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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
own muddle, leaving you helplessly confused about the intended point,
though curious to know his view of lynchings.
"Point" is of course a visual metaphor, and McLuhan will have
none of it. Stearn seems to think they're talking about how television
reporting perpetuates the war, but McLuhan, while blandly nodding his
head, clearly doesn't think the idea important or, for the moment, even
true. He thinks TV "a disaster as far as Washington is concerned" be–
cause it involves people, creates absolute nausea, and so on. Fine, reason–
able, comforting - but
this
proves the war would end
if
TV were shut
off? No, it proves just the contrary: without TV the war could go its
way in the uninvolving newspapers, without popular opposition to
"Washington" and its bloody business. McLuhan's "Oh yes" is priceless
- Stearn and the innocent reader can happily suppose he means what
they hope he means, but
he
is only probing, spinning out his theory
of
media,
not contemplating war or psychological fact.
If
Stearn wants
to think that "connectedness, equality, sameness," refers to the civil rights
movement, McLuhan has no objection; if Stearn is teasing him into
say–
ing something really outrageous, he is happy to oblige. But of course these
words have nothing to do with civil rights. They're "technical" labels
for perceptual assumptions, sense-ratios, but the misunderstanding doesn't
matter so long as he can get in the clincher, the scrap of data ("hun–
dreds of extra lines on the TV image") that proves he still knows what's
what down at Bell Labs and still can dream anything into the grand
design.
Yet it seems a little ungrateful to inquire too deeply into
what
such an entertaining voice is saying. McLuhan and his school are fal–
lible analysts of intellectual history, as Anthony Quinton and (discussing
Father Ong's
Presence of the Word)
Mr. Kermode formidably show in
recent issues of the
New Yor/Q Review;
his accounts of the present en–
vironment are suggestive but often wildly ill-considered; his projections
of the electronic future are perhaps as crankish as his history. (To
overlook in 1951 the coming of television, as he now admits he did in
writing
The Mechanical Bride,
doesn't argue limitless prophetic powers,
and his present reluctance to relate his theories to the conditions of
drug-culture suggests he may be missing another boat.) One may agree
with his main premises, which are mostly old friends anyway - yes,
experience is metaphorical, forms of information are more potent than
"content," our collective idea of reality does undergo large transforma–
tions as we live into new technologies - without thinking his the in–
dispensable guidebook to the new disorder. But his style does reveal how
the irritations and amusements of the present scene work on a mind
formed by other environments. McLuhan stands for us, not least
in
