- Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke UP, 1996)
124: “Nietzsche synchronized his writing with the principle that, as he put it, ‘The greatest portion of our experiences is unconscious and [as such] effective.’ As interface, aesthetics means prosthesis. Which is the logo-erotic extension of the material body and mind propelled onto death, an extension nonetheless of all–increasingly mass-mediatized–senses and organs, in theory to infinity and immortality. As Marshall McLuhan put it in 1964: ‘after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man–the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.’ In the condition that Baudrillard calls the ‘cybernetic peripeteia of the body,’ it is not so much that ‘passions have disappeared,’ it is rather that they ‘have materialized.'”
385-6: “Leaving Nietzsche aside for the moment, the hypertextual link, so to speak, between [Philip K.] Dick and Heidegger was ‘predicted’–or at least made plausible implicitly–by Marshall McLuhan already in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), in that remarkably prescient section entitled ‘Heidegger Surf-Boards Along on the Electronic Wave as Triumphantly as Descartes Rode the Mechanical Wave.’ McLuhan, circling close to one of his central early theses, argued: ‘The alphabet and kindred gimmicks have long served man as a subliminal source of philosophical and religious assumptions. Certainly Martin Heidegger would seem to be on better ground [than the metaphysical tradition–note in original] in using the totality of language itself as a philosophical datum. For there, at least in non-literate periods, will be the ratio among all the senses. …’ But McLuhan–unlike most McLuhanites or cyberspatial Heideggerians and Nietzscheans–still possessed the good sense to add a caveat: ‘An enthusiasm for Heidegger’s excellent linguistics could easily stem from naive immersion in the metaphysical organicism of our electronic milieu. … There is nothing good or bad about print but the unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves’ (p. 66, emphasis added). This untutored reading of Heidegger is not entirely off the mark.”
- Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke UP, 1996)
173-174 n.20: “Like [Norbert] Wiener, Marshall McLuhan defines technologies (especially communication technologies) as extensions of the senses of the human body. It is not simply that technologies create the concept of the body, but rather that communication technologies reproduce the body itself. To this end, McLuhan critically examines a variety of images and texts from popular culture to demonstrate how communication technologies function as the new body sensorium. We know our bodies through technological sense organs (self-surveillance devices), and the bodies we know have been irrevocably transformed by technological practices. If Wiener shows how cybernetics was founded on a simulation of the human body, McLuhan suggests the converse—that people have begun to simulate machines. We can read in McLuhan’s work the elaboration of a relationship between sex and technology in which human bodies become the sex organs of machines, facilitating their reproduction, evolution, and immortality through the exhaustion of our corporeal mortality.”
- Benedetti, Paul and Nancy DeHart, eds. Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan . Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1996.
- Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
337: “[I refer to the] mass media electronic communication system [as] the McLuhan Galaxy in homage to the revolutionary thinker who visualized its existence as a distinctive mode of cognitive expression.”
- Dale, Stephen. McLuhan’s Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996.
- Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design. Eds. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. New York: Kiosk and Princeton Architectural P, 1996.
- Genosko, Gary. “McLuhan and Québec.” Borderlines 41 (1996): 19-23.
- Grosswiler, Paul. “The Dialectical Methods of Marshall McLuhan, Marxism, and Critical Theory.” Canadian Journal of Communication 21.1 (1996): 95- 124.
“McLuhan argues that communism is an effect of technology. Thus, the goal of the socialist age in which Marx envisions that ‘man assumes control of the production process’ and becomes ‘master of his own destiny’ to ‘get with the historical process’ was both ‘whimsical and hopeful’ (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972, pp. 66, 67). McLuhan & Nevitt argue, too, that the ‘class struggle’–a time-honoured conflict between owners and workers–was abstracted from the service environments created by new media in the attempt to be scientific. Although this Marxist goal was ‘noble and feasible,’ Marxist analysis did not follow when science ‘went through the vanishing point into acoustic or resonant space’ with Einstein’s relativity theory (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972, p. 69). As products of ‘Western literati,’ Marx’s followers were surprised by the electric phase of the new hidden environments that retrieved many forms of primitivism and brought revolution outside highly literate and industrialized societies (McLuhan & Nevitt, 1972, p. 70). McLuhan repeats the refrain that communism had been achieved in the West before Marx was born, but he groups Marx with other utopian or anti-utopian thinkers, such as George Orwell, who are focused on the period before their own.”
- Everett-Green, Robert. “Humanists Get Hip to the Net.” Globe and Mail . 22 June 1996, sec. C9.
“Like McLuhan, the Krokers are obsessed with electronic technology, to the extent that the computer that manages their E-mail seems slightly more important to them than their refrigerator. But they are also horrified (as McLuhan profoundly was) by the way technological change destroys and remakes society without our realizing it. McLuhan used to talk about how technology ‘works us over.’ Arthur prefers to say it throws us into ‘spasm,’ which he defines as ‘the state of living with absolutely contradictory feelings all the time, and really loving it.'”
- Massolin, Philip. “Context and Content: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant and the Role of Technology in Modern Society.” Past Imperfect 5 (1996): 81-118.
- McLuhan, Eric. “Joyce and McLuhan.” Antigonish Review 106 (1996): 157-65.
- Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Taking McLuhan and ‘Medium Theory’ Seriously: Technological Change and the Evolution of Education.” Yearbook 95.2 (1996): 73-110.
- Miles, David. “The CD-ROM Novel Myst and McLuhan’s Fourth Law of Media: Myst and Its ‘Retrievals.'” Journal of Communication 46.2 (1996): 4-18.
13-14: “McLuhan (1967) remarked that each new era assumes as its content the forms of the previous age, romanticizing them in the process. The advent of the railroad, for example, which encircled whole contrysides throughout America, helped inspire the development of the pastoral, romantic style of 19 th -century writing, from Thoreau onwards. Characteristically, Myst romanticizes the forms of 19 th -cntury science; levers and switches, gauges and wheels, pumps and generators litter the landscape, transforming it into a vast museum of a bygone mechanical age. The island even boasts a statue erected to the era, a huge gear mounted on a rocky promontory of the island, a giant objet d’art half sunk in the earth. Myst ‘s world of eternal ‘button-pushing and lever-pulling,’ as the Wall Street Journal (Syman, 1994. p A10) terms it, is a romantic elegy to 19 th -century mechanics, as well as to the lost world of Jules Verne.”
- Noetinger, Jerome. “Radio Play is No Place: A Conversation Between Jerome Noetinger and Gregory Whitehead.” TDR 40 (Fall 1996): 96-101.
99: “NOETINGER: You often talk about ‘relationships’ in your work: what about the kind of relationship McLuhan talks about with regards to the Global Village?
“WHITEHEAD: Right, the glorious, glowing Global Village, which to my mind is sort of in the same elusive category as the Primal Scream. The problem with the whole constellation of ideas having to do with the electronic tribe – radio as talking drum, the wired society, the Neural Net – is that there is no necessary or automatic relationship between communications technologies and community. The slogan that ‘communication equals community’ is only true when people are willing to work very hard to achieve it, and are then willing to fight to preserve what they have built. There is a utopian aspiration in all communication technologies, but the utopian side is counter-balanced and all to often cancelled out by the darker drive, the connection between information and war, between communication and the command or control over communities. This is the other side of Radio Utopia:Radio Thanatos , and I hear it more now than ever, whether in Sarajevo, China, or in the streets of Los Angeles. The root for ‘utopia’ is the Greek ou topos , or ‘no place.’ And radio is perhaps the most powerful and destructive No Place ever conceived or conjured.”
- O’Donnell, James J. “The Pragmatics of the New: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus.” The Future of the Book . Ed.Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 37-62.
- Precoda, Karl. “From New Criticism to Cultural Pluralism: The Southern Legacy of Marshall McLuhan.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 29.3 (1996): 1-14.
6: “McLuhan believed that being Canadian, like being a Southerner, helped him to perceive the outlines of a ‘counter-environment’ that lay hidden in the shadows of the hegemonic ‘world environment’ that was being continuously and invasively promoted by the advertisers, politicians, and other debasers of the language menacing the mid-century imagination. Against this totalitarian onslaught, McLuhan imagined himself as a kind of Poundian ‘antenna,’ a farout sentry patrolling the Distant Early Warning line of cultural change. In so doing, he transmuted the New Critical doctrine of objectivity into the hipster’s credo of ‘detachment in action,’ a watchful passivity that allowed the patient observer to ‘share the creative process of the culture without any mere merging in it. And this ‘is what the jazz musicians mean,’ he explained to one correspondent, ‘by “real cool”‘ (Letters 333).”
- Pevere, Geoff and Greig Dymond. “The Circuity of Sainthood: Marshall McLuhan’s Northern Visions.” Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey . Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1996. 132-5.
132: “Our interest here is in McLuhan as a Canadian pop-cultural superstar..Before McLuhan, electronic media was about its manifest content. After McLuhan electronic media was about environment, the new world order wired by multidirectional circuitry to the collective nervous system of post-electronic civilization, concepts now elementary to our discussion of mediated existence, and without which (and maybe this is the caveat), people like Moses Znaimer and [Ted] Turner would be unimaginable. If he was right. then we may only be beginning to come to terms with the sheer daunting scope of his prescience.”
- Sterling, Christopher. “Seeking Influence: The Dozen Most Important Electronic Media Books Since 1956.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 40 (Fall 1996): 597-600.
599: “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan. has to be the most widely discussed (if not actually read!) book on this list. In the mid-to-late 1960s, it seemed virtually everyone had heard of this Canadian English professor with his ideas of hot and cold media and the global village. But fewer had actually read this sometimes circular-reasoned volume through for his arguments about newer media supplanting the old were not easy to grasp. Originating as a research study supported by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters in 1960,Understanding Media became a virtual icon, a book every college student knew and debated. Yet today’s undergraduates have often never heard of it. Sic transit gloria.”
- Surrette, Leon. “The Perils of Applying McLuhan.” The Literary Review of Canada 5.9 (1996): 25-26.
26: “Although we should not be overly impressed at McLuhan’s prescience in forecasting a future which he helped to formulate, there is enough similarity between his cultural forecasts and the events to give pause to those who have rejected him as a clown, faker, or opportunist.” (26)
- The Video McLuhan . Dir. Matthew Vibert. Writ. and Nar. Tom Wolf. Prod. Stephanie McLuhan. McLuhan Productions, 1996. (six videocassettes)
- Viswanath, K. ” Unthinking Modernity [review].” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (Summer 1996): 502-4.
502-503: “The basic premise of [Judith] Stamps, an independent researcher from British Columbia, is that Innis and McLuhan offered a far reaching critique of modernity by adapting ‘negative dialectics,’ a method originally proposed by the Frankfurt School theorists. Stamps affirms that Innis and McLuhan offered a Canadian version of critical theory that is a trenchant critique of a modern, positivist, rationalist Western society.”
- Willmott, Glenn. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse . Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996.
136: “[McLuhan’s] persistent afterlife in French poststructuralist and cultural theory has ironically allowed ‘McLuhan’ to haunt the academy which had thought him gone.” (136)
- Wolf, Gary. “Channeling McLuhan: The Wired Interview with Wired ‘s Patron Saint.” Wired (January 1996): 128-31; 186-7.