Legman and McLuhan With Zizek Along the Way

Meanwhile, check out Jahsonic's engagement with Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke.

Incidentally, I read something online to the effect that Neurotica was a big influence on Marshall McLuhan. That is exactly backwards. McLuhan was a contributor, and if you read his writings from the late 1940s, it's obvious that he'd come up with his own take on "folklore of industrial man," to use the subtitle of his early book The Mechanical Bride (1951).

By coincidence, I see that Jonathan Goodwin has noticed an interesting parallel that certainly squares with my own impression:

Žižek reminds me much of McLuhan. Facts don't matter for either. In the space of a few pages, Zizek has claimed that Martin Luther King made a radical anti-capitalist turn in the last few weeks before his death and that the Japanese Army relied on a Zen mantra similar to "the sword that kills is the sword that saves" to justify their actions in Korea and Manchuria. These are not even the kinds of claims that can be checked. As with McLuhan, Žižek just wants to make as many connective gestures as possible. That's what make both, generally speaking, fun to read but dangerous to the untutored.

This is exactly right. McLuhan liked to refer to some of his writing as "probes" -- a very space race-era locution (let's not even get into the Legmanian implications) meaning, in effect, "I am totally making this up as I go along."

About a dozen years or so back, you heard a lot about a supposed McLuhan "revival" -- he had had been a genius and a prophet, some of his books were reissued, etc. I never believed in this revival for a minute. I had read an enormous amount of McLuhan as a teenager and knew just how much of his work is -- to use the technical, philosophical term -- bullshit.

Not all of it, by any means, but an awful lot of it; and as Goodwin implies, you really have to be judicious about using him to jump start your thinking. During the "revival," so called, there was very little sign that anybody was actually reading McLuhan, let alone thinking about him -- because otherwise there would have been frequent, loud expressions of disgust at the sheer quantity of junk. (By contrast, the fact that Žižek does have readers is evidenced by the fact that even dedicated Žižekians are put out by the logorrhea, tics, and cut-and-paste of some books.)

What happened, I suspect, is that people felt like there ought to be a McLuhan revival. That he ought to have been a deep and insightful thinker about media. And so he was, for about ten minutes each Thursday perhaps, which sure didn't mean he kept quiet the rest of the time.

Anyway, I mention all this because the thought of rereading him is on my agenda of late: His statement that the content of one medium is always an earlier medium, for example, comes to mind a lot, nowadays. The problem is that the wheat and the chaff are pretty much impossible to sift out, and both are mixed up with big chunks of substances even less appetizing.