EUGENE GOODHEART
9S
one must achieve understanding. Mcluhan's insistence that electronic
culture restores the unity of the senses becomes a refrain unsupported
by evidence.
But supposing for the sake of argument that he truly understands the
history of the media, what should or can be done about it?
If
the elec–
tronic media are replacing print culture, isn't the remedy for what ails
us in print culture already in place? No longer will the auditory and tac–
tile senses be subordinated to the visual. We may no longer be required
to understand the media or do anything about it. The matter is not so
clear, however, for McLuhan is equivocal about the respective advan–
tages and disadvantages of print and electronic media. He resists the
idea that only bad things issue from print culture, but he refuses to say
"that there is anything good or bad about print culture." I suspect that
this moral neutrality disguises uncertainty about the relative advantages
and disadvantages of print and electronic culture. "Any invention or
technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies,
and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums,
among the other organs and extensions of the body." Translation: tech–
nological change has benefits and costs to our well-being. We are not
provided, however, with a cost-benefit analysis.
In
his overall argument, electronic culture seems like the consumma–
tion for which McLuhan, an avatar of the current breed of professional
champions of our pop culture, devoutly wishes. Murray Siskind, the
charismatic college instructor in Delillo's
White Noise,
speaks
McLuhanism when he affirms the codes and messages of our media–
dominated culture.
TV is a problem only if you've forgotten how to look and listen....
My students and
I
discuss this all the time. They're beginning to feel
they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier gener–
ation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they
have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the
codes and messages.
And yet while watching television, Mcluhan bursts out: "Do you really
want to know what I think of that thing?
If
you want to save one shred
of Hebrao-Greco-Roma n-En
I
igh tenment-Modern -Western Ci viliza tion
you better get an axe and smash all sets." What can such an outburst
mean for his understanding of the media? McLuhan tells us again and
again that print is a "hot" medium that renders the reader passive,
whereas TV is a "cool" medium in which the spectator becomes actively
