Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies

by Elena Lamberti

One hundred years after Marshall McLuhan’s birth, Elena Lamberti explores a fundamental, yet neglected aspect of his the solid humanistic roots of his original ‘mosaic’ form of writing. In this investigation of how his famous communication theories were influenced by literature and the arts, Lamberti proposes a new approach to McLuhan’s thought. Lamberti delves into McLuhan’s humanism in light of his work on media and culture, exploring how he began to perceive literature not just as a subject, but a ‘function inseparable from communal existence.’ Lamberti pays particular attention to the central role played by Modernism in the making of his theories, including the writings of Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. Reconnecting McLuhan with his literary past, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic is a demonstration of one of his greatest that literature not only matters, but can help us understand the hidden patterns that rule our environment.

345 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Elena Lamberti is Associate Professor of North American Literatures at the Università di Bologna, Italy, and is a specialist of modernist literature, cultural memory, literature and media ecology, war literature, literature and cognitive sciences. She is the author of eight volumes and of a number of essays and book-chapters on Anglo-American Modernism and American/Canadian literature and culture.

Reviews

[Fred Cheyunski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine Groundwork to Build Upon and Extend – Familiar with the author and reviews of her book, I found that sampling and then reading her text helped me realize its potential significance for media ecology and other fields. My interest goes back to McLuhan’s foundation in literature as well as ways these features of his work could be further utilized.

Differentiating between McLuhan the celebrity vs. the scholar, Lamberti, a literature professor, certainly gives an obliging account of his roots and influences from the literary world, revealing various aspects and connections seemingly ignored to this point. She also gives examples of how McLuhan’s kind of approach and insights might be utilized in examining more recent writers and film makers. While this book provides fine groundwork to build on, there seems to be much to do to extend such approaches in further media studies and in additional uses.

Namely, the contents of the book consist of 13 chapters in an Introduction and three parts. More specifically, after Acknowledgements, a Prologue and chapter (1) - A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan's Poetics. From Figure to Ground, there is PART ONE - THE MOSAIC: (2) Towards Post-Secondary Orality: The Mosaic. Embodying McLuhan; (3) Thus Spoke the Oracle. Oracular Pronouncements; (4) Let the Guru Resound. The Gurus' Guru, (5) A Conscious Modernist Craftsman. A Pioneer of (New) Modernist Studies ;(6) The Hyper-Language of the Media 'Fan'. Media Fan or Grammarian of Media? PART TWO - MODERNIST ASCENDANCIES: (7) McLuhan and Media Studies. Labelling the Media Theorist; (8) From Literature to Media Studies. Conscious Planning; (9) Ford Madox Ford: 'Not Mere Chat'. Literature Matters; (10) James Joyce: Vivisecting Society. Applied Joyce; (11) Ezra Pound: Pursuing Persuasion, Translating Cultures. Epical News; (12) Wyndham Lewis: Blasting Time, Blessing Space. A Proto-postmodernist; and PART THREE - APPLIED MCLUHAN: (13) Literature and Media: A Round Trip. Engaging with or Applying McLuhan? Extensive notes, references and an index are also included.

The aspects of the book that stood out for me were those where I could distill its meaning and potential future utility---particularly context about literature, more about McLuhan’s style and influences, and comparisons with more recent literary and entertainment productions. For instance, early on (pg. 5) Lamberti states that “. . . this book will investigate the literary origins of Marshall McLuhan’s media studies . . . to fully appreciate the potentialities of literature as a function. . . [and] help to reconsider the role literature can still play inside our digital age.” Regarding style, she indicates (pg. 20) that “As a whole, a mosaic creates a pattern in which the assembled components reveal an image which is larger than its parts. . . [as in McLuhan’s] combining literary references with anthropological, philosophical, and scientific observations, and discussing the effects of new media on various environments.” Mid book, Lamberti explains (pgs.106-07) that “For McLuhan, to study modernist poetics was . . . part of understanding the type of societal and technological change . . . he was experiencing . . . He aimed to unveil media languages and processes . . . [with] literature . . . [as] our warning signal, helping us to detect the grammar of change in the environment.” Near the end of the book (pgs. 255-60), she relates ways a more recent writer (J.G. Ballard) and film maker (David Cronenberg) “. . . develop their narrative through symbolic or allegoric renderings of sensorial experience. . . [evoking] ‘a super-civilized sub-primitive man’ back in an all-embracing acoustic space; . . . [there is an awareness] that ‘the new media are not ways of relating us to the old “real” world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will’ . . . “

Among the drawbacks of the book are the amount of material covered and the long sentences that require some “unpacking” to fully understand their import such as above. None the less, Lamberti does us a service such as in tracing McLuhan’s study of the classic trivium in his doctoral thesis to the ways it shows up in his later works as well as suggesting connections to other efforts (e.g., also see my reviews of Gordon’s “McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed,” McLuhan and Watson’s “From Cliché to Archetype,” Scholes’ “The Rise and Fall of English” and ”English After The Fall” as well as wa Thiongo’s “Globalectics,” and “Duarte’s “DataStory”).

In her concluding chapters, Lamberti opines (pg. 231) that “Neither literary critics nor media scholars . . . have systematically applied McLuhan to their own observations. . . For some reasons, his ‘Laws of Media’ have not been successful as an investigative approach . . .” Perhaps as those of us with similar concerns consider Lamberti’s book, these matters will receive more attention.

[Jakubek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marshall McLuhan's name is (most likely) forever tied to his saying, "medium is the message." If you were to ask a liberal arts student who he was, the answer would almost definitely be "The 'medium is the message' guy." That's all I knew about him as well. However, that four-word aphorism casts a large net, and while McLuhan's celebrity has been more or less extinguished outside university campuses, there is always something to be gained when returning to it. So long as we are not dead and can communicate, there will always be a medium and there will always be a message.

The relevance of McLuhan's "global village" is augmented every year, it seems. It's a phrase (or idea) that's more or less accepted among critics of globalism. With every new medium we truncate the bridge between individuals everywhere. Social media are rapid assortments of images, symbols, cultures, etc. As Lamberti phrases it: "McLuhan's mosaic places an environment inside another through its paratactic elaboration, which merges literacy and orality and offers a newly conceived ecological approach to a series of media and environmental issues." Parataxis abounds in contemporary media. Advertisements are one of the readily available examples of this in action. You could be reading an article from the New York Times about the consequences of leather manufacturing and scroll past that fucking Thursday leather boots ad that I see every single day. Twitter will shift from meme to beheading to Fenty ad. Contemporary media are kaleidoscopic in this sense; where a book can mimic the mosaic in that it is static parataxis, interactive media is dynamic and ever-changing. I feel the nature of going from laughing at memes to becoming livid to buying a pair of pants doesn't really allow folks to think these images through individually, or reconcile them as neighbors in a visual space. I'm not gonna scale my ivory tower and proclaim some Luddite back-to-nature nonsense, but the nature of these media is worth thinking about.

The assimilation of media into our consciousness is an eternal worry among many, however, and there are plenty of people who will eagerly (and usually hypocritically) criticize those who use social media. There are a tidy collection of folks who will dramatically and publicly announce their noble renouncement of Twitter, only to yield to their FOMO and return within the year. Lamberti elaborates on McLuhan's insistence to practice a suspension from linear (i.e., judgmental) interpretation, instead opting for a mode of thinking congruent with a mosaic; "He repeated insistently that we should stop saying 'Is this a good thing or a bad thing?' and start saying 'What’s going on?'" The politically minded may jump to say that global injustices demand action now, and there is now time to twiddle our thumbs and think about things. Again, this may be symptomatic of a mind infused with the fast-paced nature of globalization's many amenities. The contextualization of issues among the many we are now privy to can very well produce more nuanced images of broader problems. Approaches to the broader issues before knee-jerk reactions to every emerging injustice could provide a more encompassing solution than before. For those who have played Pandemic, you will almost always lose (badly) if your strategy is to jump from city to city attempting to stanch every new zone of infection, as opposed to collaborating and determining the course of action that leads to broad relief.

Lamberti quotes Ford Maddox Ford toward the end of the book: "The fact is that what humanity desires, passionately and almost before all other things, is a creed. It craves for accepted ideas; it longs for a mind at rest." The sooner we can interpolate information into our personal narrative, the more relieved and confident we feel. That's a nice feeling, but it's not always the most effective one. It's easy to round up the injustices of the world and pin it on one group of people (e.g., the deep state, the corporations, the Communists, etc.), especially when apparently easy patterns present themselves. It's not easy to resist resting on one's haunches and contenting one's self with their grand narrative, but (in my opinion) it beats proselytizing some grand narrative and ending up on the wrong side of history. (Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were, at one point, Nazi sympathizers. I'm happy to say Joyce was never a Nazi sympathizer, but I also don't think we should cancel Pound and Lewis or any individual who was once in the wrong). As Lamberti concludes her book, there is much to be gained from adopting McLuhan's approach to critical thinking, and I hope he is never relegated to a mere four words.