THE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY
Coser, Lewis
Anew intellectual type has risen on the American scene, the celebrity intellectual. He addresses a semieducated mass public that makes little claim to expert knowledge or refined taste, and that...
...Or, 1 s Boorstin, The Image, p. 57...
...Commentary, December 1965, pp...
...Exactly what happened here...
...At this point a personal reminiscence 88 Geoffrey Wagner, "Misunderstanding Media: Obscurity as Authority," in Rosenthal, McLuhan: Pro and Con, p. 159...
...The more serious, the more scholarly, the more literary a book is, the less author appearances matter...
...here he first expounded his well-known thesis that when print replaced oral communication, the eye rather than the ear became the principal sensory organ...
...This new public differs from the older college-educated stratum in significant ways...
...Without shared cultural standards, this audience relies overwhelmingly on cosmetic rather than substantive criteria...
...Two years later, in Understanding Media, he extended his previous thesis and attempted to show why and how the new electronic media restructured modern civilization in a profoundly revolutionary sense...
...McLuhan legitimized pleasures that were heretofore indulged in only with greater or lesser uneasiness...
...It is these peers and judges whose opinions the "unattached intellectuals" esteem and to whom they grant nearexclusive claims for critical evaluation of their work...
...16 The promotion director of a large publishing house, Simon and Schuster, summed it all up in a recent interview in the New York Times (Dec...
...Societies like our own are characterized by a pronounced segmentation of social and intellectual circles.' Florian Znaniecki has developed the notion that thinkers are likely to speak not to the total society but to a selected public...
...p. 15...
...Yet it was hailed as a major breakthrough in puffs by John Galbraith and Justice William Douglas...
...Another volume, The Medium Is the Massage, followed in 1967.22 With the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan became a celebrity...
...Quite the contrary...
...Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971...
...The reign of the Son was born of the reign of the Father, he taught, and it would soon be followed by a new order of perfection, the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth...
...THOUGH particular celebrity intellectuals pass from the scene, the type, I venture to think, is here to stay...
...ing of The Medium Is the Massage, NBC presented an hour-long documentary on his work, and CBS interviewed him on its toprated Sunday night public-affairs show...
...The term "consciousness" is never clearly defined...
...25 Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang, p. 129...
...But only in the 1960s did McLuhan emerge in the limelight...
...In more recent times, however, the path has been opened up for a type of intellectual who can free himself from the control of standards embedded in distinct cultural circles and personified by distinctive status judges...
...Though a sharp departure from his previous writings, the book may still be considered a not untypical product of a Catholic intellectual steeped in the classics of English literature and the prophets of modernity, who reacted with horror to the decline in standards and taste during the age of mass consumption...
...Some six months after the appearance of the book, a British writer, Henry Fairlie, met the editor of the New Yorker and made a passing allusion to the greening of New York during the St...
...Playboy and Esquire started folding short stories and short literary interviews between the pages of their cartoons and nude photographs, while Vogue and Harper's Bazaar slipped in poetry, stories and reviews among their clothing, cosmetic and jewelry ads...
...They offer rewards of exposure and applause, not an intensive exchange of ideas...
...He is under structural pressure to go off half-cocked, that is, to offer opinions and ideas that have but little grounding in mature reflection...
...Whether in the realm of drug-induced stimuli or of cultural consumption, what they crave is instant gratification...
...p. 271...
...To keep up with the competition, the celebrity intellectual must constantly refashion his personality in a way that appeals to the consumer...
...He short-circuits, so to speak, the arduous and complicated process through which other intellectuals attempt to gain recognition among qualified judges...
...It is rather that the book was nowhere, among friends and foes alike, submitted to the kind of critical scrutiny that would have been normal had it emerged within a specific intellectual circle...
...s Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1965...
...In the next 15 years, McLuhan followed a fairly conventional academic career...
...But a genuine immersion in high culture requires considerable effort, and all these people desire is an effortless acquisition of its outward trappings,5 an easy and quick way of being "in the know," or "with it...
...In otherwise heterogeneous audiences, only the new and the brilliant can provide suitable conversation pieces, allowing everyone to display his recently acquired knowledge as a badge of status...
...Although such criteria as "novelty" and "brilliance" began to be introduced with the emergence of a wider public, they continued to be held in check through the elaboration of more substantive standards of excellence, institutionalized in particular circles in which men of knowledge continued to live and work...
...The more the celebrity intellectual proclaims his allegiance to whatever conceit is currently the latest, the more likely it is that he will soon be surpassed by a new celebrity, intellectual or not, who manages to attach himself to ideas that are even more recent and hence even more "advanced...
...The particular," wrote Hegel, "is for the most part of too trifling a value as compared with the general: Individuals are sacrificed and abandoned...
...Novelty, brilliance, and abundance may, then, be taken provisionally as some of the hallmarks of the celebrity intellectual...
...As literary critic Leonard Kriegel has put it, the cultural market is "gobbling up the contemporary before it can even establish its presence...
...In addition to addressing innumerable gatherings ranging all the way from the PEN Congress to the Public Relations Society of America and the Modem Language Association, he was a sought-after guest at talk shows and other TV events...
...20 One doubts whether Reich himself would consider his work a major breakthrough in the world of ideas...
...15-22...
...contexts...
...The more recent books, in contrast, celebrate the electronic revolution and indicate, to quote Bernard Rosenberg,27 that its author has now married the mechanical bride...
...He returned to Canada in 1944 to teach at As 20 Henry Fairlie, "The Practice of Puffers," Encounter, August 1971, pp...
...WHEN CHARLES A. REICH'S The Greening of America burst upon the scene in 1970, its author was practically unknown to the larger 17 Robert Brustein, "If an Artist Wants to Be Serious...
...Whether they be salons or academies, bohemias or particular publications catering to identifiable consumers or peers, these circles helped to structure intellectual life in distinctive ways and insured the differentiation of cultural offerings...
...The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), passim...
...In the words of Robert Brustein, "he remains a victim of the culture he had fed on, schizoid to the last, stranded between two worlds, able to sacrifice neither...
...and they can provide the required cultural commodities for both low-brow fare and for the more sophisticated repertoire desired by the college-educated...
...What counts among them is not whether a work contributes understanding or knowledge, but whether it provides the shock and frisson of brilliant novelty...
...Even if he has attained his position in the limelight by what serious intellectuals judged to be an intellectual accomplishment, he may soon be reduced to performances that are no longer intellectual at all...
...18 While Segal is a transitional type, nearer in certain respects to an older type of man, once found on the fringes of Hollywood, who succumbs to the lure of the media and craves celebrity status while yet being unwilling to sever connections with the world of serious ideas, the other two intellectuals to be discussed are closer to the new type...
...Newness as a norm or a criterion 24 Ibid., p. 166...
...Forced at all times to compete for attention with celebrities who are not intellectuals, the celebrity intellectual runs in a very crowded field...
...he legitimized the existing state of affairs by having recourse to the language of novelty...
...For a modern extension of these views see Charles Kadushin, "The Friends and Supporters of Psychotherapy: On Social Circles in Urban Life," American Sociological Review, December 1966, pp...
...28 By using a deliberately new vocabulary of sloganized and easily remembered catch phrases like "The Medium Is the Message," McLuhan gave his public the impression of learning something profoundly new while exerting minimal effort...
...6 This being the demands of the new market, a host of intellectuals who had previously considered themselves to be serious rush in to supply cultural commodities in tune with the needs of the new audience...
...but with TV you are the screen," this may seem very perceptive at first—until you realize that something like 80 percent of TV material consists of film...
...2T Personal Communication...
...To cap it all, he was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University, which pays $100,000 a year for salary and for staff expenses (to my knowledge no commentator at the time pointed to the irony that this chair was meant to honor one of the great introspective, "withdrawn" figures of our time...
...The book was sparsely reviewed, and only attained an underground reputation among critics of mass culture...
...sumption University in Windsor, Ontario...
...At that time the semiheretical Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore had prophesized the imminent coming of a new historical order, in which the Church of Christ would be superseded by the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth, and most of mankind's ills would be cured...
...Such circles, in short, provide the setting for informal social control.2 An academic intellectual seeks his audience among fellow academics, and his contributions are shaped through exchanges with academic colleagues.$ He is relatively unconcerned with the evaluation of, say unattached and nonacademic intellectuals...
...A vividly written assault on the mass media in general and on advertising in particular, it attacked the "pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising...
...This is precisely what the mass media attempt to provide...
...While older, highly institutionalized circles tended to be conservative in their judgments and were so disinclined to recognize innovation as to become a source of neophobia— the loose and general public of the mass media provides the conditions for neophilia, that is, a one-sided value emphasis on what is new...
...Since his audience has no specific expert knowledge and is not held together by common canons of taste, the celebrity intellectual is able to escape the social controls habitually exercised by intellectual or social circles...
...At that time McLuhan clung fastidiously to the somewhat elitist cultural standards he had absorbed at Cambridge...
...Late in the 'S0s McLuhan's reputation as a specialist in communications had spread across the Canadian border, bringing him an appointment for 1959-60 as director of a media project for the U.S...
...Since he tends to become a performer among other performers, these, and not other intellectuals, become his reference group...
...This sounds at first blush like a fine illustration of the thesis that the medium is indeed the message since, if the content of a medium is always derived from another medium, the only real innovation is the technology of each...
...23 Harry H. Crosby and George Bond, eds., The McLuhan Explosion (New York: American Book Co., 1968), p. 167...
...Reich duplicated this vision by his periodization of history into the old orders of Consciousness I and II, soon to be followed by redemption in Consciousness III...
...His public does not have enough in common to be capable of judging his intellectual work in the way, for example, an academic public judges the products of academic research, or in which cultured groups judge a novel...
...His scholarly work was mainly concerned with translations of Roman plays and commentaries on Latin authors...
...The Medium Is the Massage sold about 200,000 copies...
...But can you imagine Rosa Luxembourg [sic] on Johnny Carson's show...
...Gossage: "Everything's coming up roses...
...His publisher initially seems not to have expected major sales for this book, and orders for the first as well as for the second printing were only for 5,000 copies...
...Thus when he says, for example, that "with film you are the camera...
...By contrast, the celebrity intellectual does not address a delimited circle of peers, or an appreciative public of specifically trained connoisseurs, but an educated or semiedu 2 Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968, new ed...
...4 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), and "The Problem of the Intelligentsia" in Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956...
...What next...
...Far from being cultured judges of the intellect, like some literary critics, they are of uncertain cultural background, live above their intellectual means, and are disposed, like the public they serve, to value the new above the significant...
...He seemed to give instant knowledge, an immediate shock of recognition...
...of value," the literary critic Geoffrey Wagner has written, "is the quickest and most convenient concession to the dominant technology...
...His Scottish-Irish parents were of Baptist and Methodist faith, but he became a Catholic convert in his twenties...
...Although it can hardly influence the quality of his work by applying substantive standards, it is likely to judge it in terms of what may be called "appeal qualities," such as "novelty" or "brilliance...
...It was then assumed, as Hegel once put it, that in case of "conflict between genius and his public, it must be the public that is to blame .. , the only obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius...
...MCLUHAN was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911...
...I don't mean only in time, the months that have passed...
...But precisely this leads to the ever-present danger of becoming rapidly obsolescent...
...Consequently, once the intellectual becomes a performer he no longer gains gratification from reciprocal exchanges with his audience, nor does he experience the delight that emerges through consensus between author and public...
...play the fool on demand in return for continued exposure in front of the public...
...McLuhan had an advantage over them...
...LEWIS COSER it as the work of a celebrity, as a book primarily known for its well-knownness...
...his way of life...
...Even in writers as great as Voltaire, Diderot, or 6 Robert Brustein, "If an Artist Wants to Be Serious and Respected and Rich, Famous and Popular, He Is Suffering from Cultural Schizophrenia," New York Times Magazine, September 26, 1971...
...Even the message conveyed by the "unattached intellectuals" described by Karl Mannheim,' who are less tied to specific circles than the types described by Znaniecki and whose audience is not as rigorously defined or confined, is mediated by a closer group of peers and expert judges of status...
...But there comes a point for celebrity intellectuals when such tactics are counterproductive...
...A professor of law at Yale, his contributions were restricted mainly to the law journals...
...12 C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963...
...25 What accounts for this craze...
...To begin with, as a perceptive critic has remarked, "Fame and adulation of this proportion are only granted to someone who tells people something they already want to hear...
...Individuals are used up, but the institutionalized setting exerts pressures for their rapid replacement...
...93-101...
...Such intermediaries, far from being independent evaluators, are in fact gatekeepers who will allow entrance to all whom they judge as agreeable to the audience they serve...
...It was a last whimper...
...Louis University, after his conversion in 1937...
...8 Cf...
...To others he would say that his trashy novel was in fact a contribution to literature...
...Closer textual analysis than can be attempted here would reveal that the ratio of sense to nonsense in the writings of McLuhan has steadily decreased from the days of The Gutenberg Galaxy to his more recent work...
...26 The Mechanical Bride, with its savage indictment of modem mass culture, it will be recalled, had only a very modest impact...
...Upon reflection, however, it turns out that many of the greatest achievements in film-making, like the works of Bergman, Fellini or Antonioni, or the comedies of Keaton and Chaplin, are not based on novels, plays, or operas...
...Up to the 1950s McLuhan published almost exclusively in scholarly and literary reviews, contributing papers on Poe, Tennyson, Kipling, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, as well as on Elizabethan writers, to such magazines as Sewanee Review and Kenyon Review...
...Michael's College, the Roman Catholic unit of the University of Toronto, with which he has been associated ever since, having been promoted to full professor in 1952...
...The new of yesterday rapidly becomes the old of today, so that the effective exposure time of the celebrity intellectual is likely to be very brief...
...The first thing broadcast interviewers look for, he suggested, "is an author who is a celebrity, somebody whose name is known beyond the book...
...and prominent personalities began enjoying incomes of more than $100,000 from lecture tours alone...
...Two years later he joined the faculty of St...
...What counts is not content or truth, but "novelty" or "brilliance...
...786-802...
...To interviewers who asked him why and if he had given up his scholarly calling he replied that he had by no means done so, that he was still a scholar at heart...
...1° Given such competition, the celebrity intellectual is driven to stunts and feats that will keep attention focused on him...
...THE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY 51 public...
...After students who at first admired him as a teacher who had managed to work with the Beatles now put him down as having sold out to the mass media, Segal availed himself of further recourse to TV shows and film festivals in order to "explain himself...
...They are likely to ask not whether what is asserted is true or significant, but whether it is startling...
...This, as well as the insatiable demands of the public, may account for the frantic pace characteristic of these men, who compress into a few years an output of writing, lecturing, interviews, and TV appearances that for others could be spaced over a lifetime...
...Others manage fully to internalize the demands of the new public and hence escape the torture of ambivalence...
...Some are still marked by ambivalence in regard to their new roles, and given to comparing their old reference anchorage in restricted circles with their new roles and audience...
...McLunacy, having lasted some eight years, is over...
...The celebrity intellectual must forever try to be "with it" because his status depends on his ability to contribute brilliantly to the set of ideas currently defined as "novel," "advanced," or "progressive...
...A San Francisco advertising executive, Howard Gossage, became his unofficial publicity agent, advertising him as "an Archimedes who has given the ad industry levers to move the world...
...she must also `sell herself.' For in the personality market, the personality itself, along with advertising, becomes the instrument of an alien purpose...
...29 When such outrageous examples are cited to defenders of McLuhan, the reply always turns out to be that his insights are not meant to be right or wrong...
...McLuhan: "You mean it's going to be fun from now on...
...These people regard the acquisition of status through the consumption of some "high" culture a basic requirement...
...What is more, since intellectuals can produce significant work only when it is matured over fairly long periods of incubation, the celebrity intellectual has to repeat himself and produce variations of essentially the same idea...
...The Gutenberg Galaxy, his first successful book, was published in 1962...
...We know," says Reich, "what causes crime and social disorder, and what can be done to eliminate those causes...
...After initial studies in English literature at the University of Manitoba, McLuhan went abroad to Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, to study under such figures as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis...
...In the romantic age there arose the idea of the genius, the direct ancestor of the creative hero of avant-garde modernism...
...Once it had been publicized in the New Yorker, the influential taste-makers of the media treated 19 All these puffs can be found on the backcover of the paperback edition...
...His first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, appeared in 1951, just a year before he received his promotion...
...Thus thinkers may be classified in terms of their public and of the performances expected of them within these 1 Cf...
...Many critics have pointed out the innumerable logical fallacies, the almost ludicrous distortions, to which McLuhan had recourse...
...They are forever in pursuit of red-hot novelty...
...12 In our case, since the celebrity is "known 11 Cf...
...Yet legitimation of the media had been attempted earlier by others, with much less success...
...McLuhan himself refers to his writings as "probes...
...This brought about a heightening of sensory awareness...
...Senator McGovern found it "one of the most gripping, penetrating and revealing analyses of American society I have yet seen," and the Washington Post believed it to be a "brilliant synthesis of contemporary ideas...
...The very reception of the book utterly falsified some of its premises, such as the plaintive assertion that "the media systematically deny any fundamentally different or dissenting point of view a chance to be heard at all...
...Some of my freshman students have recently asked me with puzzled expressions, "Who is Marshall McLuhan...
...The reasoning is shoddy to the extreme and the evidence painfully wanting...
...The celebrity intellectuals, figures like Erich Segal, Charles Reich, and Marshall McLuhan, come to the fore under identifiable conditions and exhibit a distinct set of relations with an admiring public...
...He can bypass them, so to speak, and address himself directly to an undifferentiated public of superficially educated consumers...
...The products of the celebrity intellectuals are not mediated through an intellectual giveandtake in identifiable circles...
...But what is a probe...
...But such is clearly the case with Marshall McLuhan, who seems the purest incarnation of the celebrity intellectual yet to appear on the American scene...
...10 See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (New York: Atheneum, 1962), p. 58...
...18 1 bid...
...For a few months it was all but impossible to look at a mass culture magazine or a TV show without encountering the theme of The Greening of America...
...David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), and Abundance for What...
...The book feeds parasitically on other modish writers, from Marcuse to Keniston to Cleaver...
...Two national magazines offered him permanent offices in their buildings, plus fees, to do occasional consulting work...
...110 and 130...
...8 Although 18th- or 19th-century intellectuals tried to come to terms with the new public that appeared with the increase in literacy, they were still tied to their own circles of cultural producers and consumers, as I have attempted to show elsewhere...
...THE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY might be in order...
...Whether Time or Life, The National Review or Commentary, Popular Photography or the Times Literary Supplement, all made an attempt to interpret him...
...Having failed to satisfy the public's taste, he deserves the penalty of oblivion...
...he does not grant them the claim to make judgments about his intellectual work...
...with a dissertation on the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe...
...The millenarian desires for a perfect 52 universe of love reappear in Reich's pop version, but the earnest yearnings of the millenarians have become utterly trivialized...
...26 Neil Compton, "The Paradox of Marshall McLuhan," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, p. 107...
...As to the rest, it is, above all, an embarrassingly crude celebration of the "new"—of protest, drugs, Woodstock festivals, and liberated life styles...
...29 Dwight Macdonald, "Running It up the Totem Pole," in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con, p. 33...
...so G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Bohn Library, n.d...
...Not only have others compared him to Darwin, Pavlov, Freud, Newton, and Einstein, 21 but he gives the impression of having made their judgment his own...
...Corporation executives, in the advertising industry and elsewhere, soon clutched McLuhan to their collective bosoms...
...41 Gerald E. Steam, ed., McLuhan Hot and Cool (New York: Dial, 1967), P. xv...
...In the '50s, then, McLuhan had broadened his audience, moving from the world of English literature to circles interested in communications—a subject that attracted widespread attention at that time...
...At times he is known to rant at "a lot of pseudointellectuals in New York, who put me down at cocktail parties...
...But such fame is short-lived...
...Since such qualities are not likely to afford long-term satisfaction, they foster a well-nigh insatiable appetite for "more" of the same...
...His father made his living as a real estate salesman...
...The relative homogeneity of cultural standards among the older college graduates has been replaced by an enormous heterogeneity whose only common denominator is the certification by which these men or women are said to be Bachelors or Masters of Arts or holders of professional de grees...
...14 But with the celebrity intellectual, this statement has to be reversed...
...To be sure, in itself the introduction of such formal criteria in the evaluation of intellectual products is not new...
...Whereas the cultivation of brilliance may at first have been a device to draw attention to the qualities of the intellectual product, it tends later to be cultivated in itself...
...It is a rhapsody to the antinomian, a bathetic celebration of spontaneity and pastoral bliss...
...It is that by which he creates his own life and thus creates the society in which he lives...
...THE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY body who could hold a pen was in a position to be as famous as a movie star...
...23 One corporation offered him $5,000 to present a closed-circuit television lecture on how the products of its industry would be used in the future...
...More than 100,000 copies were sold...
...To the extent that he is aware of this, he is inclined to make the most of the moment allotted to him and to pile into it as much as he possibly can...
...The fact that this general audience makes no claim to expert knowledge or cultivated taste does not mean that it has no effect on the celebrity intellectual...
...Instead, he appeals to an amorphous general public from which he craves acclaim...
...Men of knowledge are supposed to respond to or anticipate certain demands of their circles and these in turn grant certain rights and immunities...
...But in the last few years he suddenly started writing successful pop songs, collaborated on screenplays for such movies as The Yellow Submarine, and, more recently, achieved bestsellerdom (almost 500,000 copies sold) with the sentimental novel Love Story, which was soon made into an even more successful movie...
...the most cherished, sought-after, carefully calculated, and profitably traded adjective in the lexicon...
...19 The point is not that all reviews were laudatory...
...LEWIS COSER 50 as another literary critic, William Phillips, writes, Ideas are dissolved into styles, and everything is gobbled up by publicity and coopted...
...Given this "tradition of the new," to reshape somewhat Harold Rosenberg's phrase, THE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY it stands to reason that the time span in which celebrity intellectuals can hold the limelight is extremely short...
...see also Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), pp...
...The whole mood is so remote now...
...A few years ago I attended a small seminar in which McLuhan asserted, inter alia, that new technological inventions are reflected in the writing styles of great literary figures, so that "you cannot understand the style of Swift without realizing that he wrote in the age of the spinning jenny...
...Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968, enlarged ed...
...3-13...
...More often than not, a statement for which there is no evidence or which flies in the face of obvious facts...
...This exhibitionistic behavior, it needs to be stressed, is not necessarily part of his psychological makeup...
...Love on earth, love from the heart would replace the stem laws of both Testaments and usher in a millenarian age of human bliss...
...Here follow the portraits of three celebrity intellectuals...
...The Celebrity Register lists its 2,200 biographies in alphabetical order so that Polly Adler comes after Mortimer Adler and Bertrand Russell is followed by Jane Russell...
...The questionable "The Medium Is the Message" gave way to the absurdity of The Medium Is the Massage...
...Specific social circles, he argued, bestow recognition, provide material or psychic income, and help shape the selfimage of the thinker as he internalizes their normative expectations...
...T Robert Nisbet, "What Is an Intellectual...
...his `head...
...I have relied heavily on this fine essay...
...When I pointed out to him that Swift had died several decades before the invention of the spinning jenny, there came the amazing reply, delivered with great selfassurance, "So, he anticipated it...
...He addresses a semieducated mass public that makes little claim to expert knowledge or refined taste, and that adheres to no commonly shared cultural standards...
...Robert Brustein summarizes these developments very well: Soon, Hollywood discovered there were big grosses to be had from movies based on serious literature, and not just "Anthony Adverse" or "Gone with the Wind...
...And since members of the new public sometimes suffer from boredom in the quotidian routines of their lives, they particularly value those cultural producers who engage in a search for new stimulants to revive jaded intellectual or aesthetic palates...
...First, the coming of age of an unprecedentedly large college-educated middle class, providing a market for new and relatively sophisticated cultural commodities...
...These large masses of men and women are not equipped to judge the ac s I bid...
...As late as the first half of our own century, distinctions between high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture were still clearly in evidence...
...Nor was there a concerted commercial promotion campaign...
...What then had Reich wrought...
...It has developed gradually with the spread of intellectual products to an increasingly wider and more undifferentiated audience...
...These new media, especially TV, are able to service an enormous mass market at relatively low cost, realizing appreciable economies of scale...
...When I heard Germaine Greer was guest host for Dick Cavett, all I could think of was that she was a natural for TV...
...Samuel Johnson, this new public criterion became one of the reasons for their enormous success...
...What he had provided was essentially a pop version of an interpretation of human destiny that has been part of the underground currents of mythical ideas ever since the late 12th century...
...He received his Ph.D...
...Ballantine Books, n.d...
...31, 1971) : "The more an author is known as a celebrity, the more personal promotion helps...
...it is a response to his structural position...
...CBS produced a record 22 For biographical information, see, Raymond Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), pp...
...No longer guided, if he ever was, by the disciplined criteria of inquiry and assertion emanating from a circle of colleagues and peers, he is pushed, and not just by happenstance, to make a fool of himself in the effort to grab the mike...
...Operating without visible pangs of conscience as celebrity intellectuals, they seem to feel that they offer the public not just entertainment but profound and novel intellectual fare...
...It is all rather sad...
...it is, among others, so we are told, "the whole man...
...the literary and academic celebrities thus created were being toasted on a host of television talk shows...
...This wider public— though it did not yet abandon other criteria of evaluation such as mastery of a subject, depth, and accuracy—was peculiarly fascinated by those aspects of style that could be seen as "brilliant" or "novel...
...This has important consequences...
...THE EMERGENCE of the celebrity intellectual in the postwar years can be traced to three related occurrences...
...The structural conditions pressing for the emphasis on novelty and brilliance, though already partly at work a century or two ago, have become perfected only in recent times, so that in our days, "Brilliance has become...
...Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964...
...The public at large took to McLuhan only after he had taken to the mass culture that public espoused...
...IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone, The Container Corporation flew him from one city to the next to talk to their hierarchs about the electronic future...
...Robert Nisbet has shown that the search for "brilliance" was already quite marked in the 18th century,' flourishing in the salons of Paris and the coffeehouses of London at a time when for the first time a broad audience emerged for men of ideas...
...17 His case is of interest not because Segal in his new persona pretended to major contributions in the world of ideas, but because it illustrates the tensions that arise in men suddenly caught between old and new standards...
...80 Such is the cunning of reason, or, as the sociologist has it, the power of institutions...
...In an effort to keep raising the ante, McLuhan increasingly parodied himself...
...and my Introduction to this volume...
...They assume a fetishistic character, being weighed not for their intrinsic worth but for their public rating...
...14 Quoted in Irving Howe, Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), p. 8. 15 Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 88...
...Gossage: "Listen, there are so many people willing to invest money in your work now, you'll never have to grade papers again...
...TV, as well as "sophisticated" illustrated magazines such as Esquire or Playboy, are the media par excellence for performers...
...ERICH SEGAL, a professor of classics at Yale, was fairly inconspicuous until recently...
...This objection only strengthens my point...
...He derives most of his gratification from an ever-renewed exhibitionism, as insatiable in him as in his audience...
...But all of a sudden the New Yorker, for reasons unknown, decided to reprint large excerpts from the book and, within a week, it became a tremendous success, the talk of the town...
...At the most, such outside appraisals are given only peripheral attention...
...LEWIS COSER 54 Iles for Look on such topics as "The Future of Sex" (co-authored by a Look editor) 24 Tom Wolfe, the fashionable journalist, once witnessed a conversation between McLuhan and Gossage, the publicity agent...
...We were into an age where the appetite for fame joined the hunger for money as the decisive factor in the direction of many careers and every 5 On the notion of effortlessness, cf...
...In the 1960s there was hardly a magazine * that failed to deal extensively with McLuhan's theses...
...In the 1950s McLuhan directed a seminar on culture and communications at the University of Toronto sponsored by the Ford Foundation and, together with the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, edited the periodical Explorations, largely devoted to unconventional and highly imaginative analyses of mass communications...
...48 LEWIS COSER curacy, the mastery or depth of a contribution, but they are sufficiently well-educated to judge a work in terms of surface characteristics of style and presentation...
...He had an office at Time, Inc., and wrote arti * Not DISSENT—Ed...
...they are meant to be "stimulating...
...Office of Education and the Na tional Association of Educational BroadTHE INTELLECTUAL AS CELEBRITY casters...
...into entertainment...
...Their appeal is to an unidentifiable and heterogeneous audience that has no other way of responding than through popularity ratings...
...The New York Times in turn gave the book its accolade by reprinting excerpts and running a number of comments pro and con, in addition to its regular review...
...The content of a movie," says McLuhan, "is a novel or a play or an opera...
...He must keep trying to raise the ante so that subsequent utterances often seem like selfparodies of earlier ones...
...Kurt H. Wolff, ed...
...Marx once remarked that historical happenings tend to repeat themselves, that which was enacted once as historical tragedy being reenacted as farce...
...His celebration of the electronic media served to allay residual feelings of inadequacy the public may still have harbored over its immersion in the delights of nonlinear sensory stimulations...
...The Mechanical Bride is a book that Ortega y Gasset would have appreciated...
...With the dawn of the electronic age, however, linear thinking based on print was pushed into the background...
...p. 34...
...It might be objected that celebrity intellectuals do not address their generalized public directly, but that their contributions are mediated through television commentators, talk-show hosts, media executives, and the like...
...The contributions of the celebrity intellectual, it turns out, tend to be judged in terms not of their use value but of their exchange value on the market of intellectual commodities...
...Time, for example, called it, "A colloidal suspension of William Buckley, William Blake and Herbert Marcuse in pure applesauce...
...Patrick's Day parade...
...Understanding Media quickly went from a hard-cover edition priced at $8.50 to a paperback edition priced at $1.95 to a drugstore paperback edition selling at 95 cents...
...As Robert Brustein writes, "In Segal, the media interviewers had found the perfect patsy—a performer willing to 16 William Philips, in Partisan Review, Spring 1971, p. 142...
...The half-life of most of them is short indeed...
...Men of ideas, he argued further, define data and problems in terms of actual or anticipated audiences...
...In recent years, Segal, usually attired in the latest mod style, has been seen on innumerable talk shows, delivering a variety of "with it" comments...
...In case of a conflict between him and his public, it is he who is felt to deserve the blame...
...Here Gordon Allport's principle of functional autonomy comes into play: specific forms of behavior become, under certain conditions, ends or goals in themselves, although they were only means at an earlier stage...
...Brilliant novelty becomes a tension-reducing anodyne...
...The austere London Times soon followed suit...
...cated public at large...
...Hence he comes to resemble the salesgirl on the personality market of whom C. Wright Mills wrote that she "must not only sell her time and energy...
...The development of the new media of communication corresponds to the emergence of a wide college-educated public...
...As Dean Inge noted a while ago, he who would marry the spirit of the times is soon likely to become a widower...
...Moreover, competition with the new media lead to the rapid transformation of older media to serve the needs of the new half-educated public...
...He began his teaching at the University of Wisconsin and joined the staff of a Catholic institution, St...
...William Shawn, the New Yorker editor, remarked in reply: "That all seems so long ago...
...only for his well-knownness," this purpose is simply the need for keeping one's competitive standing within the ranks of celebrities...
Vol. 20 • January 1973 • No. 1
