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PARTISAN REVIEW
you can do about it. So much for understanding in order to achieve con–
trol.
McLuhan was not the only academic of his time to take popular and
mass culture seriously; his contemporaries included Kenneth Burke in
America, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in England, and
Roland Barthes in France. Nor does he have priority in his response to
electronic culture; he acknowledges indebtedness to the work of his
Canadian compatriot Harold Ennis and to that of Siegfried Gideon,
among others. What distinguishes McLuhan is the theatrical enthusiasm
with which he embraces his subject-the way he allows what he writes
about to infect his style. He never comes across as a mere academic. He
is always "with it," a "cool" medium of the media he is studying. (Here
are samples of his style taken randomly from
The Mechanical Bride:
"All that glitters is jitters." "Crime thrills for the law abiding. Sex thrills
for the impotent." "You want to feel secure. Well, nothing recedes like
success." "Is it what's in the jigger that makes them bigger?") It should
not come as a surprise that among his admirers were Duke Ellington,
Alvin Toffler, Kurt Vonnegut, Andy Warhol, Bob Newhart, Ann Lan–
ders, and Peter, Paul and Mary.
McLuhan's prophesy about the demise of the printed word has not
been fulfilled. As Robert Darnton recently remarked, '''The Gutenberg
galaxy' still exists, and 'typographic man' is still reading his way around
it. " Moreover, there is no indication of their imminent decline. As a
guide to an understanding of electronic media at the present time,
McLuhan has little to offer. His prejudice against content does not help
us reflect upon the quality of the programs on television (the represen–
tation of political and social commentary in its talking heads, the repre–
sentation of our social and family life in its sitcoms, the representation
of violence and sexuality in its dramas). The distinction between "hot"
and "cool" does little to illuminate the uses and abuses of the Internet.
McLuhan's vision of a global unity of interdependent groups or nations
seems little more than a fantasy in our time of ethnic and national con–
flict. Damton sums up McLuhan's irrelevance to our present condition:
"His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing
technology now looks dated.
]f
it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it
does not provide a map for the millennium we are about to enter."
McLuhan's biographer, W. Terrace Gordon, informs us that Thomas
Carlyle was an early favorite of McLuhan's because of his "bold innov–
ative style." Like Carlyle's vatic pronouncements, McLuhan's utterances
have the aura of prophesy. Neither Carlyle nor McLuhan depends upon
careful and reasoned "linear" argument. Both writers appear at the
