McLuhan's Tom-Toms
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING McLuhan's Tom-Toms By Raymond Rosenthal On the job, Marshall McLuhan wears the severe, no-nonsense white coat and rubber gloves of the laboratory technician immersed in his...
...Dialogue also presupposes distinct entities, individuals...
...Without individuals there can be no significant exchange, McLuhan has announced the end of the individual, ergo . . . And, in fact, turning the page, we read: "Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West...
...Like Pop artists and other victims of modernism's decay, McLuhan mimics the gestures of modernism but is incapable of responding to its inner spirit...
...After his first tremors of uncertainty, the bolder layman will realize that McLuhan has so crassly simplified the complex reality of such events as revolutions and civil uprisings that whatever modicum of truth his statement contains is vastly outweighed by all the truths????social, political and economic????it must ignore...
...Actually, from the very start McLuhan had little to say, and that little was hopelessly confused and badly expressed...
...WRITERS & WRITING McLuhan's Tom-Toms By Raymond Rosenthal On the job, Marshall McLuhan wears the severe, no-nonsense white coat and rubber gloves of the laboratory technician immersed in his esoteric labors...
...But McLuhan ascribes this deadness and passivity to the disorientation that attends any great transition or upheaval...
...But what does the sentence mean...
...But what myths...
...The high-brows had lost interest...
...McLuhan has obviously chosen this last course...
...It indicates how the enrichment of human experience can occur unexpectedly with the crossing and interplay of the life of media forms...
...The contained, the distinct, the separate????our Western legacy????are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused...
...And what is the mythical...
...This immediately marks it off from movies and television, where reflection and meditation, the main aspects of voluntary memory, are canceled by the distracting flow of images...
...they cannot be art in its fullest sense precisely because they are passive and not collaborative experiences...
...On the other hand, dialogue????the free exchange of ideas-cannot possibly be embarked on in the world McLuhan postulates, since he believes that power is woven by electrical means into the warp and woof of our everyday existence...
...Are these the entities McLuhan wants to carry on his impossible dialogue?flowing, unified fused...
...This man, one feels, has more important things to do than merely ingratiate us...
...It is in fact a criticism of all McLuhan is presently underwriting and praising...
...Its workings in his case are pathologically evident...
...But the grain of truth in this proposition was soon corrupted by Mc-Luhan's refusal to acknowledge that the divorce of the artist from his audience which printing caused is enormously intensified by the use of mechanical, electrical means...
...As such, myth is merely another pseudo-scientific word, bound to impress the foolish, but meaningless in any concrete context...
...This is true...
...But he did not make a virtue out of a necessity, as McLuhan does...
...all those pseudo-scientific words strung along in a sequence do exert some sort of numbing attraction...
...As McLuhan uses the word, myth is really the tom-toms of the mass media...
...They are, in fact, brow-beating words, shrewdly calculated to scare the layman, or at least put him in his place...
...Art is the communication of the artist's consciousness, both intellectual and emotional, to his audience...
...that, surrounded by the inauthenticity of modern experience, the artist must retreat from life into the be-seiged citadel of art...
...Modern life is rife with pundits, inspired or not...
...Someone should inform McLuhan that consciousness came before books, movies or television...
...It is also the old dream of a new man, this time surrounded with the fashionable trimmings of primitivism and refurbished religion...
...In short, his initial insight, valid in itself, has been so distorted that it now has become a pervasive lie...
...Just at the extreme point of mechanization represented by the factory, the film, and the press, men seemed by the stream of consciousness, or interior film, to obtain release into a world of spontaneity, of dreams, and of unique personal experience...
...One would first have to know what McLuhan means by propaganda and by dialogue...
...In Understanding Media he made a great show of his modernism, his interest in the methods employed by the greatest modern artists: "In 1911 Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution created a sensation by associating the thought process with the form of the movie...
...Now how, exactly, is one supposed to carry this out...
...His hortatory crudity is a distinguishing pundit trait...
...Now, first of all, Bergson's comparison of thought to the flow of filmic images can hardly be regarded as a conquest...
...Thus, on page 9 of his latest word-and-image concoction, The Medium is the Massage (Random House, unpaged, $10.50...
...But let me explain...
...It was the perfect setting for the appearance of a pundit, and McLuhan showed up...
...The myth of money, the myth of power, the myth of success, the myth of sexual omniverousness...
...No other explanation can be offered for the bumbling, fumbling gait of his prose, its opaque weight and impenetrability...
...Both Benjamin and McLuhan look to the mass media as harbingers of a "new man...
...Jingle in Pickwick Papers...
...Inevitably, the original mistake leads them into a labyrinth of contradictions, non sequiturs and downright nonsense...
...Certainly in David Copperfield he made a great technical discovery, since for the first time the world unfolds realistically through the use of the eye of a growing child as camera...
...McLuhan's "new man," however, is a tribal creature impregnated with the mythical...
...Benjamin thought the media would destroy the bourgeois individual and produce the political, mass man of the future...
...Oswald Spengler is the classic instance in the field of history...
...he is a pundit...
...Bantam Books, paperback, $1.45) we come across this sentence: "Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environment created by electric informational media...
...For once, McLuhan gives us a definition: "Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects...
...The tiny peephole McLuhan has forced us for the moment to gaze through reveals so minute, hunched and distorted a picture that it amounts to an outright falsification...
...McLuhan is not a critic...
...Indeed, when it suits his argument, propaganda becomes information, and vice versa...
...A movie, a record of a symphony, a program on the radio????all these experiences are perfectly valid either as propaganda or amusement...
...one idea negates another...
...No, McLuhan is not speaking of any of these myths which rule our lives, but of the mythical as an abstract, all-enveloping atmosphere...
...As we see, one page contradicts the next...
...We would be fools to give up what we have for McLuhan's shallow, cockeyed muddle...
...But there are no definitions of these terms in his books...
...This also accounts for a good part of his special cachet, that sedulous thickening of the murky atmosphere of scientific mystery-and science is mysterious, as he well knows-worked up with the intention of awing or frightening the layman...
...The deadness of much of our art is a direct result of the deadening, passivity-producing effect of the mass media on the potential art audience...
...It is not true that McLuhan wants to contradict himself, or does so as a matter of principle...
...If this, we think to ourselves, is the new, unlinear, mythic, stereophonic thinking McLuhan advocates, then, for better or worse, we are stuck with the old ways of thinking and acting...
...Behind them, glowering and remote, stands the frigid, impersonal, dreadful figure of the scientist as the popular imagination has conceived him...
...It is simply that the pundit must either renounce his system and become a mere critic????with all the loss in social prestige that such a renunciation implies????or persist in his errors and absurdities...
...You must talk to the media, not to the programmer...
...yet McLuhan has told us with gloating repetitiveness that the individual is finished, done in by the electric forces he has invented and deployed...
...Here was the stream of consciousness, perhaps, in its original form before it was adopted by Proust and Joyce and Eliot...
...This is what always happens to system-making pundits who refuse to follow the logical unfolding of their thought...
...For example, near the end of this book McLuhan proffers this typical piece of pundit counsel: "The environment as a processer of information is propaganda...
...The present book should silence once and for all those who put McLuhan forward as a modernist...
...and that consciousness is the foundation on which all art and scientific discourse rest...
...Some years back, McLuhan decided that books shut off man from a whole range of emotions and experiences of a tactile and sensory nature...
...McLuhan doesn't understand the art he adduces in support of his ideas...
...The very complexity and uncertainty that infect all modern situations provide the pundit with his opportunity...
...Propaganda ends where dialogue begins...
...Proust's novel is really a testing out of Bergson's ideas, a confrontation of voluntary and involuntary memory, and the latter could not exist in the novel without the existence of the former...
...Another is the impossibility of applying a pundit's advice to things as they are...
...Of course everybody had become fed up with complaints about the mass media...
...Pundits begin with an overmastering insight, a method for organizing the randomness and disorder of our existence...
...Significantly, the novel's conclusion is a depressingly triumphant one, typical of the situation of the beleaguered modern artist????it tells us that our pasts, our memories, are purely a matter of chance...
...With its stuttering alternation of words and pictures it looks like the kind of book produced by a forward-looking industrial management to keep its employes on the ball...
...McLuhan is a frightening instance of what the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood calls the "corrupt consciousness...
...the middle-brows were stunned, most people were honestly bewildered...
...Long before McLuhan ever wrote a line, Walter Benjamin, a Marxist critic of great subtlety, pointed to the change in the nature of perception which was being brought about by the mass media...
...As sheer sound, the sentence has a rough, incantational charm...
...Dickens perhaps began it all with his Mr...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 10
