Marshall McLuhan

Tribalization of the Global Village: Marshall McLuhan, Orientalism, and Technocultural Panic

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Media pundits rarely take on the pervasive Orientalist discourse that makes up Marshall McLuhan’s legacy as “prophet of the media.” Orientalist discourses are central to McLuhan’s theory of media, but these are difficult to read for two reasons. First, McLuhan’s Orientalism brazenly adopts metaphors and analogies that most well-educated people today either critique or avoid. In addition to this discomfort, McLuhan’s discourse reinforces his personal ties with radically primitivist (/racist) moderns such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Second, his Orientalism is difficult because it emerges out of self-consciously esoteric literary contexts (he was hired as an English professor and not a media theorist). In the video above (1968), McLuhan and Mailer describe two versions of cultural contact (see above 15.30–22.00 min) between “East” and “West.” One cannot rule out satire in McLuhan’s “Orientalism,” given that his account of electric “Western” man inhabiting “all points” (19.38–19.50 min.) is also his exact definition of the “auditory” and “tactile” realm of what he calls “oriental field theory.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he writes: “The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory.” His famous book Understanding Media (1964) equates this existential field with the “tribal drum” of an electric “West” in an age of the “global village.”

 

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