Chase Joynt (Wynne Neilly)

In the opening pages of Vantage Points, in a section titled “How This Book Works,” Chase Joynt quotes Douglas Coupland writing about Marshall McLuhan: “Art is art. And an artist, according to Marshall, is someone on the frontiers of perception, who looks at information overload with the goal of pattern recognition, to see things before anyone else.” The recursiveness here – the 21st-century commentator analyzing the 20th-century media critic by telescoping intellectual distance (“frontiers of perception”) and time (“before anyone else”) – is a useful guide for Joynt’s own book, a genre-busting mash-up of memoir and post-postmodern examination of our media-saturated psychological landscape.

The invocation of McLuhan is central to Joynt’s project, which arises at least in part out of his discovery of a tangential family connection to the Canadian guru of media and technological studies. This connection is found in a box of papers and other memorabilia discovered in the wake of a grandfather’s death. The box was being proffered by an uncle, known in the book only as “X,” who was responsible for serial sexual assaults of Joynt when he was a child. A trans man assigned female at birth, Joynt’s retrospective confrontation with this personal family history is as much a confrontation with what masculinity entails as it is a working through of childhood trauma at the hands of a supposedly trusted adult.

This is effected through the prism of McLuhan’s writing. Joynt adopts a feminist reading of the scholar and his work, most particularly his 1964 classic Understanding Media, which serves as a structural guide for the current volume. (The structure is severe and rigid: Joynt uses the same number of chapters as McLuhan, providing the earlier writer’s original chapter titles in parentheses.) Joynt echoes the authors and editors of the 2022 anthology Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan by insisting that “any return to McLuhan in the contemporary moment must refuse the urge to rescue him from his racism and misogyny.” In the author’s view, Vantage Points is about precisely this: “where McLuhan saw the production of media, I see the production of masculinity.”

Joynt employs a collage approach to the materials in his book, which include photographs, graphics, and reclaimed objects such as newspaper clippings, telegrams, and travel documents, to cumulatively build up an argument about the intersection of gender and media in the context of his own life experience. The resulting work is fragmentary and non-linear, an example in practice of the theoretical suspicion Joynt suggests queer, trans, and Indigenous people maintain regarding linear, hierarchical time or narrative. In practice, the book cleaves closer to poetry than it does to a conventional essay or memoir format.

The result is challenging, both for its often searing content and its peripatetic focus. Subjects appear and then are unceremoniously dropped. A page made to look like a screenplay presents a dialogue between Joynt and an anonymous licensing coordinator who has been asked for permission to use a segment of Woody Allen’s script for Annie Hall (a film in which McLuhan had a cameo); this segues into a quote from Allen about being “the poster boy for the #MeToo movement” followed by a passage from American critic Claire Dederer’s 2023 book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma before this entire subject area disappears from the proceedings altogether.

Joynt’s chapter on how Vantage Points works is “After Roland Barthes”; Jacques Derrida is quoted elsewhere. French postmodern theory as espoused by Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Debord, and others weighs heavily on Joynt’s own book, rendering it less of a coherent narrative and more an intellectual exercise “made possible through a willing collaboration between reader and writer.” How willing a collaborator any individual reader proves to be will depend on each reader’s comfort with navigating generic slipperiness, juxtaposition, and free association. “For whom does a life narrative progress so precisely?” Joynt asks. For no one, which is why we need art: to impose structure and meaning on what is essentially chaotic and, more forebodingly, even potentially meaningless.