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this Lewis essay since he cited a passage from it and specifically referenced its appearance in Eliot’s Criterion in an unpublished manuscript now in the Ottawa papers.⁶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)