Genosko Gary - McLuhan and Baudrillard : the masters of implosion

For better and for worse, a McLuhan renaissance is in full swing. Although many of his booksare still out of print and his journals such as The Dew-Line Newsletter and Explorations haveacquired rare book status in some quarters, Marshall McLuhan, a thinker of the end of thebook, is at home in todays electronic environments where he has been firmly and very muchposthumously ensconced; he has even been elevated to the status of, in some instances, asaint. He is, to be precise, a patron saint of Wired magazine and a regular virtual sidekick ofCamille Paglia. In order to understand why McLuhan is again on the menu, McLuhan andBaudrillard: The Masters of Implosion considers the diffusion and lasting effects of his ideasprimarily in France and secondarily in Qubec.

My first step in understanding McLuhan today is to place him in historical perspectiveamong the francophones. The French reception of McLuhan cannot, of course, be isolatedfrom his international influence in the 1960s and 1970s. Further work needs to done on hisinfluence in Japan, for instance, with special attention given to the debates over the relevanceof the cult of McLuhanism in the Tokyo press recounted to McLuhan in unpublishedcorrespondence with Kenichi Takemura (MP 38/80). From the very outset it needs to bestated that this book does not Frenchify McLuhan but, rather, concerns itself with theMcLuhanization of French intellectuals and media workers interested and operating in creativecommunications and media environments in general. I also owe a debt to the rhetoric, still verymuch in evidence, of figuring French intellectuals as if they were in some manner equivalent toMcLuhan or French McLuhans.

The debates in French intellectual circles around McLuhans ideas not only raged widelyand intensely during the decades of his greatest influence in the 1960s and 1970s, but theeffects of these debates are still being felt today. The McLuhan renaissance is a secondcoming, of sorts: another quasi-global outpouring of interest and influence tied once again toemerging communications technologies and information systems, and the cunning of capital asit expands into, and transforms for its own ends, these new infrastructures. McLuhanismremains compatible with capitals new means of expansion in the deregulated, post-industrial cyberscape. During the 1980s, McLuhans work had largely disappeared from view. Myinvestigation of McLuhans French reception puts this latency period into perspective. The1980s were also the period of the Baudrillard Scene, a pop intellectual phenomenon thatspread like wildfire through English-speaking countries in the same delirious manner asMcLuhans notions had done earlier in the 1960s and 1970s. For Baudrillard was, for manycritics, the postmodern scene par