Page 120 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the media 105
images, by millions. Indeed, it could be argued that it is this
function rather than any particular set of technological conditions
that defines television today.

Conclusion

For Adorno any reconciliation or dissolution of high and low culture
takes places within the context of a homogenization; if high and low
meet it is because the former has been reduced to the level of the
latter. Nothing could provide a greater contrast than McLuhan’s
account of this process:
Perhaps it is not very contradictory that when a medium
becomes a means of depth experience the old categories of
‘classical’ and ‘popular’ or ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ no longer
obtain … When [the] l.p. and hi-fi and stereo arrived, a depth
approach to musical experience also came in. Everybody lost
his inhibitions about ‘highbrow’ and the serious people lost
their qualms about popular music and culture. Anything that is
approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest
matters … Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight
is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the
content of the item seem quite secondary. Consciousness itself
is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content
(1964: 247)
During the course of the chapter we have repeatedly encountered a
fundamental ambiguity in McLuhan’s attitude toward his subject.
This is an ambivalence writ large in the trajectory of his published
work, which begins with the highly critical The Mechanical Bride and
moves toward increasingly eulogistic accounts of media. Yet even in
the white heat of technological euphoria a shadow remains, an
awareness of the darker possibility of the forces at play in the
electronic environment, and McLuhan is able to pass from exhorting
his readers to prepare themselves for the techno-medial rapture, to
observing that: ‘Electric technology is directly related to our central
nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of “what the public
wants” ’ ([1964] 1995: 68). We have seen that McLuhan felt under
no obligation to resolve these tensions, and in an illustration of
Whitman’s declaration ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict
myself, I am large, I contain multitudes!’, was happy to serve as the
site of multitudinous contradiction, as long as they served to provoke
debate. Indeed, McLuhan saw the demand for consistency as part of
the cultural legacy of print, as a rear-view Guttenberg hang-up, which
prevented an apprehension of the inherently plural space of the new
media.

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