Fringework: Marshall McLuhan and the Canadian Artist
Canada is a nation of great, sweeping, unpeopled expanses. Most Canadians have chosen to live at the fringes of this massive country, as far away from the geographic centre as possible. We all know the reasons for this: the climate, the economic pull of the American border, the practical reality that it is easier to build cities where the weather will not try to kill you nine months out of the year.
At the risk of sounding trite, these settlement patterns are also a kind of metaphor. They are a tangible representation of how Canada thinks of itself, and how Canadians think about Canadian art. The heart of the country is cold and remote, and we have learned to situate ourselves just far enough away from it to remain comfortable.
Marshall McLuhan is, in my mind, the greatest Canadian public intellectual. Although his impact is often reduced to a few pithy statements about media (which are largely misunderstood), he spent a surprising amount of time thinking about this peculiar Canadian condition—and he had no illusions about it, either. He dubbed Canada the “land of the DEW line,” referring to the Distant Early Warning system of Cold War radar installations strung across the Arctic. In other words, a country defined by the periphery, by the edges, by its proximity to a greater power.
But as with everything he said, there are layers to this statement. McLuhan also believed this peripheral position offered a distinct clarity. From the margins, you can often see plainly what those at the centre are too involved to recognize, i.e., your perspective is cool.
Today is Canada Day, and without a doubt you’ll encounter all kinds of demonstrations of national pride. Rather than write an impersonal listicle about Canadian indie authors or cover designers, I think it’s prudent to articulate (with McLuhan’s gracious assistance) the unique advantage of a Canadian perspective in the world of arts and letters. Here we go.
1. “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”
This is an incendiary quip, and it affirms my feeling that most of what our Marshall said publicly was intended to get a reaction out of people. He often chose to probe rather than proclaim, but nonetheless a strong, cogent opinion shines through.
In his view, Canada’s lack of identity (that is, identity on the whole) presented a unique freedom from culture. Canada has no central cultural identity, and is instead a nation of pluralities. We “contain multitudes”, to quote Walt Whitman. In our art there is no single style, no original movement that could be considered either fully Canadian or representing all of Canada. We are not ambiguous, but rather hyperspecific, reinforcing the individual rather than the collective—in most cases.
If you’re skeptical of this assessment, ask yourself, “What is Canadian culture?” You might be able to come up with an answer (not involving Tim Horton’s or poutine, I hope), but your answer will be very different from all the others. Canada’s culture is a multitude of cultures infinitely exchanging with each other. One for McLuhan.
2. “The border is not a connection but an interval of resonance.”
I think about this often when I consider what it means to be a Canadian author. The border, whether geographic or cultural, does not operate like a bridge. It is not simply a means of exchange. It is more like an interval, a space where identities are held in suspension, waiting for validation from elsewhere.
This is why Canadian art can sometimes feel provisional. Its legitimacy seems contingent, as if it only becomes real when it is recognized by an audience beyond the interval. But McLuhan’s insight is that life at the periphery offers a vantage point the centre can’t access. You can see the shape of things more clearly when you are standing just outside them.
3. “Art is anything you can get away with.”
This passage is taken from McLuhan’s groundbreaking Understanding Media, published in 1964. It’s a book that seems to turn everything you know and love on its head.
Interpretations of this passage often lean nihilistic, the superficial understanding being that nothing has any real value beyond what value it is perceived to have—especially art.
I choose to interpret this line in the inverse.
That is to say, “Art is that which you can get away with.” When the denizens of culture (self-proclaimed or otherwise) hold up their scorecards and write their opinion pieces, they may be able to push the needle in a certain direction, but it’s ultimately the reading, the movie-going, the record-collecting public that decides what’s worth preserving and disseminating. Canadian authors would do well to write for this public rather than aim to be darlings of the press. [Lasting] art is that which you can get away with, that which escapes the clutches of critics and connoisseurs and sticks around in the minds of regular people with more important things to worry about—that’s when you know you’ve made something special.
4. “Time has ceased, space has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening.”
McLuhan was one of the most sensitive, most finely-tuned cultural seismographs of the 20th century. Note that he said this decades before anyone ever even uttered the word “internet”.
Because of this cessation of time and space afforded first by electric circuitry and now the internet, Canadian writers (and writers of all other nations) can publish their work to a global audience in an instant. Nonetheless, the peculiar sense of being peripheral has not vanished. In a contradictory turn of events, the present deluge of information has made national borders seem both largely irrelevant and more sharply felt.
When everything is available everywhere, the temptation is to flatten your work into something that is internationally recognizable and loveable, something that will not be mistaken for regional or minor. McLuhan might argue that resisting this temptation to flatten your is what gives any art—including Canadian art—its value.
5. “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
This final quote is less about Canada specifically and more about the danger of specialized expertise, but I think it serves the theme rather well.
If Canadian culture has a flaw, it might be a tendency to emulate the specialists elsewhere, and to adopt the styles and metrics of larger markets without questioning whether they actually suit a Canadian work of art.
McLuhan’s warning is that perfect conformity can be the most dangerous mistake of all. A book that tries too hard to be universally acceptable often loses the intrinsic uniqueness that sparked its creation in the first place.
Canada will probably always be a country that feels slightly outside the main current of cultural attention. Our literature will be reviewed elsewhere (when it’s reviewed at all). Our films will be described by their relation to American counterparts, which usually have bigger budgets and plenty of Canadian actors. Our musicians will relish their Junos, but it doesn’t really count until they’ve won a Grammy.
Still, there are advantages to living and working in this space just outside the centre. When no one expects you to be the main act, you have the freedom to do something that’s never quite been anticipated, something that can’t quite be classified. You can try out ideas that are too specific or too obscure to survive in the middle of the market. You’re free to probe around without exerting too much force. You can write books that don’t apologize for their small scale or their regional character. McLuhan understood that recognition of its place on the periphery is not a defect in Canadian culture, but rather its defining strength. The sooner we accept that, the less time we’ll spend measuring ourselves against someone else’s standard of importance. And who knows—perhaps our most lasting contributions will come not from the parts of our culture that strain themselves to appeal to the rest of the world, but from the parts that are content to be simply, unapologetically Canadian.
