If it works...

How many great books have you not read? Hundreds, right? Maybe thousands. (I recently copped to one of them, here.)

They sit out there...a vast indictment of an inability to live a dream.

Occasionally, however, I take one up, knowing, at my age, that the rest will still be there, but unwilling to leave them ALL there.

This time, the one I took up was Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.  I'm 20 or so pages into it and already astonished by McLuhan's brilliant insights. Yes, I'd read plenty of treatments of his thoughts, but the casual way in which he tossed off powerful ideas, 45 years ago (!), is positively awe-inspiring.

I'm not going to launch into anything too heavy. But I did want to just take up this five-word phrase for a moment:

If it works, it's obsolete.

Many of us have such a visceral reaction to the word "obsolete" that it is difficult to deeply comprehend what McLuhan is saying here. Frail mortals that we are, we yearn for things that "work." Some of us spend our lives making sure that things "work." We construct homages to things just "working": if it ain't broke...

And here's this daft Canadian telling us that the moment something "works" it's obsolete.

What the hell is he talking about?

Maybe the clue is in understanding the meaning of the word "works."

Something's said to "work" if it serves the function to which it is put. There's a deep sense of accomplishment inherent in that word "serves"; it implies permanence, a stable set of relationships between expectations and achievements.

Would that this were so.

What we know about ourselves, and our expectations, is that they are anything but "stable." We, and our expectations, are deeply dynamic. Even if we do not recognize our dynamism directly, we can detect it (like those trails that subatomic particles leave in particle accelerators as proof of their existence) in the movement of our expectations.

We have help, of course; plenty of help. The obsolescence of things that work is, arguably, at the core of capitalism. "Works" isn't enough. And the moment when something does, it's spelled its own demise. Some clever fellow traveler, well-schooled in the ways of our voracity, will dangle some bauble in front of us and whisper, "hey...whaddya think of this?"

And, boom, we're lost. Some perfectly fine thing is now, "obsolete."

Here's my problem: Understanding Media already contains scores of phrases like that. How the hell do you get through such a book without spending a half-hour on each one?

Comments

[niti bhan]

Dear Tom,

YOu don't do it, that's what I learnt. YOu can't, so I"m still reading Understanding media and its travelled with me these past 6 weeks as well. The Toyota Way starts with the premise that we are all but lifelong learners. It is never too late, if I thought that I wouldn't have gone to Paris for my 40th birthday, you see it was my lifelong dream to see Europe by 30, now after having been sidelined with having to start over on a new continent, i've just begun to go through the old list of dreams we must do in this lifetime.

Best,
niti

[Michael Wagner]

Thanks for sharing what that "Canadian" has to say.

"What the hell is he talking about?"

I love the incompleteness of his thought and your search for the clue in what he means.

Reminds me of an Old Testament proverb - "the more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?"

It must have made him a great teacher!

Just a outright treat to think along with as I read your postings.

Keep creating,
Mike