Monthly Archives: October 2023

Mimesis in Laws of Media

Laws of Media has more discussion of mimesis than any other McLuhan text. But its appearances in LoM are far from uniform. The demand made as much on a reader today as on the McLuhans, when they discussed these points together in the 1970s, is to interrogate its Protean nature.

The question of subjective, objective and dual genitives is, as always, a key to interrogation. McLuhan employs the following genitive phrases regarding mimesis : the nature of mimesis, versions of mimesis, the spell of mimesis, the oral habit of mimesis, mimesis of the alphabet, the mimesis of human action. It must always be wondered what sort of genitive seems to have been intended, what other sort of sorts might have been intended, and what sort or sorts should have have been intended.

Here in page order are the discussions of mimesis in LoM. A later post, or posts, will supply commentary. 

Laws of Media, 4
There has been great confusion for many centuries over certain matters crucial to an understanding of acoustic space, for example, the natures of logos, of mimesis, and of formal causality. This confusion flows directly from the fact that all commentary and research, from Aristotle onwards, was conducted by persons, to one or another degree visually biased, who assumed visual space to be the common-sense norm. As a result, there are at least two forms or rather versions of mimesis and of logos and of formal cause. One of each has an oral structure, and the other a visual — with the former conventionally regarded as a confused or tentative attempt to explain the latter.

Laws of Media, 16-17
The split between conscious and unconscious, as an effect of the alphabet, is of crucial significance. It is a mimesis of the dissociation of perceptual sensibilities (of vision from the other senses), which is inherent in the form of the phonetic alphabet.
For the preliterate, mimesis is not merely a mode of representation but ‘the process whereby all men learn’; it was a technique cultivated by the oral poets and rhetors and used by everybody for ‘knowing’ via merging knower and known. This understanding survives in the maxim ‘the cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known’. Using mimesis, the ‘thing known’ ceases to be an object of attention and becomes instead a ground for the knower to put on. It violates all the properties of the visual order, allowing neither objectivity, nor detachment, nor any rational uniformity of experience, which is why Plato was at pains in the Republic to denounce its chief practitioners. Under the spell of mimesis the knower (hearer of a recitation) loses all relation to [the] merely present persona [of] person and place and is transformed by and into what he perceives. It is not simply a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable portion of Preface to Plato to this problem. As he discovered, mimesis was the oral bond by which the tribe cohered:
“You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said and about him. Such enormous powers of poetic memorisation could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity. Plato’s target was indeed an educational procedure  a whole way of life.” (Preface to Plato, 45)
Paradoxically, when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology using their oral habit of mimesis, they put on its visual stress instead.
The new visual ground completely alienated [the Greeks] from tribal culture; and so there came to be an intense rivalry between the two modes of culture. In the Republic Plato vigorously attacked the control exercised through mimesis by the oral establishment, for it “constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorised experience. He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the ‘subject’ who stands apart from the ‘object’ and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just ‘imitating’ it.” (Preface to Plato, 47) Through mimesis of the alphabet, the Greeks absorbed visual dissociation of sensibilities…

Laws of Media, 17
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

Laws of Media, 19
Previously, with [oral, pre-alphabetic] mimesis, ‘being’ had been immersed in the metamorphic and Protean flux of everyone’s daily experience. With the new ground of alphabetic awareness, objectivity and detachment became the rule. Mimesis was turned from a making process into representational matching, and the old experience of being was retrieved on the new terms of visual space, that is, as an abstract absolute.

Laws of Media, 33
There is much confusion among early commentators and later scholars about the various forms of space as well as other matters such as the nature of mimesis and of the logos. Aristotle and others were working with one foot in each world, as it were, using the new forms of awareness but trying to retain or update the ideas of the old oral culture.1 

Laws of Media, 35
The mode of cognition in acoustic [and in]2 multisensory spaces is mimesis. ‘The cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known’ while the eye is in equal interplay with the other senses.

Laws of Media, 48
The French symbolist poets responded immediately and intuitively to the ground introduced by the telegraph by retrieving pre-alphabetic forms of discontinuous resonance and mimesis. Baudelaire announced the rediscovery of audience as mimetic ground for [his]3 work: his reader puts on and wears the art as a means of correcting not his concepts but rather his perception. The reader is a mask-wearer (‘Hypocrite’), the poem the mask: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’

Laws of Media, 64
The acoustic power available to the poetic establishment that Plato warred against was puny by comparison to the sensory stress exerted by any one of our technologies and its grounds. Plato realized that civilization did not have a chance until the mimetic spell of the bards was broken.

Laws of Media, 80
It took many centuries for the alphabet to suppress the right hemisphere and the mimetic tribal bonds of the Greeks and to release the focused energy of the visual left hemisphere, for the technology had to filter up from the working and merchant classes to the aristocracy.

Laws of Media 83
The caricature of inner or right-hemisphere awareness experienced by the drug culture (…) provides an artificial mimesis of the electric information environment

Laws of Media, 123
Ricoeur [in The Rule of Metaphor] leans on Aristotle’s distinction of metaphor as part of rhetoric on the one hand, and as part of dramatic mimesis on the other. His essential point is contained in Aristotle’s statement, “to metaphorize well implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” [Poetics, 1459a3-8].

Laws of Media, 123-124
The effect of phonetic literacy on the Greek psyche and culture was catastrophic. Mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments, each bearing some one or another of its original properties.

Laws of Media, 205 (Visual Space Tetrad)
resonant, multilocational, multisensory, transformational <=> mimesis, the animate universe

Laws of Media, 229-230
It is Aristotle, notes Paul Ricoeur, “who actually defined metaphor for the entire subsequent history of Western thought, on the basis of a semantics that takes the word or the name as its basic unit. Furthermore, his analysis is situated at the crossroads of two disciplines — rhetoric and poetics — with [two] distinct goals, ‘persuasion’ in oral discourse and the mimesis of human action in tragic poetry” (The Rule of Metaphor, 3). It is no accident that Aristotle chose to dissect the point of maximal interface of rhetoric and grammar, [namely] dramatic poetry. The heart of the discussion is found (…) in the Poetics (1457b, 6-9): “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.”

Laws of Media, 235 (Metaphor Tetrad)
transformation/transfiguration <=> fresh awareness via mental mimesis

  1. In a footnote to LoM 35: “The obscurity of this commentary is largely a result of the problem posed Aristotle by his own visual bias when trying to report on audile-tactile awareness.” See McLuhan and Plato 13: epyllion for some discussion. ↩
  2. The McLuhans have ‘or’ here, which is ambiguous between identifying or differentiating ‘acoustic’ and ‘multisensory space’. The suggested amendment takes the differentiating option. ↩
  3. McLuhan: ‘a’. ↩

Wyndham Lewis, Paleface, comments

But if, politically and socially, men are to-day fated to a subjective role, and driven inside their private, mental caves, how can art be anything but ‘subjective’, too? Is externality of any sort possible for us? (Criterion 12) (Paleface 108)1

McLuhan owned a copy of Wyndham Lewis’ 1929 Paleface which is preserved in his ‘working library‘ at the University of Toronto. But he does not seem to have mentioned Paleface anywhere in his published writings.2 At a guess, he may have avoided Lewis’ Paleface3 just as he avoided Pound’s politics, because he wanted to communicate certain of the ideas he shared with them without associating that message with their more notorious notions. Indeed he may well have thought that both men had hurt the cause of their best work by freighting it with dubious and even contradicting social and political theories.

It may be that McLuhan obtained his copy of Paleface, which is not annotated and may not have been read by him, only late in his career.4 But it is possible, of course, that he had earlier read a library copy of it, and/or seen its Part ii in Lewis’ 1927 Enemy No. 2 (which he also had in his library).5 Notably, however, the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, which seems to have been so important to McLuhan, was not included, except for a few of its pages, in Enemy No. 2.

Most of that ‘Introduction’ did appear, however, in an issue of The Monthly Criterion from July 1927 in an essay from Lewis entitled ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art’. And McLuhan certainly knew of this Lewis essay since he cited a passage from it and specifically referenced its appearance in Eliot’s Criterion in an unpublished manuscript now in the Ottawa papers.6

That same issue of The Monthly Criterion had a review of G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity by its editor, T.S. Eliot, himself. Now Chesterton and Eliot were the two most important figures for McLuhan at the time of his undergraduate stint in Cambridge,7 and Eliot’s review mentions “the Belloc-Chesterton gospel of Distributive Property” — McLuhan’s social and political touchstone at the time.8 It therefore seems highly likely that McLuhan, via his intense interest then in Distributism, knew already at Cambridge in 1934-1936 of this issue of The Monthly Criterion and thereby of the Lewis essay in it.

However all that may have been, McLuhan agreed with a very great deal — arguably the very heart of his enterprise — of Lewis’ ideas as they are particularly expressed in the ‘Introduction’ to the second part of Paleface.9 In that ‘Introduction’ Lewis makes an obvious gesture towards Nietzsche in employing the phrase “All-too-Human” (Paleface 110).10  But in fact his whole project as set out there replays Nietzsche in the following key points:

  • the relation of human beings to nature is always indirect and mediated: “things (…) are not objects of direct perception” (Criterion 4) (Paleface 98) 
  • as modernity has increasingly become conscious of this lack of “direct perception”, aka of the inevitability and inexorability of mediation, it has at the same time been borne into it that it “is not in touch with nature” (Criterion 4) (Paleface 98), that “nature is no longer there” (Criterion 5) (Paleface 99)  
  • an attempt to rediscover true — or any! — relation to nature therefore depends upon a critical understanding of the range of mediations, or media, through which human beings at every instant have their experience: “an art that is ‘subjective’ and can look to no common factors of knowledge or feeling, and lean on no tradition, is exposed to the necessity (…) of instructing itself far more profoundly as to the origins of its impulses and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works” (Criterion 8) (Paleface 103) 
  • “it is evidently in these conditions that you must look for the solid ground of our ‘subjective’ fashions” (Criterion 6) (Paleface 100)

Compare McLuhan:

  • “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.” (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960)11
  • “Technology has abolished ‘nature’ in the old sense and brought the globe within the scope of art.” (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations 2, 1954)12
  • “As for [my] approach itself, it may be said to accept any work of (…) human expression (a road, a town, a building, a poem, a painting, an ashtray, or a motor-car) as a preferential ordering of materials. Since all art expresses some preference, any portion of anything made by man can be spelled out [within the field or spectrum of possible preferences]. Every art object and every art situation represents a preferential response to reality, so that the precise techniques chosen for the manipulation and presentation of reality are a key to the mental states and assumptions of the makers.” (Stylistic [review of Mimesis by Eric Auerbach], 1956)13
  • “The total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious (…) We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.” (Playboy Interview, 1969)

If McLuhan can be said to have attempted to communicate Lewis after 50 years, so might Lewis be said to have attempted to communicate Nietzsche after 50 years. And so do we need to attempt to communicate McLuhan today — after 50 years.

For Nietzsche, Lewis and McLuhan together:

In a word, we have lost our sense of reality. So we return to the central problem of our ‘subjectivity,’ which is what we have in the place of our lost sense… (Criterion 6) (Paleface 100)

  1. All page numbers below refer to ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art‘ in The Monthly Criterion and to their corresponding pages in Lewis’ Paleface, both at the Internet Archive. ↩
  2. In his unpublished manuscript, ‘The Little Epic’, dating to the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan cites a passage from the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, but in doing so he references, not Paleface from 1929, but the earlier appearance of most of that ‘Introduction’ in T.S. Eliot’s magazine, The Monthly Criterion, from July 1927. Here is the citation: “We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public, world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the Unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history, of our particular ‘subjectivity’. In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue.” (Criterion 8) (Paleface 103) McLuhan comments in the same place of his ‘Little Epic’ manuscript: “Wyndham Lewis is no friend or admirer of the various art forms which we are reviewing here under the head of ‘little epic’. But he is an invaluable guide to all that these forms mean.” ↩
  3. Lewis’ Paleface, 1929:

    and then, of course, there is also his 1931 Hitler:

    ↩

  4. He may have obtained this copy from, or through, Sheila Watson whose thesis on Lewis  he advised in the early 1960s. A hint in this direction lies in an M.A. thesis by Paula Grace Pantry at the University of Alberta in 1972,  The Wyndham Lewis Polemic: The Enemy as Paleface. Pantry notes in an Acknowledgement: “Special thanks are given to Dr. Sheila Watson, without whose inspiration this thesis would not have been written.” ↩
  5. The 3 volumes of The Enemy are in McLuhan’s library at Fisher in Toronto. In ‘My Friend, Wyndham Lewis’ (1969), McLuhan recalled from 1944: “He (Lewis) suggested that if I were to come to Windsor with him, we could start up again his magazine The Enemy, which had been published twice in 1927 and once in 1929.” ↩
  6. For details, see note 2 above. ↩
  7. See Autobiography – encountering Chesterton and Eliot’s bread. ↩
  8. McLuhan’s first published piece after his University of Manitoba newspaper articles was a letter to the Editor of G.K.’s Weekly from September 19, 1935 — and his first academic article was ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ published in The Dalhousie Review in January 1936 — both while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. ↩
  9. The key passages from that ‘Introduction’ are set out in Wyndham Lewis, Paleface. But it should not be overlooked that Lewis’ best ideas there are not original to him, but in fact have a long heritage going back to the origins of western civilization. It is part of their strength, indeed, that they were not merely his. As Hegel put the point: “Meine Meinung ist nur mein.” ↩
  10. This passage is not in the Monthly Criterion essay. That version of the ‘Introduction’ stops a couple paragraphs before it. ↩
  11. ‘General Introduction to the Languages and Grammars of the Media’. This amounts to a multiplication of our remove from nature. In a medium like film, the ordinary experience of nature, which is always already mediated by, eg, language and culture, is not only presented, it is re-presented such that that mediated experience is again mediated. But this is exactly why, according to McLuhan, that “we live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible”. See the Playboy Interview above for the full passage. ↩
  12. After the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, McLuhan frequently maintained that it was this event that had ‘put an end to nature’. Here he is in a review of Erich Fromm’s Revolution of Hope in 1968: “With Sputnik, nature ended. The Darwinian environment of evolutionary biology went inside a man-made environment. The evolutionary process shifted from biology to technology.” ↩
  13. McLuhan to Pound, July 16, 1952, Letters 231: “Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different.” ↩

Paleface (Introduction to Part ii)

McLuhan on the influence of Wyndham Lewis on his work:

Good heavens, that’s where I got it! (…) Lewis was the person who showed me that the man-made environment was a teaching machine — a programmed teaching machine. But earlier, you see, the symbolists had discovered that the [individual] work of art was a programmed teaching machine. It’s a mechanism for shaping sensibility. Well, Lewis simply extended this private art activity to the corporate activity of the whole society in [its] making environments that basically were artifacts, or works of art, and that acted as teaching machines on the whole population. (Lewis in St Louis, 1967)1

According to Lewis, “The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.” And in his own writing Lewis foresaw many of the problems of today. (…) Giovanelli and I (…) were eager to discuss his own work with him and especially his more controversial “pamphlets” like The Doom of Youth, Time and Western Man, and The Art of Being Ruled. (…) He was utterly beyond the reach of the ordinary political, social, artistic interests of the day. In fact, it is only since the disappearance of the vast bulk of his contemporaries from the scene that his image has assumed its true dimensions in the history of art and letters. (…) He was tirelessly alert to all sorts of contemporary developments in the popular media which I have ever since found a world of delight. (…) Even in the ’20s, as Sheila Watson expresses it, he observed the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert. Is it any wonder that his analysis of the political, domestic, and social effects of the new technological environments had a great deal to do with directing my attention to these events? (My Friend Wyndham Lewis, 1969) 

  

Below are excerpts from the ‘Introduction’ to the second part of Lewis’ 19292 book Paleface.  Also included here are references to The Monthly Criterion from July 1927 which featured an essay from Lewis entitled ‘The Values of the Doctrine Behind “Subjective” Art’. This was the original appearance of most of Lewis’ ‘Introduction’ — one that McLuhan is known to have seen.3

These essays do not come under the head of ‘literary criticism ’ They are written purely as investigations into contemporary states of mind, as these are displayed for us by imaginative writers pretending to give us a picture of current life ‘as it is lived,’ but who in fact give us much more a picture of life as, according to them, it should be lived. In the process they slip in, or thrust in, an entire philosophy, which they derive from more theoretic fields, and which is usually not at all the philosophy of the sort of people they portray. The whole of Paleface, in fact, deals with and is intended to set in relief the automatic processes by which the artist or the writer (a novelist or a poet) obtains his formularies: to show how the formulas for his progress are issued to him, how he gets them by post, and then applies them. (Paleface 97-98) (Criterion 4)

According to present arrangements, in the presence of nature the artist or writer is almost always apriorist, we suggest. Further, he tends to lose his powers of observation (which, through reliance upon external nature, in the classical ages gave him freedom) altogether. (…) So he takes his nature, in practice, from theoretic fields, and resigns himself to see only what conforms to his syllabus of patterns. He deals with the raw life, thinks he sees arabesques in it ; but in fact the arabesques that he sees (…) emanate from his theoretic borrowing, he has put them there. It is a nature-for-technical-purposes.
(Paleface 98) (Criterion 4)

Scarcely any longer can he be said to control or be even in touch with the raw at all, that is the same as saying he is not in touch with nature: he rather dredges and excavates things that are not objects of direct perception, with a ‘science’ he has borrowed (…) observes only according to a ‘system’4 of opinion which hides from him any but a highly selective reality. (Paleface 98) (Criterion 4)

‘Life’ is not-knowing: it is [therefore] the surprise packet: so (…) if nature can be so arranged as to yield him as it were a system of surprises, the artist will scarcely take the trouble to look behind them, to detect the principle of their occurrence (…) He automatically applies the accepted formula to nature; the corresponding accident manifests itself, like a djinn, always with an imposing clatter (since it is a highly selective ‘accident’ that understands its part): and the artist is perfectly satisfied that nature has spoken. He does not see at all that ‘nature’ is no longer there. (Paleface 99) (Criterion 5)

If I could surprise anybody into examining with a purged and renewed sense what is taken so much for granted, namely our ‘subjectivity’ — though who or what is the subject or Subject? — I should have justified any method [of attempted communication] whatever. (Paleface 99) (Criterion 5)

Oh it is a wild life that we live (…) between one apocalypse and another!5 (Paleface 100) (Criterion 6)

In a word, we have lost our sense of reality. So we return to the central problem of our ‘subjectivity,’ which is what we have in the place of our lost sense…
(Paleface 100) (Criterion 6)

Elsewhere I have described this in its great lines as the transition from a public to a private way of thinking and feeling. The great industrial machine has removed from the individual life all responsibility.6 (…) It is evidently in these conditions that you must look for the solid ground of our ‘subjective’ fashions. The obvious historic analogy is to be found in the Greek political decadence. Stoic and other philosophies set out to provide the individual with a complete substitute for the great public and civic ideal of the happiest days of Greek freedom: with their [Stoic and other then contemporary philosophical] thought we are quite at home. (Paleface 100-101) (Criterion 6)

There is not much resemblance, outwardly, between the pulverization by one central power, such as that of Rome, and the pulverization of our social and intellectual life that is being effected by general industrial conditions all over the world. But there is, in the nature of things, the same oppressive removal of all personal outlet (…) in a great public life of individual enterprise: and (…) at the same time, through the agency of Science, all our standards of existence have been discredited. (Paleface 101-102) (Criterion 7)

[Bertrand Russell] “The kind of difference that Newton has made to the world is more easily appreciated where a Newtonian civilization is brought into sharp contrast with a pre-scientific culture, as for example, in modern China. The ferment in that country is the inevitable outcome of the arrival of Newton upon its shores. (…) If Newton had never lived, the civilization of China would have remained undisturbed, and I suggest that we ourselves should be little different from what we were in the middle of the eighteenth century.” (Radio Times, April 8th. 1928.)
[Lewis] If you substitute Science for Newton (…) that explains our condition. We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history of our particular ‘subjectivity’.
(Paleface 102–103) (Criterion 8)

In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue. Yet an art that is ‘subjective’ and can look to no common factors of knowledge or feeling, and lean on no tradition, is exposed to the necessity, either7 of instructing itself far more profoundly as to the origins of its impulses and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works; or else it is committed to becoming a zealous parrot of systems and judgments that reach it from the unknown. In the latter case in effect what it does is to bestow authority upon a hypothetic something or someone it has never seen, and would be at a loss to describe (since in the ‘subjective’ there is no common and visible nature), and progressively to surrender its faculty of observation, and so sever itself from the external field of immediate truth or belief — for the only meaning of ‘nature’ is a nature possessed in common. And that is what now has happened to many artists: they pretend to be their own authority, but they are not even that. It would not be easy to exaggerate the naivete with which the average artist or writer to-day, deprived of all central authority, body of knowledge, tradition, or commonly accepted system of nature, accepts what he receives in place of those things.
(Paleface 103-104) (Criterion 8)

It is astonishing how in all the heated dogmatical arguments, you will never find them calling in question the very basis upon which the ‘movement’ they are advocating rests. They are never so ‘radical’ as that. (…) They have not the least consciousness (…) of the many alternatives open to them. The authority of fashion is absolute in such cases: whatever has by some means introduced itself and gamed a wide crowd-acceptance (…) is, itself, unassailable. Its application, only, presents alternatives. The world of fashion for them is as solid and unquestionable as that large stone, against which Johnson hit his foot, to confute the Bishop of Cloyne. For them the time-world has become an absolute, as it has for the philosopher in the background, feeding them with a hollow assurance.
(Paleface 104-105) (Criterion 9)

a herd of happy and ignorant technicians entranced, not with ‘mind’, but with ‘subjectivity’. (Paleface 105) (Criterion 10)

The kind of screen that is being built up between the reality and us, the ‘dark night of the soul’ into which each individual is relapsing, the intellectual shoddiness of so much of the thought responsible for the artist’s reality, or ‘nature’ today, all these things seem to point to the desirability of a new and if necessary shattering criticism of ‘modernity’ as it stands at present. (Paleface 106)  (Criterion 10)

It is an unenterprising thought indeed that would accept all that the ‘Newtonian’ civilization of science has thrust upon our unhappy world, simply because it once had been different from something else, and promised ‘progress’ though no advantage so far has been seen to ensue from its propagation for any of us, except that the last vestiges of a few superb civilizations are being stamped out, and a million sheep’s-heads, in London, can sit and listen to the distant bellowing of Mussolini; or (…) to the [nearby] bellowing of Dame Clara Butt.8 It is too much to ask us to accept these privileges as substitutes for the art of Sung [China] or the philosophy of Greece. (Paleface 106) (Criterion 11)

Most dogmatically ‘subjective’, telling-from-the-inside, fashionable method — whatever else it may be (…) — is ultimately discovered to be bad philosophy — that is to say, it takes its orders from second rate philosophic dogma. Can art that is a reflection of bad philosophy be good art? (Paleface 107) (Criterion 12)

But if, politically and socially, men are today fated to a ‘subjective’ role, and driven inside their private, mental caves, how can art be anything but ‘subjective’ too? Is externality of any sort possible for us? Are we not of necessity confined to a mental world of the subconscious, in which we naturally sink back to a more primitive level (…)? Our lives cannot be described in terms of action — externally that is — because we never truly act. We have no common world into which we [might] project ourselves (…) To those [political and social] questions we (…) in due course would be led: but what here I have been trying to show is that first of all much more attention should be given to the intellectual principles that are behind the work of art: that to sustain the pretensions of a considerable innovation a work must be surer than it usually is to-day of its formal parentage: that nothing that is unsatisfactory in the result should be passed over, but should be asked to account for itself in the abstract terms that are behind its phenomenal face. And I have suggested that many subjective fashions, not plastically or formally very satisfactory, would become completely discredited if it were clearly explained upon what flimsy theories they are in fact built: what bad philosophy, in short, has almost everywhere been responsible for the bad art.
(Paleface 108-109)  (Criterion 12)

My main object in Paleface has been to place in the hands of the readers of imaginative literature, and also of that very considerable literature directed to popularizing scientific and philosophic notions, in language as clear and direct as possible, a sort of key ; so that, with its aid, they may be able to read any work of art presented to them, and, resisting the skillful blandishments of the fictionist (…) understand the ideologic or philosophical basis of these confusing entertainments, where so many false ideas change hands or change heads. As it is, the popularizer is generally approached with the eyes firmly shut and the mouth wide open. [As a result] the fiction (…) takes with it the authority of life — people live it, as it were, as they read: so it is able to pass off as true almost anything.9 The often very elaborate philosophy expressed in this sensational form very often not only misrepresents the empirical reality, but misstates the truth. (Paleface 109) (Not in the Criterion essay)

 

 

  1. Flexidisk recording in artscanada No. 114, November 1967. For the recording itself, images and discussion, see Andrew McLuhan’s post:
    https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/mechanisms-for-shaping-sensibility/.     ↩
  2. Much of Paleface was written and published in 1927. As described in this post, much of the ‘Introduction’ to its second part appeared in The Monthly Criterion from July 1927. Nearly all of the rest  of that second part appeared in October that same year in Lewis’ The Enemy Number 2. ↩
  3. In his unpublished manuscript, ‘The Little Epic’, dating to the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan cites a passage from the ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Paleface, but in doing so he references, not Paleface from 1929, but the earlier appearance of most of that ‘Introduction’ in T.S. Eliot’s magazine, The Monthly Criterion, from July 1927. Here is the citation: “We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public, world, by the successive waves of the ‘Newtonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental caves, of the Unconscious and the primitive. We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history, of our particular ‘subjectivity’. In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting and overriding the larynx and the tongue.” (Paleface 103) (Criterion 8) An echo of this passage appears in McLuhan’s 1969 ‘My Friend Wyndham Lewis’: “he was pleased to quote Eliot’s observation in The Egoist (September, 1918) that ‘in the work of Mr. Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man’.” McLuhan comments further in his ‘Little Epic’ manuscript: “Wyndham Lewis is no friend or admirer of the various art forms which we are reviewing here under the head of ‘little epic’. But he is an invaluable guide to all that these forms mean.” ↩
  4. Although Lewis also uses science and system in other senses than these, he does not mark his depreciative use of them here with scare quotes. They have been added to mark their ambiguity in his work. ↩
  5. Elsewhere in Paleface commenting on “a herd (…) driven madly hither and thither in gigantic wars that have at length become completely meaningless”: “If this apocalyptic picture sounds to your ears sensational or far-fetched, I can only say that you forget very quickly what was called at the time (= WW1) ‘Armageddon’.” (26) ↩
  6. In ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’ (1944), McLuhan cites Lewis from The Art of Being Ruled (142): “The first object of a person with a desire to be free, and yet possessing none of the means (…) such as money, conspicuous ability, or power to obtain freedom, is to avoid responsibility. Absence of responsibility (…) is what men most desire for themselves.” ↩
  7. Instead of ‘either’, Lewis has ‘first of all’. ↩
  8. Clara Butt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Butt. ↩
  9. Compare McLuhan in Laws of Media half a century later: “Under the spell of mimesis the knower (hearer of a recitation) loses all relation to his merely present persona (…) and is transformed by and into what he perceives. It is not simply a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable portion of Preface to Plato to this problem.” ↩
  10. The medium is the message. McLuhan in ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’: “It is therefore, politically and humanly speaking, a matter of the utmost concern for us to know from what sources and by what means the rulers of the modern world determine what they will do next.  How do they determine the ends for which, as means, they employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement?” The phrase “rulers of the world” is used by Lewis in Paleface 88. ↩

Mimesis

‘Mimesis’ is part of a group of terms with ‘simulation‘ and others (like the nous poietikos) which is used in complex ways by McLuhan, both in regard to the individual terms themselves and to their relations with each other. Note 11 below gives some attention to this complexity, but further posts in the future will be needed to do justice to the topic — which lies at the heart of McLuhan’s project.

Survey of Joyce Criticism, 1951
Heinrich Straumann recalls a conversation with Joyce during which he asked whether a knowledge of the local conditions in Dublin would make the reading of Finnegans Wake any easier. Joyce replied firmly In the negative. “One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to place-names, historical events, literary happenings, and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect one as such.” Here is Joyce’s confidence in the mimetic powers of language itself to communicate before and beyond ordinary understanding.

Poetry and Opinion (review), 1951
Pound’s (…) prose (…) is, in its mimesis of the drama of intellectual maneuver, unmatched since Bacon and Jonson. The basis of Pound’s prose as of his verse is the immediency of its grip of the object.

Maritain on Art, 1953
G.R. Levy [in] The Gate of Horn views Plato and Aristotle as having been consciously engaged in doing just what Maritain is tackling: “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the ‘pattern laid up in heaven’ is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the ‘imitation‘ by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers.”1

Media Fit the Battle of Jericho, 1956
Writing was the break-through from sound to sight. But with the end of the acoustic wall came chronology, tick-tock time, architecture. Writing, the enclosure of speech and sound space, split off song and dance and music from speech. It split off harmonia from mimesis. Writing permitted the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc.

Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960
The growth of the Euclidean fictions in the patterns of human sensibility were as upsetting then as the return of nuclear non-Euclidean modalities of experience today. Gombrich, writing [in Art and Illusion] of the rise of pictorial space and illusion in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., says: “The very violence with which Plato denounces this trickery reminds us of the momentous fact that at the time he wrote, mimesis was a recent invention.“ (…) The multiple levels and modes of sound and tactility are favored in cave art above the visual. So it is with speech itself. But the reduction of speech to sight by the phonetic technology gave the eye an ascendancy over the other senses which is anything but natural to man. l am not making a value judgment. The natural may not be desirable at all. But the ascendancy of eye over the other senses gave us the miracle of mimesis, of foreshortening, and, eventually of perspective and vanishing point, which we have accepted as natural and rational for centuries. Such assumptions do not coincide with those of the electric media.

Understanding Media, 19642
Eliot and Pound used the typewriter for a great variety of central effects in their poems. And with them, too, the typewriter was an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime.

Understanding Media, 19643
Joyce puts these matters not so much in cryptic, as in dramatic and mimetic, form. The reader has only to take any of his phrases such as this one, and mime it until it yields the intelligible. Not a long or tedious process, if approached in the spirit of artistic playfulness that guarantees “lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.”

The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966
In his Poetics (Chapter IV, 1448b), Aristotle reminded us that mimesis is the process by which all men learn. He alluded to the process of making by which our perceptions simulate within us the environment that we encounter outside ourselves.  It is this learning and making process that, by electric circuitry, is being extended beyond our central nervous system.4

McLuhan to Donald Theall, Aug 6 1970
The sensory completion, or the actual experience of anything never corresponds to the event or input, i.e. there is no matching, but only making in human experience. This relates, of course, to Aristotle’s poiesis and mimesis, and his phrase: “It is the process by which all men learn.”

From Cliché to Archetype, 19705
The main Cinderella plot of My Fair Lady (…) is a retrieval of the nineteenth­ century world of mechanical industry that had mass-produced a large new upper middle class, The industrial technique of precise repetition gets new force from the musical rhythms, which also increase the irony of dehumanization by which both mechanized speech and mechanized production are attained. This class had been provided with a special uniform speech by the new public schools. It was a speech that unconsciously mimed the machine itself (as T.S. Eliot wittily observed when his Madame Sosostris speaks to her client: “Tell dear Mrs. Equitone … “). To speak with the mechanical precision of a machine has been an aspect of the comic mask worn by the corporate English upper class for some decades. To acquire this manner is not only easy but devastating. One puts on vocally the technology of the age, much as Chaplin did in his way, as if in revenge and reversal. First American jazz and now the English Beatles have me­chanically extended the speech modes of the lower middle classes with image-acceptance. For such mimetic enlargements of ordinary experience are as enticing and flattering clichés as the movie or the motor car. The mime of mechanization is then the subplot in My Fair Lady.

From Cliché to Archetype, 19706
Mimesis or Making Sense — The entire world of technology makes sense by miming the human body and faculties. Most studies of mimesis (…) proceed on the assumption of matching inner and outer. Notable exceptions are found in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato. The technique of continuous parallel that Eliot indicates as the essential myth-making form of mimesis in his classic essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth” simply tosses aside the idea of matching in favor of interface and metamorphosis.

From Cliché to Archetype, 19707
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or of making a house by following the lines of Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aris­totle writes; “Thus, if a house had been a thing made by Nature it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and if things made by Nature were made also by art, they would come to be in the same way as by Nature.” Aristotle thus confirms the sacral quality of the cliché or artifact by aligning it with the cosmic forces, just as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny.

Take Today, 1972
The artist by retracing the processes of cognition (mimesis) bridges the world of sense and the world of awareness.8

Monday Night Seminar, January 22, 19739
Mimicking is an act of making,  but notice it’s in another medium. You replay something that took place in one medium and you put it in another medium. It’s translated into another material. That is the nature of mimesis. Poetic mimesis means snatching one mode of experience and putting it into another mode, namely language or pigment. It’s translation, it’s metaphor.

The Medieval Environment, 1974
Havelock contrasted the corporate mimesis involved in the performance of the Greek epics and drama with the individualist analysis that came with the innovation of the phonetic alphabet.

Laws of Media, posthumous10
The effect of phonetic literacy on the Greek psyche and culture was catastrophic. Mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments, each bearing some one or another of its original properties.11

  1. This passage from Levy is also cited in ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ from that same year of 1953. ↩
  2. Page 262. ↩
  3. Page 302. ↩
  4. Compare ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’, 1951: “In the Poetics (Chap. 4) Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn.” McLuhan often quoted Aristotle to this effect — see the next citation. He did so again, 30 years after the 1951 essay, in the conclusion to Take Today (296). ↩
  5. Page 144-145. ↩
  6. Page 147. ↩
  7. Page 147. ↩
  8. “The world of sense” here does not mean ‘the world of material objects’. See McLuhan’s 1970 letter to Don Theall above: “The sensory completion, or the actual experience of anything never corresponds to the event or input“. ↩
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVBc7v5vjUI ↩
  10. Laws of Media treats mimesis more extensively than any other McLuhan text. These passages are assembled in Mimesis in Laws of Media. ↩
  11. Page 123-124. Mimesis is here (and in the preceding citation) seen as what was lost along with oral culture in Greece, whereas it is elsewhere said to have been what was gained with that loss. Compare the present passage (“mimesis gave way to individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was broken into multiple fragments”) with, for example, passages from Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1960, above: “mimesis was a recent invention“, “the ascendancy of eye over the other senses gave us the miracle of mimesis”. This sort of striking ambiguity is not infrequent with McLuhan, but it does not amount to outright contradiction (as is often alleged). Instead, he is using ‘mimesis’ in different senses. Laws of Media notes something of this complexity as follows: “there has been great confusion for many centuries over certain matters crucial to an understanding of acoustic space, for example, the natures of logos, of mimesis, and of formal causality. This confusion flows directly from the fact that all commentary and research, from Aristotle onwards, was conducted by persons, to one or another degree visually biased, who assumed visual space to be the common-sense norm. As a result, there are at least two forms or rather versions of mimesis and of logos and of formal cause. One of each has an oral structure, and the other a visual — with the former conventionally regarded as a confused or tentative attempt to explain the latter.” (4) ↩

Nous poietikos, agent intellect

The nous poietikos or agent intellect as “imitation” belongs to McLuhan’s family of terms ‘simulate-simulation’, ‘mimesis-mime-mimicry‘, ‘making’, etc. He seems to have been concerned with the nous poietikos chiefly in the 1948-1954 period.

Difficulties of Yvor Winters,19481 
Coleridge was quite right in lifting from Kant the idea of the esemplastic or creative imagination since it was the nearest Kant could get to the nous poietikos by which in the hylomorphic philosophy the active intelligence reveals the intelligible species of things present. (…) The nous poetikos makes of every moment of human perception a creative activity.2

Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process,1951
In the Poetics (Chap. 4) Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn. But this fact is not linked with the power of abstraction which in the De Anima he attributes to the nous poietikos, or the agent intellect. That there is, however, a degree of poetic imitation in abstraction itself, is plain from the fact that even in sensation “things exist in the soul without their proper matter, but with the singularity and individuating conditions which are the result of matter.” (St. Thos., De Anima, article 13) That this is so is the effect of the nous poietikos, which has the power of individuating anew in a bodily organ that which it has abstracted from existence. “For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan.” (St. Thos., De Anima, article 12) Again, “For every object produced by art is the effect of the action of an artificer, the agent intellect being related to the phantasms illuminated by it as an artificer is to the things made by his art.” (article 5). And in the same place the creative efficacy of the nous poietikos as “illuminative” is referred to the text in the Psalms (4:7) “The light of thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord.”
For Joyce and Eliot all art is a shadow of the Incarnation,3 and every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing the signatures of things, so that what the nous poietikos is to perception and abstraction the artist is to existence at large: “The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and reembody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.” (Stephen Hero, 78)
Ordinary experience is a riot of imprecision, of impressions enmeshed in preconceptions, cliches, profanities and impercipience. But for the true artist every experience is capable of an epiphany: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself….Imagine my glimpses of that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.” (Stephen Hero, 211) 

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect — that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being [subj gen] within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being [obj gen]. (…) Cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being (…) that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness.4

Sight, Sound, and the Fury, 1954
In cognition we have to interiorize the exterior world. We have to recreate in the medium of our senses and inner faculties the drama of existence. This is the world of the logos poietikos, the agent intellect. In speech we utter that drama which we have analogously recreated within us. In speech we make or poet the world even as we may say that the movie parrots the world. Languages themselves are thus the greatest of all works of art. They are the collective hymns to existence. For in cognition itself is the whole of the poetic process. But the artist differs from most men in his power to arrest and then reverse the stages of human apprehension. He learns how to embody the stages of cognition (Aristotle’s “plot”) in an exterior work which can be held up for contemplation.

Memory Theatre Encounter 1967
When the Schoolmen translated Aristotle’s phrase nous poietikos they used the words “intellectus agens” or the agent intellect. The function of the agent or making intellect extends to the very idea of knowing. Knowing as making is an idea central to Aristotle and Aquinas. 

  1. Submitted to Sewanee Review and perhaps elsewhere, but never published. Like other work of McLuhan, this essay bore several different titles over time. More than 20 years later, McLuhan recalled it: “Years ago I wrote an essay on Winters entitled ‘Rhymer Reditus’. (…) Winters pushed criticism into a pattern of concept minus percept, which was also an unwitting parody of paraphrase and poetic commentary of the preceding time (namely that of Thomas Rhymer, 1643–1713, hence the ‘Rhymer Reditus’ title). The great discovery of the Symbolists had been the need to start with effects even when dealing with ideas and systems. To perceive a theory or a philosophy as itself an object for aesthetic experience and testing…” (Roles, Masks, and Performance, 1971) ↩
  2. Two decades later in his Playboy interview: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” The unpublished Winters essay shows that this shift was in full swing by 1948 at the latest: “The nous poetikos makes of every moment of human perception a creative activity.” ↩
  3. “All art is a shadow of the Incarnation” — at once illuminating (because grounded in the Incarnation) and obscuring (because shadowing) . ↩
  4. Also in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’: “The drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.” And: “The poet differs from other men only in his conscious ability to arrest the intake of experience and to reverse the flow. By this means he is able to externalize in a work the actual process by which each of us in perception or cognition incarnates the external world of experience. But every word uttered by man requires a large measure of the poetic ability. Our words are analogies of the miracle by which we incarnate and utter the world.” ↩

Simulation

McLuhan deploys packages of related terms throughout his work. Understanding his thought requires that these packages be teased apart to uncover how they work, that is, to see how similarities and differences operate within them.1

One such package includes ‘simulation’ and ‘mimesis‘-‘mime’-‘mimic’ — and would have included ‘meme’ had the term become current before the last years of McLuhan’s life.2 

Here in chronological order are passages in which McLuhan uses the words ‘simulate’ and ‘simulation’. With the exception of an isolated example from 1947, all fall within the 1963-1971 time period:

the academic mind (…) would simulate a passionate perception which it cannot feel. (The Southern Quality, 1947)3 

The next extension of man will be the simulation of the process of consciousness itself.4 (MM to Harry Skornia October 4, 1963)5

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. (Understanding Media, 1964, 3-4) 6

the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s. (Understanding Media, 1964, 130)7

Computers (…) can be made to simulate the process of consciousness, just as our electric global networks now begin to simulate the condition of our central nervous system. But a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist’s dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.  (Understanding Media, 1964, 351)8

Another way of looking at our situation today in the age of cybernation and information machines is to say that from the time of the origin of script and wheel, men have been engaged in extending their bodies technologically. They have created instruments that simulated and exaggerated and fragmented our various physical powers for the exertion of force, for the recording of data, and for the speeding of action and association. With the advent of electromagnetism, a totally new organic principle came into play. Electricity made possible the extension of the human nervous system as a new social environment. (Cybernetics and Human Culture 1964)

It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness. In fact, it will be limited to simulating specialist activities of the mind for some time to come. In the same way, our technologies have for thousands of years simulated not the body, but fragments thereof. It was in the city alone that the image of the human body as a unity became manifest. (Cybernetics and Human Culture 1964)9 

In the case the astronauts they have to take the planet with them in order to survive. We have now had to build space capsule environments that include the planet. We have to be so much involved in our own planetary forces and gravitations and so that we can simulate it. The old idea of participation in natural forces was by simulation — the tribal dancing and so on was done by mimicry of the natural forces in order to control them. Well, that’s what modern science does. Modern science mimics nature in all its levels. (McLuhan to Studs Terkel, 1966) 

electric technology enables us to mime or simulate the old planetary environment in our [space] capsules. (The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966)

In his Poetics (Chapter IV, 1448b), Aristotle reminded us that mimesis is the process by which all men learn. He alluded to the process of making by which our perceptions simulate within us the environment that we encounter outside ourselves.  It is this learning and making process that, by electric circuitry, is being extended beyond our central nervous system. The next phase of this extension will naturally concern the action of making consciousness technologically. What we have called education in recent centuries has consisted in visiting or in simulating as many earlier environments and cultures as possible. Language is unrivaled in providing the actual sensuous modalities of other environments, with their unique ground rules. Electric circuitry can become a means to bypass language and plug directly into other modes of consciousness.  (The Emperor’s Old Clothes 1966)10

The all-at-onceness of the electronic environment dispenses with connections. To this degree does it not simulate our unconscious? Having long supposed that the next extension of man would be that of his consciousness, it strikes me as only too fitting that all the while it was the unconscious that had been externalized.11 That is, it is a fitting mark of my own inability to see the present.12 (McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February, 8, 1967)

Consciousness (…) is a specialist and fragmentary operation which works by exclusion rather than inclusion. The subconscious by contrast is inclusive rather than exclusive  It accepts all things and all times and all places, and accepts them all-at-once. That is why electronic information services can simulate the character of the unconscious so readily.  These same services involve us in depth in all the past and present experiences of the race, creating a profoundly mythic milieu for living, if not for thinking. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest 1967)

The computer enables you to simulate any type of situation, a learning situation, a war situation, way in advance of its coming into reality. (CBC Interview of McLuhan by Bob Quintell, , 1967)

Art is ceasing to be a special kind of object to be inserted in a special kind of space. The sense of participation in the art process has reached an extreme in the so-called “Happenings,” which are plausible simulations of environmental control. (Through the Vanishing Point, 1968)

the story line in the minotaur myth is that of human cognition, leading to the confrontation with human identity, which is the monster. This is what [the] labyrinth was. It simulated the act of cognition.13 (Exploration of museum communication, 1969)

The [trips induced by] hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment,14 thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture.15 (Playboy Interview, 1969)

The motorcar has been obsolete for some time but it may be some quite irrelevant aspect of the car that will finally finish it off. The car, as a means of concentrating workers, or polluting environments with both hardware and smog, seems to continue quite merrily. Its persistence in spite of numerous inconveniences may be due to some hidden factor such as its simulation of the space capsule, providing a carapace for the human organism in an ever more intimidating environment. In other words, transportation may not be the reason for the continuance of the car at all. (Innovation is Obsolete, 1971)

No greater fulfillment of the visual man’s preference has occurred than the faking of the real world in the “software” world of “celluloid” and the silver screen. In this “reel world” a vast simulation of the outer realities was provided as a fantasia of the semiconscious movie patrons. (Take Today, 95-96)

 

 

 

  1. See note 3 for example. ↩
  2. Richard. Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. Chapter 11 is ‘Memes: the new replicators’. ↩
  3. ‘Simulate’ is used here to mean ‘put on’, ‘pretend’, ‘dissemble’, etc. It is deceptive and decidedly negative. Later it becomes something more like ‘account for’, ‘formulate an algorithm for’, ‘provide a demonstrable discipline of’, ‘set out an investigative field for’, etc.  It is revealing and decidedly positive. Yet another meaning emerges when he maintains in Through the Vanishing Point (1968) that “happenings (…) are plausible simulations of environmental control”, where the sense is ‘provide an example of’, ‘show the ultimate implications of’, etc. ↩
  4. See McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February 8, 1967, cited in the post above, where McLuhan corrects this notion from the extension of consciousness to the extension of the unconscious. ↩
  5. The letter to Skornia continues: “I think it will occur in the 1960’s. It does not mean the end of private awareness, rather a huge heightening of same via involvement in corporate energies. Corporate awareness, of course, is iconic, inclusive, Not an aspect, not a moment out of a total life, but all moments of that life simultaneously.” “Corporate awareness” here is “all moments (…) simultaneously” in the same way as chemistry is “all moments” of material nature “simultaneously”. McLuhan’s notion is that human experience must become just as conscious of its own laws and properties as it has come to know, mostly in the last two centuries, those of physical entities. ↩
  6. Regarding “the technological simulation of consciousness”, see McLuhan to Warren Brodey, February 8, 1967, per note 4 above. ↩
  7. Regarding “the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness” see note 4 above. ↩
  8. Regarding “simulate the process of consciousness” and “extension of our consciousness”, see note 4 above. ↩
  9. Regarding “the need to simulate consciousness”, see note 4 above. ↩
  10. Regarding “the action of making consciousness technologically”, see note 4 above. ↩
  11. See MM to Harry Skornia October 4, 1963 above — and the following passages which also speak of the extension of consciousness, not of the unconscious. ↩
  12. Fine example of McLuhan’s self-depreciation which is nearly always missed in assessments of his work which commonly take it to be absurdlyly self-aggrandizing. ↩
  13. Beginning around 1950, McLuhan investigated the notion of “the identity of the processes of cognition and creation” — “artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience” (Playboy Interview). ↩
  14. Compare Laws of Media 83: “the caricature of inner or right-hemisphere awareness experienced by the drug culture of hallucinogenics (…) provides an artificial mimesis of the electric information environment.” ↩
  15. McLuhan continues: “LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it’s understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.” ↩

McLuhan and Plato 13: epyllion

In his unpublished notes on ‘little epic’ from the middle or late 1950s, McLuhan makes these interesting points regarding Plato:

  • “There is nothing that was later known as idyll and epyllion in Alexandria that was not familiar to Plato and Aristotle.”
  • “There was nothing new about little epic to Plato and Aristotle — the Platonic dialogues can be read as epiphanies of truth obtained in the ritual tracing of the labyrinths of dialectic.”

A decade or so later, in ‘Toward an Inclusive Consciousness’, 1967:

Plato and Aristotle, the representatives of the new literate culture of Greece in philosophy, had this same doubleness. They straddled the written and oral traditions. They translated the tribal encyclopedia of the preceding culture into the written, classified form.1 

The same point is made regarding Aristotle in Laws of Media:

Aristotle and others were working with one foot in each world, as it were, using the new forms of [literate] awareness but trying to retain or update the ideas of the old oral culture. (33)

‘Doubleness’ was the central characteristic of the little epic (epyllion) for McLuhan. In his view its labyrinthine character amounted to a resonance between distinct plots, styles and lessons. ‘Dialectic’ in Plato could be seen as the attempt to instill acquaintance with this resonance — via this resonance.

  1. McLuhan seems to have taken this point from G.R. Levy. His ‘Maritain on Art’ (1953) quotes Levy’s Gate of Horn (1948) on what she saw “Plato and Aristotle as having been consciously engaged in doing”, namely: “Plato’s theory of Ideas constitutes a gigantic effort to establish the mystic doctrine upon an intellectual basis. The relation of created things to the ‘pattern laid up in heaven’ is, as we saw, that methexis, or participation, which Aristotle equated with mimesis, the ‘imitation’ by which the living world was built upon the Pythagorean numbers.” The same passage from Levy is cited in McLuhan’s Wyndham Lewis essay later that year of 1953. ↩

Predicting the present

John Kettle’s 1965 article, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge’,1 ends with some observations by McLuhan which uncannily look ahead to 1968 — 3 years later.

Kettle concludes his article with McLuhan’s “response (verbatim, complete)2 to my request for biographical detail”:

I like being Canadian. Being Canadian is to be a 19th century person in a very special sense. The Canadian can use his country as a DEW Line for the whole century. A Canadian knows more about Americans than anybody; they’re his immediate environment.
I have this immediate sense of the 20th century as very odd, surreal — as if the whole thing had been done by Dali, very witty, full of the most crazy conceits and witticisms. In my youth I merely rejected it totally as unfit for human habitation. Now I look at the 20th century as a new form.

The Dali TV Guide cover for June 8-14, 1968 elicited many comments from McLuhan.

The first Dew-Line newsletter, “Black Is Not A Color”, McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter I/1, appeared in July 1968.

McLuhan’s Playboy Interview was published in 1969 but recorded in 1968:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.3

 

  1. John Kettle, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge: Easing the Technological Burden of Western Man’, Canada Month, October 1965, 10-12. ↩
  2. The bracketed specification is from Kettle. ↩
  3. Full passage: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” ↩