Essential McLuhan 8 McLuhan, at base a grammarian, required absolutely the continual collegial dialogue that was the ground for his work. Even as far back as the group engaged in the Explorations project (McLuhan, Tom Easterbrook, Ted Carpenter, and others), the McLuhan style was one of discussion geared to discovery. He was a first-rate investigator who often found meaningful patterns in the work of others that they themselves had not perceived. Most importantly, he thrived on the inputs of the best of those few around him who could play the game close to his level of intensity. You are hereby invited to engage in this process of seeking illumination by learning to probe for underlying structure in information. Read, criticize, and remember that McLuhan was quite prepared to change any statement that didn’t hold up under continual probing. Go on to the new places where this material leads. VI Essential McLuhan is divided into four sections. Within each division the selections run chronologically. Part I, “Culture as Business,” investigates the merger of culture and business in the sense of taking advertising and entertainment seriously as phenomena of fundamental cultural importance. McLuhan was the first systematically to study the shift of business, extended by media, to making and marketing culture. He and his one-time partner, anthropologist Ted Carpenter, along with Edward Hall, used the techniques of modern anthropology to discover the “out-of-awareness” aspects of culture, the “hidden grounds,” as McLuhan came to call this domain of the deep underlying structure of information. “Print and the Electric Revolution,” Part II, presents key excerpts of the groundbreaking works on the revolution of literacy that Gutenberg’s technology gave the world. That great event is contrasted with formative pieces on the electric revolution and the turbulent shift provoked by this pervasive, globalizing technology. This transformation of all communication systems by electric process is the crux of McLuhan’s work and is what we want to represent in these key excerpts. The selections are carefully chosen to epitomize the fundamental contrast between print and its complementary electric mass media. The “Oral McLuhan” who dominates Part III is closest to the essence of the man himself. He was at his best “dialoguing” with friends and colleagues. The discoveries he made often occurred when in full flight of conversation. Whoever said “I never learn anything when I’m talking,” it surely wasn’t McLuhan; he always made “breakthroughs” during the high-powered chats some of us were privileged to share. Like Coleridge, McLuhan impressed everyone in person as a man of enormous learning and perception, and by the elegance of his spontaneous speech. The Playboy article especially has caught the rhythm of McLuhan’s mind in the elegant flow of investigative repartee. The selections in Part IV, “Culture and Art: Figures and Grounds,” exemplify McLuhan’s erudite playfulness. He works a trope or two on Carl Jung and sheds new light on the notion of archetypal power. (Who would have thought anyone could alter the idea of an archetype after the dominance of that area by Jung?) Art is very serious, high- powered play, and the intrusion of popular culture into the arena of art has been one of the most important new aspects of Western culture.