Culture Is Our Business

340 Pages·2015·39.831 MB·English

by  Marshall McLuhan

Marshall
$3.95
Mcliiihan
Culture
Is
Our
Business
War
Equals Education
Violence Is the Quest For Identity
Culture Our Business
Is
Who
says so?
We
do. Americasaysso, andMarshalMc-
Luhan diagnoses our message to history in
this startling new book that picks up where
his classic The Mechanical Bride left off.
Culture Is Our Business examines our civ-
ilization as it manifests itself through the
century's one great art form, advertising.
Divided into twenty-seven chapters, this
tour guide to the Inner Space Age reveals
our values (Help Beautify Our lunkyards,
Throw Something Lovely Away . our
. . "),
fears ("Yes, We Have No Nirvanas"), our
joys ("Lower the Age of Puberty"), our toys
("The Carsophagus"), ourselves.
Sample ads illustrate the gnomic, always
witty, insightful text. E.g.: In the country of
the blind the one-eyed man is not king. He
is an hallucinated idiot. The new proletariat
is not the poor but the affluent. The poor re-
tain their identities and goal-orientation.
The rich have been "scrubbed" and have
no goals left. Hence the affluent young are
the violent in quest of identity.
) )
BOOKS BY MARSHALL McLUHAN
The Mechanical Bride:
Man
Folklore of Industrial
Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man
The Gutenberg Galaxy:
The Making of Typographic Man
Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations
The Medium Is the Massage
(with Quentin Fiore)
War and Peace in the Global Village
(with Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel
Through the Vanishing Point:
Space in Poetry and Painting
(with Harley Parker)
Selected Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson
(Editor)
Voices of Literature:
Volumes One and Two
(Richard J. Schoeck, Co-editor)
Counterblast:
(with Harley Parker)
The Interior Landscape:
The Literary Criticism of
Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962
(selected, compiled, and edited
by Eugene McNamara
Marshall
McLuhan
Culture
Is
Our
Business
Ballantine Books • NewYork
r
7
Copyright© 1970 by McLuhan Associates, Limited
All rights reserved.
Library ofCongress Catalog Card Number: 78-9581
SBN 345-02695-0-395
Thisedition published by arrangementwith McGraw-Hill, Inc.
First Printing: May, 1972
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC/An Intext Publisher
101 Fifth Avenue, NewYork, N.Y. 10003
INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION
This is a book of exploration and discovery. American ads are a
world offestivityand celebration. Theworld ofthe ad istheworld of
20th centuryfolkart. That is,thead is a meeting placeofall thearts
and all the skills and all the media ofthe American environment.
JamesJoyce recognized the ad asthe centreoffolkart in ourtime
when he made Leopold Bloom, ad man and space salesman, the hero
ofUlysses. Each night hisfinal meditationswere:
Of some one sole unique advertisementto cause passers to
stop in wonder, a poster novelty,with all extraneous accretions
excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficientterms not
exceeding the span ofcasual vision and congruouswith
thevelocityof modern life.
{Ulysses—p. 641)
Advertising isthe garmentof abundance. Itwould be quite different
and even useless in the U.S.S.R. The world of our ads represents a
Masque-like "puton " ofall the motifsand actionsofourtime. The
climate of advertising responds instantly to any social change, making
ads in themselves an invaluable means of knowing "where it's at."
The phrase "where it's at" isvery appropriate for anybodystudying
the new patternsofads orofnews "leaks." The phrase notonly
concerns a focal image, but expresses a kind of "consensuality" of
persons, places, andthings in a single instantofawareness. Invented in
theageof rock musicto indicateareasof relevance and aliveness,
the phraseconveysa resonantand acoustic kind ofawareness
quite alien to anything like "clocktime."
Thetitleofthis bookalso pointstoa flip in American societyfrom
hardwaretosoftware. With the coming ofTV,theconsumerwas
replaced bythe active participant. It has beenthesame inthe new
information serviceswherethemakingof news has replaced
reporting. In advertising,as in newsservices,the objectsand the means
used are seeminglyoutofall ratiotothe endsserved. But in shifting
from hardwaretosoftware,and from productsto processes,and from
goalsto rolessinceTV,America hasentered a phaseofculture in
which the old mechanical specialisms,whether of industryorofthe
organization chart, have yielded to new forms and images.
In up-dating his Death of a Salesman (McCall's, July, 1970)
Arthur Millerwrote: "The older generation hasan investment in waste
and self-denial, and when these are mocked, honour is seemingly
soiled and degraded " What has happened sincethe Death ofa
Salesman (indeed,the Death of a Salesman was an early indication
that itwas happening) has been the creation ofa world-wide
information environment. Information itself has become by far our
largest business and commodity.
Advertising as information has long been supposed to be primarily
forthe purpose of moving products. It has not been sufficiently
noticed that advertising is itselfan information commodityfar greater
than anything that itadvertises. That iswhy it is no longer possible ,
to classify itas a mere means ofselling goods and services. Long ago,
audience studies revealed thatthe people who 'heed" the ads are
mostlythose who already own the product in question. In a word,
advertising provides the corporate meaning for the experience ofthe
private owner. That isto say, ads can be studied as complexsocial
events and as "meanings" minusthe experience ofthe commodities
in question. Advertising can be taken as a vastentertainmentfar
beyond the scope of anything Hollywood or the networks have ever
attempted. Even the individual ads can be seen asvorticesof
powerthat "put us on " as artformsdo.
There will be a timewhen theseformswill fetch top pricesatSotheby's
because it is an absolute surety in all cultural matters, that "the more
there were, the fewerthere are." Elizabethan ads or hand-bills are as
rare as Shakespearefolios. Thesocial studentofthefuturewill pore
overthe inclusive dramas embodied in our advertisements and hewill
be rewarded as much asthe reader ofthis book.
Contents
FLIP 15
A Handful of Pills
A Runaway World?
Japan Airlines
1.
Pussycat
Tired of Feeling Like a Commuter?
BREAKDOWN AS BREAKTHROUGH 27
Hose-and-Ladder Division
2 Turn for the Worse
One of the Nicest Things About Being
Big is the Luxury of Thinking Little
uOne Man's Mede Is Another Man's
Persian"
The Frustrated Radio Announcer:
Blowing Both Horns of His Dilemma
CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS 39
End of the "Muddle Crass" and the
3 Sugar Daddies
Grow Food
T.S. Eliot on "The Frontier of Criticism"
Fake Vermeer
All but Those First Four Notes
POLITICAL GAP 51
4 Run for Your Life
America Is Not Yours
The Emperor's New Clothes
We
Are Putting Out Our Political
Language and Quitting the Paley
O'Logical Scene?
Lead Kindly Fowl
VIOLENCE IS THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY_63
Dr. Spock's Spooks—Yippee—yap!
5
The Military Gap
Alis, Alas, She Broke the Glass
The Graduate, i.e., Kids of Twelve and
Under
Psychological Interrogation
GOALS VERSUS IMAGES 75
Whorled without Aimed
Gilt Feelings
6.
Obsolete on the Day of Graduation
Helix Culpa—Return of ESP
(HOT/COOL) GROOVY: RUT OR GRAVE?_85
7 Hotfoot
When the Tag Goes On
Teeth in It
Who My
Tarzan's Last Yell: Greased Vine?
Let's Bury the Hatchet in the Skull of Our
Rival
CENTRALISM VERSUS DECEXTRALISM_97
Your Son Runs Away from Home,
If
8 He's Probably Following in Your
Footsteps
Holmes and the Bureaucrat
No Business Is an Island
TV: Crisis versus Service
Growth Country
THE POOL OF SPACE __109
9 Touch as Interval
Keep in Touch
Come Out Fighting!
Edison and Braille
Baseball, R.I.P.