Whatever you may write on the typewriter will always be less important than the radically different way in which the mechanics of typing will have caused you to consider writing. The fact that printing led to the widespread diffusion of the Bible depends on the fact that every technological achievement is added to what we already are; but printing could have developed in Arab countries, to bring the Koran within everyone’s reach, and the kind of influence printing has had on modern sensibility would not have changed: the shattering of the intellectual experience into uniform and repeatable units, the establishment of a sense of homogeneity and continuity that generated, at a distance of centuries, the assembly line, and presided over the ideology of the mechanical age, as well as the cosmology of infinitesimal calculation.
“Clock and alphabet, shattering the universe into visual segments, put an end to the music of interdependence”—they produced a man capable of dissociating his own emotions from what he sees aligned in space; they created the specialized man, accustomed to reasoning in a linear way, free with respect to the tribal envelopment of the “oral” epochs, where every member of the community belongs to a kind of undefined unit that reacts compactly and emotionally to cosmic events.
The press (to which McLuhan had dedicated perhaps his best work, The Gutenberg Galaxy) is a typically hot medium. Unlike what the adjective might suggest, the hot media develop a single sense (vision, in the case of the press) to a high power of definition, saturating the receiver with data, stuffing him with precise information, but leaving him free as far as his other faculties are concerned. In a way, the hot media hypnotize him, but fixing his sense on a single point. On the contrary, cool media supply information of low definition, oblige the receiver to fill in the gaps, and thus they engage all his senses and faculties, they make him a participant, but in the form of an overall hallucination that involves him completely. Press and movies are hot; television is cool.
With the advent of electricity certain revolutionary phenomena occurred: First of all, if it is true that the medium is the message, independently of content, then electric light was presented for the first time in history as a medium absolutely lacking in content; in the second place, electrical technology, replacing not an individual organ but the central nervous system, offered, as its primary product, information. The other products of mechanical civilization, in a period of automation, rapid communications, credit economy, financial operations, became secondary to the information product. The production and sale of information has overcome even ideological differences; at the same time the advent of television, the medium that is cool par excellence, destroyed the linear universe of mechanical civilization, inspired by the Gutenbergian model, reestablishing a sort of tribal unity, like a primitive village. Just as television does not foster perspective in art, so, according to McLuhan, it does not foster linearity in living.
“Since TV, the assembly line has disappeared from industry. Staff and line structures have dissolved in management. Gone are the stag line, the party line, the receiving line, and the pencil line from the backs of nylons.” The visual sense, extended by phonetic literacy, stimulated the analytic habit of perceiving “the single facet in the life of forms” and enabled us to isolate the single incident in time and space, as happens with representational art. “Iconographic art,” on the contrary, “uses the eye as we use our hand in seeking to create an inclusive image, made up of many moments, phases, and aspects of the person and thing.” Such an “iconic mode” is not “visual,” it is rather “tactual,” total, synaesthetic, and involves all senses.
“Pervaded by the mosaic TV image, the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy.” The young people born with TV “have naturally imbibed an urge towards involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic.” It is abundantly clear that this kind of involvement has nothing to do with the content of TV messages; the quality of the program is irrelevant (chapter 31 of Understanding Media).
Speaking of automation (chapter 33), McLuhan insists on the fact that “our new electric technology now extends the instant process of knowledge by interrelation that has long occurred within our central nervous system.” Such a phenomenon ends the mechanical age that started with Gutenberg. “With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communication.”
This collage of quotations summarizes McLuhan’s position and, at the same time, exemplifies his techniques of argumentation, which —paradoxically—are so illustrative of his thesis that they undermine its validity. We will try to make this clear.
Typical of our time, all-enveloping and shared, is the domination by cold media, one of whose properties, as we have said, is to present figures in low definition, not finished products but processes, and thus not linear successions of objects, moments, and arguments, but rather a kind of totality and simultaneity of the data involved. If this reality is transferred to methods of exposition, we will have discussion not through syllogisms, but through aphorisms. Aphorisms (as McLuhan reminds us) are incomplete and therefore require profound participation. Here his method of argumentation corresponds perfectly to the new universe in which we are invited to integrate ourselves—a universe that to men like Sedlmayr would seem the diabolical perfection of “loss of the center” (the notion of centrality and symmetry belong to the era of Renaissance perspective, supremely Gutenbergian), but for McLuhan it represents the future “broth” in which the bacilli of contemporaneity can develop to a degree unknown to the alphabet bacillus.
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,
