The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan

First published: 1962

Type of work: Literary and cultural criticism

Form and Content

Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy is subtitled The Making of Typographic Man, and the study is precisely that: an examination of how literacy, first in the form of the phonetic alphabet and later reinforced by printing, has created the culture of the modern Western world. It is McLuhan’s underlying thesis that all media are extensions of one or more of the human senses and that the development of any one medium will favor the particular sense which it extends. When that happens, the human perception of the world will come to be dominated by the favored sense. According to The Gutenberg Galaxy, the sense of sight has been favored in the Western world for thousands of years, since the development of the alphabet, and has been supreme for the past five hundred years, following the invention of printing. The configuration that resulted is the “galaxy” in McLuhan’s title, aptly named for the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, and with increasing speed during the twentieth century, this Gutenberg galaxy has been penetrated by a new organization of perceptions based on the electric media: the telegraph, radio, television, and computers. As Western culture moves into this latest phase, it is now possible to examine the all-pervasive, and therefore unconscious, framework which has held the Gutenberg galaxy in place. This is the task McLuhan sets for himself in this work. The study of the electronic galaxy is carried on in his subsequent volume, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan takes what he calls a “mosaic or field approach” to the subject. Moving in roughly chronological order, he examines preliterate cultures and their characteristics; probes the impact of the alphabet and its effect on art, philosophy, and human behavior; traces the rise of manuscript culture in the Middle Ages; and finally, charts the dramatic shift in consciousness following the invention and spread of printing. Within this general guide, however, McLuhan freely darts from subject to subject, touching upon disciplines ranging from art history to anthropology and considering topics as seemingly diverse as the reaction of tribal Africans to motion pictures and the reason that the introduction of Arabic numbers in the late Middle Ages caused the divorce between arts and sciences in Europe.

There are 107 short chapters, each headed by a provocative gloss which the chapter proceeds to explain or refine, frequently by the copious use of quotations from a variety of sources: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, James Joyce, medieval theologians, and modern scholars. As in his other books, McLuhan makes use of puns—“Medieval Idols of the King,” for example. He also refuses to confine himself to the strictures of approved academic style: “Heidegger surf-boards along the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.”

Like the glosses, the chapters are thought-provoking, sometimes puzzling, always interesting. Seldom does any single chapter advance a complete argument or concept; instead, McLuhan builds his work just as he said he would, as a mosaic, and it is only after the entire work has been studied that it fits together as a whole.

This approach derives logically from McLuhan’s basic premise. The creation of the Gutenberg galaxy involved the whole spectrum of human existence, since one central event—printing—affected innumerable other parts of human life. To depict such a world-altering shift from a single point of view not only would be difficult but also would distort beyond recognition the actual patterns which McLuhan believes he has found. The method of his book is fitted to the nature of his concern, for, as he writes:

the galaxy or constellation of events which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation—particularly in our own time.

Critical Context

Generally speaking, McLuhan’s cultural commentaries can be grouped into two categories: the more traditional and structured works, such as The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media, and his more innovative juxtapositions of images and brief, provocative commentary, found in such works as The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The Medium Is the Massage (1967), or Culture Is Our Business (1970). The subtitle of The Medium Is the Massage is especially significant—An Inventory of Effects—because this is the essence of McLuhan’s method: determining and explaining the effects which media and their extensions have on human beings and their culture.

Even in his more traditional writing, however, McLuhan was far from conventional. The Gutenberg Galaxy is indeed what its author proclaimed it to be: a mosaic of bits and pieces, evidence and proof gathered from a dozen different disciplines and at least 288 authors, cited in its bibliography. It is far ranging, it is lively and stimulating, and it is one of the central works in the McLuhan canon.

Along with Understanding Media, The Gutenberg Galaxy gives a definite form to McLuhan’s thesis about the impact of media and provides the most consistent and articulate presentation of his evidence in support of that thesis. It might be said that The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media attempt to convince the reader through reason and argument, while the other works aim, and succeed, at provoking the reader into thought. While both exercises are undoubtedly useful, it can hardly be doubted that the playful explorations of The Medium Is the Massage would not have been possible without the profound conclusions reached in The Gutenberg Galaxy.

In a way, McLuhan’s concept is both simple and complex. The underlying thought is simple: New technologies shift the stress among senses, and this in turn makes changes in the way humans perceive, and therefore organize, the world and society. The complex part of the arrangement comes in providing the evidence for these shifts and proving that these changes do indeed take place.

McLuhan thought that he had discerned two such major shifts in Western consciousness, one from the oral, preliterate world to the world of print, and the ongoing change into the electronic age. The Gutenberg Galaxy is his most far-reaching and effective presentation of the case for the first shift and foreshadows his later efforts at addressing impacts of the electronic media on human society and culture.

Bibliography

Duffy, Dennis. Marshall McLuhan, 1969.

Miller, Jonathan. Marshall McLuhan, 1971.

Ong, Walter J. Review in America. CVII (September 15, 1962), pp. 743-745.

Rosenthal, Raymond, ed. McLuhan: Pro and Con, 1967.

Simon, John. “Pilgrim of the Audile-Tactile,” in The New Republic. CXLVII (October 8, 1962), pp. 21-23.

Stearn, Gerald, ed. McLuhan: Hot and Cool, 1967.

Theall, Donald. The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan, 1971.