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PARTISAN REVIEW
and fully involved-a desirable situation. (Counterintuitively,
McLuhan views reading as a passive experience and watching television
as actively involving all the senses.) Why then does he vent his spleen on
television? Could it be that he is appalled by the content of its programs,
despite his insistence that content is an irrelevance in our experience of
TV? "The medium is the message." Smashing the set with an axe is
hardly the act you expect to follow from an
understanding
of the
medium. In a less excited mood, he makes a more reasonable suggestion:
"To resist TV...one must acquire the antidote of related media like
print." So after all that he has said about the fragmenting of the sensi–
bility by print, it remains an agent for saving civilization from electronic
barbarism.
McLuhan and his defenders don 't feel obliged to be consistent. Con–
sistency of point of view or of argument is a function of print culture,
which it is McLuhan 's task to overcome. An admirer, Samuel Becker,
advises us not "to respond to McLuhan's work as though it is a scien–
tific research, historical or anthropological observation, or even serious
criticism, [but rather] to respond to it as the object it most closely
approximates-a projective test. We ought not to read it for what it or
McLuhan means, but rather for its help on loosening our imaginations,
for stimulating us to think about communication in fresh and imagina–
tive ways, for causing us to dredge up out of the very recesses of our
own minds the ideas which are lurking there." ]n other words,
McLuhan is himself a cool medium like television in which we find what
we want to find. He is the forerunner of a radical reader-centered criti–
cism in which the reader in effect constitutes the text.
If
his work is
intended as a sort of Rorschach, then it is disingenuous for him and his
defenders to assert again and again, as they do, that he has been misun–
derstood by his critics. Misunderstanding implies the possibility of a
true understanding of an author's intention. But McLuhan and his cool
electronic culture have effectively undermined the whole idea of author–
ship and authorial intention. Post-print media, in this view, are now the
possession of active readers and spectators.
"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's application of the for–
malism of Eliot and Joyce to the products of popular culture. "Our con–
ventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that
counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content'
of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to dis–
tract the watchdog of the mind." McLuhan "burglarizes" Eliot's
metaphor for the effect of the content of a poem on the mind of the
reader. But what does it mean to ignore content in responding to the
