Alex Kitnick, Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde, reviewed by Emily Collins

Abstract

Prophetic media theorist, playful analyst, technological optimist, ardent formalist, pop philosopher, amateur actor, interpreter of the world – much can be said about Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan, whose prolific work throughout the 1950s and 60s formed the cornerstones of media theory and communications studies. McLuhan is widely known across a range of academic and mainstream spheres for his eclectic, influential and prescient texts, but has often been reduced to the oft-cited mantras and hollowed-out phrases that disseminated his thought – ‘the medium is the message’, ‘the global village’, and so forth. This is the central argument made by Alex Kitnick in his comprehensive study Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde, which seeks to approach these expressions, as well as McLuhan’s contributions to various discourses, from a different perspective. Kitnick maintains that he was as much a theorist of art as he was a media theorist, and that, through McLuhan’s lens, both theoretical fields are integral and complementary to one another, offering important insights into the role of the artist as researcher who deploys art as a means of cultural exploration and environmental change. Parsing the relationship between McLuhan and the arts of his time, Kitnick positions him in a symbiotic feedback loop in which the critic/artist work in steadfast collaboration: borrowing and blending style and form from each other, yielding consistently revised, hybridized, cutting-edge creative results.