It was Friday evening and I was on my way out to a party (a rarity in my quiet life), with a small clutch bag instead of my usual giant work bag. So my book to read on the Tube had to be correspondingly small. I grabbed the smallest visible on my shelf at eye level. It was [amazon_link id=”0006324282″ target=”_blank” ]McCluhan[/amazon_link] by Jonathan Miller, a 1971 book in the Fontana Modern Masters series edited by Frank Kermode. I saw that I’d bought it second hand in Edinburgh in 1987. Fine for a short journey.

[amazon_image id=”0006324282″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]McLuhan (Modern Masters Series)[/amazon_image]

To my shame (or so I thought), I’ve never read anything by McLuhan. It has always looked almost unreadable, but surely a well-educated person should have dipped into his work? Nor for that matter had I any memory of reading this little book by Jonathan Miller, picked up during the Festival one year. By the time I’d whipped through it yesterday evening, I was pleased not to have bothered. For Miller’s brief introduction ends:

“For the purpose of discussion I have deliberately adopted a hostile tone, partly I must admit because I am in almost complete disagreement with the main body of McLuhan’s ideas.”

The book traces McLuhan’s ideas – to the extent Miller acknowledges them to be coherent – to Catholic theology and a specific 1930s tradition in criticism. Miller acknowledges that he was excited to first read McLuhan’s [amazon_link id=”0802060412″ target=”_blank” ]The Gutenberg Galaxy[/amazon_link], and that as a result he did start to notice print – and later the telephone and TV – as a thing in itself, to understand that the medium puts some constraints on the delivery of the message. But he concludes:

“Not that I remember a single observation that I now hold to be true, nor indeed a single theory that even begins to hold water. … Perhaps McLuhan has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies.”

[amazon_image id=”0802060412″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man[/amazon_image]

What editorial mischief led Frank Kermode to decide that Miller was the right many to write a short overview of McLuhan’s work? It reminded my of a Julie Burchill review of a Jeanette Winterson novel, some years ago; the sub had given it the headline: “My enemy has written a bad book.”

On reflection, maybe I need to read something by McLuhan after all. He sounds, from this short book, like the original intellectual imposter (cf [amazon_link id=”1861976313″ target=”_blank” ]Intellectual Impostures[/amazon_link]). Yet He made Jonathan Miller so very, very angry that one senses behind the dismissive conclusions a fear about what has been unleashed by McLuhan’s unmooring of meaning by this kind of cultural criticism.

[amazon_image id=”1861970749″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Intellectual impostures. postmodern philosophers’ abuse of science. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont[/amazon_image]