There are (at least) three «introductions» to «Understanding Media» (in English.) Two by McLuhan and one by Lewis Lapham.
The original begins «James Reston . . .» and it appears in all the printed versions I have found. For the paperback edition, there is an «Introduction to the Second Edition» (which is also called «Preface to the Third Printing» in later hardbound editions) that begins «Jack Parr . . . »
It is in the «Jack Parr» essay that McLuhan introduces the term «pattern recognition» which he directly contrasts to both «classification» and «the Ideas» — which, in turn, is a reference to the Great Books program of Mortimer Alder and Robert Hutchins from the Univ. of Chicago.
It is important to note that for McLuhan these were important matters and are based on an enduring moral conflict between two warring sensibilities . . . a conflict which, in turn, provides the structure of his PhD thesis — Grammarians vs. Dialecticians.
McLuhan’s relationship to the «Great Books of the Western World» was arguably pivotal in his life, however it only rates two indirect references in the published «Letters»:
1) In a March 1944 letter to Father J Stanley Murphy, CSB (Registrar of Assumption College), McLuhan says, «I can do a thing with a text which Adler and Hutchins are always talking about but never do.» (p. 157, footnoted in Marchand’s «Marshall McLuhan» but not shown in the «Letters» index.)
2) In a Jan. 1946 letter to Father Clement McNaspy, SJ (also at Assumption College), McLuhan says, «It seems obvious that we must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations, and, with it own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic. There is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough to be known that the operator is a Christian. This job must be conducted on every front — every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics . . . Hutchins and Adler have a part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates. Dialectics and erudition are needed, but, without the sharp focusing of training in moral sensibility, futile.» (p. 180, w/ footnote about Hutchins and Adler, which also mentions the highly critical «Great Books» section that would later appear in «The Mechanical Bride» in 1951 and McLuhan’s trip to UofChicago later in 1946.)
Apart from this brief mention in the footnote, there are no published letters about McLuhan’s trip to Chicago.
Marchand make a big deal of the June 1946 trip McLuhan made to UofChicago with Cleanth Brooks but fails to fully understand what was going on. He says:
«To escape from poverty, McLuhan dreamed of various projects, One of the more exciting resulted when Cleanth Brooks asked him to visit the University of Chicago . . . Brooks had left that university disappointed with its rigorously ‘logical’ approach to literary criticism. Robert Hutchins, then president of the university and ally of Mortimer Adler in the Great Books approach to education, had asked Brooks, whose reputation as a literary critic was then steadily rising, to speak to him personally about what might need to be changed. Brooks agreed on the condition that McLuhan accompany him. Brooks had been enormously impressed by McLuhan’s Cambridge thesis and its historical review of the trivium. That account, he felt, had a direct bearing on what was wrong with the University of Chicago.
[Here Marchand, one of the few who had read McLuhan’s thesis in 1989, let’s his readers down by not describing the moral conflict that provides the structure to «The Classical Trivium.» Most likely he didn’t understand what McLuhan had written or why Brooks found it important. In the first reference to Brooks in the «Letters,» dated May 1946 to Felix Giovanelli, a month before his trip to Chicago, McLuhan says, «I begin to see deeper into the consciousness of Poe and Faulkner. Their rage is relatively noble. Rooted in a community born in the decadence of the Greek revival they were peculiarly alive to the impact of technology . . . Inner exhaustion was called on to fight an empty robot. A nightmare of nullity. And yet symbolically in such as Tate and Brooks, note a modest confidence in renewal of the human condition. Not the abstract assertion of such a possibility as in Mumford the urbanite, but the quiet cultivation of a positive *grammatica*. Stirrings, however dim, of a genuine culture. Knowledge and supply of a real pabulum. That’s where, I too, take my stand.» (p.184) «Pabulum» means «food, nourishment» and also «feed, guard, protect.»]
«In June 1946 McLuhan went to Chicago with Brooks and argued the case for change. Basically he told Hutchins that if he wanted to produce graduates who were capable of ‘learned eloquence’ instead of mere technical expertise — as Hutchins had told the world he was going to do — then he would have to do something about his deans, who were all complete dialecticians, strangers to rhetoric and grammar . . . «McLuhan returned from Chicago with more than his usual share of optimism, sat down, and wrote a 10,000-word brief expanding on what he had said at the meeting . . . McLuhan, in not so subtle fashion, urged Hutchins to hire him and a few friends to take over his program in the humanities. As McLuhan wrote to one those old friends form St. Louis, Felix Giovanelli, Hutchins was being offered a plan to revamp his university that would allow McLuhan, Brooks, Muller-Thym, Giovanelli and others to from a cadre of New Critics and like-minded metaphysicians on his campus. The ‘circle of fine intellects’ McLuhan had been dreaming of since his undergraduate days in Manitoba would be given an institutional power base and institutional prestige.» (p.90, quoting an unpublished and undated letter.)
Marchand didn’t have a good grasp on the context of these meetings or of the magnitude of the underlying conflict. Of course, this «project» was doomed from the beginning. McLuhan also probably didn’t know what or who he was dealing with. This «invitation» was part of an attempt by Hutchins and others to test the capabilities and fortitude of the Catholic intellectuals of his time, which included forays to Marquette and elsewhere. In 1950, those aligned with Hutchins et al, published «The Authoritarian Personality,» a book that formed a foundation for the field of Social Psychology and was based on the notion that those who followed the path advocated by those like McLuhan were «proto-fascists» and were to be kept away from educating the youth.
McLuhan had secured his position at the University of Toronto in May 1946, a month before his trip to Chicago.
The events in Chicago aren’t mentioned in Terrence Gordon’s biography and there are no references to either Hutchins or Brooks in his index, although he does quote from the letter to Father McNaspy, ending the quote before McLuhan mentions Hutchins and Adler.
(to be continued . . . )
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
Blog de Octavio Islas 