Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man suggested a striking way of using the strategies of explication de texte for the analysis of popular culture. For many impressed young English instructors, McLuhan's imagination had discovered a way of using high culture to exorcise the devils of mass- and mid-culture. McLuhan explains that his anthropological approach to American popular culture almost forced itself upon him when he found himself teaching Midwesterners Freshman English after finishing a Ph.D. dissertation on the medieval liberal arts curriculum in England.
McLuhan, in effect, found himself in a "strange country" whose language he did not understand. He did his field work among homo boobiensis brilliantly, and The Mechanical Bride holds up solidly today despite McLuhan's disavowal of it as the product of "a victim of print culture." Indeed, the Mechanical Bride seems to me to provide the way to retain the achieved values of the Gutenberg revolution much more persuasively than The Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, one must confess an increasing incomprehension of McLuhan's work, beginning with the later issues of Explorations, the now-terminated magazine on media problems, which was supported by the Ford Foundation.
Some supporters of McLuhan defend his unique approach by describing him as "prophetic." He is the intellectual frontiersman who blazes a trail for less sure-footed mortals who will then make a roadbed broad and level enough to carry the freight of civilization's institutions. The trouble with this defense of McLuhan is that he blazes away at every tree in the forest--and even the most dedicated road-builder refuses to macademize in circles. Still one has learned so much from McLuhan that one tries to follow the leader far beyond the point of too much exasperation. Pre-literate man communicates by speech in a world of acoustic space. Simultaneity and interdependence characterize this richly resonant tribal society. Writing, which follows the end of nomadism, and printing--to a much greater extent--transform the spherical "ear and now" of pre-literate man to the linear "eye am" of Cartesian and Newtonian man.
McLuhan's fearless symmetry now suggests a world returning to a retribalized global society based on electronics. This eerie cosmos of rock and roll and Telstar is "the early part of an age for which the meaning of print culture is becoming as alien as the meaning of manuscript culture was to the eighteenth" (page 135). Granted, but what, as C. S. Peirce might ask, do the differences mean for intelligent action? McLuhan promises another volume, Understanding Media, which perhaps will get down to cases. One hopes it will be more responsible than this one. For McLuhan's reading is so catholic, one needs to be a polymath to know when he is making sense and when not. But inevitably he mentions a book one has read as carefully as he expects his to be--and the result is shocking.
Television in the Lives of Our Children, by Wilbur Schramm and associates is much too complex and solid a book to be dismissed contemptuously--and on the shaky grounds of McLuhan's own incredibly speculative theory of the television image as made by "light through" instead of "light on" it surface. "When we see the reason for the total failure of this book to get in touch with its announced theme, we can understand (McLuhan argues apodictically) why in the sixteenth century men had no clue to the nature and effects of the printed word" (page 145). No one who has any acquaintance with the Schramm canon--and no one should presume to write on communications who does not have a thorough familiarity with it--can pretend that he is insensitive to media differences or to the history of communications. To so refuse to come to honest grips with Schramm's sociological mode of understanding media change is to subvert the conditions of academic discourse--and, incidentally, to put the whole "mosaic" theory of media comprehension in a strange light.
When McLuhan makes a hypothesis a minute and gives scarcely a shred of evidence--either his own or in the long quotations which constitute better than a third of the book--it is impossible to check out all his wild surmises. But when he touches an area where the reader is informed, belief unwillingly suspends itself. So when McLuhan speculates in a fast aside--"as today, the insatiable needs of TV have brought down upon us the backlog of the old movies, so the needs of the new presses could only be met by the old manuscripts" (page 142)--one wants to remind him that he is comparing the expedient of the American television industry with the way parts of western Europe responded in their various ways to the Renaissance and Reformation.
More prudent industry policy which understood American's real needs would have greatly increased the coverage of local reality on American television, leaving the competing movie, with its groaning archives of once-expended fantasy, unknown on television. Cuban television features four-hour harangues; Italian television instructs illiterates; French television teaches groups of farmers. the analogy between print and electronic media history, then, means nothing when looked at closely.
It is a pity that McLuhan has chosen to grandstand with chapter titles ("glosses"). For example: "Heidegger surfboards along the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode along the mechanical wave." To extend his metaphor, he forgets how hard the coral reefs that make surfing possible are on one's "sense ratio"--and that a pearl-diving surfboard is no fun even to the "audile-tactile" man. One suspects something like self-justification in one of his many asides, this one on his intellectual ancestor, Harold Innis: "There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organization would be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." (page 216).
Perhaps so, but why, then, does McLuhan so often cite the strictly linear--and brilliantly insightful--purpose of Chaytor, Diringer, Dudek, Goldschmidt, Hadas, Jones, Kenyon, Lowenthal and Wilson? Almost a third of "his" mosaic is their linearity. Indeed, for the student of media history, their various texts--and McLuhan's bibliography--are useful, even indispensable.
--from McLuhan: Hot & Cool, Signet, 1967
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