EUGENE GOODHEART
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medium? We can only guess from his examples. His readings of "the
folklore of industrial culture," the subtitle of
The Mechanical Bride,
fol–
Iowan established model of demystification-in Freud's terms, reveal–
ing the latent content hidden in the manifest content. The automobile
has "taken up the burden of sex." Superman is "the adolescent dream
of imaginary triumphs," a compensation for impotence. Dagwood, the
man, is emasculated; Blondie, the woman, is virile. Content doesn't dis–
appear: one content replaces another. Marx, Freud, Kenneth Burke
(who called it rhetorical criticism), and Roland Barthes have been prac–
titioners of the art of demystification.
The Mechanical Bride
was not written under the aegis of "the
medium is the message." The examples in
Understanding Media
suggest
another view of the contentless medium: "One of the many effects of
television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment
medium into a kind of nervous information system... .It was no acci–
dent that Senator McCarthy lasted such a very short time when he
switched to TV." He was a "hot" figure, and "TV is a cool medium."
"In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, those who heard them on the radio
received an overwhelming idea of Nixon's superiority.
It
was Nixon's
fate to provide a sharp, high-definition image and action for the cool TV
medium that translated that sharp image into the impression of a phony.
It
might well be that FOR would not have done well on TV. He had
learned, at least, how to use the hot radio medium for his very cool job
of fireside chatting." McLuhan provides the kind of knowledge that
benefits party officials and political consultants in their choice of candi–
dates. Ideas and policies are irrelevant content. What counts is the look
of the candidate. In the instances of McCarthy and the Kennedy-Nixon
debates, the effect of evacuating content from the medium is to trivial–
ize the events.
McLuhan describes the effects of the media and doesn't pass judg–
ment. He eschews "a moral point of view" because "too often litl serves
as a substitute for understanding in technological matters." Premature
moralizing can interfere with understanding. As Jonathan Miller puts it,
"McLuhan tends to cast suspicion upon any form of investigation that
allows 'values' or anything else to limit the lines of inquiry." His resis–
tance to a moral point of view, it could be argued, enables him to per–
form the role of double agent between high and popular culture. But
then what are we to make of a value-neutral description of something
whose effects may be benign or noxious? Where does it leave us? We are
left wondering whether McLuhan is complicit with "the cool" medium,
or whether he is simply saying, well, here it is and there is very little that
