Essential Listening

http://www.putfile.com/monsquaz/media

Intro to Joyce

McLuhan's recommended introduction to the work of James Joyce: Austin Farrer's "A Rebirth of Images" (1949)

Cold Cut [ft. Roots Manuva]

INVENTORY! See Cold Cut's take on the "Word that Makes the Market."

Extract from Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput

"Consider how helpless millions of American parents are to protect themselves or their children from the "scientific experiments" in edu­cation initiated by a few individuals such as John Dewey. The vast American political machine of American education is directed not by thousands of "scientific experimenters" but by three or four minds of the most dubious quality [note 20]"

[note 20] "The fact that the modern state is necessarily an educationalist state owing to the huge impassivity of the urban masses on the one hand and to the closely centralized control of all agencies of communication on the other, does not prevent the teacher from being as much a victim as the pupil] – from the ART OF BEING RULED."

The Symbolic Stadium

One of the reasons that McLuhan’s proposed first base of operation is understanding rather than action is that he appears to have been decidedly ambivalent about the operations of the “symbolic stadium.” His ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in his later observations on William Shakespeare:

If Shakespeare were alive he would be in an ad agency drawing down huge salaries and all you cannot name … they pay damn well and they are great patrons of the arts. They are the only folk art we have. [1]

On one hand, he saw the North American post-war reconstruction and the redirection of the war-time propaganda machine and entire Hollywood apparatus toward ostensibly economic ends as a new, world information war. It differed from earlier hardware wars only insofar as the casualties of the latter are imperceptible in terms of symptomatic physical carnage.[2] The “carnage” of information war is largely invisible: “…it aims not only at providing mental dim out by means of a huge crescendo of sensation but the reduction of all constituents of consciousness to a single wave line.”[3] As McLuhan notes in the “Typhon in America,” the great mistake, of course, is to suppose that what went on physically in Birkenau does not go on psychologically in America and England. “Intellectually, spiritually and emotionally this is precisely what we have been doing for some decades.” [4]

There is no difference in result between our entertainment industry and Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion at these is irrational as we have developed more complex and subtle ways of achieving the same end. [5]

Far from being a conscious conspiracy, this is a nightmare dream from which we would do well to awaken at once. Return again, Finnegan … At the moment the sleeper stirs and writhes. It is nice to be enfolded in the comfort of the collective dream as long as it is greater than the pain. We have nearly passed that point whereby consciousness will come as a relief. [6]

On the other hand, however, McLuhan appears to have seen some services in the wake of the second great betrayal. Advertising was providing an educational program and common language for a country that might otherwise dissolve in anarchy. [7] Further, the operations of the “symbolic stadium” had restored “language,” if not to intellectual respectability, then at least to a position where ancient theories of the “Logos type” were recognized in some quarters as having practical application. Writing to Harold Innis in 1951 McLuhan notes:

Many of the ancient language theories of the Logos type which you cite in Empire and Communications for their bearings on government and society, have recurred and amalgamated themselves today under the auspices of anthropology and social psychology. Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have, in turn, given salience and practical effectiveness to these magical notions of language. But it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language, such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. [8]

1. McLuhan, “It Will Probably End the Motor Car,” Cinema Canada 30 (August 1976), 37. Kirwin Cox, the interviewer, responds, “but ads are designed to manipulate?” To which McLuhan replies, “of course, but so is any drama. Shakespeare dramas are all highly manipulative.”
2. After all, the economics of advertising had by that time taken on the scale of a military operation. McLuhan, “The Age of Advertising,” Commonweal 58, no. 23 (1953): 556. Undoubtedly McLuhan’s observations are informed by his never having been directly involved in armed combat. McLuhan remained a civilian throughout the Second World War, and his direct experience of “war,” as it is conventionally understood, was restricted to life at Cambridge, England (c. 1939–40).
3. McLuhan, “Typhon in America, typescript (I),” MS., 14.
4. Ibid., 24. Please note, there is a break in the pagination in typescript I of “Typhon in America.” The page cited is from the second part of the script.
5. McLuhan, “The Subliminal Projection Project,” MS., n.pag.
6. The Mechanical Bride, 128.
7. McLuhan, “American Advertising,” MS., 2 in “The New American Vortex.” It is possible that McLuhan also agreed with Otis Pease who regarded advertising as one of the only force that was at work against Puritanism. See McLuhan, review of The Responsibilities of American Advertising: Private Control and Public Influence, 1920–1940, by Otis Pease, MS., 3.
8. McLuhan to Harold A. Innis, 14 March 1951.

#FIN[N]

"Ever since I can remember, I've been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative; in religion a neo-orthodox even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I'm going to end up a neo-that's all, neo dash nothing." Irving Kristol. http://www.pbs.org/arguing/reviews.html

The Happening

“As an artform, the Happening does not so much as address the audience as include the audience. It expects the audience to immerse itself in the “destructive element,” as it were. At various times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper it is decidedly the audience that is the show. Such in large degree is the nature of language. It is a Happening that includes all publics and all past perceptions in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he knew he had found the means to transform the entire human community into a work-force for the artist (McLuhan & Watson, 1970, p. 198).

Cold Fusion Experimentation Continues

[The following article is taken from Physicsworld.com: http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc_1.html]

On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and — for around a month — the world was under the impression that the world's energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair's results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did "not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion."

This hasn't prevented a handful of scientists persevering with cold-fusion research. They stand on the sidelines, diligently getting on with their experiments and, every so often, they wave their arms frantically when they think have made some progress.

Nobody notices, though. Why? These days the mainstream science media wouldn't touch cold-fusion experiments with a barge pole. They have learnt their lesson from 1989, and now treat "cold fusion" as a byword for bad science. Most scientists agree, and some even go so far as to brand cold fusion a "pathological science" — science that is plagued by falsehood but practiced nonetheless.

There is a reasonable chance that the naysayers are (to some extent) right and that cold fusion experiments in their current form will not amount to anything. But it's too easy to be drawn in by the crowd and overlook a genuine breakthrough, which is why I'd like to let you know that one of the handful of diligent cold-fusion practitioners has started waving his arms again. His name is Yoshiaki Arata, a retired (now emeritus) physics professor at Osaka University, Japan. Yesterday, Arata performed a demonstration at Osaka of one his cold-fusion experiments.

Although I couldn't attend the demonstration (it was in Japanese, anyway), I know that it was based on reports published here and here. Essentially Arata, together with his co-researcher Yue-Chang Zhang, uses pressure to force deuterium (D) gas into an evacuated cell containing a sample of palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide (ZrO₂–Pd). He claims the deuterium is absorbed by the sample in large amounts — producing what he calls dense or "pynco" deuterium — so that the deuterium nuclei become close enough together to fuse.

So, did this method work yesterday? Here's an email I received from Akito Takahashi, a colleague of Arata's, this morning:

"Arata's demonstration...was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there...Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers...This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata's lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active."

I also received a detailed account from Jed Rothwell, who is editor of the US site LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and who has long thought that cold-fusion research shows promise. He said that, after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.

Rothwell also pointed out that Arata performed three other control experiments: hydrogen with the ZrO₂–Pd sample (no lasting heat); deuterium with no ZrO₂–Pd sample (no heating at all); and hydrogen with no ZrO₂–Pd sample (again, no heating). Nevertheless, Rothwell added that Arata neglected to mention certain details, such as the method of calibration. "His lecture was very difficult to follow, even for native speakers, so I may have overlooked something," he wrote.

It will be interesting to see what other scientists think of Arata's demonstration. Last week I got in touch with Augustin McEvoy, a retired condensed-matter physicist who has studied Arata's previous cold-fusion experiments in detail. He said that he has found "no conclusive evidence of excess heat" before, though he would like to know how this demonstration turned out.

I will update you if and when I get any more information about the demonstration (apparently there might be some videos circulating soon). For now, though, you can form your own opinions about the reliability of cold fusion.

Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 23, 2008 3:05 PM

Beloit College's Mindset List for the Class of 2011

Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.

1. What Berlin wall?
2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
3. Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
5. Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
6. They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
7. They have grown up with bottled water.
8. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
11. Rap music has always been mainstream.
12. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
13. “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
14. Music has always been “unplugged.”
15. Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
16. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
17. They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
18. The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
19. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
20. Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.
21. Eastern Airlines has never “earned their wings” in their lifetime.
22. No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
23. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
24. Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.
25. Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.
26. Katie Couric has always had screen cred.
27. Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
28. They never found a prize in a Coca-Cola “MagiCan.”
29. They were too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.
30. When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.
31. Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.
32. They grew up in Wayne’s World.
33. U2 has always been more than a spy plane.
34. They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”
35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
36. American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.
37. Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.
38. On Parents’ Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.
39. Fox has always been a major network.
40. They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.
41. The “Blue Man Group” has always been everywhere.
42. Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.
43. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
44. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.
45. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.
46. Most phone calls have never been private.
47. High definition television has always been available.
48. Microbreweries have always been ubiquitous.
49. Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
50. Smoking has never been allowed in public spaces in France.
51. China has always been more interested in making money than in reeducation.
52. Time has always worked with Warner.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
54. The purchase of ivory has always been banned.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
56. The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.
57. Jerry Springer has always been lowering the level of discourse on TV.
58. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.
59. They’re always texting 1 n other.
60. They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.
61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.
62. They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said “goodbye to rusty cars.”
63. Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.
64. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil.
65. Illinois has been trying to ban smoking since the year they were born.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
67. Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.
68. Burma has always been Myanmar.
69. Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.
70. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

Against Sports and Humour: Lewis’s Abjuration of Delectation

[Further notes on McLuhan’s Reading of Wyndham Lewis]

Lewis, says McLuhan, is a mystic or visionary of the comic, moving towards the pole of intelligibility instead of that of feeling:

Lewis makes great and grim comedy of the horror of spirit shackled to the dying animal or human body. His own point of view in comedy is expressed as opposite to Bergson's when he says that laughter results from the spectacle of things (that is, persons) trying to behave as though they were alive. Bergson found the key to laughter in persons behaving as though they were things. Bergson had not the courage of his own philosophical position.[1]

It is precisely Lewis’s Gnosticism and his consequent “un-worldliness” that makes Lewis “so intense … and evaluation so fearless,”[2] and for McLuhan, so valuable. Unlike Joyce, who expressed ambivalence in regard to both Gnosticism and Catholicism, McLuhan finds that Lewis has value and importance in the technological age because of his courage to push his Gnosticism to the extreme:

It just happens that in the new age of technology when all human arrangements from the cradle to the grave have taken on the hasty extravaganza aspect of a Hollywood set, the nihilist philosophies of neo-Platonism and gnosticism have come into their own. Existence is an empty machine, a cheap art work, they have always said. The soul is a shabby mechanism, the body a monstrous one. The spirit or artist says to body and soul, a plague on both your prisons. And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One.”[3]

And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-PIatonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other.[4]

McLuhan states that the situation was so obvious to Lewis in the 1920s that he devoted the next two decades to warning us and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, and everyday activities in commerce and social engineering.[5]

[1] McLuhan, “Nihilism Exposed,” review of Wyndham Lewis, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 7, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 98.

[2] Ibid., 99.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 98.

[5] Ibid. “Electrically, mans struggles are with principalities and powers, and Lewis presents the struggle more vividly that any other writer of the 20th century,” (McLuhan, “The Lewis Vortex: Art and Politics as Masks of Power,” MS., 6).

Recycled Fragments Shored Against McLuhan's Ruin

The following is a relatively good essay I have “borrowed” and recycled from Peter Montgomery (pacificcoast.net/~montgomery/mcluhan). Among other things, Peter’s treatment of McLuhan’s “debts” to Lewis and Joyce makes a contribution to the question -- to laugh or not to laugh.

"Fragments Shored Against McLuhan's Ruin." By Peter Montgomery.
As time passes and Marshall's physical presence recedes from us the more, it becomes imperative that his academic and spiritual presence be more strongly affirmed. The importance of this awareness was underlined to the writer some few years ago when it became clear that one could no longer take it for granted that McLuhan was a household, or College-hold, or University-hold name. As a small gesture of defiance against time, it seemed appropriate to resurrect a haphazard collection of old audio tapes and assemble from them a collage of significant McLuhanalia. The immediate purpose was to build a concrete and sensory bridge for students to some awareness of this person of intensely kinetic mind. The collection of tapes was hardly a collection -merely random gatherings of bits of broadcasts and other recordings that had informally gravitated together over the years for no apparent purpose. They were not properly documented, and while their sources can be roughly identified, the fine details of documentation that research desires can only infrequently be supplied. The validity of the collage which this writer assembled from them is in its effect, rather than in its intellectual content, however, and that perhaps justifies its informality. The following is an attempt to translate the spirit of that collage into the print medium.

It became apparent from different attempts to assemble the material that the pieces had a life of their own and dictated an order based on a certain simple, prevailing logic in Marshall's thought. That thought was roughly as follows: the new electronic media create a programmed and programming surround that has and is drastically reshaping our sensibilities. We have moved from the logically ordered domain of a print-dominated culture to a randomly ordered domain of multi-sensory awareness. A dominant force in the new domain is advertising. The techniques of advertising surrender to literary/artistic analysis because some of the chief artists of our time, notably Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and P. Wyndham Lewis were among the first to probe and define the dimensions of this domain. These artists teach us to distinguish figure from ground and so allow a consciousness of the surround (ground) which shapes us. This new consciousness is a path to freedom from control by the new surround. The conclusion which this simple overview of Marshall's thought allows, is that he was in a unique position as an English teacher and personal friend of some of the above writers, to understand the new electronic world that was and is undergoing its genesis in our very presence. This genesis will be referred to as The Electronascence. McLuhan very clearly and unequivocally identifies the source of his inspiration as being the painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis. He does so in a plastic recording published by Arts Canada in November of 1967. He indicates that Lewis taught him to see the environment as "a programmed teaching machine" much the way the symbolists had done for themselves. Taking his cue from this insight of Lewis, McLuhan can be seen in his pre-Gutenberg Galaxy phase as examining the effects of industrial folklore-advertising on language, and advocating "intense training in language" and the arts ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). At this stage, McLuhan seems every bit the literary man of insights advocating strong scepticism about popular culture and its effects.

A distinct but very fine shift of position would seem to apply to his attitude circa 1962 and following, with the insights which are manifested in Gutenberg Galaxy. The character of this new attitude is one of non-judgmental detachment, almost an acquiescence in or acceptance of the inevitability of the changes. This is notably a public posture and has its contradictions in less guarded moments. Its main thrust remains, nonetheless, a desire to make manifest the dynamics of the Electranascence. The technique is that of the probe -- the uttering or outering of tentative half-thoughts as radar pulses that elicit multiform responses, depending on the mind and background of the responder.

Time and again the object of his probing is advertising. He detects in Advertising a form of warfare, organized on a vast scale and aimed at conquering and subjugating the human heart and the human mind ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). Time and again his probe reveals the artist in the advertiser-the creator of tremendous effects. The negative response of academia to this approach has been well documented. What has received less attention is the positive response of some segments of the business community. Tony Schwartz, advertiser par excellence, supplied, in his audio/visual presentation, The Sound of Sense, an excerpt of an address that Marshall gave to such an audience. The response to this address would seen to be one of mystified intrigue-a willingness to follow blindly, McLuhan's random logic of probing that exposes the simplistic values of that very audience and yet entices them to laugh at themselves and love the laughing. In the address, McLuhan cites the ability of the advertiser to present the effect of a thing without one having to have that thing. Advertising makes an object effectively present, even though the object is not there at all. This insight explains, says Marshall, why people don't really read through an ad until after they own the object it advertises. The reason they give this post factum attention is that that is how they get their fulfilment. The real experience is in the ad, not in the object. The artistically manipulated sensory experience is the true effect.

The key then, to Marshall's thinking as it presents itself in these auditory fragments, lies in the word EFFECT. Marshall indicates that the advertiser is like the artist in wanting-to get his effect across ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). Neither person is concerned with what their audience thinks, with theories or with changes of mind. Both are very interested in shaping sensibility, in molding the individual's manner of experiencing the world.

If the advertiser is the artist of the Electranascence and he has learned his techniques from the more "traditional" artists, then it becomes imperative to see what Marshall found to be important in the work of those traditional artists. In the world of Percy Wyndham Lewis, McLuhan found the importance of the eye in making the artist a cold, detached, objective observer. The visual field is a continuous one that has all spaces filled and leaves nothing for the observer to infer. It has an alienating effect. The importance of this detachment cannot be emphasized enough. For Marshall, a person whose bias is that of the visual culture of the Renaissance, is in a unique position as a detached observer to see, without being involved, the goings on of the new Electranascence venture. The Renaissance painter is very much in the position of the modern cameraman. The viewer of both picture and photograph sees not the maker of the scene nor his instruments, only what the maker makes -the visual effect. The modern advertiser, it may be inferred, has learned from the Renaissance artist to stay out of the visual field. Let the viewer confront the scene directly. The object to be advertised must be experienced as a natural part of the scene.

From James Joyce and Joyce's love of Thomas Aquinas, Marshall gets an insight into the importance of touch. Touch provides an interest- ing counterbalance to sight, because touch is all-engaging, all-involving. If the visual field is totally continuous, the haptic field is completely discontinuous. Every moment of touch is different. Touching is seen here in a broader context than merely skin connecting with some external object. Touch is the very experience of connecting itself. Touch is the interfacing or touching of the different senses with each other. When two senses combine, insight is achieved, or in Joycean terms, an epiphany results. From this insight, it can be inferred that the artist of the Electranascence has learned to bring the senses into contact with each other, to assault his audience in more than one way at a time to make the audience feel or touch a thing by experiencing it through more than one sense ("Saint Thomas Aquinas").

W. B. Yeats provided Marshall with the aesthetic of the emotion of multitude. Like the Joycean aesthetic, the emotion of multitude involves the experience of multiples. Unlike the Joycean aesthetic, the components of the emotion of multitude do not touch each other. The concept is, indeed, that they do not come in contact. Instead, they run in parallel, allowing the audience to perceive and create the significance of the parallels. It is the resonant interval between the paralleled elements that is significant here. This is the same resonant interval as that found between notes in a piece of music or between the lines of a haiku poem. The implication here is that the sense of sound has its own special role to play. Marshall indicates that the effect of the resonant interval created by running elements in parallel is one of realism. Just as the components of a stereo system, when brought properly into phase, can create the realistic ef- fect of sound being generated in three dimensional space, away and distinct from the speakers that generate it, so in a play such as King Lear, Shakespeare makes his audience experience the reality of political, social and family breakdown by showing that process of breakdown happening in the parallel situations of Lear himself and Gloucester ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").

In speaking about Ezra Pound, McLuhan focuses primarily on Pound's contribution as editor in the making of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Pound limited "The Waste Land" to those voices which define the character of the Twentieth Century. Material from the Georgians or other decayed poetic forces of the past was expunged. The effect of this work was to make the poem a collection of resonant fragments that brought all times and places past to bear on the present and so caused the present to alter the past irrevocably. This synchronicity that, in effect microscopes time and place to almost nothing, and that allows all times to exist equally in the here and now, is very powerful. It frees man from entrapment by forces of the past or the future that prevent him from seeing himself as he is ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").

The tape collection does not provide much in terms of Marshall's thoughts on Eliot. What is there, is Marshall repeating from "The Waste Land" the line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). That one line, however, reflects Eliot's concern (as in "Tradition and the Individual Talent") that the relationship of the past to the present, as being seen in the now, is crucial to any strategy of cultural survival. The line also points to the resonant intervals between all the fragments in "The Waste Land," and it reminds us that these fragments, like fragments of papyrus, or stone tablets, are voices that speak to the present. The poet assembles the responses through what Eliot called the auditory imagination, the sense for voices of the most primitive past that speak to the most immediate present. A phrase like "the racer's edge" used in modern advertising for motor oil, evokes the whole philosophical world of William of Occam. The Electranascence artist has learned well the things left in the legacy of Eliot and Pound.

Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and Percy Wyndham Lewis were Marshall McLuhan's beacons in the dark confusion of the modern technological explosion. Focusing on their aesthetics provides clues to interpret the miasma of modern experience. The guiding principle behind the use of these clues is enunciated in Marshall's favourite story by Poe, "The Maelstrom". A victim caught in a whirlpool notices that certain hollow objects are ejected by the vortex. He grabs on to one such object and is saved ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). These objects are the fragments of cultural vitality that manifest themselves at random, like the fragments of "The Waste Land." They are part of a process of transformation which takes the cliché, the empty and used up garbage of communication, and renders it an elemental constituent of consciousness.

At the time of the publication of his co-authored book, From Cliché to Archetype, written with his friend, the noted Canadian poet and playwright, Wilfred Watson, Marshall appeared on the David Frost Show and spoke extensively on the subject of cliché transformation to a bewildered Frost, somewhat unused, it would seem, to coping with that intensity of thought. There were two streams in Marshall's thinking at the time. On the one hand, he identified what might be called the rear-view mirror syndrome in which the present is interpreted only in the terms of the past. In such a mode we find that the content of any new medium is an old medium (see also Schwartz). The novel subsumes the play; the movie subsumes the novel; television subsumes the movie. The record subsumes the performance; the tape subsumes the record; the high density magnetic or laser disk subsumes the tape. There would seem to be an illusion of security in using the new technology to do the work of the old. This syndrome all the while buries the used up language and rituals of the old technology under deeper and deeper layers of new technology. Eventually, as coal is transformed into diamond, so the voices of the past reappear as the permanent cultural features that are identified with such images as the mother, the hunter, the seductress, and the wise old man. Or the garbage apocalypse of industrial man transforms into the ecologically coordinated gardens of electronic man ("The David Frost Show").

The rear view mirror syndrome is, in effect, a concomitant of the cliché/archetype process. When an old technology is dumped and be- comes the content of a new technology, as the main frame computer is in the process of becoming the content of the microcomputer, then that old technology becomes an artefact, an object of study rather than use, an art form or a museum piece. Before long, one might expect to see UNIVAC as part of the environment for a drinking lounge.

In particular, Marshall was concerned with the transformation of language, the process by which the cliché phrase becomes a poetic statement. This interest was one with his love of puns and, there- fore, of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The rhetorical device of paranomasia was his guide here. Like Joyce, he would give a cliché a twist and out would come an insight, an archetypal statement or epigram. So, as the writer remembers from one of McLuhan's lectures: "Girls are Jung and easily Freudened"; "Be he ever so proud, there was no police like Holmes"; "History is a series of thud and blunder"; and, "I Cain, but are you Abel?"

Perhaps more important than either cliché or archetype is the transformation itself, the idea of percept in flux, in a state of change that we used to mean by that now badly abused piece of new- speak, process. The importance of this sense of alteration lies in its compatibility with the Electranascence, the electronic culture, by definition a culture of dynamic, of flow. The significance of percept in flux is seen by paralleling it with the "concept in stasis" which, McLuhan constantly reminds his audience, is an outmoded sensory posture. It is outmoded because it is a direct descendent of that fixed sense of space -- visual, continuous space -- which was bequeathed to the world by Plato and his descendents, and which was intensified for European man in the Renaissance ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?"). The presence and dominance of fixed, visual space in Western culture was made possible by the Greek emphasis on the written word and the Renaissance emphasis on the printed word. The vast majority of information came to be processed through the eyes. To see was to under- stand. To see was to believe. Only Othello's "ocular proof" would suffice. The concept and sight, insight and vision, became one and the same. Sight provided a place for everything, and concept put everything in its place. A world of stasis. Such a world breaks down in the Electranascence, for all the senses compete as handlers of awareness. Insight comes to be "in touch", with all the senses con- necting. The world of marble columns and apollonian institutions, so solid that they are meant to outlast time (ars longa, vita brevis), shatters in the current of the wired, weird world. Capital succumbs to the barter of immediate electronic exchanges and so money becomes more and more scarce. Labour surrenders to the adaptability of intellligent electronic technology, and so jobs disappear. The industrial era recedes ("McLuhan: What If He Was Right?").

Breakdown, however, is also breakthrough ("The David Frost Show"). The collapse of a system exposes the functioning of that system. That epiphany brings man in touch with the new possibilities that present themselves out of the fragments that remain. If Poe's "Maelstrom" is the guide, then it is imperative to look for the positive, creative percepts that are ejected by the current vortex of economic, social and cultural breakdown. This awareness, perhaps more than any other, explains Marshall's refusal to be negative about electronic culture. He was probing (perhaps "is," for the probes continue to advance and resonate) for Horace's "disjecti membra poetae" that would become the ground for the new culture.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." THE SACRED WOOD. London: Methuen, 1920.

McLuhan, Marshall. "Wyndham Lewis Recalled." ARTS CANADA. Plastic. Recording, 33 1/3. No. 117 (Nov@ber, 1967).

McLuhan, Marshall. THE GUTENBERG GALAXY. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

McLuhan, Marshall, with Wilfred Watson. FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE. New York: Viking, 1970.

"McLuhan: What If He Was Right?" Written and presented by Prof. Derrick De Kerckhove.- Research Assis. Helga Heberfelner. Ideas. Prod. Damiano Katropaulo. Tech. Assis. Ken Barnes and Larry Mawry. Exec. Prod. Geraldine Sherman. Intro. Russ Germaine. CBC [N.D.].

"Saint Thomas Aquinas." Gathered and edited by Ann Hutchison. Plain Chant Dir. Giles Bryant. Concern. Prod. Diana Fowler. Tech. Assis. John Hollinger- Narr. Warren Davis.

Schwartz, Tony. THE SOUND OF SENSE. Slide/tape. New York: [N.P.], 1968.

THE DAVID FROST SHOW. Host David Frost. CBC (March) 1970.

Thingness: Some Notes on McLuhan's Dialogue With the Church

McLuhan’s dialogue with the Church was not restricted to a top-down engagement with the hierarchy. During his tenure as hallucinated idiot McLuhan also tried to save his fellow Christians from ruination by “conventional theology” [1] on the grounds that: “…all those having trouble with their faith today tend to be victims of post-renaissance conceptualized theology and catechism.”[2] His efforts in this regard bring us, in many respects, to the single most “personal object” he sought to address throughout his entire career.[3]

The crux of McLuhan’s praxis here was to try and provide some propaedeutic for an “encounter”[4] with the uncharted and un-chartable “thingness” and what he considered the “ever present fact”:[5]

Isn't the real message of the Church in the secondary or side-effects of the Incarnation, that is to say, in Christ's penetration into all of human existence? Then the question is, where are you in relation to this reality? Most people prefer to avoid the question by side-stepping it. The message is there but they want no part of it. So they eliminate it by plugging into another channel. They hypnotize themselves with the figure so as to better ignore the ground. They prefer to study the words rather than the questions that Christ asks everywhere, and of every human being. [6]

Central to his procedure was his bid to recast what “theology” means. Here McLuhan’s conversation with Hubert Hoskins brings us to the heart of McLuhan’s way, and works to further illuminate the relationship of his work to the “negative way” of T. S. Eliot with which we began this chapter:

McLuhan: The revelation is of thing, not theory. And where revelation reveals actual thing-ness you are not dealing with concept. The thing-ness revealed in Christianity has always been a scandal to the conceptualist: it has always been incredible. This issue is raised in the Book of Job, where faith and understanding were put at totally opposite poles. Job was not working on a theory but on a direct percept. All understanding was against him; all concept was against him. He was directly perceiving a reality, one revealed to him.

Hoskins: If what you are saying is right, I still don't see how such an activity as theology is possible even in theory.

McLuhan: I should think that it is very much a pastime, in the sense of a rehearsal of past times. It is not personal and direct confrontation. Theology is one of the “games people play,” in the sense of its theorizing. But using direct percept and direct involvement with the actuality of a revealed thing — there need be no theology in the ordinary sense of the word....

Hoskins: You regard this as a game?

McLuhan: Pure game.

Hoskins: A useless game?

McLuhan: Not necessarily more useless than any other game. Most games are a tremendous katharsis for pent-up emotions and frustrations. There has always been a great clash between works and concepts in religion. I think that theology can become a work, perhaps a part of the opus dei, part of the prayerful contemplation of God. Insofar as theology is contemplation and prayer it is part of the contemplation of the thingness and the mysteries.

Hoskins: This is using the term “theology” in a rather unusual way.

McLuhan: Theology should ideally be a study of the thingness, the nature of God, since it is a form of contemplation. But insofar as it is a theoretical or intellectual construct, it is purely a game, though perhaps a very attractive game. It can be played equally with any oriental theology: it has no more relevance to Christian theology than to Hindu theology.[7]

+ + +

[1] See McLuhan, “Milton, Montaigne, and the Philosophi Christi,” MS., 5.

[2] McLuhan to William Kuhns, 5 January 1970.

[3] McLuhan says to Wakin, only 1 in 6 of his kids raised in the Church stayed in the Church. “There is a great disparity between what the kids learned in Church and what they experienced and what their needs are,” (McLuhan, “Our Only Hope is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light, 63).

[4] “It is clear to me that a study of the effects sought by any writer or artist or scientist whatever would naturally stress the experience of encountering this person. The word "encounter" is universally employed today, just as the words "perception" and "involvement" are. I think that the series I have in mind would be very much on the side of "encounter" and direct experience,” (McLuhan to Judith Greissman, 14 July 1971).

[5] “… I can say that I do not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever present fact, an occasion for continuous dialogue,” (McLuhan to James Taylor, 15 January 1969).

[6] McLuhan, “Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin,” in The Medium and the Light, 102–03.

[7] McLuhan, “Electric Consciousness and the Church,” in The Medium and the Light, 81–82.

Point of Method: the “Continuous Parallel”

The discovery of and subsequent employment of the technique of the “continuous parallel” — by creating an interface between two worlds/times — is an indispensable tool for creating a cubist perspective and probing a society dedicated to the abrogation of space and time by way of the full extension of communication by every means.

McLuhan used the technique throughout his career. For example during the last decade of his life and career, McLuhan suggests that Lewis Mumford might “be quite correct in seeing the wedding of the old mechanical hardware and the new electric software as creating a megamachine of the Aztec or Pyramid type” (“The Case of the Unhappy Medium”).

Animated Hieroglyphics

Do Egyptian hieroglyphics help us understand Youtube?
Does Youtube help us understand ancient Egyptian art?

We are seeing numerous changes in the ways we read and write. Today, embedded Youtube “clips” (Youtubes?) are used as compositional units for a new kind of writing. Electronic “texts” built from one or more Youtubes are frequently devoid of letters from a phonetic alphabet (save in cases where a URL is used in place of an embed). Perhaps, the closest example in human history of a similar writing system can be found in the “cooler” and “culturally richer” hieroglyphics of the near-East and ancient Egypt:

"The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years. But the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the wide range of data in their societies -- unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages. This achievement demanded the separation of both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound. It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium -- or Gestalt interplay of all the senses -- and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system" (Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview”).

The current parallel between Ancient Egypt and our own time also appears to be permitting discoveries for “scholars” working in the “other” direction. Recently, for example, Dr. Eric McLuhan has discovered how the ancient Egyptians developed an “animation” technique, grounded in the calculated admission of ambiguities, that makes their figures appear to “dance.” Certain silhouette type drawings (e.g. like the one included), Eric McLuhan shows, appear in one instant to be facing the viewer and in the next moment facing away. This quality makes the image appear to be in constant motion -- walking like an Egyptian.