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Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular `McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world.McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as `being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects. He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought.

The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a `modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-commodification in art, business, and popular culture.

McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today. ... Read more

Product Description
Until now, no book has explored the full expanse of Marshall McLuhan's thinking. Here we have assembled alongside his most prescient aphorisms excerpts from the full range of his astounding life's work. One revolutionary book distills the wisdom and wit of the man who explained to us the "the medium is the message" and that we are "now living in a global village", that "privacy invasion is now our most important knowledge industry" and that "obsolescence is the moment of superabundance".

Cover to cover, Anthology is not only one hundred percent McLuhan's own words, these are McLuhan's finest words. McLuhan called these bold perceptions probes and today they gleam like gems embedded everywhere in his life's output - in his books, in more than 200 speeches, in his classes (especially the Monday Night Seminars), and most of all in the nearly 700 shorter writings that he published between 1945 and 1980. In recent years, his son Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns have combed through all these sources to compile and edit what has become Anthology - The Book of Probes.

The collection is so fresh that most probes will be new to even the most avid readers of McLuhan, and opens a new portal to McLuhan's mind, one that promises to change the ways in which we recognize and interpret McLuhan in the future. Readers will marvel at how the consistency, the clarity of concept, and the abundant wealth of observations, some made twenty or thirty years apart, dovetail to form a whole.

Art Director and Designer David Carson presents McLuhan's images with new insight, and has built a work of art that is reminiscent of those lasting works permanently commissioned and interpreted by new generations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

The book is like a review ofpre-filesharing culture
The art in THE BOOK OF PROBES starts early, with pictures and computer graphics generated by David Carson going out of the blue and into the black on pages 4-400 including 33 pages preceding the author, title, list of editors, and contents, which lists "Probes 8 - 545" for pages that have a mixture of such art, Commentary on pages 403-448 and Fragments, before the Album with regular pictures, explanations, and credits on pages 547-574.People familiar with the book will become able to find portions by checking the color of the edges of the pages.Pages 4-33 and 54-397 are white along the bottom, in a strip which includes tiny page numbers; pages 402-425 (except for the yellow strip on the bottom of pages 405-406) have the numbers in a blue strip; pages 440-449 have a green bottom strip; etc.The primary concern is with communication, but I would like to pick up the pieces in the alphabetically arranged Fragments that suggest how closely the atomic nature of evidence of modernity includes expectations of a mushroom cloud in our future.

"All invention is a form of bodily fission, with the ensuing chain reaction in the body and the environment."(p. 456).

"Light is information without `content,' much as the missile is a vehicle without the additions of wheel or highway.As the missile is a self-contained transportation system that consumes not only fuel but its engine, so light is a self-contained communication system in which the medium is the message."(p. 487).

"Rapid changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons."(p. 503).

"The environment always manages somehow to be invisible.Only the content, the previous environment, is noticeable.The BOMB itself became content, having had a short reign as environment."(p. 517).

"The metropolis is obsolete.Ask the Army."(p. 524).

"Western literate man is easily inclined to make moral protests, but is seemingly incapable of recognizing the formal or `acoustic' structure of situations which are disturbing and destroying him."(p. 538).

I am getting off of the subject, as modern readers tend to do, but I have so many concerns that I am worried about why the following biological observation applies so well to mass politics:

"Smoothness and repetitive order, the attributes of teeth, enter into the very nature of the power structure."(p. 505).

The pages with a green strip on the bottom, 441-448, contain "McLuhan and Saussure" by W. Terence Gordon.Saussure's "Course in General Linguuistics" predicted that universal laws of semiotics could be discovered, and McLuhan used `LOM' as his note for Laws of Media "over and over and listing the passages where Saussure's groundwork buttressed the emerging synthesis of ideas that McLuhan would articulate first in 1977 and fully explore in the posthumously published Laws of Media (1988)."(p. 442).Politics is largely the result of accepted terminologies for approaching areas that are perceived as problems, particularly in democracies, where a person's politics provides some frame of reference for picking the future he or she would prefer."To use a brand of car, drink, smoke or food that is nationally advertised gives a man the feeling that he belongs to something bigger than himself."(p. 535).Spending a trillion dollars for a strategic weapons system that could destroy parts of our world which do not conform to our wishes is like the icing on the cake of modern life.

A Useful Tool
First of all, I'm baffled about previous posters claiming Carson is not the designer here with no explanation for the charge. Secondly, does it really matter if Carson assistants contributed under his guidance (if that be the case)?

I'm a big fan of Marshall McLuhan and Carson, so I was pre-disposed to a welcome reception of this volume, and indeed I feel it delivers the goods. At times Carson's designs appear perhaps unnecessarily minimalist, until one considers what must be his reverence for the top billing - McLuhan's probes. McLuhan's 'probes' are ironizable (self-deconstructing) conceptual assertions intended to serve the phenomenological purpose of disclosing new percepts about the world. And in this way the book delivers effectively if used as such.

Happy probing..

Keep Probing for McLuhan
Reading the advance hype for this book got me very excited. At last! I can understand Marshall McLuhan! Don't get me wrong. It's not that I haven't encountered MM before, but understanding him eluded me. I had hoped for more deluxe versions of the Quentin Fiore collaborations: War and Peace in the Global Village and The Medium is the Massage. But instead of timely, interesting photos, David Carson resorts to typography to frame pithy little McLuhan epigrams. Like those other two books, you at least get your shots of MM one line at a time, and some of the lines are very memorable indeed. Yes, I'm convinced Marshall McLuhan was a prophet (small "P" or maybe big "p"), and that everything he said has already happened. We live in a global village full of hot and cool media; the medium is the message. How obvious it all seems. Reading this book is ancient history. It's already happened. I just wish I could understand it better. Don't bother with the DaVinci code. Crack the McLuhan code and we will all know what's going on. This book reinvents "coffee table books"--it's an 8 inch square two inches thick--so it goes well on little coffee tables from Ikea. I see why they didn't use photos--Corbis owns them all, unlike the public domain galleries in the two earlier books cited (which dazzlingly show more than they tell). Someone new to McLuhan, finding Probes on the tiny coffee table, would probably drink it in, like someone quaffing a particularly good drink. But having finished the tumbler, they'd likely wander off to find the hostess and a refill, asking where she learned her mixology. Those reading, or rather encountering, Probes will also be left inquiring about McLuhan, and probing for more understanding.

who really designed this book
The design in this book is great and was obviously not really designed by David Carson at ALL.

read this book
"Like Kafka and Freud, McLuhan is a writer who is often referred to or quoted without being understood, resulting in a shorthand for cultural conditions that everyone recognizes but few can articulate. This title provides a refreshing representation of the philosopher's work, artfully arraying his ideas as brief statements in the space of the page and setting them against stunning imagery and design work by David Carson." ... Read more

Product Description
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases global village and the medium is the message in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Five stars for McLuhan, four stars for this edition
Marshall McLuhan is such an interesting figure. His oracular commentary on media is so much more than the "sci-fi nerdiness" that some 21st century critics accuse him of. If anything, his ideas are even more applicable today with new mediums such as the Internet. He's far more than a 60s craze - he's still worth reading.

Since most will probably already have an opinion or familiarity with his work, I'll restrict my comments to this particular edition.

This is part of the Routledge Classics series of small, slightly pricey editions. I say they're pricey because they're little paperbacks that tend to cost around $20, but then again, they aren't printed domestically. McLuhan, of course, wrote in English, so there's nothing in the way of translation to mention. I think the main difference between this Routledge edition and others such the Gingko Press edition is the lack of commentary. If you're looking some some editorial comments, critique, or other such features, you're better off elsewhere. The Routledge edition is just what McLuhan wrote - nothing extra.

***** - Five stars for McLuhan
****- Four stars for this edition ... Read more

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At the time of Marshall McLuhan's death in 1980, his was a major voice in our understanding on media and society. And yet, few analyses of his impact have been written. In clarifying McLuhan, Neill provides a critical, yet sympathetic assessment of McLuhan's work and impact. While the author dismisses McLuhan's basic theory that the medium is the message, he points to McLuhan's importance, and argues for a re-examination of McLuhan as an artist and a poet. ... Read more

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This comparison of European and Canadian political thought, reinterprets the communications theory of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan as a Canadian variant of the critical theory associated with the early Frankfurt school. Stamps argues that Innis and McLuhan worked towards a theory of how westerners have developed classifications through which they perceive the world. Moreover, he shows that they used insights derived from their North American experience to add a new media-based perspective to such a theory. ... Read more

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In this previously unpublished work, a young Marshall McLuhan, as cultural historian, illuminates the complexities of the classical trivium, provides the first ever close reading of the enigmatic Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, and implicitly challenges the reader to accept a new blueprint for literary education.
Ideas that would ground McLuhan's media analysis of the 1960s and 70s are here in embryo, as he sets out in scrupulous detail the role of grammar (interpretation), dialectic, and rhetoric in classical learning. Under McLuhan's scholarly microscope, the internal dynamics of the trivium and its purpose are revealed. As is its indispensable role in giving full due to the rich prose of Thomas Nashe.
In ranging over literature from Cicero to the sixteenth century, McLuhan discovers the source and significance of multiple traditions in Nashe s writings. Here, more than half a century after it was written, is a fresh, insightful, and richly coherent framework for studying Nashe and an unequivocal call for a program of education based on the ambitious and lofty ideal of reintegrating the classical trivium. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

the essential roots of McLuhan
Thank you, Gingko Press.Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made.Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural transformations.Here is the scholarship the academics said McLuhan lacked; rather he shows where the scholars themselves were lacking, and why he abandoned their methods in favor of Joyce, Eliot, et al, a way of living in and experiencing any present with both understanding and electric immediacy.Some of this appears in a very compressed manner in Eric McLuhan's 'The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'; it is developedmore slowly in this book.Here McLuhan defined the struggle between art and science as between rhetoric and dialectic.Here is Mcluhan the patristic scholar showing that conservative theology does not mean ossified or dialectical; it means having at hand all the rich tools of the tradition with which to renew the present (remember, this is during the time when de Lubac, who tread the same waters, was under censure). Here McLuhan discovered percept in a living Trivium where dialectic was balanced by rhetoric.The war is indeed in the Word. . .

A "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy
The Classical Trivium: The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time is a previously unpublished work of the late Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), presenting the story of western literary culture from antiquity to the Elizabethan age. Examining the divisions of classical Rhetoric, Grammar, and Dialectic, in a strategy that he would later refine in his media analysis of the 1960s and 70s, The Classical Trivium, he connects the roots of ancient philosophy with modern-day interpretive and evaluative techniques. More than a half-century after it was written, The Classical Trivium remains a superb lens through which to examine the traditions of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Divided into four chapters, three devoted to sections of The Trivium and the fourth to Thomas Nashe himself, The Classical Trivium is a "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy.
... Read more

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Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) predicted the effects of electronic media on modern culture as early as 1964. McLuhan published several breakthrough books and coined terms like "hot" and "cool" media, "the global village," and "the medium is the message." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Introduction to a Guru I Never Knew
Marshall McLuhan was a Wise Guy, a very wise guy. In some ways, he was a phrophet, coming from Canada, no less! It opened my eyes to him and I think Judith Fitzgerald will go down in history as being a great poet, thinker, and genius herself, like her mentor and favourite Canadian. I didn't know he was a McLuhanatic until she wrote about that and she proves he was anything but. I like her writing style in prose but I LOVE her poetry. I started reading her writing in my first year English course but after I read River, I found Iphigenia's Song and it was the best find I could have found. It made me soooo happy when I was very dpwm and feeling I could never be anything but a lonely girl. Judith showed me there is peace and joy, and she helped me stop hurting myself with her book. I never thought I would read about razor blades and scars and find it devastating and beautiful both. I know I am just a girl in Ottawa but I am very very happy to know that even a girl like me matters and I know she wrote this book to help others but it is mostly and the poetry that is so moving and beautiful, the poet is extraordinary and I love her writing.I will order more of her books when I have more money. I have already bought Given Names and Rapturous Chronicles but I am saving them to read them on my birthday because I am not really a published poet yet. All my friends know I am asking them for books by Judith Fitzgerald and I will give me these birthday presents when the time comes, too. I was born on Canada Day. I am truly a Canadian and I think Marshall McLuhan and Judith Fitzgerald are our greatest artists and poets and thinkers. Both are Genius! Awesome. I love them both. I also bought Understanding Media but I don't think I am smart enough to understand it all yet. I know I am not a narcissist in a narcotic haze. Other than that, buy anything you can by either Marshall McLuhan and Judith Fitzgerald. They will make you see the world with fresh eyes. ... Read more

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Marshall McLuhan pioneered the study of the media and is now making a comeback, despite the fact that he died in 1980. McLuhan was a professor of English who loved James Joyce, hated television, played himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and fired off ideas like a machine gun. If he were alive today, he would want to continue infuriating a world moving into the 21st century with 19th century perceptions. This book is described as a "documentary comic book" that explains his ideas but doesn't take itself too seriously. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great intro to mcluhan
I found McLuhan difficult to follow. His ideas are spread on his thick books and sometimes it's hard to make sense of all of them at first. This book was a great intro to his work. It gives a good overview and reading the books afterwords becomes a fun pleasure.

An excellent Intro to McLuhanism
Terrence Gordon, who also wrote a book on McLuhans thoughts and life, gives a cohesive and concise introduction to this genius' work. Although the idea of McLuhan for beginners might be a contradiction in itself, oneneeds to start somewhere, and I suggest this one to be a great start.Citing from all of McLuhans works and some more obscure titles, Gordonmakes the impression that he is very knowledgable of McLuhan, as well ashis theories, being able to make analogies and modern day references foranyone to understand. This book will also give you the appreciation anddepth of McLuhans work without losing the message in its compactness ofthought. Highly reccomended for those interested in McLuhans works. ... Read more