434
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
creating the new state of things or will have to live longest with it,
McLuhan himself is nearly irrelevant. The Lumpen-youth, in whom his
prognostics seem best realized, don't read much and don't need him to
tell them where they are, while their more clerkly peers, still provision–
ally interested in print and rational operations, find him superficial and
old hat. (For them the electronic culture is also a paperback culture,
and they read or at least carry Levi-Strauss and Fanon, not
Understand–
ing Media.)
McLuhan's audience consists mostly of people like himself,
middle-aged souls formed by the literary culture of the twenties and
thirties but anxIous to feel up to date and touchingly sure that an
intelligent reader of Joyce and Eliot can grasp just about anything if
he sets his mind to it. There are no essays in
Hot
&
Cool
by psycho–
logists or communications scientists - the wise, apparently, are saying
nothing till they see.
McLuhan is
our
sage, alas. Like us, he can apprehend technical
innovation only through analogy. Like us, he can do "research" only
by pasting up other people's discoveries. Like us, he wants badly to have
a sense of humor, keep cool and witty in the face of seeming night–
mare, respond openly to the new without quite yielding to its seductions,
remain critically objective without holing up in pedantry and moral
fogeyism. His task has been to find a style, an expressive medium for
his predicament and ours, and it's his style, in the largest sense, that
here concerns me.
He seems most at home in the give-and-take of interview and con–
versation, where his method of "probing" - saying anything that seems
provocative, regardless of contextual relevance or rational substance–
works more freely than it can in premeditated print. The most reveal–
ing piece in
Hot
&
Cool
is a transcript of conversations with G. E.
Stearn,2 from which I detach a representative and topical moment:
STEARN:
Similarly, you claim that the war in Vietnam is, more or
less, a creature of television.
MCLUHAN:
Without an informed public there would be no war. We
live in an informational environment and war is conducted with
information. TV news coverage of Vietnam has been a disaster as
far as Washington is concerned because it has alienated people
altogether from that war. Newspaper coverage would never alien–
ate people from the war because it's "hot," it doesn't involve. TV
does and creates absolute nausea. It's like public hangings - if
there were public hangings there would be no hangings. Because
2 Later quotations, if not otherwise identified, are from this interview, first
published in
Encounter,
June, 1967.
