His outline of western civilization is pretty straight forward:  an oral-biased civilization (Hellenic/Greek culture) gave way to a culture of writing and record keeping (the Roman Empire), but “modernity” did not emerge until writing could be effectively reproduced via the printing press.  The printing press and allied technologies have shaped our sense of self, community, time, and space in ways significantly different from the perceptions of Greek and Roman citizens.  Communities as the primary source of identity gave way to nations and individuals, time is now perceived primarily as linear rather than circular, and sacred space (a unity of people and environments) gave way to profane and pragmatic space (space is to be dominated and controlled, not communed with).  McLuhan believes that electricity is bringing about fundamental changes to self, community, space, and time again, although he is willing to admit that print culture will tenaciously hang on for quite some time. 

Figuring out specific characteristics of each culture will take a careful reading of The Gutenberg Galaxy and probably some additional research.  Critics of McLuhan think he oversimplifies theses characterizations of each era, and that he is deterministic (i.e., McLuhan argues that technologies automatically have certain effects and human agency cannot shape those effects).  What do you think about his claims?  His descriptions of eras? 

Catchy phrases and lightening bolts of insight.

McLuhan is most remembered for two phrases:  “the global village” and “the medium is the message”.  One of his arguments is that in a post-literate, electronic culture, catchy phrases, sound bites, and one-liners are more powerful than carefully elaborated statements backed by mounds and mounds of research.  Below are some lightening bolts of insight I have found in The Gutenberg Galaxy. 

“the first onset of literacy, and, therefore, of visuality abstracted from the other senses, seemed to Plato a diminution of ontological awareness, or an impoverishment of Being.    . . . [I]f some agent [like writing, or television] could double the speed of all events in the world, . . . we would discern a great loss of richness in experience.  Such seems to have been Plato’s attitude toward literacy and visual mimesis.” (52)

Admittedly not very catchy, but translated, McLuhan is adding to Plato’s list of anxieties about writing this concern about the effects of “doubling the speed of all events” leading to a kind of information overload, a kind of numbness, and a flatness of experience —terms I often see associated with the youth culture of today. 

To the oral man [sic], the literal is inclusive, contains all possible meanings and levels.  So it was for Aquinas.  But the visual man of the sixteenth century is impelled to separate level from level, and function from function, in a process of specialist exclusion.  The auditory field is simultaneous, the visual mode is successive.  (111)

The movement from generalist to specialist is one of McLuhan’s favorite themes; here he makes a sharp distinction between the oral person of manuscript culture (Aquinas) and the “modern” sensibility of the sixteenth century: an emerging specialist who liked to interpret Scripture and the world according to four discrete levels: literal, figurative, topological, and anagogic. 

One of the most radical of new literary conventions of the market society of the eighteenth century was the novel.  It has been preceded by the discovery of “equitone prose.”  Addison and Steele, as much as anybody else, had devised this novelty of maintaining a single consistent tone to the reader.  It was the auditory equivalent of the mechanically fixed view in vision.  Mysteriously, it is this break-through into the equitone prose which suddenly enabled the mere author to become a “man of letters.” (273)

McLuhan isn’t particularly radical in making these claims—most literary critics will agree that the novel and the modern concept of author emerged along with specific technological (printing press) and economic (market society, rise of the middle class) changes.  His ability to pull all of these threads together into five sentences is impressive, and he makes you think: why was this breakthrough “mysterious”?

When he [Harold Innis, McLuhan’s mentor] interrelates the development of the steam press with “the consolidation of the vernaculars” and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody’s point of view, least of all his own.  He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight. . . . Innis makes no effort to “spell out” the interrelations between the components in his galaxy.  He offers no consumer packages [systems of thought] in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits, like a symbolist poet or an abstract painter.  (217)

McLuhan is very found of reading literature, or in this case, an academic study by Harold Innis] for its “instructions.”  He and Innis resist the idea of offering up a “system of thought,” and instead write books that might encourage people to write and think like them.  This approach has influenced my own thinking pretty strongly—it explains why you are doing a project called “Doing things with Phaedrus” and the Mosaic Tiles.  I hope we are in the process of setting up a mosaic configuration for insights. 

What could be me practical for a man [sic] caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy?  He is behaving like Poe’s sailor in the Maelstrom who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives.  May not it be our job in the new electronic age to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures?  (77)

Poe’s story Maelstrom and this idea of studying the whirlpool of contemporary culture is among McLuhan’s favorite sources of imagery.  He always points to this example when someone accuses him of being deterministic.   Pay more attention to the world and the technologies won’t drown you, he says!  Or, “Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fall-out?” (246)

A few loose notes. 

We tend to think of contemporary TV, Film, Computer culture as "visual culture" but for McLuhan, the visual culture = print culture.  Contemporary culture is more auditory (sound and information coming at us from different directions), more tactile (we are always "in touch" with one another, the world). 

Visual culture = perspective and point of view.  One thing at a time.  Clarity of vision, singularity of mind, individuality.  Acoustic culture = simultaneity, no point of view, all-at-onceness. 

McLuhan  tends to offer fascinating observations about culture beyond what artists tell us.  He explains global conflicts in term of the biases of each culture's dominant communication style: oral Russian culture previously in conflict with visual/print western culture; Iraq and North Korea have non-western alphabets: we are most out of sorts with those culture with whom we not only don’t share a language, but don't share an alphabet.