Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1968
The Summer Way
Moderator: Ken Foley
Host: Paul Soles
Marshall McLuhan debates Norman Mailer (American writer)
Concepts discussed: The planet as art form, Violence as a quest for identity, Pattern recognition, The medium is the message, Nature of the artist, Technologies as extensions of man, Moral judgement as alienation
Transcript:
[McLuhan]“Violence is essentially the form of the quest for identity.”
[Mailer]“I don’t really go around punching out guys in the nose – and I try to avoid getting punched in the nose.”
[McLuhan]“The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the encounter with the present can give the pattern recognition.”
[Mailer]“You take for granted processes which I would consider Faustian, tragic, dramatic, apocalyptic, cataleptic.”
[McLuhan]“Gone into orbit.”
[Warren Davis]Tonight: a meeting of minds, Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on The Summer Way. Two of the most remarkable men of this era must surely be Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The one, a prophet of hip and the probable conscience of the nation. The other, a prophet of the media and a spokesman for the electronic age. Mailer’s career is studded with literary success and stained with matrimonial failure. It had its early beginnings with The Naked and the Dead, a bestseller that brought him instant fame. Recent years have been lean, but last October he joined 50,000 Americans in a march on the Pentagon to protest against the war in Vietnam. Mailer pushed his way through police barricades to certain arrest. He is now appealing a five-day prison sentence. His account of that skirmish has become what the critics have called his greatest book, Armies of the Night, a modern-day document of dissent. In his latest about-to-be-released book, War and Peace in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan maintains that violence is really a quest for identity and firmly nails down his prediction that the media will eventually hurl 20th-century man back to tribalism. Well, who or what does he speak for? His followers claim he’s a brilliant revolutionary in his own right who speaks for the future. His critics are less enthusiastic. They see more jargon than genius in his tribal village, rearview mirror, and host of novel slogans that have become his universally acknowledged trademarks. Call him what you will, there’s no doubt that McLuhan’s definition of communication makes him at least a passing master of the media. Two men of our time. Hate them or love them. But you must listen to what they say on tonight’s meeting of minds. Here’s Ken Foley face to face with Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan.
[Mailer]Look Marshall, we’re both agreed that man is accelerating at an extraordinary rate into a super-technological world, if you will. And that the modes and methods by which men instruct themselves and are instructed are shifting in extraordinary –
[McLuhan]We’ve gone into orbit.
[Mailer]Well, at the same time I would say there’s something profoundly autoerotic about this process, and it’s sinister for that reason.
[McLuhan]It’s psychedelic. When you step up the environment to thosespeeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward, by the way. It’s an inner trip, not an outer trip.
[Foley]Look, Marshall, you’ve said, among other things, that a novelist like Norman who is preoccupied with sex and violence is mid-Victorian for that reason. What do you mean by that?
[McLuhan]Oh, I didn’t say that.
[Mailer]No, you said in that sense I was essentially Victorian.
[Foley]Centrally Victorian?
[Mailer]Essentially, I think it was. Essentially? Well what did you mean by that?
[McLuhan]I don’t –
[Foley]Well, he’s saying what you said.
[McLuhan]I doubt whether I said that. But anyway, what was the key to the Victorian period? It was the great triumph of the mechanical age, which is the age of fragmentation and specialism. But just at the peak of that mechanical triumph came the electric circuit, flooding in the whole electric image and world.
[Concept: The planet as art form]
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