Introduction 5 Newspaper ads and television commercials are rooted in the ancient oratorical tradition, as Joyce has shown in the “AEolus,” or newspaper, episode of Ulysses which features a mass of up-dated rhetorical figures. All communication in any medium carries out a rhetorical agenda. McLuhan’s great talent is in exposing these deep grounds to electric conditions. W.B.Yeats always declined to explain his poems on the grounds that that would tend to limit their suggestibility. He required his readers to get involved with the poetry. Similarly, in all electric media, “the user” must learn to enter into the communication process, to become a sort of co-producer. Under electric conditions, each object is not merely itself but represents a manifold process which evades simple, logical definition, as any astute admirer of Picasso, Klee, or Mondrian knows. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own times. He is the man of integral awareness. (Understanding Media, 65) In some ways, McLuhan was closer to such artists in his perceptions: a Kandinsky who held that “the environment is the composition,” and that “objects have to be considered in the light of the whole.” His art, especially apparent in The Gutenberg Galaxy, of connecting Medieval and early Renaissance forms to present electric conditions made him seem a spectacular advance on the blindness of specialist scholarship. In the rage against McLuhan and his popularity we often heard howls, inside and out of academe, of ignorance and fear from infuriated minions of a previous century’s hold on public consciousness. The university always wants facts, evidence, and argument. Even the humanists had for too long managed to remain innocent of the implications of the theories of uncertainty, probability, complementarity, and incompleteness. This general inheritance from particle physics reinstated the usefulness of paradox for understanding the chaotic array of conflicting truths that interpretive media created. In the golden groves, the strident debate produced maniacs of Luddite interpretation, some with blood in their eyes. At one point, in the late 1960s, a rumour surfaced that a major U.S. magazine had put out a contract on McLuhan and was offering big money for a name who would “waste” him in print. Hugh Kenner, we know, refused this offer. The jealousies gelled in a comic aspic of misinterpretations, many critics suspended in postures of arrested awareness, in gestures of alarm and admonition. McLuhan’s desire to be perceived, at one level, as a satirist could not have been more deliciously realized. A Dunciad of detractors queued up to rail against what they saw as an assault on civilization. This was the “what nonsense” stage in all its violent petulance. Each adversary looked furiously for the hook of a factual mistake to hang his mad hat on. McLuhan’s sympathies were with the past, with the civilized literate life. He understood better than most that the future is always a new way of retrieving the past. The only rational indictment of his work would be that he relied too much on the past, that his work, in places, was extremely erudite. His was the first coherent interpretation of the electric world and it required a rethinking of everything. There was resistance. One should not have expected the dinosaurs blissfully to embrace their own ends. No wonder he was not taken immediately