viz.

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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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McLuhan opposes the gestalt of “Oriental,” “non-literate,” “auditory,” and “tribal” awareness to that of a “visual,” “specialized,” “analytical,” and “rational” ideology that emerges in the wake of the Gutenberg Bible. These words each bear subtle meanings. “Oriental” pertains to the mystical field of experience and a tactile flow of information (patterns) that also invisibly structures human life in our electric age. “Tribal” belongs to a repertoire of ethnic stereotypes, by which McLuhan designates a mode of immersive being unstructured by typographic notions of identity and rationality. He also uses “tribal” as an elitist designation for the anaesthetizing collective unconscious of American popular culture. The “non-literate” perhaps frames McLuhan’s Orientalist tropes most precisely, since he is really describing a hypothetical foil for the typographic, individualist, private, and specialist cultures of the “West.” “Non-literate,” furthermore, is also McLuhan’s term for an electric America “re-tribalized” in the “global village.” Make no mistake about it—the “prophet of media” is cut from extremely conservative cloth. McLuhan's Orientalism is central to a complex web of media theory, however. One of the subtitles of his The Gutenberg Galaxy captures the theoretically complex registers of his Orientalism: “The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory. . . . A modern physicist with his habit of ‘field’ perception, and his sophisticated separation from our conventional habits of Newtonian space, easily finds in the pre-literate world a congenial kind of wisdom” (GG 28–29).

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McLuhan depicts the “typographic man” fostered by the Gutenberg Bible as imprinted with a sensory training, which is later reified as a cultural typology and value-system: “Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to cosmic patterns as tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. . . . [Indifference to the cosmic] fosters intense concentration on minute segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique strength of Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy” (UM 135). In Annie Hall, we almost miss the fact that McLuhan chastises the professor "You mean my fallacy is wrong" with a nonsensical speech, which is largely overshadowed by his iconic presence.

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McLuhan argues that, after its "explosion" in Renaissance Europe, print fostered ideals of a detached abstracting perspective of an eye and the "I" of the individualist/perspectival tradition. This shift in values relegated the auditory, participatory, and “tribal” ear to the realm of a powerful unconscious. According to McLuhan, the emergence of electric media re-awakens a forgotten “haptic” (nonverbal) interplay between senses—a process he calls “touch.” An aggressively visual culture (trained on “Gutenberg” and empiricism) will be unconsciously susceptible to the tactile (“field theory”) and the auditory (myth). McLuhan warns, “The implosive (compressional) character of the electric technology plays the disk or film of Western man backward, into the heart of tribal darkness, or into what Joseph Conrad called ‘the Africa within.’ . . . By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of other senses” (UM 120–21). For McLuhan, electric media is the "tribal drum" of the collective unconscious. 

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McLuhan lays out an apocalyptic vision in Understanding Media (1964). Here is how that book begins: “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we extended our bodies in space. Today, after nearly a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (3). McLuhan specifies the specific privileging of one sense in the “West”: “This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in ‘backward areas,’ we call Westernization. . . . That is only the East side story, for the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear-culture to the literate West. Not only does the visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner have now to live in daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the earth [my note: “myth”], but his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence. We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit. What do we know about the social or psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure in Europe? Make no mistake, the fusion of people who have known individualism and nationalism is not the same process as the fission of ‘backward’ and oral cultures that are just coming to individualism and nationalism. It is the difference between an ‘A’ bomb and the ‘H’ bomb. The latter is more violent, by far” (55).

McLuhan implicitly addresses this scene of technocultural panic to the recent dissolution of the British Empire. His comments on the topic range from the predictable to to bizarrely complex. He applies the term “barbarian” to refer to England’s landed aristocracy before the arrival of the English canon: “The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall: ‘Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?” (UM 16). McLuhan’s precedents are often literary authors ill at ease in their mediated environments. For example, consider how he ties the oriental electric age to James Joyce: “Associated with this transformation of the real world into science fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Western. Joyce encoded this reciprocal reverse in his cryptic phrase: ‘The West shall shake the East awake/ While ye have night for morn.’ The title of his Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, following the track of old Finn, but wide awake as we enter the tribal night” (UM 38). As much as McLuhan is describing electric media, he is reflecting on a non-ilterate and tribal Orient that “can no longer be contained” but is “now involved in our lives, thanks to the electric media. . . . The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action” (UM 5).

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Univ. of

Toronto Press, 1962).

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964).