Books and Culture, looks like Eagleton is getting bumped off of March’s “Delightful Article” award last minute by Jacobs.

All signification involves mediation: any sign mediates in multiple ways, between a person’s mind and a concept, or a thing, or another person’s mind. Media are systems of signification; and the people who populate media signify and thus mediate. Did Kenneth Clark get chosen by the BBC to host Civilisation because he was an authority on its core subjects? No doubt; but more to the point, Clark was recognized by a large audience as an authority on its subjects because he was chosen by the BBC. He mediates culture to his audience—just as Carl Sagan, in precisely the same way, mediates science, and Phil Donahue mediates a very different subset of culture than does Clark. Each of these figures offers “a personal view” of an issue or “a personal voyage” into a subject and in so doing makes the abstract and the difficult (or in Donahue’s case the just plain weird) seem accessible, recognizably human. Television provides for us a series of authoritative mediators of images, who are themselves, though we are not encouraged to think about this, also images.

We are not encouraged to think about how the structures of mediation work because that would cause us to question them and our relation to them. That is, we might start reflecting on the semiotic construction of the self, and begin to see the formation of our selves as problematic, none of which is good for business. American media culture, Percy believed, involves a lunatic oscillation between absolute indulgence of the self (Donahue) and absolute evasion of it (Sagan). Looked at in one way—in any number of ways—Phil Donahue and Carl Sagan have very little in common; looked at in Percy’s way, they serve an almost identical function as guides who gently distract us from attention to how we’re being formed and how we might be formed differently. Percy’s task, therefore, is to bring the self with all its contradictions into proper focus, to subject it to the harsh light of truth.

In Contact, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens we meet are perhaps more technologically developed than we are but they clearly feel a kinship with us that they wish to deepen. This vision offers a radical alternative to the previously dominant idea that such aliens would want to destroy us out of sheer but inexplicable malice. But the possibility that an extraterrestrial intelligence might look upon us with moral disgust and even horror never crosses the popular mind. Percy sees this as a lamentable failure of imagination.