Beginning around 1970 McLuhan began to be mocked as a lightweight who could not think or write. He had a major heart attack that year and throughout that last decade was in steeply declining health until his debilitating stroke in 1979. Even in the preceding decade after his first serious stroke in 1960 he was obviously not himself for those family members and friends who knew him well. (This is not at all to deny that from time to time he came up for air and produced remarkable essays.)

McLuhan’s health problems necessarily turned his attention to questions of how his work might be brought to conclusion, or conclusions, and preserved — this at a time when he usually lacked the energy and concentration to do this himself. Although there is little evidence in the Carpenter-McLuhan correspondence, it is said that Carpenter already played a major role in the production of Understanding Media in 1962-63. Certainly that book was very different from the report McLuhan produced in 1959-60 for the NAEB which was also titled Understanding Media. All of McLuhan’s subsequent 8 books¹ after Understanding Media (2 of which appeared posthumously) were co-productions (including the 1969 Counterblast where this is not acknowledged).

Many of these co-productions were hastily put together and contributed to, when they did not actually cause, McLuhan’s precipitously declining reputation. Critics of his earlier work,[Like Professor Carroll Quigley, who characterized McLuhan as a charlatan.] usually as defenders of the book and print, found these 1970 and subsequent criticisms very congenial. They piled on.

In response to this criticism and at times outright mockery, the people around McLuhan, perhaps led by his son Eric, came up with a defense strategy. He was not a theoretician or an author, much less a thinker, he was a satirist, a jokester, who did not intend his ‘work’ to be taken seriously. Those who mocked it had been ‘taken in’ by his professorial ‘put on’. More, such satire and joking were not only some idiosyncrasy of McLuhan as an individual, it was the hidden bond between him and the western tradition as a whole. Its productions, too, had either been satirical or should have been. The value of McLuhan’s ‘work’ lay in this general exposure. He was important after all, but only as a satirist both of himself and of everything that had ever appeared.

Although there was a certain genius to this strategy, it represented a concession to the very critiques it was intended to deflect. Yes, it was true that he didn’t know how to think or write, but this was because he didn’t want to, because this wasn’t his goal at all. All he really wanted to achieve was to trick people into believing that he intended to think and write.[1.

This is not to deny that McLuhan himself came to see this line of defense as helpful. He did. After all, he had long experience with the futility of the more difficult defenses of appeal to rigor or truth or uncommon insight. But there is a world of difference between the sometime use of strategic rhetoric and the claim that that is all there is.