Books: The Ultimate Non-Book

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Aphoristic Armory. McLuhan himself works his readers over with aphorisms and jokes. "If we were to dispose of the city right now," he says, "future societies would reconstruct them, like so many Williamsburgs." Of Renaissance art, which he blames for placing Western man "outside the frame of reference," he says: "A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza." Telstar, movies and jetliners have generated "a worldpool of information"; the clash of cultures in the modern world is a "collide-oscope"; television programming is "the charge of the light brigade." As a result of the information explosion occasioned by modern technology, "all the world's a sage."

There is no denying many of the McLuhanian truisms. Mankind today is indeed caught up in a technological tsunami of unprocessed information and unrelated impressions, events and pseudo events. But the world is not quite yet McLuhan's "global village," nor can the sequential thought patterns of three millennia be totally dissolved in a burst of electronic energy, however it is harnessed. With the sweeping generalization that delights his followers but irks so many anti-McLuhanians, he compares present times with the late medieval era, when tribal thought was giving way to print-processed "linear" thought, and finds in both the medieval theme of the Dance of Death and today's Theater of the Absurd a similar fear of changing technology. Says he: "Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old." To a degree, the same could be said of this book. It is stimulating enough, yet for best therapeutic effect, McLuhan's massage should perhaps be administered via the neo-tribal TV tube.