This technique, however, involves certain flaws. The first is that for every affirmation McLuhan aligns another, opposed to it, assuming both as congruent. In this way his book could offer valid arguments for Sedlmayr and for all the apocalyptic bunch as well as for the Adjusted & Co.; excerpts could be quoted by some Chinese Marxist who wants to excoriate our society; and there are demonstrative arguments for a theoretician of neocapitalistic optimism. McLuhan doesn’t even worry about whether all his arguments are true; he is content that they be. What might, from our point of view, seem contradiction is, to him, simply copresence. But, since he is writing a book, McLuhan can’t elude the Gutenbergian habit of articulating consequent demonstrations.
The consequentiality is Active, however; he offers us the copresence of arguments as if it were a logical succession. The speed with which he moves from the concept of linearity in business organization to the concept of linearity in the texture of a stocking is such that the juxtaposition cannot help but seem a causal nexus.
All McLuhan’s book is there to prove to us that the “disappearance of the assembly line” and “disappearance of net stockings” must not be connected by a “therefore”—or at least not by the author of the message, but rather by the receiver, who will take care of filling in the gaps in this scantily defined chain. But the trouble is that, secretly, McLuhan wants us to put in that “therefore,” also because he knows that, out of Gutenbergian habit, as we are reading the two data lined up on the printed page, we will be forced to think in “therefore” terms. So he is cheating just as Sedlmayr cheats when he tells us that microscopy means loss of the center, and as the madman cheats when he points to the seven matches. McLuhan requires an extrapolation, and imposes it on us in the most insidiously illegitimate way imaginable. We are in full cogito interruptus, which would not be interruptus if, in consequence, it were no longer presented as cogito. But McLuhan’s whole book rests on the equivocation of a cogito that is denied, arguing in the modes of denied rationality.
If we are witnessing the advent of a new dimension of thought and of physical life, either this is total, radical—and has already conquered—and then books can no longer be written to demonstrate the advent of something that has made all books purposeless; or else the problem of our time is that of integrating the new dimensions of intellect and sensibility with those on which all our means of communication are still based (including television communication, which, at the outset, is still organized, studied, and programmed in Gutenbergian dimensions) and then the critic’s job (as he writes books) is to act as mediator, and therefore to translate the situation of enveloping globality into terms of a Gutenbergian rationality, specialized and linear.
McLuhan has recently realized that perhaps books must no longer be written; and with The Medium Is the Massage, his latest “nonbook,” he suggests a discourse in which word is fused with image and the chains of logic are destroyed in favor of a synchronic, visual-verbal proposition, of unreasoned data set spinning before the reader’s intelligence. The trouble is that The Medium Is the Massage, to be completely understood, needs Understanding Media as a code. McLuhan cannot elude the requirement of rational clarification of the process we are witnessing; but when he surrenders to that demand for cogito he is bound not to interrupt it.
The first victim of this ambiguous situation is McLuhan himself:
He doesn’t just line up disconnected data and make us swallow them as if they were connected. He also makes an effort to present us with data that seem disconnected and contradictory while he believes them to be connected by logical operations, but he is ashamed of showing these operations in action. Read, for example, this excerpt, which we have complemented with numbered parentheses, in order to separate the various propositions:
“It seems contradictory that the fragmenting and divisive power of our analytic Western world should derive from an accentuation of the visual faculty.
(1) This same visual sense is, also, responsible for the habit of seeing all things as continuous and connected.
(2) Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that isolation of moment in time, or of aspect of space, that is beyond the power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement.
(3) By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synthesia and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.”
Now, try rereading this incomprehensible excerpt, inserting at the indicated places these links: (1) In fact; (2) Nevertheless; (3) On the other hand. And you will see that the reasoning flows, at least formally.
But these observations still concern only the expositional technique. More serious are the instances where the author sets actual traps of argumentation that can be summed up in a general category definable in terms dear to those schoolmen that McLuhan, an old commentator of Thomas Aquinas, should know and imitate: the equivocation on the suppositio of the terms: or, equivocal definition, in short.
Gutenberg man and, before him, alphabet man had at least taught us to define precisely the terms of our speech. To avoid defining them in order to “involve” the reader further could be a technique (what else is the deliberate ambiguity of poetic discourse?), but in other cases it is a trick to throw sand in our eyes.
We won’t go into the carefree change of a term’s usual connotations: Thus hot means “capable of allowing critical detachment” and cool means “involving”; visual, “alphabetic”; tactile, “visual”; detachment, “critical involvement”; participation, “hallucinatory uninvolvement”; and so on. Here we are still at the level of a deliberate regeneration of terminology for provocatory purposes.
Let us look, instead, as examples, at some more criticizable games of definition. It is not true that—as McLuhan says—all the media are active metaphors because they have the power to translate experience into new forms. In fact, a medium—the spoken language, for example—translates experience into another form because it represents a code. A metaphor, on the contrary, is the replacement, within a code, of one term with another, a simile established and then covered. But the definition of medium as metaphor also covers a confusion in the definition of the medium. To say that it represents an extension of our bodies still means little.
The wheel extends the capacity of the foot and the lever that of the arm, but the alphabet reduces, according to criteria of a particular economy, the possibilities of the sound-making organs in order to allow a certain codification of experience. The sense in which the press is a medium is not the same as that in which language is a medium. The press does not change the coding of experience, with respect to the written language, but fosters its diffusion and increments certain developments in the direction of precision, standardization, and so on. To say, as McLuhan says, that language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet (in so far as it allows us to move from one thing to another with ease and nonchalance) is little more than a boutade.
In effect, all of McLuhan’s reasoning is dominated by a series of equivocations very troubling to a theoretician of communication, because the differences between the channel of communication, the code, and the message are not established. To say that roads and the written language are media is making a channel the same as a code. To say that Euclidean geometry and a suit of clothing are media means pairing a code (a way of formalizing experience) with a message (a way of signifying, through conventions of dress, something I want to say, a content). To say that light is a medium means not realizing that at least three definitions of “light” come into play here:
(1) light as signal (I transmit impulses which, in Morse code, then mean certain messages);
(2) light as message (the light burning in the girlfriend’s window that means “come”); and
(3) light as channel of other communication (if, in the street, there is a light burning, I can read the poster on the wall).
In these three cases light performs different functions, and it would be very interesting to study the constants of the phenomenon under such diverse aspects, or to examine the birth, thanks to the three different uses, of three phenomena-light. In conclusion, the happy and now famous formula, “The medium is the message,” proves ambiguous and pregnant with a series of contradictory formulas. It can, in fact, mean:
(1) The form of the message is the real content of the message (which is the thesis of avant-garde literature and criticism);
(2) The code, that is to say, the structure of a language—or of another system of communication—is the message (which is the famous anthropological thesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf, for whom the view of the world is determined by the structure of the
language);
(3) The channel is the message (that is, the physical means chosen to convey the information determines either the form of the message, or its contents, or the very structure of the codes— which is a familiar idea in aesthetics, where the choice of artistic material notoriously determines the cadences of the spirit and the argument itself).
All these formulas show that it is not
