Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhanWar and Peace in the Global Village(1968) & From Cliché to Archetype(1970)

By: Lorna, Brody, John and Ryan

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

• Used Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration.

• Wake is a gigantic cryptogram that reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders.

• Each "thunder" is portmanteau of other words to create a statement to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced.

• To understand, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words and speak them out loud for the spoken effect of each word.

Thunder I•Paleolithic to Neolithic .•Speech.• Split of East/West.• From herding to harnessing animals.

Thunder II• Clothing as weaponry. • Enclosure of private parts. • First social aggression.

Thunder III•Specialism. •Centralism via wheel, transport, cities.•The civil life.

Thunder IV• Markets and truck gardens.• Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.

Thunder V•Printing introduced.•Distortion and translation of

human patterns and postures and pastors.

Thunder VI• Industrial Revolution. • Extreme development of print process and individualism.

Thunder VII•Tribal man again. •All characters end up separate,

private man.•Return of choric.

Thunder VIII• Movies. • Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. • Wedding of sight and sound.

Thunder IX•Car and Plane. •Both centralizing and

decentralizing at once create cities in crisis.

•Speed and death.Thunder X• Television. • Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. • The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

From Cliché to Archetype (1970)• Collaborated with Canadian

poet Wilfred Watson.• Approached the various

implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype.

• Introduced a new term that succeeds from global village: global theater.

• A cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects (ie: Eugene Ionesco's play The Bald Soprano).

•McLuhan's archetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it.

•The factor of interplay between the cliché and the archetype = "doubleness“

•Relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd.

Theater of the Absurd• A communicating to the

head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about.

• In the 17th century world, the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.

• The "languages of the heart", or oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.

The Satellite Medium• Encloses the Earth in a man-

made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

• "All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artefacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes").

• Meshes this into the term global theater.

• It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.

Works Cited•"War and Peace in the Global Village."

Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. Apr. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org

• "From Cliche to Archetype." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. Apr. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org

• Google Images

The EndThank you!