So the question, if I recall: what happens when we have to juggle multiple voices at once? Well, in short, framing becomes all the more important. We’re not just directing a single voice here; we’re orchestrating an ensemble.
Below, I offer another excerpt from Lee’s article. I’ve done my best to remove the framing that both helps us understand the conversation, and assures us that someone is in control of the conversation. How does this excerpt read without the framing? Is it easy to digest? Which of the “four levels of quote integration” does this excerpt most often reflect? What, specifically, is missing? And how do you feel about the transition between paragraphs?
The global village concept is perhaps the ultimate fetishization of the village’s primordial aspect. “[T]he electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under the conditions of a ‘global village.’ We live in a single constructed space resonant with tribal drums…. Electric speed [brings together] all social and political functions in a sudden implosion,” and “the electronically contracted globe is no more than a village” (McLuhan 20). However, the “constant sliding of categories in McLuhan from the technological to the social and vice versa” reveals a mix of technological and theological discourse (Huyssen 12). Rather than offering a media theory McLuhan offers a “media theology,” in which a high-speed electronic medium, such as television, “retribalizes the world” (12). Also, the “global village” is an “appropriation of the rural” (Spivak 330). The concept of global village, built on the “[e]lectronification of biodiversity . . . is colonialism’s newest trick” (330).
In Tropic of Orange, there is an illegal immigrant couple, Bobby and Rafaela, and a white-collar professional couple, Gabriel and Emi. These sets of characters embody the disparate socioeconomic positions and emphasize the growing fissures that run through the global village discourse.
Okay, now I want to offer Lee’s actual paragraph. If you were an editor at Modern Fiction Studies where this article was first published, and if you instantly recalled all those valuable lessons you learned about quote integration in ENGL 299, would you recommend further changes? What’s still just a little bit off here? And how has the transition been improved here?
The global village concept is perhaps the ultimate fetishization of the village’s primordial aspect. This fetishization is explicit in Marshall McLuhan’s formulation of the global village. As he writes in The Gutenburg Galaxy: “[T]he electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under the conditions of a ‘global village.’ We live in a single constructed space resonant with tribal drums” (31). McLuhan’s global village discourse fundamentally appeals to primordialism (human family, tribal drums) in translating high-speed electronic medium into a social relationality of intimacy, cooperativeness, and familiarity: “electric speed [brings together] all social and political functions in a sudden implosion,” and “the electronically contracted globe is no more than a village” (Understanding 20). As Andreas Huyssen notes, the “constant sliding of categories in McLuhan from the technological to the social and vice versa” reveals a mix of technological and theological discourse. “Rather than offering a media theory McLuhan offers a media theology,” in which a high-speed electronic medium, such as television, “retribalizes the world” (12). Gayatri Spivak, discussing McLuhan’s The Global Village, casts a more political condemnation: “global village” is an “appropriation of the rural.” The concept of global village, built on the “[e]lectronification of biodiversity . . . is colonialism’s newest trick” (330).
Tropic mulls over precisely this unidirectional logic of the globalist “we” by sharply delineating the material inequalities that obstruct the binding of the First World and Third World into one subject position. In its depiction of Los Angeles, too, the novel focuses on extremely disparate socioeconomic positions and emphasizes the growing fissures that run through the global village discourse. There is an illegal immigrant couple, Bobby and Rafaela, and a white-collar professional couple, Gabriel and Emi.
And here, finally, is a paragraph that I have tried to frame out even further. Have I succeeded in making the reader’s job easier?
The global village concept is perhaps the ultimate fetishization of the village’s primordial aspect. This fetishization is explicit in Marshall McLuhan’s formulation of the global village. As he writes in The Gutenburg Galaxy: “[T]he electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under the conditions of a ‘global village.’ We live in a single constructed space resonant with tribal drums” (31). McLuhan’s global village discourse fundamentally appeals to primordialism (human family, tribal drums). Crucially, technology enables this primordialism, translating high-speed electronic medium into a social relationality of intimacy, cooperativeness, and familiarity. McLuhan extends this argument in his subsequent study Understanding Media. “Electric speed [brings together] all social and political functions in a sudden implosion,” he contends, concluding that “the electronically contracted globe is no more than a village” (20). Andreas Huyssen has taken issue with these influential ideas, noting a quasi-religious element that McLuhan might not have intended: “Rather than offering a media theory,” Huyssen argues, “McLuhan offers a media theology,” in which a high-speed electronic medium, such as television, “retribalizes the world” (12). Gayatri Spivak, addressing McLuhan’s The Global Village, casts a more political condemnation. The “global village,” she writes, is an “appropriation of the rural.” Indeed, the concept of global village, which uses technology to flatten essential aspects of biodiversity, amounts to nothing more than what Spivak derisively calls “colonialism’s newest trick” (330). Putting these criticisms together, it seems that an almost religious fervor over technological advancement combined with a nostalgia for village ideals only serve to mask a new and nefarious form of colonial oppression.