1982

  • Blake, Richard A.. “Condominiums in the Global Village: Views of Marshall McLuhan.” America 146 (June 5 1982): 433-6.

433-434: “The global village, an optimistic projection of the McLuhan era, probably never did exist in fact, and if it was the logical goal of a trend apparent at the time, that trend has long ago hit a detour. Technology, which McLuhan was ever sensitive to, has moved in like a greedy landlord and broken the global village into condominiums. Since the time of McLuhan’s initial insight, the world has become less a tribal village and more an urban apartment building, where people in adjacent flats cannot recognize one another.”

 

  • Chesterton, David. “Chesterton, Pollack, and McLuhan – Three Searches.” The Chesterton Review: The Journal of the G.K. Chesterton Institute 8.1 (1982): 51-56.

55: “As I was washing my hands later, I became aware that McLuhan was beside me, doing the same thing. I asked him what he felt when comments were made which suggested that the speakers had an inner knowledge of the working of his [McLuhan’s] thought processes. He grinned. ‘It amuses me and, in some ways, alarms me. It amuses me that they have found some special meaning in what I have said or written – essentially because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. My writings are an exploration of some ideas – explorations without conclusions. I’m searching for something I may never find. That’s not pessimism, by the way; I’m enjoying the search. What alarms me is that these university professors are going back to their institutions and giving their students a totally false view of my work. They’re telling the young people all about the meaning of my work and nothing about the search – and young people nowadays desperately need to be involved in a search.’ Ever since then I’ve read McLuhan’s work as a participant in that search – of course, I don’t know what he’s looking for, but he didn’t seem to know either.”

 

  • Cooper, Thomas W.. “Marshall McLuhan: Style as Substance.” American Review of Canadian Studies 12 .1 (1982): 120-32.

124: “Admidst [ sic ] McLuhan’s staple crop of personifications flourishes a smaller spicing of paradox. Like the aphorism or the flip, the paradox provokes the content-oriented reader to participate at a different level of interaction with print. When McLuhan writes, ‘The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist,’ he is not simply flaunting his cleverness. McLuhan is attempting not only to personify his subject matter but also his comatose audience. More than any other author who has published books via the printing press, McLuhan recognizes that ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.’ The over-riding undercurrent within McLuhan’s assault upon audience lethargy is life itself. In contrast to Innis’s ‘deadly’ scholarship, one posits McLuhan’s ‘lively’ craftsmanship.” (124)

 

  • Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982.

165: “[T]echnical critiques of McLuhan are somewhat beside the point. How does one logically attack a court jester, a man who declares the end of linear logic? McLuhan’s analysis of modern media has profoundly transformed our perceptions of twentieth-century life, particularly for the generation born after World War II. When the French coined the term mcluhanisme [sic], they were referring not only to the man but also to a new cultural stance , a commitment to the serous examination of popular culture. If nothing else, McLuhan’s efforts instilled an urgent awareness of the media environment as a basic force shaping the modern sensibility.”

 

  • Fekete, John. “Massage in the Mass Age: Remembering the McLuhan Matrix.”Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 6.3 (1982): 50-67.

 

53: “[T]he post-structuralist development of the productive notions of trace and genealogy all parallel or confirm McLuhan’s approach and create around it a politically democratic intellectual and institutional cluster which was unavailable in the 1950s and 1960s, which is more or less realistically synchronized with the widely variable retrieval and reception conditions in the contemporary information environment, and into which McLuhan can be fruitfully resituated.”

 

  • Havelock, Eric. Harold Adams Innis: A Memoir . Toronto: Harold Innis Foundation, 1982.

 

  • Ong, Walter J.. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word . London: Methuen, 1982.

 

167: “There is little doubt … that today many persons do rely on a logocentric model in thinking about noetic and communication processes. In breaking up what he calls phonocentrism and logocentrism, Derrida is performing a welcome service, in the same territory that Marshall McLuhan swept through with his famous dictum, ‘The medium is the message.'”

 

  • Powe, Bruce W.. “Marshall McLuhan: The Put-On.” The Antigonish Review 50 (1982): 123-139.

128: “McLuhan was … addicted to antagonizing, spouting paradoxes, and carrying an idea to a frequently-ridiculous extreme. This was in evidence during his Monday night seminars at the Centre, a so-called ‘free’ night on which guest speakers came to participate in a dialogue. Some of these guests over the thirteen years of the Centre’s existence had included Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould, John Lennon, Edward Albee, and Buckminster Fuller. They rarely got the chance to finish anything, as McLuhan would interrupt and the discussion would often assume a tone of high comedy, with cunning aphorisms being cuttingly exchanged.”

 

  • Sparshott, Francis. “The Last Word in Criticism.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 20 (1982): 117-29.

117-118: “At this moment of its history when our Society pauses to survey the past and peer into the future, it is amusing to note that of the two critical neighbours in Toronto, McLuhan, though he was notorious for his relentlessly forward-looking gaze, located art in the obsolete past and cherished only that; whereas Frye, who argues that literary understanding must look to the past, orienting itself by a mythological structure in which timeless possibilities are not otherwise accessible than through actual history, values the literary imagination thus formed only because it is a matrix for the envisioning of possible futures, and has done much to inspire and encourage the young writers of his own place and time.

These things being so, some remarks about the past and future of criticism would not be out of place in this cultural stock-taking. Unfortunately I am neither a historian nor a prophet, so that I find myself in that notoriously Canadian posture, an apologetic bewilderment at finding oneself where one happens to be and doing whatever it is one happens to be doing. Helplessly caught between future and past, I reflect that at least I am what is in this room this morning; and as Frye says, on can use one’s imagination anywhere even if, as McLuhan said, art is somewhere else.”