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 uncertain 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 and preserved — this at a time when he lacked the energy and concentration to do this himself. But even when he had had tremendous energy before his cascade of health problems after 1960, book creation had never been his thing. His PhD thesis was not in a finished state when he submitted it and he never succeeded in bringing it to completion despite decades of work on it . Mechanical Bride went through an endless back and forth with the publisher between 1946 and its eventual publication five years later. The original Understanding Media from 1960 was a joint production of McLuhan and the NAEB.  Gutenberg Galaxy was in preparation for a decade and was finally finished only with the help of a team of grad students.¹

When his health problems began to get serious around 1960, he had a huge backlog of notes, manuscripts in various stages of completion, recorded conversations and even published writings belonging to largely unpublished projects. And, of course, he did not know how much time he had left —  his mother had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1956, similar to his in 1960, and she had died five years later in 1961.  

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. Except for Culture is Our Business in 1970,² all of McLuhan’s subsequent 8 books³ 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 first cause, McLuhan’s precipitously declining reputation. Critics of his earlier work,⁴ usually as defenders of the book and print, found these 1970 and subsequent criticisms very congenial. They piled on. And this especially at the University of Toronto!

In response to this criticism and at times outright mockery, the people around McLuhan, led by his son Eric, came up with a defense strategy.⁵ In this presentation McLuhan was not a theoretician, much less a thinker, he was a Menippean satirist,⁶ a jokester, who did not intend his ‘work’ to be taken seriously (at least in an academic way). 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 much of 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 deconstruction. He was important and prescient after all, but as a satirist, not as a thinker or scholar.

Although there was a certain genius to this strategy, it represented a concession to the very criticism it was intended to deflect. Yes, it might true that he didn’t know how to think as a theorist, but this was because he didn’t want to, because this wasn’t his goal. All he really wanted to achieve was to trick people into the idea that he had any intention to think and theorize. As Eric McLuhan put it in his 2008 essay ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg‘: “Marshall McLuhan did not have A Theory of Communication and he did not use theories in his work.”⁷

This is not to deny, however, that McLuhan himself saw this satirical line of defense as helpful. He did. After all, he had long experience with the futility of the more difficult defenses of his work through an appeal to rigor or truth or uncommon insight. But there is a world of difference between the sometime use of a certain rhetorical strategy and the claim that that is all there is.