Devices of an Explorer

By translating the dichotomous concepts of hot and cool as “forró” and “hűvös” into hungarian, we loose central aspects of meaning of the original terms. Although McLuhan used deliberately thermodinamical terms, these concepts are embedded in a much wider context in the english language. The word “hűvös” is the hungarian translation of two terms, that of cold and that of cool. It is significant that cold refers to the whole media, while cool denotes a certain kind of medium. But this latter term means much more than temperature, it also implies casuality, detachment, and awesomness. Indeed, the central trait of a cool medium is, that it is a personal trademark, and the term itself is not just an abstract notion describing the thickness and activity/passivity of the recipients. The term hot is even harder to translate, because besides hotness, it also refers to something new (like hot news), or to something which attracts attention and keeps it alive (for example: she is hot), meaning that the beholder literally can not take its eyes from it. Th is last layer of meaning correlates, according to McLuhan, with thickness of signs and continuous and focused attention. However, there are no words in hungarian, which could cover this spectrum of meanings. We can fully grasp the dichotomy between hot and cool only, if it engages observations on certain kinds of media. Television has a peculiar position, because it is, according to McLuhan, a cool medium, and yet it is not visual but haptic, which „is tattooing its message directly on our skins”. This somewhat surprising allegation is analogous to Alois Riegl’s differentiation between “haptisch” and “optisch”, which could be used to shed light on McLuhan’s problem. In my view, the labelling of television as a cool medium is much more an influence of Riegl, rather than being just a techno-deterministic problem of resolution in McLuhans’s work. The reason why television is a cool medium is not because of the resolution of the monitor or some other technical traits, but for the way it transmits its contents to the viewer. This is contrary to film, which is a hot medium but is embedded into another medium, namely television. The notions of television on the one side and that of hot and cool on the other are interlinked and can not be understood without the others. By drawing upon the concepts and arguments revealed in the discussion of „Kunstwollen”, I am going to argue that we should use in the hungarian scientific discourse the original terms of hot and cool with their rich spectrum of meaning, and not the translated ones because they make it harder to grasp the essence of McLuhan’s work.