The MMM

I like to believe that Marshall McLuhan — the most forward-looking thinker of recent times — wrote for a form that did not exist in his lifetime.

The McLuhan Marshalling Machine is, I hope, a step toward finding that form.

If there’s ever a proper, fully developed McLuhanopedia of his enormous lifetime output – a master assembly of all his thinking – its entrance foyer will, I hope, resemble this database.

This project began in 1987, in the Reading Room of Archives Canada, where I was researching his biography. I read through reams of his letters and shorter writings and speeches. My overwhelming impression: I was soaring through the reaches of another, larger sky.

I kept marvelling at the gems I found along the way, those brilliant nuggets of insight phrased in aphorisms so precise, concise and arresting, no paraphrasing could improve upon them. Unwritten books lay packed into these apercus, oaks from acorns.

I remember the first aphorism that I wrote down as an acknowledged gem:

When I read that line, it lit up that vastness I was discovering – that sky of McLuhan’s thought — like a bolt of lightning. 

I gathered up more of his gems by the hundreds, eventually the thousands. I wrote them, then typed them, onto 3x5s. Shoeboxes of 3x5s became a cabinet of drawers of 3x5s. From Day One I was calling the collection the McLuhan Marshalling Machine.

As it grew, the collection was shared with and raided by Marshall’s son Eric McLuhan, first in 1995 for “A McLuhan Sourcebook,” as part of that early canonical anthology Essential McLuhan. Eight years later Eric and I distilled the quotations into a few hundred that joined with the lavish designs of David Carson in The Book of Probes. While I was happy to see both collections appear in print, I was privately miffed that neither included source attributions, which I had been scrupulously keeping for every quote.

I’d always foreseen the outcome of the McLuhan Marshalling Machine as a book, one that grew longer and heavier over the years. Then, in the summer of 2024, in while I was chatting with Marshall’s other son, Michael, Michael made the suggestion of putting all the quotes as a freely available public database. Another, all-illuminating flash of lightning: this time accompanied by the clap of a thunderbolt.

Thank you, Michael.

Oh, and that biography I began researching back when? It’s due out in 2026 or thereabouts, as an expansive graphic novel-biography. Watch for it: The Bio-GRAPHIC Marshall McLuhan: His Life and Thought Lavishly Illustrated. I’ve tried to use a cartoonist’s hand to give fresh expression to many of the gems here — the preferred literate form of our time, or what I call coexpression.

And thank you, reader of these gems, for joining in the most scintillating of discoveries: of another sky, more expansive than the one over our heads.

~ William Kuhns
www.williamkuhns.ca