Luckily for U of T, there is a group of dedicated researchers who are continually showing why Marshall McLuhan’s ideas are relevant today. Many often forget that McLuhan, one of the most influential philosophers and media theorists of the 20th Century, had close connections with this school.
Undoubtedly his connection to the university has been overlooked at some points in the 24 years since his death. But Andrew Chrystall and Richard Pope, two young McLuhan Fellows at U of T’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, are proof of a growing relevance for McLuhan’s work and why his ideas remain just as relevant today as when he wrote them just over 30 years ago.
Chrystall sees Marshall McLuhan’s writing and poetics as being “relevant today, as they provide a pattern for peaceful living and existence in this palaeolithic age of terror.”
According to Pope, McLuhan “teaches us how to train our perceptions for the digital age-allowing us to understand the environment in which we live.”
The idea of having tools that allow for this may seem like something that students, in an ideal world, would like to come away from university with. However idealistic that seems, discussion of just this sort of tool building and their use in modern societies was exactly what those organizing U of T’s contributions to the McLuhan International Festival of the Future were working towards.
Now in its second year (following a trial run last year), the festival took advantage of the continuing work of interpreting McLuhan and applying his insights into culture, technology, and media to wider problems.
The centre itself sits tucked behind St. Michael’s College at the rear of houses fronting Queen’s Park Circle. There, in a nondescript coach house which once held carriages that ferried the wealthy around Toronto, a dedicated group provides insights into how McLuhan’s thinking can serve as a method to understand and travel through our modern complex and technology-influenced world.
Just as it was in Marshall McLuhan’s day, the Centre for Culture and Technology remains a somewhat hidden treasure. On October 12, the centre opened its doors to festival-goers and members of the general public for a series of intense discussions, debates, and explorations of his work and evolving influence.
But why McLuhan and why now? After all, since his death, there have been several periods of re-invigoration, as well as those when interest in his work has waned.
Bob Dobbs, former archivist of McLuhan’s work, replies, “McLuhan is a hidden ground for understanding our time. He is relevant for students looking to understand the situation that they’re in right now. This is because he established a new version of an ancient tradition-the person who looks at the world and gives you another way to understand and translate it, and he provides an anti-environment to describe what’s going on.”
Mark Federman, chief strategist at the Centre for Culture and Technology, explained McLuhan’s continuing relevance in that “he provides us with a framework from which we can observe the effects of what we are doing to ourselves and our world.” He went on to explain that “we… then get to take control of these forces and bring about the effects that we want and thereby create the world that we want.”
The idea of celebrating McLuhan’s work and his influences in a popular setting is long overdue. However, how to put together a festival in honour of a thinker as diverse as he was posed a considerable challenge. The best thing that the organizers could do was to provide a venue and some structure that would allow a series of “happenings” to take place.
This was in the hope that those familiar with his work would discuss and help others to learn something of it and how this influences where we are now. When this was realized, it met with considerable success and many of the discussions went well beyond their 11:00 p.m. scheduled endings.
Even the explanations can be difficult at times, though. As Federman made clear, you need to be able to put yourself in McLuhan’s mind to a certain extent, in order to begin reading his work properly.
“To understand McLuhan you have to read him, but to read him you have to understand him. You can either sneak up on him or you can take him on his own terms.”
Federman explained that in order to understand him you need to fully understand how he used language, and how his purpose was to wake up the world-yet this could not merely be done with a statement of his ideas. Instead, McLuhan chose a more effective way, which required the reader to take his writing apart and not approach it from a traditional academic point of view.
The discussions that ensued during the week at the coach house also took on a McLuhanesque sense in that they were full of ideas that would result in eventual deviation as connections with the audience were made. Participants who had been there during the famous weekly sessions that were held in the coach house during McLuhan’s time at the centre (1967-1980) commented that the festival’s discussions were very much in the same tradition as those he had with his students.
With the discussions and interest generated by the festival, it is clear the McLuhan’s work will continue to be applied to the modern condition. The festival will continue to grow as well if it can attract the sort of thinkers that were present at the coach house for the week.
McLuhan would have seen the future of the festival and the discussions as being a continuation of a tradition he started at the centre. As Dobbs explains: “McLuhan was the greatest futurist because he used the past and the present to describe the future. This is because the present always was invisible anyway. He said that he never predicts the future, he only describes what has already happened, but people think that’s the future because they don’t really know what has just happened. In fact, McLuhan warns us-don’t look back, the future may be gaining on you.”
