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PARTISAN REVIEW
tooth with weak hams and a cuckold hairdo"). In his turn on Sherlock
Holmes and "the sleuth cult," McLuhan hyperbolically sees a "fore–
shadowing of the police state."
Like Barthes, McLuhan is a demystifier who takes pleasure in the
mystifications of popular culture. You get the feeling from the wit and
vividness of his language that he relishes the ads and comic strips that
provide him with the lowdown of what our culture is really about. His
severest strictures are reserved for the great books and great ideas of
academic culture-particular targets being Robert Hutchins and Mor–
timer Adler of the University of Chicago.
The Mechanical Bride
features
a photograph of Adler and associates grouped around a display of great
ideas written on cards and alphabetized ("angel," "animal," "aristoc–
racy," "art"-all the way to "wealth" and "will":
x,
y,
and
z
apparently
don't qualify for greatness) as if they were tombstones in a cemetery of
ideas. McLuhan is bothered by Hutchins's defeatist attitude toward
mass culture. He quotes Hutchins: "But to hope that even the best train–
ing in criticism can cope with the constant storm of triviality and pro–
paganda that now beats upon the citizen seems to me to expect too
much of any educationa l system." McLuhan comments: "Why has it
not occurred to Dr. Hutchins that the only practical answer to the
'storm of triviality and propaganda' is that it be brought under control
by being inspected? Its baneful effects are at present entirely dependent
on its being ignored ." This is a refrain that runs through all of
McLuhan's work.
He means to defend the great books in his criticism of Hutchins and
Adler, and of what he calls "the little magazine culture."
To win more and more attention for the best work it is necessary
to
demonstrate what constitutes the second-rate, third-rate and so on
....The air of unreality which has hovered over the little magazine
culture in general is due
to
their neglect of the close interrelations
between the good and bad work of the period. The result of this
neglect is, finally, failure to see the goodness of the work itself. The
great artist necessarily has his roots very deep in his own time,
roots which embrace the most vulgar and commonplace fantasies
and aspirations.
Pierre Bourdieu has recently made a similar argument: we can under–
stand the distinction of the authors who have survived by studying "the
universe of contemporaries with whom and against whom they have
