EUGENE GOODHEART
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constructed themselves," which means "rehabilitating second-rate
authors."
You may not like popular culture, you may fear its effects, but if you
want not to be victimized by it, you'd better understand how it works.
So we need to ask how McLuhan understands popular culture and how
this understanding leads to the control he desires.
If
one looks for a clear
exposition of ideas in his work, one is bound to be disappointed. He
prefers what he calls "probes" to sustained exposition and argument,
the probes being held together by overarching themes or by a narrative
statement.
In
The Gutenberg Galaxy,
the history of culture in its broad–
est outline is a movement from oral culture to print and finally to our
electronic culture. Oral culture synthesizes the senses, print separates
them, giving pride of place to the visual sense, and the electronic
restores the unity of the senses. The Christian narrative of paradise lost
and regained is close
to
the surface of McLuhan's thought (he remained
a good Catholic throughout his life), as is
T.
S. Eliot's literary myth of
the dissociation of sensibility. Before Gutenberg, culture was an organic
whole: vision, sound, and touch were interdependent, thought and feel–
ing inseparable. Print with its "Iineality" catastrophically separated the
senses, subordinating the auditory-tactile to the visual. One effect of
print is point of view ("equitone prose"), a cultural misfortune in
McLuhan's opinion, which his prose (to the discomfort of his readers)
tries to overcome. The social cffect of print culture is detribalization and
the emergence of nationalism, an effect asserted without argument or
evidence. According to McLuhan, we have now entered a new phase:
the retribalization of culture into a global village through electronic
technology. The romantic longing for organic unity paradoxically finds
its satisfaction in our experience of electronic media. All the significant
changes that have occurred in culture are the result of technological
changes in the media. McLuhan can be fairly called a media determin–
ist.
His style is intimidating. He doesn't argue his case; rather, he ham–
mers it home through reiteration supported by long quotations (whose
relevance is not always clear) from virtually every major writer of the
Western tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ramus, Shake–
speare, Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Spengler, to name a few) and a
host of minor writers. McLuhan's self-described "mosaic" style is sup–
posed to provide an antidote to the lineality of the book, the medium in
which he is compelled to express himself. McLuhan has denied from
time to time that he views the book (the consummate expression of print
culture) as a misfortune. After all, he reads omnivorously and writes
