The Ultimate Non-Book

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. 159 pages. Banfam. $1.45.

"Good morning!" says a raw egg, lolling in a shallow dish, its yolk bearing an advertisement for a no-pressure printing technique, proving that the ovum can become a commercial. Noses nudge knowingly from a page dealing with psephology. Five pages of pebbled and scaly abstract photography resolve themselves into a closeup of human toes to make the point: "The wheel is an extension of the foot." One entire spread is printed in Leonardo-like "mirror writing," and another is set upside down just to show how absurd the whole concept of books can be. Indeed, the authors of this eye-stopping, mind-wrenching whatzis have created the ultimate in non-books.

Canada's All-Purpose Prophet Marshall McLuhan, soon to be enchaired at Fordham University, has argued for years that the book is obsolescent. Unfortunately, his major testaments (The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media), while full of ideas, were rendered virtually unreadable by soporific syntax and mastodonian metaphors. Now, with the artful aid of a graphics designer, Quentin Fiore, McLuhan gets his message across more appropriately by juxtaposing his text with pictures. The result is a punchy put-on, to be sure, but that only serves to make a point: McLuhan has never taken himself as seriously as his critics have; his cheerful objective is to stir up some fresh thought.

The book restates McLuhan's increasingly familiar argument: the introduction of the alphabet 3,000 years ago, abetted by Gutenberg's introduction of movable print in the 15th century, turned mankind into the alphas and omegas of a giant cultural alphabet soup. The "seamless" and communal thought processes of tribal, preliterate man were fragmented; perception itself took on the rigid, abecedarian character of writing. Letters led to the "idea," which required structure—beginning, middle, end—and forced the writer or reader out of immediate experience and into an abstracted, objective remove from "group reality." According to McLuhan, the advent of "electrical technology"—radio and records, television and telephones—has changed all that. Man today is returning, through the vacuum tube, to a tribal-type perception, and is no longer tied to rational, sequential modes of thought.

For those who have yet to understand McLuhan, this book is a provocative primer. In both text and pictures, it uses the zany Zen technique of shattering orderly thought with irrational accident. Even the title is a gag, deriving from McLuhan's earlier pronouncement: "The medium is the message." That meant, as any anthropologist might have put it, that technology predetermines social structure; hence, tools prefigure the psychology of their users. By punningly altering the slogan, McLuhan merely means that "all media work us over completely."