Print this pageNorman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan give a master class in how to be richly, creatively, productively, necessarily wrong. Of course our notions of Nature are looks in the rearview mirror; of course nature is a void — empty, vast, and alive — and we’re far from putting an artificial environment around it. And yet even by giving shape to its character, I put it inside a little art work. Like Diogenes, McLuhan couldn’t satisfy his hunger by rubbing his stomach — and yet we can figure that hunger. And the very limitlessness of that figuration makes it part of nature, too. —via NextNature
The show’s opening sequence is trippy and excellent. I guess that’s a sun symbol moving around jerkily on the screen? Charming!
So true—sixties highbrow teevee is a blast!
[...] Type, Next Nature and Hilobrow have all linked to a great video of Marshall McLuhan (and Norman Mailer) discussing the physical [...]
wowsa! with what whimsical certitude does old marshall school the frowning norman! although i think he drops the ball early on, when norm suggests that the new environment is ‘auto-erotic’ i.e. AN ENORMOUS WANK (diagnosis borne out by subsequent developments) and marshall just coos amiably about ‘psychedelic’ and ‘kaleidoscopic’…
[...] of media”) and Norman Mailer (“prophet of hip”) to debate the modern condition. (Via.) The overall question: What is left of nature — and humanity — in a world totally mediated by [...]