Now Is - The Life and Work of Marshall McLuhan by Terrence Gordon
Section 1: A Sunday Drive Through McLuhan
Characters: Herbert McLuhan (father), Elsie McLuhan (mother),
Marshall McLuhan (age 14), Red McLuhan (age 10), Marshall McLuhan (age
55), Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, Fidel Castro, I. A.
Richards, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, eecummings, Rudyard
Kipling, Jonathan Miller
Enter HERBERT, ELSIE, MARSHALL, RED. They walk toward the "car"
(see below).
Enter TV McLUHAN/NARRATOR, taking a position on an elevated part of
the stage behind them. He remains there for the entire performance.
HERBERT: Who wants to go for a drive?
MARSHALL: O boy!
ELSIE: Let's go!
RED: Where are we going?
TV McLUHAN (of the 1960s and 70s as NARRATOR): A Sunday drive through
McLuhan. He positions a nearby lectern in front of himself, puts on
glasses, takes a set of index cards from his pocket, flips through
them till he finds the one he wants to begin with.
HERBERT, ELSIE, MARSHALL, and RED take seats arranged as in a car.
HERBERT: We're heading for the country!
TV McLUHAN /NARRATOR: Ford's in his flivver and all is well with the
world. Or is it? The automobile extends individual privacy but
reverses into the corporate privacy of traffic jams. This reversal is
typical…
Enter ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: (Impatient) Professor McLuhan! You're
getting ahead of yourself. A little more slowly, if you will, sir.
It's a Sunday drive, after all.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Since the telephone offers a very poor auditory
image, Mr. Bell, we strengthen and complete it by the use of all the
other senses. When the auditory image is of high definition…
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: (Exasperated) But the subject was the motor car!
Exit ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, shaking his head.
Enter CHARLIE CHAPLIN, looking quizzically at NARRATOR as he speaks.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The automobile and the telephone are media. Both
operate in fundamentally the same way. Paradoxically, the effect of
the wheel and of paper in organizing new power structures was not to
centralize but to decentralize. Center-margin dynamics…
CHARLIE CHAPLIN: He mimes instructions to McLuhan to slow down.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: (He peeks from offstage.) What was that part
about the motor car and the telephone both being media?
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Because they are both extensions of the human
body. As are clothing, clocks, and credit cards. And language.
Especially language. With the development of writing, spoken language
was impoverished, wasn't it Mr. Chaplin?
CHARLIE CHAPLIN: Mimes emphatic "yes."
Exit CHARLIE CHAPLIN.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: (To audience) What have you noticed lately?
MARSHALL: (Leaning out car window and pointing) O boy!
Sustained sound.
Overheat the cool medium: TV MCLUHAN on screen pointing to
blackboard, using magazine cutouts, etc.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: What haven't you noticed lately? New
technologies, or new media, surround us, swamp us. That's obvious
enough. A drowning man knows he is in water. What media do to us,
all that they do to us, to our work, our play, our homes, our habits,
is not so obvious. A fish does not know he is in water. We need to
uncover, discover, media—as environments—to bring them under our
control. We need discovery without end to counter media effects. Now
is. Now is the time.
HERBERT: Marshall, Red, there's a train coming. (He brakes the car
to a stop, relaxes his driver's posture, rubs his neck.)
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The railway did not introduce movement or
transportation or wheel into human activity and social organization,
but it did accelerate and expand the scale of previous activity and
organization. It created totally new kinds of work and leisure. This
happened wherever railways were introduced and is completely
independent of whatever freight the railway medium might carry. So
the "message," in this special sense of the word, of the railway
or of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or
pattern that it introduces to human affairs.
ELSIE: The horseless carriage meets the iron horse.
RED: What's an iron horse?
ELSIE: A locomotive. She recites:
Said the Western Engine, "Phew!"
And a long, low whistle blew.
"Come, now, really that's the oddest
Talk for one so very modest.
You brag of your East. You do?
Why, I bring the East to you!
All the Orient, all Cathay,
Find through me the shortest way;
And the sun you follow here
Rises in my hemisphere."
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Iron horse, horseless carriage, air ship, or
picture radioan early name for TV. These hybrid terms reveal how
we typically think of new media in terms of older ones. New media do
not replace older ones; they just complicate their existence. Spoken
language got turned into handwriting, handwriting got turned into
printing, printing got turned into telegraph, while spoken language
took on a new life through phonograph, radio, and telephone. Signs of
signs of signs.
[Here Elsie or Marshall could recite two stanzas from Lewis
Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark dealing with "conventional
signs." These are given at the end of the text]
RED: What did that red and white sign say, Marshall?
MARSHALL: "Toughest whiskers in the town."
RED: What?
MARSHALL: "Toughest whiskers in the town." (Pause) Look! (He
points to sign ahead.) "We stand them up." (Pause till they
reach the next sign.) "You knock them down." (Pause till they
reach the last sign.) "Burma Shave."
[Comfort station scenette could be inserted here or used in place of
video clip.]
VIDEO CLIP: TV commercial for razor with actor playing Castro saying
"Esta cara attrae muy attencion."
Narrator comments on:
1) advertising
2) advertising connection to propaganda
3)Castro as per UMCE, page 415
4) language as an expression of collective psychic energy
5) beard as icon vs. bare face as mask (bring back bearded or
beardless AGB)
6)TV ads vs. non-TV ads (lead in to Mechanical Bride?)
7) UMCE on Castro (page 56)
8) photography in context of photography in Cuba, B &W, August 2003
Develop 1) - 8) in relation to each other.]
RED: (Watching as they pass cyclists.) A bicycle for two.
HERBERT: When is an airplane like a bicycle?
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: How is a road like a story?
RED: (Bewildered) When is an airplane like a bicycle??
Pause. The others look at each other. Nobody answers.
HERBERT: When the pilot flies by the seat of his pants.
(He laughs uproariously)
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The tandem alignment of wheels created the
bicycle and gave the wheel a new degree of intensity. The bicycle
moved the wheel into the sphere of aerodynamic balance and created the
airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle
mechanics or that early airplanes looked like bicycles…Now how is a
road like a story?
Toughest lesson on the drive/One, two, three, four/ You say…
(Gestures to the audience to say "five")
Magic wands may grant a wish
Number magic makes us…
Enter I.A.RICHARDS
I. A. RICHARDS: Number magic!?! You mean word magic! Have you
forgotten what I taught you about the power of words, chant and
enchantment, the paralyzing power of the spoken word, taboos, thought
under the control of language instead of language under the control of
thought?
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: I never forgot any of it. I took the ideas
further. Number is a medium just as much as language. There is as
much number magic as word magic in the world around us. To Europeans,
America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken
on an existence of their own57 varieties, 7-Up, behind the 8-ball,
7-11. It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial
culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.
I.A. RICHARDS: Words express our thoughts and our feelings. Words
extend our minds. What does number extend?
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Mr. Chaplin!
Enter CHARLIE CHAPLIN.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN: He mimes extensions of the fingers.
I.A. RICHARDS: My word!
Exit I. A. RICHARDS
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: My number!
CHARLIE CHAPLIN: He mimes "my number."
Exit CHARLIE CHAPLIN.
MARSHALL AND RED: (Together)
Toughest whiskers in the town
We stand them up
You knock them down
Burma Shave
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR:
Toughest concept in the town:
Though fish will never ever drown
Water's not what fishes see
It's like the pixels on TV
Medium blank but message sent
Invisible environment
Toughest concept in the town:
Seeing water all around
Fish eye staring at TV
What's the screen? Could it be me?
Pixels blank but message sent
Invisible environment
Enter JAMES JOYCE.
JAMES JOYCE: As for the viability of vicinals, when invisible they are
invincible.
ELSIE: Veni, vidi, vici
RED: What?
ELSIE: (Schoolmarm delivery) It was with these words that Julius
Caesar described his conquest of Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered.
MARSHALL:
Latin is a language
dead as dead can be
first it killed the Romans
and now it's killing me
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The Roman conquest of tribal areas was
consolidated by the alphabet. According to an old Greek myth, the
alphabet produced militarism. It tells that King Cadmus sowed
dragon's teeth and harvested armed men. Militarism is a kind of
visual organization and of social energies that is specialist…
JAMES JOYCE: All for a bit.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: ...and explosive.
JAMES JOYCE: All for a bit.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Militarism is a form of industrialism or the
concentration of large amounts of homogenized energies into a few
kinds of production. The Roman soldier was a man with a spade. As
the Cadmus myth points out, the homogenized military life that was
known to antiquity sprang from that greatest processor of men for that
purpose: the phonetic alphabet.
JAMES JOYCE: Alphabet, allforabit
Exit JAMES JOYCE.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The effects of phonetic literacy do not depend
upon persuasion or cajolery. It was not so much the Latin language
itself but its alphabet as a technology that transformed the
resonating world of the tribes conquered by Rome into Euclidean
lineality and visuality. Roman roads and Roman streets were uniform
and repeatable wherever they occurred. With the decline of papyrus
supplies, wheeled traffic on these roads stopped. Deprivation of
papyrus, resulting from the Roman loss of Egypt, meant the decline of
bureaucracy, and of army organization as well.
MARSHALL: (Thumbing through a small notebook) Oh boy! Just two more
and I'll have a hundred people on my paper route.
Enter I.A.RICHARDS
I. A. RICHARDS: Standard number magic.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The process that Rome effected by gearing the
phonetic alphabet…
I.A. RICHARDS: ...thereby shattering word magic…
Exit I.A.RICHARDS
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: ...gearing the phonetic alphabet to its paper
routes has been occurring in Russia for more than a century.
Enter JAMES JOYCE
JAMES JOYCE: The East shall shake the West awake and ye shall have the
night for morn.
(He continues to recite Anna Livia Plurabelle sotto voce, as if
missing his cue to go off stage, while Narrator "misses" his cue
to come on.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: (To offstage interlocutor) ...global village…
What about Global Capers A Musical? American boy meets Russian
girl, East meets West… yes… discovery patterns for the two
cultures… Russian take: an educational system with roots in a
little red schoolhouse must be sound at the core… get it all started
with a brainstorming session… chiefs of the American state get the
full Madison Avenue treatment to work up creative solutions to world
tensions… Russians wind up wanting to trade Sputnik for Marilyn
Monroe… sure… maybe a stage manager from Tibet or outer space or
an Oberon-Puck type… fits right in with our electronic culture…
trade-offs… Russian ballet for rock and roll… OK!
RED: Marshall, let's count telephone poles.
Enter ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: Standard number magic.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Games and numbers go together. But what happened
to word magic with the invention of the telephone?
JAMES JOYCE: Television kills telephony.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: That's getting ahead of our story.
Projected image of Nipper the RCA dog. Strains of "All Alone By the
Telephone, All Alone and Feeling Blue"
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: With the telephone, there occurs the extension of
ear and voice that is a kind of extrasensory perception.
JAMES JOYCE: The dog's getting us ahead of our story.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: Not really phonograph, telegraph, telephone.
They all go together. The phonograph had to wait for the tape
recorder to release it from its mechanical trappings and take its
place in the galaxy of electric forms.
RED: Fifty!
Visual track from Haskell Wexler's"Medium Cool" starts and
continues throughout following poetry recitations to split audience
attention.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The first great extension of our central nervous
system was the mass medium of the spoken word. In the second great
extension of the central nervous system, the spoken word was wedded to
electric technology.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: Was my telephone a groomsman or an electric
bride?
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The word "telephone" came into existence
before Mr. Bell was born. It was used to describe a device made to
convey musical notes through wooden rods. Is the telephone sounding
brass or a tinkling symbol?
JAMES JOYCE: An inkling of a tinkling of the cymbal as symbol.
Exit JAMES JOYCE and ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: What did happen to word magic with the advent of
the telephone?
Enter CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: (He recites)
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.
Like long echoes that mingle in the distance
In a profound tenebrous unity,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.
Some perfumes are as fresh as the flesh of
children, Sweet as the sound of oboes, green as pastures
—And others corrupt, rich, and triumphant,
Having the expanse of things infinite,
Such as amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
That sing of the flight of spirit and the senses.
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: The typewriter and the telephone teamed up. They
are most unidentical twins, and they remade twentieth century woman
with technological ruthlessness and thoroughness. That's one
message the telephone and the typewriter sent together. And here's
another message that the typewriter sent all by itself: a singing
telegram to the world of poetry.
Exit CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Enter EECUMMINGS
EECUMMINGS: (He recites)
lame baloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisabel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's spring
and
the
goat footed
baloonman whistles
far
and
wee
Exit EECUMMINGS
RED: One hundred!
TV MCLUHAN/NARRATOR: I was a professor of English literature before I
was a media analyst. Actually, I never thought of teaching literature
or learning about the visual arts or investigating media effects as
separate activities. I taught poetry. Loved poetry…
Enter RUDYARD KIPLING
RUDYARD KIPLING: (He recites)
When the flush of a newborn sun fell first
On Eden's green and gold
Our father Adam sat under a tree
And scratched with a stick in the mould
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen
Was joy to his mighty heart
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves
"It's pretty, but is it art?"
...
When the flicker of London's sun falls faint
On the club room's green and gold
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the
mold
They scratch with their pens in the molds of their graves
And the ink and the anguish start
When the Devil whispers behind the leaves
"It's clever, but is it art?"
Exit RUDYARD KIPLING
Logos spread from McLuhan and Carson, The Book of Probes appears on
backdrop.