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McLuhan's Global Village Today: Transatlantic Perspectives. Edited by Carmen Birkle, Angela Krewani, & Martin Kuester. London, UK: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. 256 pp. ISBN: 9781848934610.
By the end of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan's landmark book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, originally published in 1962, had been translated into more than twenty languages. His influential study, Understanding Media of 1964, could have been read, by the end of the same period noted above, in Swedish, German, Finnish, Spanish, French, Danish, et cetera. European publishers received McLuhan with open arms, yet the critical reception/literature that each translation spawned, both in public debates and more intimate and specialized academic circles, constitute unique cultures with original features that continue to unfold. In my scholarly work I have focused my attention on the French translations and McLuhan's diverse readerships in France and Québec, and there are, in addition, robust investigations into the Japanese McLuhan scene by Marc Steinberg. McLuhan has always been transatlantic and indeed, global in reach.
The edited collection McLuhan's Global Village Today: Transatlantic Perspectives contains a lively record of exchanges, first staged in Marburg, Germany courtesy of the Centre for Canadian Studies in 2011, among Canadian and primarily German scholars under the banner of transatlantic McLuhan studies. So, what the editors mean by transatlantic is limited contextually to a field that is labelled, for better or for worse, as German media theory, including the theoretical contributions of Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and Siegfried Zielinski and diverse perspectives from the Canadian side (not explicitly Toronto School), but not an exhaustive roster by any means. The spirit is that of international friendship and celebration of the McLuhan centenary year. However, most of the Canadian contributors look elsewhere other than to the German media archaeologists for inspiration.
Richard Cavell considers the question of theorizing bio-mediation in his leading contribution, turning McLuhan toward Eugene Thacker for an insight into the body as medium, neither as machine nor cyborg, but through our technologies as an enWe counter with our othered humanity-not our posthumanity. Although the mythic version of this-narcissus as narcosis-captures only one dimension of a transformative encounter with ourselves, it is the transformative that is important for the contributors to this volume, as both Cavell and Jana Mangold,...