Two weekends ago I was given the chance to speak publicly in Boston at The Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2023 convention thanks to the wonderful followers of my work here, on Twitter, and my YouTube channel. Since then, I’ve lost all taste for the lonely reading of scripts into my webcam, and so am foregoing a recording of this fourth installment in my series on Logos. I will work diligently to ensure that more actual, real, embodied public speaking opportunites present themselves in the future that I might share here with you. Thanks again to everyone who sponsored my trip!

Part IV: Analysis of The Age of Advertising

The 1953 article Age of Advertising, not available online for public reading before today, apparently, was written at at turning point in McLuhan’s strategy for writing to the public. I believe it is the final word in his old strategy of attacking advertisements, and prescribing “laughter” as the cure to awakening from the ailments of modern commercial, secular culture. After this piece, his work started resonating and gaining traction.

I think there are two primary influences in this shift. First was McLuhan’s realization of just how explicitly occult doctrines informed the artistic strategies of modernism, as I’ve laid out in past entries. The second was his allying with Ted Carpenter with the founding of Explorations journal, allowing him to learn and use the anthropology behind contemporary revivals of occultism with renewed purpose.

Magick with a Kellogg’s Special K

This was published September 1953 which is just over a year since his shock at realizing the influence of occultism, and magic, upon the artistic techniques of the Symbolist and later artists. And so his emphasis upon magic and anthropology is pointed and charged.

If, as McLuhan had long claimed, “advertising is… absorbing most of the artistic talent of our world.” and most advertisements are pieces “of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism such as is reputed to outrage the ordinary man when he meets it in an art gallery,” then the through-line from occultism and magic to the commercial advertising industry of the fifties becomes clear.

McLuhan is not using magic in any banal, trite sense—as a marketer might in advertising a certain laundry soap might “magically” lift out stubborn dirt and stains. He is “spilling the secrets,” as it were, of occultism as its practices can be witnessed and observed at their highly level of public visibility and efficacy.

Intelligence and Anthropology

It also comes out just five months after McLuhan and anthropologist Ted Carpenter won their grant from the Ford Foundation toward the establishment of Explorations journal. This provides context to McLuhan’s bold comparison that “The consumer surveys of modern industry can only be likened to the departments of military intelligence maintained by modern governments. And the advertising divisions of these departments of intelligence employ professors of psychology and anthropology.”

Just as McLuhan writes here about anthropologists and sociologists working for advertising, he is himself teaming up with exactly the same sort of folks in order to help the academic world catch up to private commerce. We might then view this piece as something of a final “problem formulation” which he was then to go on to solve with his media studies.

Hereafter, backed by the wide-ranging scholarship of contributors and editors at Explorations, McLuhan would find his way toward to media studies as the solution to the problem of advertising, commercialized art and study, military intelligence, and magic. Appreciation of the media itself—how the trick is done, we might say— is the means of disenchanting the effects of magic at large.

Living in the Future i.e. Not Being Present

Symbolist poetry and painting were magical in theory and in practice, linking objects which had no logical connection. Modern advertising is a form of magic (“kissing sweet in five seconds”), and it employs all the techniques of symbolist art. It is a kind of Arabian Nights world of Aladdin lamps and genii who spring from bottles to do our bidding. In this world, as in the world of Omar Khayyam, the sorry scheme of things as they are is forever being remolded nearer to the heart’s desire. So powerful is this feature of the huge artificial pictorialized neon-lighted environment created by advertising that people have got into the habit of living in that future environment which the ads promise. Not satisfied with the present, they live in those months ahead when the ice-box will be paid for or a course of beauty treatments and a psychiatric analysis will have brought romance and success into their lives. Advertising creates a promised land.

The first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was published in 1859, and became a literary sensation, leading to the creation of many clubs dedicated to its reading and analysis. The twelfth to fifteenth quatrains of the fifth edition are the sixth exhibit in the art analysis book Through the Vanishing Point by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, released 1968. The glosses of the poem by McLuhan and Parker read

  • Like the hokku[haiku], its quatrains omit connectives and make a series of symbolic leaps

  • The youthful Eliot found Omar Khayyám an “almost overwhelming introduction to the new world of feeling.” Omar hoicked him out of the merely visual spaces of Western poetry.

  • In Omar, as in Eliot, there are scarcely any visually connected spaces.

  • Many Victorians sailed to Byzantium with Omar Khayyám before Yeats set up his tour [i.e. Yeats’ 1889 poem Sailing to Byzantium].

The relevance to the total poem to the effects of advertising McLuhan ascribes might be evidenced in the following verses:

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcass crippled to abide?

‘Tis but a Tent where takes his one day’s rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another Guest.
—XLIVth and XLVth quatrain

With his media work, he’d focus on how the discontinuities behind “magic” are both made possible and often unintentionally created within our environment by widespread use of electronics, which can short-circuit causality in sensorily-apparant physical space by instantaneous action over distances. While this essay is called The Age of Advertising, McLuhan would go on from here to refer to our age as that of electricity, or “The Marconi Galaxy” in reference to the inventor of radio.

I infer that the change in focus from artist-shaman sell-outs to commercialism and intelligence gathering, to the deeper enabling media of electronics (telegraph, radio, telephone, pre-computer data-processing machines, computers) was a deliberate step in dethroning the “magicians” from their place of power.

The “magical” ability of advertising to manipulate time and space, such as to create an always-future “promised land” to which is only rarely actually “delivered” is generalized, then, into the mind-body split engendered by typography, as he elaborates in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Totem Animals

With typography, the “visual space,” or spatial sensibility engendered by the eye unmoored from speech hearing by easy silent-reading, lead to appreciation of abstraction. Newtonian physics, Cartesian space, accounting, and complex machinery reigned in such a continuous world of connected logical propositions and mechanical cause and effect.

But with modern advertising since, apparently, the circus master P. T. Barnum (famous for his phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute”), the world of media to which the individual “consumer” is a multi-sensory world of dreams in full living technicolor.

McLuhan is still relying on the language of the anthropology of the early-mid 20th century when he here writes

National brands of commodities like Coca-Cola or Lucky Strikes have a way of becoming a kind of totemistic institution. Totem societies were held together collectively by the totem plant or animal. A man was not a member of the Kangaroo clan or tribe. He was a kangaroo. He participated in the life of the kangaroo with his brothers. It was a kind of mystic communion or participation. Advertising, with its appeal to collective emotion, has set up national brands and totems for communal participation.

Later, when he moves towards his media studies, he’d speak about such “involvement” as a feature of “cool media” which uses all of the senses, creating “corporate identities” instead of individuals. The term “corporate” is most certainly an intentional pun, ostensibly meaning collectivist, but nakedly alluding to the advertisers and corporations which his earlier, advertisement-focused writing was directly attacking.

It might be difficult to understand how it is that McLuhan was able to “predict” everyone’s interinvolvement with one another, the turning of consumers into producers, before the internet and “social media” made direct interaction between end-users en masse a common phenomenon. That is a bias of our appreciation of the instantaneity of electrical communication. Today most cybernetic feedback loops are instant, and so our direct interaction with each other online is obvious. The feedback loop between market analysis, advertisement planning and production, roll-out, and effect measurement in legacy media, by contrast, has historically been a matter of months or, at best, weeks. Nevertheless, for a century our direct purchasing decisions, let alone responses to surveys and polls, have been a feeding of our selves into a machine which directly impacts everyone else.

What’s changed in the market is the instantaneity of feedback, and the level of personalization possible. This second point might best be illustrated by the movement toward consideration of the self as a “brand.” We are still corporate in a collective sense, but simultaneously will speak as though being a corporation of one. So long as one is spilling one’s self into the electric machine, and simultaneously becoming its contents, the sort of individualism which was created by the printing press is still rendered impossible to cultivate.

The Mind/Banana Split

The transformation of the mind-body split from merger with abstract, lineal, typographical space toward multi-sensory representations in modern media was maintained in both cases by ignorance of the medium underlying the conveyance of the dream-world of the dream-self to the real physical body. Personal manifestation of one’s identity, or “incarnation” in the Christian theological sense, could only be discontinuous or out-of-direct touch with the material world within which the body existed when one ignored the material apparatuses of illusion or conveyance of meaning. Otherwise, the mimesis natural to human perception (c.f. Ted Carpenter’s book They Became What They Beheld) would skip over the material world, leading to merger of self with media content. And the content of art which results from mass surveying and analysing of normalized trends through demographic study makes what it is you are becoming to be everyone else.

McLuhan focus on the media itself was always about revealing the magicians tricks, and returning the individual to a consciously cognitive and physical relation to and interface with the actual material world. When he was writing about artists selling out to commercial interests and governmental/supergovernmental agencies, it was advertisers and, implicitly, propagandists he was focusing on. He went nowhere with his work. But when he switched from “Art” to all human artifice, McLuhan was finally able to begin delivering real answers and strategies for personal salvation from the maelstrom.