a Canadian television show in 1968 featur[ed] a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the '60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. "The planet is no longer nature", he declares, to Mailer's uncomprehending stare; "it's now the content of an art work".Perhaps he was, instead, the global idiot savant.
Watching McLuhan, you can't quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As Douglas Coupland argues in his pithy new biography, McLuhan's mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of an apple from the base of his brain. ...
McLuhan was a scholar of literature, with a doctorate from Cambridge, and his interpretation of the intellectual and social effects of media was richly allusive and erudite. But what particularly galvanized the public was the weirdness of his prose. Perhaps because of his unusual mind, he had a knack for writing sentences that sounded at once clinical and mystical. His books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat. That kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture — the bearded and the Birkenstocked embraced him as a guru — but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.
I'm reminded of William Melody's acerbic review in Information, Communication & Society of Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (MIT Press, 1998) by Philip Marchand -
Now that McLuhan has been dead for nearly twenty years and cannot divert us with his dazzling elliptical metaphors and bad puns, his work can be examined without raising the passions the deliberately provocative oral communicator managed to inflame in his prime. Adopting a stance of arrogant superiority, he considered clarifying his ideas an unworthy menial task for intellectual plodders, and dismissed challenging questions with comments like, 'You don't like those ideas. I got other ones', and the infamous, 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' He paid scant attention to facts and never conceded a point. His ultimate put down was a benign explanation that the question revealed the person was locked into the uni-dimensional visual bias of the age of print and could not really be expected to understand.
