Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger.

WHEN THE BIKINI-CLAD Goldie Hawn cooed, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?" on Laugh-In in 1968, there was no longer any doubt. For better and for worse, McLuhan had become a celebrity.

How did this Canadian academic achieve his unlikely prominence? Answer: He announced the end of literacy and spoke oracularly of a world transformed into a global village, pulsating with the tom-toms of electronic media. And he seemed to suggest that this would be a prelapsarian idyll the achievement of which required nothing more arduous than watching television, a task made all the easier by cavorting young women such as the giggling, pre-feminist Miss Hawn.

That is what Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) seemed to be saying in the mid Sixties, but he was never the naive celebrant of the electronic age he allowed himself to appear, as anyone knows who has taken the trouble to read his two important works, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. His popular image was largely a fabrication at which, admittedly, he connived. This is made clearer than ever by Philip Marchand's lively yet judicious biography and by Oxford University Press's collection of McLuhan's letters. Here we find a man who was as wary of technology as he was fascinated by it. Although he would become a world-renowned media theorist, he was the last on his block to buy a television. Having done so, he proposed to limit his children's viewing to an hour a week. He once said, "I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it for my own survival." In 1977 he advised Governor Jerry Brown to ration Californians' TV viewing for their own good. Brown's staff didn't agree. The measure, they demurred, might be a trifle unrealistic.

McLuhan thought of himself as "a stodgy conservative." The apostle of mass electronic communication, who prophesied the obsolescence of the book, confided to FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson that he had prepared himself to analyze media by reading French Symbolist poetry. Not satisfied with secular texts, McLuhan rose daily at five to read the Bible. And to guide him in his explorations of twentieth-century culture, he turned to St. Thomas, finding himself on "the same wave-length" as the angelic doctor.

McLuhan's popular reputation can be blamed on his acquiescence in the public-relations game that grew up around him. Once he began to gain notice, professional PR types moved in for a piece of the action. Since their influence led to well-paid consulting jobs, McLuhan didn't object. He even lent his name to publications to which he contributed little more than some offhand dictation. At first to his bemusement, later to his chagrin, he became part of the popular culture he had set out to criticize.

Marchand puts all this in perspective while reclaiming what is of value in McLuhan's work. Read together with the letters, Marchand's book puts us in touch with the real McLuhan, whose lasting achievement, it turns out, may have more to do with his religious convictions than his debatable theories.

Marshall McLuhan cannot be understood without taking into account his conversion to pre-Vatican II Catholicism, a decision that touched every part of his life. Like many another convert, he did not take his faith lightly. He felt there was nothing untoward about inviting guests to kneel beside their chairs after dinner to say a rosary with his family. A daily communicant, he said that the Eucharist was as necessary to him as his daily bread. (McLuhan, like his favorite novelist, James Joyce, took his puns seriously.) Although, in intellectual debate, he was rarely explicit about his faith, it was the cornerstone of all his arguments. To a Jesuit colleague he wrote that Catholics "must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations and, with its own terms and postulates, shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic."

The influence of McLuhan's faith was most apparent in his preoccupation with media. He was convinced that we cannot think clearly about our existence until we become aware of how powerfully our modes of communication affect us. Every medium, he argued, from the alphabet to typography to television, exerts a sort of enchantment. We unwittingly accept its conventions, failing to recognize how profoundly they shape our lives. In the modern period, for instance-since the Renaissance and the Reformation -the conventions of print media prevented us from becoming fully aware that we were creating a soulless technocracy that, in his words, threatened the "obliteration of the person." McLuhan's thesis about print literacy is more complex than I can hope to unravel here, but one strand may illustrate the direction of his thought.

McLuhan was convinced that the West had made a Faustian bargain when it adopted the phonetic alphabet. It is, he argued, a notational system that fosters attitudes quite different from those found among peoples using different writing codes. The ideographical alphabets of other civilizations begin with pictures, he observed. Their signs visibly conform to the world they represent. If, as McLuhan was fond of saying, the medium is the message, then the message of the ideogram is that we should deal with the world by adapting to its patterns as we find them, in an attitude of reverent accommodation with nature. The dynamic of the phonetic alphabet, however, is quite different. Using a largely arbitrary code to represent its aural symbols, it puts us at a distance from immediate experience. This results in a language of abstraction, its symbols poised not only to represent but also to manipulate reality. In ideographic writing the symbol for, say, "horse" began by looking like a horse. Such a sign, evolving from an image, will naturally imply respect for the reality it represents. In phonetic writing, however, the process tends to be the reverse, at least in daily practice. Before an animal can be called a horse, it must first satisfy the definition of the word, about which, it must be said, there is nothing inherently horsey. As a consequence, in the West we became accustomed to having nature fit itself to our symbolic constructions, a very useful attitude if you want to extend your technological grasp on the world. The danger, however, is that it also leads to humanistic pride. We come to think of ourselves and our symbols as the sole measure of reality.

McLuhan reasoned that, for all its manifest achievements, phonetic literacy needed a corrective, and television might provide it. Although he loathed most of its content, he thought the medium might have the benefit of bringing us literally to our senses. His argument is more than a little ingenious. Television's low-definition image, he pointed out, requires the viewer's sensory participation to complete its pictures. We don't just watch television, he argued, we get in touch with it. Of course, he didn't think television would replace literacy, but it might awaken us from the spell of typographic abstraction, helping to close the alienating distance between sign and referent, the individual and reality.

Today, fashionable philosophers label as logocentric anyone naive enough to believe there's a meaningful reality behind man-made symbolic constructions. Perhaps it is just on this head that McLuhan most deserves our reconsideration. He offers a passionately logocentric response to the gnostics and nihilists who now prattle about deconstructing texts for ontological significance. McLuhan believed that in the beginning was the Word, and that the Word became flesh, which is to say that the original sign and its referent were one and the same. We can see why he thought his theories were, as he put it, "Thomistic to the core." Following Aquinas's analogical reasoning, he concluded that the sound of any word reverberates with the first creative utterance and potentially contributes to the realization of God's continuing presence in His world. This is why McLuhan was drawn to the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. For him the doctrine of transubstantiation made perfect sense. It is the archetype for all symbols. As the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, so on a lesser level all our representational systems from the alphabet to video's electron grid can put us directly in touch with the object behind the sign and, thereby, proximately in touch with the Real Presence that stands behind this world, guaranteeing that however "monstrous and sickening" it may sometimes appear, it is nevertheless worthy of redemption.

What was McLuhan doin'? Well, Goldie, it may sound strange in the era of Dallas, Dynasty, Downey, and Donahue, but he was trying to save us from what could become the terminal vulgarity of our popular culture.