One very modern off-shoot of this philosophy is the argument (distraction in my opinion) over the role of social media in popular rebellion. Does the application of Twitter to 21st century society result in occupations, riots and strikes? It's certainly a more comforting conclusion than admitting people over the world are tired, poor and fed up with living under their rulers.
But McLuhan was not a member of the counter-culture. He was a professor of English Literature, a public intellectual who appeared an adverts and movies. He was a practising Catholic. He may have been friends with Timothy Leary, but he was also on close terms with people like Wyndham Lewis.
But he was an educator, an educator with a very keen sense of the crisis in education, which arose out of post-war society, its contradictions, and came to be known as the Generation Gap.
Capitalism needed an educated, skilled workforce more than ever. Educational opportunities grew. Millions of young people growing up in the core capitalist countries for the first time had the chance to go into Higher Education and so reap the rewards of a better life. At the same time the rigorous application of capitalist norms to a formerly artisan-like HE system generated conflict, conflict between the new mode of intellectual production and the relations of production. The lecturer was slowly proletarianised. The student, promised intellectual liberation, was subjected to fusty, paternal supervision and backward rules. For example: the student struggle in France 1968, which set off the great strike in May, began as a struggle over the right of male students to visit female dorms overnight.
McLuhan was a lecturer during this period of change. He experienced the shift when he began teaching. Though only a few years older than his students, he felt an insurmountable gap between him and them. The difference, he thought, was in the mode of understanding. He was steeped in the literate, sequential and disinterested mode of thought. His students were saturated by modern media and its effects. Their understanding was post-literate, non-linear and deeply involved.
He saw this as the root of the conflict, the crisis of education (and of society at large). It was this he studied. His solutions were humane, intellectual and appropriately utopian – more designed to provoke debate rather than resolve it. His answer was critical reflection, we had to understand the changes we were going through as a society in order to cope with them. Cutting edge thought, and in particular art were to lead the way.
The Marxist response is clear. Firstly, culture is ambiguous. For human history so far every document of civilisation has also been a document of barbarism. In order to have Socrates you also had to have slaves. The prevailing culture of any class society is determined by that society's ruling class, their prerogatives, their preoccupations. An obsolete way of thinking does not simply give way to critical reflection, which brings us onto the second point, Consciousness has its basis in material reality. As Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach, criticism of heaven takes place on earth.
I want to conclude with two quotes, from Challenge and Collapse, the final chapter of the opening section of Understanding Media, one which Marxists should find intriguing:
Perhaps the most obvious “closure”... of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programmes.
This is a close relation to the Marxist observation that a society does not create problems for which it does not already have solutions. There is no solution to bad weather therefore it is not a problem. There is a solution to poor harvests, to food speculation and starvation. These things are problems. While McLuhan's solutions may be technocratic, we can accept what he is saying here. But, McLuhan continues:
The power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing - a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the “content”of public programmes... It is ridiculous to talk of “what the public wants” played over its own nerves... Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we really don't have any rights left.This is a vital point, that we can all agree with. However you define 'the media', broadly or narrowly, they are our mode of existence, alienated from us and used against us. We take them back under our control in order to emancipate ourselves.