MCLUHAN
441
to cheer me up. But McLuhan's claim that he preaches such detach–
ment is a little confusing:
In his amusement born of rational detachment of [sic] his own situa–
tion, Poe's mariner in "The Descent into the Maelstrom" staved
off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool. His in–
sight offers a possible stratagem for understanding our predicament,
our electrically-configured whirl.
(The Medium
is
the Massage,
p. 150)
It's a favorite allusion, here dubbed in from the preface to
The Mechan–
ical Bride.
4
But the present availability of such detachment is firmly
denied elsewhere in
The Medium is the Massage
(pp. 50-53) :
Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult
of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible
and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involve–
ment....
The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point
=
Self-Effacement.
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!
The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the
frame of experience. . . .
The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all
of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.
We are to understand our predicament by doing what that predicament
makes impossible, cultivating a "rational detachment" from the electric
environment that was created by and can be sustained only
in
perspec–
tive-print environments. Detachment is the bad thing that lured oral–
scribal man out of his medieval garden, yet it's what any man will cul–
tivate in the midst of bewildering cultural revolution. McLuhan the
historical mapmaker is all Catholic and anti-individualist, yet he reaches
for a strangely Protestant self-regulation when he contemplates himself
living,
as a man, under the new dispensation.
4 With a few interesting changes. The subliterate "detachment of his own
situation" results from a revisionary elision: "rational detachment
as a spectator
of his own situation" is the original reading, but the new electric metaphor can
accomodate no
spectators.
The
Bride
text says that the sailor "saved himself,"
but in the darker mood of later McLuhan this becomes "staved off disaster";
and "by understanding" was first "by
studying
the action of the whirlpool and
by
cooperating with it,"
faithful to Poe but maybe a bit too active and
self-assertive to
fit
the electric experience?
