Ezra Pound’s New Learning introduces the question of new forms of (subliminal) mass control; the works of Wyndham Lewis introduce a sharp critique of consumerist society, combined with a deep understanding of the impact of new forms of communication and technological industrialization on societal matrixes. They provide us with an opportunity to discuss the origin of concepts which will later be found in Marshall McLuhan’s works on media – including such ideas as the global village, the artist as a satirist pointing to unseen aspects of society, and primitivism or the new tribalism – as well as the impact of Vorticism on McLuhan’s mosaic. Although McLuhan read Lewis’s works in the 1930s, together with those of the other modernist writers, and even though he met Lewis before Pound, in McLuhan’s evolutionary process as a media theorist, Lewis’s influence comes later.
If modernism can be summed up as ‘The Pound Era,’ then postmodernism could already be envisaged in most of Lewis’s works. The fact that Lewis died in 1957 does theoretically disqualify him as a true postmodernist, but his literary and philosophical themes reveal a proto-postmodernist, an oxymoronic and a paradoxical definition which might have pleased him. He was, in fact, the master of different causes and counter-causes, the enemy par excellence of whatever was at stake, yet always with some credibility. Wyndham Lewis himself is a paradox but not an inconsistency. Lewis – as an individual, as an artist, and as a writer – seems to prove one of McLuhan’s Laws of Media: whatever is pushed to its extreme flips into its reverse. Wyndham Lewis always had a fierce (if not violent) approach to whatever he did, wrote, or painted, always pushing it to its extreme. He flipped into many reversals, and he forces his critics and readers to cope with an evident difficulty of stabilizing their object and subject of observation, another tenet typical of postmodernism. Wyndham Lewis was ‘at the same time the exemplary practitioner of one of the most powerful of all modernist styles and an aggressive ideological critic and an adversary of modernism itself in all its forms.’1 He was too many things at once: a post-impressionist and an expressionist; an admirer of classicist rigours and an exploiter of Romantic wordiness; a man aware of history while theorizing the a-historicity of his own time … and much more.
In 1979, Fredric Jameson brought Lewis back to the critics’ attention with a controversial volume, acknowledging that he had been ‘among the most richly inventive of modern British writers,’ whose works merited ‘unapologetic rediscovery and [could] sustain enthusiastic reading as well as the closest critical scrutiny.’2 Since then, Lewis has received much-needed renewed attention, especially from critics such as Paul Edwards, C.J. Fox, Alan Munton, Andrzej Gasiorek, and Brett Neilson; nevertheless, there is still a lot of room left to situate him against the background of the twentieth century. Lewis is an artist who bore witness to the making of that century, cutting across crucial decades and perceiving most of it – and all before his death in the mid-1950s. The intent of this brief chapter is to place Lewis and his works within McLuhan’s progress as a media explorer. It is just a tiny drop in a vast sea which, hopefully, will be navigated later. Whoever takes on this venture must know from the beginning that it will be a troubled journey into difficult questions – including racism and sexism – which have characterized the history of our previous century. As Jameson warned, ‘The polemic hostility to feminism, the uglier misogynist fantasies embodied in his narratives, the obsessive phobia against homosexuals, the most extreme restatements of grotesque traditional sexist myths and attitudes – such features, released by Lewis’ peculiar sexual politics … are not likely to endear him to the contemporary reader.’3 And neither does his ‘brief flirtation with Nazism,’ nor the elements of anti-Semitism that could be detected in his works. But all this, too, was the twentieth century; wasn’t it? As McLuhan noticed: ‘Lewis pleases nobody because he is like an intruder at a feast who quietly explains that dinner must be temporarily abandoned since the food has been poisoned and the guests must be detached from their dinners by a stomach pump.’4
Technically, Lewis was not a British, but a Canadian, writer, born on his father’s yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia. It was precisely because of his Canadian citizenship that McLuhan could meet the old lion of the right who was in North America when the Second World War was declared and could not return to England, the country where he had grown as an individual and as an artist and where he had established himself. Typical of Lewis, while in Canada he put on a mask and considered himself, together with his wife, Froanna, a prisoner. McLuhan met him in 1943, when Lewis lived in Toronto and taught in Windsor, where he lectured at what was at the time Assumption College.5 Lewis’s Canadian experience is controversially recalled in his semi-autobiographical (and proto-postmodernist) novel Self Condemned (1954), a novel which McLuhan quotes in the opening of his own Counterblast, a pamphlet written in the same year and conceived in Lewis’s vorticist style to discuss ‘Media Log.’ Momaco, Lewis’s fictionalized Toronto, is selected as the setting for what Lewis perceived as the ultimate unfortunate and mortal condition of a hyper-industrialized and culturally numbed mass society. His protagonist, René Harding, is born twice in the novel, as his name reveals, and each of his choices bears witness to his own trajectory as an individual living our modern times. As we shall see, René is in fact born first as a Nietzschean superman who challenges society and its established rules, then as a new kind of contemporary everyman inhabiting North American cities. After a rebellion against his professorial life in England and an escape to Canada, because he has to go ‘somewhere out of sight of what is going to happen,’ René will end his career as a university professor at an American university. He will adjust to the world-consumerist culture which Lewis often attacked in his philosophical prose, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man, in his fictional works, as well as in his memoirs, Filibuster in Barbary, America I Presume, and others. In such a consumerist world, human beings lose their personality and are forced to conform to commonly accepted ideas. They are portrayed by Lewis as empty masks or straw men. As early as 1914, he wrote: ‘Men have a loathsome deformity called self; affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows: social excrescence. Their being regulated by exigencies of this affliction. Only one operation can cure it: the suicide’s knife.’6 In reacting to such a numbness-inducing form of corporatism – for which new media were deemed to be in part responsible – the artist becomes the enemy of all accepted ideas; he becomes a self-displaced human being, a permanent ‘transient’ who counterattacks kulchur through ruthless satire.
Lewis had already started to dynamite straw men in 1914 and 1915, in the two issues of his avant-garde little magazine, Blast. It was the beginning, and he never stopped. In his inter-war productions, Lewis engaged with his time as if trying to affect and orient change, but in his later works, published after the Second World War, he seems to have lost all hope, even though he continues to denounce and attack the straw men’s society. McLuhan met Lewis when he was already a bitter enemy, aware that to resist or direct change was no longer possible, if it ever was. As his post–Second World War fiction shows, all he could do was to continue to satirize the end of the individual and denounce the triumph of the corporate. In 1943, Lewis was a self-displaced man, a version of the enemy already in line with the postmodernist spirit of a ‘deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions.’7 Thus, while in Toronto, Lewis embodied not only the late modernist artist, but also the new postmodernist one. He was an outcast, a self-displaced individual bearing witness to the making of a mass society which he despised but borrowed from; he was also an adjustee, who tried to negotiate through irony, parody, and sarcasm ‘the contradictions between [his] self-reflexivity and its historical grounding.’8 As McLuhan wrote in Counterblast, ‘In 1954 Wyndham Lewis blasted Toronto in the novel SELF CONDEMNED. His René (reborn) seeking his true spiritual self selects Toronto, Momaco: (Mom & Co) as a colonial cyclotron in which to annihilate his human ego. He succeeds.’ On the contrary, as McLuhan would discover, Lewis did not annihilate himself; he preserved his loathsome deformity.
After their first meeting, McLuhan engaged in a correspondence with Lewis that was mostly focused on his attempts to secure Lewis lectures and commissions for portrait paintings in St Louis, where McLuhan was teaching at the time. Generally speaking, this correspondence sheds light neither on McLuhan’s intellectual take on Lewis nor on his works (as was the case of his correspondence with Pound), but it shows McLuhan’s great admiration for Lewis as a portrait painter. Away from his mission as a Lewis promoter, McLuhan writes his letters in a style which resembles Lewis’s own histrionic tone. He also seems to share some of Lewis’s ideas on both Canada and the new role of the intellectual in the mass age, of which Lewis had written in Time and Western Man when discussing advertising. In the 1930s, in his letters to his family written from Cambridge, McLuhan had condemned Canadian sterility; in the 1940s, in his letters to Lewis, he further expands his criticism, writing passages like: ‘Oh the mental vacuum that is Canada … There is terrible social cowardice, and all action here seems so furtive that one can only conclude that some unacknowledged guilt is behind it all.’9 McLuhan’s statement recalls comparable comments which Lewis made in his essays on Canada.10 Similarly, in other letters to Lewis, McLuhan expresses unsparingly ironical remarks on colleagues and other intellectuals such as Maritain,11 as well as his discontent related to his life as a professor, as when he comments on the ‘campaign of attrition against’ him at St Louis University following the arrival of a new department head. He is sharing his own blasts with the enemy himself.12 As with Pound, McLuhan mimics the style of his favourite modernist masters as if trying to tune in or put them on. It is, in fact, as if he is studying and testing their style, while searching for his own. After all, McLuhan openly admitted to Lewis that the writer ‘had been, for years before [he] met [him], a major resource in [his] life.’13
More central to the understanding of the development of McLuhan as a media theorist are the letters that he wrote to Lewis in the early 1950s, when they resumed their correspondence after a few-year break following an impromptu outburst of Lewis against his Canadian friend. As the editors of McLuhan’s letters recall, in February 1945 Lewis wrote a brief letter to McLuhan harshly rejecting his friendship for no clear reasons; the correspondence between the two men resumed in 1953.14 In particular, in his later letters, McLuhan comments positively on some of Lewis’s most recent publications, such as Rude Assignment, Rotting Hill, The Writer and the Absolute, and The Human Age. He also informs Lewis that he has written an essay discussing his theory of art and communication ‘mainly in your own words.’15 McLuhan’s essay was in fact a witty assemblage of Lewis’s quotations taken from his various works (The Lion and the Fox, America and Cosmic Man, Wyndham Lewis the Artist) and introducing ideas on the role of the artist in a shifting technological society.
The essay bore the title ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’; it was originally printed in Shenandoah in 1953, then reprinted in The Interior Landscape. It remains a crucial passage for fully appreciating not only McLuhan’s approach to Lewis’s work, but also the former’s view on media in the light of the latter’s ideas on art. McLuhan points out that Lewis ‘took America as the laboratory in which was being produced the new ahistoric man,’16 juxtaposing the role that the artist, on the one hand, and the modern scientist, on the other, plays inside such a new laboratory. While the former monitors society and enlightens on ‘a particular aspect of existence,’ the latter ‘has developed formulas for the control of the material world and then applied this to the control of the human mind. He invades the human mind and society with his patterned information. That is the key to the nature of the new mass media.’17 It is a statement which recalls McLuhan’s denunciation in his preface to The Mechanical Bride, a book that McLuhan wrote following Lewis’s lesson, as he clearly acknowledges in his correspondence: ‘As for my book. It owes much to you of course.’18 It was a debt which McLuhan had already confessed to Ezra Pound shortly before the volume was released.19 As recalled in McLuhan’s Letters, ‘Part III of Lewis’s The Doom of Youth (1932) contains a “Gallery of Exhibits” made up of newspaper headlines and extracts, with comments by Lewis … that prefigures McLuhan’s treatment of advertisements and other examples of popular culture in The Mechanical Bride. Lewis discusses advertising – “The spirit of advertisement and boost lives and has its feverish being in a world of hyperbolic suggestions” – in Book I, Chapter II of Time and Western Man (1928).’20 It is an important reference; and yet McLuhan’s debt to Lewis in The Mechanical Bride does not simply concern his treatment of popular culture and ads, but it also relates to McLuhan’s understanding of Lewis’s original aesthetic, which the writer theorized in Time and Western Man in terms of a new spatial philosophy. It is a ‘philosophy of the eye’ which ‘attaches itself to that concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’21 but which is not conceived as a return to previous mechanical approaches to space; instead, it is conceived in an effort to retrieve a lost sensory balance induced by an excessive emphasis on time. Lewis blamed Bergsonism as the main cause for corporate hypnosis. By privileging intensity over extension, Bergson’s time philosophy relied exclusively on the sensa world which Lewis defines as the ‘world of the Unconscious or automatic in the sense’:
It is our contention here that it is because of the subjective disunity due to the separation, or separate treatment, of the senses, principally of sight and of touch, that the external disunity has been achieved. It is but another case of the morcellement of the one personality, in this case into a tactile-observer on the one hand and a visual-observer on the other, giving different renderings of the same thing …
So what we seek to stimulate, and what we give the critical outline of, is a philosophy that will be as much a spatial philosophy, as Bergson’s is a time-philosophy … The interpretation of the ancient problems of space and time that consists in amalgamating them into space-time is for us, then, no solution. For, to start with, space-time is no more real, but if anything a little less real, in our view, than Space and Time separately. The wedding of these two abstractions results, we believe … in the ascendancy of Time … over Space: and of the two, if we have any preference, it is for Space; for Space keeps still, at least is not (ideally) occupied in incessantly slipping away, melting into the next thing, and repudiating its integrity.22
Time philosophy is the consequence of an abstracted sensory imbalance against which Lewis retrieves space as a matter-of-fact concept also embedding the empirical, historical, and social dimensions. As noted by critic Brett Neilson: “Since Time and Western Man, Lewis extended his notion of space so as to explore the implications following the multiplications of transnational fluxes, as well as the relationships between local and global. Lewis’s analysis of space-time relations, of technological processes and of intercultural exchanges, theorised globalisation as a trend leading to cultural and social homogenization.’ In Time and Western Man, he writes about a ‘“mercurial spreading-out in time,” of an “overriding of place,” of the annihilation of space which threaten to establish a “oneness,” that is, a global uniqueness.’23 To counterbalance such ‘mercurial spreading-out in time’ is the task of the artist, whose work must provide ‘the experience of arrest’ inducing consciousness.
Lewis was a constant case study for McLuhan, and a case study that he often discussed with Canadian writer Sheila Watson, who had written a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Wyndham Lewis: Post Expressionist’ under McLuhan’s supervision. As their correspondence reveals, discussing and assessing Lewis’s poetics, his operative project, and his original form was a way to explore how to translate the new audile/tactile sensibility of their own time.24 In particular, McLuhan’s understanding of Lewis’s vorticist aesthetic emphasizes precisely this counterbalancing of space over time:
But it is important for an understanding of his vortex view of art and civilization to notice his insistence that the world of Space as opposed to the world of memory and history is the world of a ‘pure Present.’ ‘The world of the “pure Present” of the Classical Ages is obviously the world that is born and dies every moment’ … That is, the moment of art is not a moment of time’s covenant. And art emotion is specifically that experience of arrest in which we pause before a particular thing or experience.25
Lewis’s vortex is not conceived as a flux, but as a dynamic, progressive, moving image related to time but also containing a stable point, the spatial element from which its energy spirals originate. In Lewis’s aesthetic metaphor, the stable point represents an original viewpoint from which the observer can finally embrace both dynamism and its causes. The epiphany follows the perception of something which is arrested briefly while progressing: the ensuing snapshot will inevitably emphasize the grotesque of a situation, which such an imposed pause alters and distorts. But it is precisely the distorted perspective which brings new light to the whole process and interrupts the otherwise reassuring and hypnotic flux.
Vorticist art retrieves extension over intensity and recreates the ground that reassesses all figures. It is a strategy that also offers McLuhan a model for his critical evaluation of society at a time when, as he theorized, our planet has been turned into a man-made artefact by media and technological discoveries and applications. It can therefore also become a way to arrest and reassess the overwhelming flow of information. McLuhan attempts this in his Mechanical Bride, as he clearly states in the preface: his strategy is to arrest the numbing flux by pausing before a series of specific mass icons and mass experiences that represent the ‘Folklore of Industrial Man.’ The pieces are no longer offered as reassuring components of a harmonious and homogeneous ground; instead, they have become grotesque masks distorting reality and returning it to hypocrisies and ambiguities. Following Lewis’s aesthetic, McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride becomes a troublesome mosaic, more than simply a new type of science fiction or a contemporary epic. As previously suggested in the chapters on Joyce and Pound, The Mechanical Bride becomes, in fact, a grotesque satire of mass media actuality. It wants ‘the public to observe the drama which is intended to operate upon it unconsciously.’26 From Lewis, McLuhan has learned how to reinterpret reality, combining so-called high and low forms of communication through a vigorous use of satire which should not only contribute to the preservation of the individual’s self, but also counterbalance the overriding of various time philosophies prevailing in the literary and artistic domains.
The technique to experience the arrest is something McLuhan also relates to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories. In Counterblast, Poe is defined by McLuhan as ‘a press man and … a science fictioner’ whose technique is introduced as a derivative of the new technological culture;27 as such, it is therefore possible to counter-use that rhetorical strategy to reverse the numbing process enacted by the masterminds, the market researchers, of the new mass age. Not by chance is Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ quoted in McLuhan’s preface to his first book. In that short story, the mariner saves himself because he stops to observe the movement; his vision is therefore the consequence of a conscious moment of arrest which makes him see through the vortex flux. The mariner is inside the situation; he does not try to avoid it. And yet, as an insider, he stops and plays with it. Only later will he re-enter the vortex flux (time), but in the wake of a new environmental (spatial) consciousness. His epiphany follows his voluntary suspension from time through space, which also proves to be amusing in spite of the extremely dangerous situation. Or, precisely, because of that.
Amusement is also a key word inside a consumerist society: entertainment is, in fact, both an industry and a strategy to win consent and to ‘keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting …’28 McLuhan also discusses amusement in The Mechanical Bride, where he develops a use of the comic element which resembles more the one suggested by Lewis than the one theorized by Bergson.29 He decides to use both humour and verbal playfulness as key strategies in his mosaic. As he clearly points out in his essay on Lewis, the French philosopher and the Canadian-born writer developed two opposing ideas of laughter and of the comic, as if suggesting the impossibility of a reconciliation between their different philosophies of life, time, and space. Whereas Bergson sees the roots of the comic in the fact that it ‘does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN,’30 for Lewis ‘the root of the comic is to be sought in the sensation resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person.’31 Consistently, not only the root but also the aim of laughter differs in Bergson’s and in Lewis’s visions.32 Contrary to what Bergson theorized, for Lewis the comic is not a strategy to enact social punishment employed by a community to exorcize and rectify a series of attitudes perceived to be in contrast with the élan vital, which, in Bergson’s theory, stands for life itself. For Lewis, the comic does not restore a lost order or social harmony; quite the opposite, laughter has a satanic implication used to unmask the vacuum of élan vital itself, which Lewis sees as something inscribed inside an empty world dominated by a vulgarized science which ‘makes us strangers to ourselves … It instils a principle of impersonality in the heart of our life that is anti-vital.’33 According to Lewis, the ‘evolution of our machines’ has deprived human beings of their personality, of their humanity; they are, in fact, things which try to behave like people. Thus, humans appear as empty puppets, zombies. Laughter is what comes out of such a sad situation, an epiphanic outburst which does not consolidate but compromises societal cohesion: ‘No man has ever continued to live who has observed himself in that manner for longer than a flash. Such consciousness must be of the nature of a thunderbolt. Laughter is only summer-lightening. But it occasionally takes on the dangerous form of absolute revelation.’34 The tragic element of Lewis’s grotesque humanity consists in the fact that, after the laughter, after the revelation, it is no longer possible to return to the previous condition: madness or submission is the only possible solution. Hence, McLuhan sees Lewis as ‘a mystic or visionary of the comic, moving toward the pole of intelligibility instead of that of feeling.’35 Lewis’s grotesque laughter is as uncanny as it is revelatory; it is a type of amusement which has no moral pretence but which captures new environmental processes precisely through a defamiliarization of well-established behaviours.
In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan develops a similar attitude to laughter and amusement: ‘Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stages of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced. Moreover, it is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide.’36 In this book, amusement derives from a satirical mosaic-like rendering of defamiliarized mass icons which behave like people but which are in fact puppets controlled by ‘the best-trained individual minds’ of their times. Such a rendering owes much to Lewis, especially if we read its cumulative final effect as a grotesque expressionist landscape recreating satanic versions of our reality. Uncanny details are amplified, and reality is recreated by subsequent visions which arrest time and turn it into ‘pure Present’: such a grotesque extension of reality arrests it, halts its intensity, and makes us readers ‘see’ inside the flux because, for a few moments, space wins over time. McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride consists of a series of decontextualized visual blasts, which are juxtaposed in an expressionist collage that reveals aspects of the folklore of the industrial man that individuals cannot see because they are too much in love with or dependent upon that very lore. It’s McLuhan’s mode of alerting the straw men of his times.
McLuhan considered Lewis’s works instrumental to his explorations of communication in culture and technology. Lewis’s spatial philosophy, which considers art as ‘that experience of arrest in which we pause before a particular thing,’ offers McLuhan a conceptual form of writing which is designed, not as a flow, but as a mosaic, that is, as a juxtaposition of pauses or intervals in turn blasting the numbing acceptance of actuality. McLuhan links Lewis’s work explicitly to his media studies, as he writes in the letter announcing his new role as the chairman of a Ford Foundation project dedicated to the study of culture and communication;37 he tells Lewis that his books are ‘indispensable’ to achieving that study, because his research group is split over time and space, including both ‘vertical and horizontal doctrinaires.’38 It is a letter which bears witness not only to McLuhan’s shift to media studies, but also to his own original approach. It confirms that he did not enter media studies through a side door, since as a professor of literature he had always been working on and with writers whose aesthetics were in fact deeply pervaded by new media. Ford, Joyce, Pound, and Lewis were constantly engaging with their societal and cultural processes to the point that their works of art can be used as modern tools of illumination (both in content and through structure). As a modernist scholar, McLuhan always considered Lewis’s productions as counter-environments determined to detect and express cultural and technological change. McLuhan found, in the case of Wyndham Lewis, a number of ideas which would later prove to be crucial tenets of his own media analysis. For instance, Lewis provided McLuhan with a metaphor for the new depth-involving newness: the global village.
It was in fact Lewis who, as early as 1929, wrote that ‘the Earth has become ONE place instead of a romantic tribal patch work of places.’39 In Lewis’s analysis, such a place is mutually modelled by new media, new social actors, a new idea of art, industrialism, and politics; these are in fact understood as forces which determine culture and condition society (The Art of Being Ruled, 1926; Time and Western Man, 1927). In Lewis’s writing, such an idea translates both a new environmental situation and a political take on his actuality: on the one hand, to think of the Earth as ONE place is a way to translate the shrinking imposed by new media on the environment;40 on the other hand, it translates Lewis’s idea of a ‘new kind of universalism.’ He was convinced that ‘the machine age has made nonsense of nationalism.’41 Thus, Lewis overcomes both the Joycean mythography and the Poundian epic: history and actuality are in fact the foundational paradigms for understanding his works. Lewis’s artist must live in his own time fully; he must awaken in the here and now, avoiding escape into an emotional flow which only serves to preserve a sentimental approach to situations. Consistently, history and actuality play a major role in all his novels, and especially in his Self Condemned, whose main character, René Harding, is a professor of history who can no longer teach this subject because he no longer conforms to the institutionalized (or homogenized) epistemic approach encouraged by his home university.42 After the writing of his controversial volume The Secret History of World War II, René Harding leaves England for Canada. North America is, in fact, the continent of the new civilization which Lewis opposed to the old one of Europe, a juxtaposition which enabled Lewis to enlighten both positive and negative aspects of such a civilization.43
America was portrayed as the cradle for the evolving Cosmic Man, a continent that Lewis could fully appreciate during his forced stay in the United States and Canada: ‘Thus, even during the war, Lewis was eagerly taking cognizance of those characteristics of life on the American continent which most impressed him, the cosmic and the crude. Eventually he was to suggest a link between them.’44 The global village and its related world primitivism (or better yet savagery) are the two elements which Lewis theorized and which were also later translated into McLuhan’s terminology. The two intellectuals looked at their own times from the same outpost, but wearing two different uniforms. Lewis was the enemy, a satirist possessing a loathsome deformity and acting in terms of his temperament and personality; McLuhan became the media explorer, acting instead as a detached humanist observer interested in the new mediascape. Lewis threw his blasts to provoke his readers and induce reaction over societal and political issues; McLuhan’s counterblasts were conceived to warn us, with no party bias, about the evolving environmental conditions and their side effects on both people and situations.
Even though he was among the first – if not the first – to theorize it, Wyndham Lewis did not particularly like the new global village (until he started to associate it to a renewed idea of internationalism, that is until his forced stay in North America). He feared the over-emphasis on the corporate, which he considered detrimental to free thinking; but what he feared most, in fact, was the annihilation of space in favour of time, a situation which led him to perceive the environment as inscribed inside a ‘world of direct sensation,’ no longer a ‘world of distinct objects.’ Thus, the cosmic aspect was also inexorably associated to the crude one, which Lewis defined in terms of a societal degeneration towards a newly conceived form of barbarism: ‘Our civilization, with the impetus given it by machines, is turning from the settled to the restless ideal – from “civilization” to “savagery.”’45 To the savagery of the industrialized word, Lewis opposes the noble primitivism of ancient North African tribes, even though his understanding of those cultures was never based on a rigorous anthropological interest.
In Filibusters in Barbary, Lewis describes the slums of Casablanca, which he saw as being the most westernized city of North Africa, and asserts that ‘capitalism and Barbary breed the same forms.’46 And yet, he considers the situation of North American city slums more critical (in particular, he insists on the Chicago area), as it mirrors the passage from civilization to savagery and not vice-versa.47 The new North American barbarism is therefore the product of a society now dominated by merchants, executives acting inside the corporate world of the machine age who appear as cultural inheritors of T.S. Eliot’s new barbarians ‘… on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’48 Lewis’s original and brief fascination with progress and new technologies, or better his fascination with the promise of progress they seemed to encourage, was now superseded by his historical take on them. Lewis tells us that the aesthetic potential of machines has been replaced by the long-term effects of industrialization, which is no longer seen as bringing welfare, but rather degeneration and aberration. Lewis’s admiration for the primitive world of North African Berber tribes is the admiration for a world in which ‘industrialism has not put its squalid foot.’49 Contrary to Lewis, McLuhan’s idea of the global village leads to a discussion of retribalization as a social dynamic, not as a social organization. He does not discuss the idea of the primitive as a critique of mass society; instead, he privileges a discussion of the different forms of communication, characterizing oral societies as being in contrast with literate ones. The global village, as an electronic village, is an image which is immediately associated with tribalism and the primitive as the extreme consequence of a hyper-industrialized environment. As McLuhan wrote in his 1954 version of Counterblast: ‘By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane. We have evoked super-civilized sub-primitive man.’
As recalled earlier, in the 1960s McLuhan dropped all direct criticism of the media world, became the explorer not the explainer; as such, he explored satire as a possible rhetorical device, but fully embraced humor as his favorite one. He did not wear the mask of the enemy, like Lewis, but as we saw opted for other masks. He was the media oracle, the media guru, the modernist, the grammarian of media, and humour was a more appropriate strategy for pursuing his operative project. The humorous tone, freed from a moral bias which satire often preserves, helps to unmask hypocrisies. Sardonic or mocking laughter leads to irony; a satirical or sarcastic tone often sounds judgmental and makes you take sides pro or con situations. Generally speaking, McLuhan became a pop icon, therefore engaging with a less troublesome role than Lewis’s ‘the enemy.’ From Lewis, he retained the verbal playfulness, as well as drawing on the most bombastic vorticist artistic experiments. McLuhan wrote two editions of Counterblast, the first dated 1954 (originally handmade and only recently published in book form), the second, designed and published together with Harley Parker and dated 1969. The first was written by a professor of English who found himself on the threshold of progressing mediascapes and who found models in avant-garde achievements; the second was elaborated by a media theorist collaborating with a celebrated artist of the time. Juxtaposing these two editions of Counterblast offers a way to map the evolution of McLuhan’s poetics, in response to Lewis’s (editor of the vorticist little magazine Blast, 1914–15) and in relation to his own progress as a media theorist. Counterblast (1954) is a pamphlet written in Lewis’s vorticist style; McLuhan combines Lewis’s works of 1914 (Blast), 1948 (America and Cosmic Man), and 1954 (Self Condemned) to work out his own approach to media studies: ‘I have coming out a new version of BLAST which takes Self Condemned (1914–1954) as a focal point. As theme for Blast for forty years later I have taken in place of abstract art and industrial culture, the new media of communication and their power of metamorphosis.’50 That passage is followed by a discussion of his idea of acoustic space. And yet, in his first short pamphlet, McLuhan still writes as a satirist in Lewis’s wake, his blasts aiming at arresting the flux and grasping the genesis and direction of the related movement:
In AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN Lewis saw North America as a benign rock crusher in which all remnants of European nationalism and individualism were happily reduced to cosmic baby powder. The new media are blowing a lot of this baby powder around the pendant cradle of the New Man today. The dust gets in our eyes.
Counterblast 1954 blows aside this dust for a few moments and offers a view of the cradle, the bough, and the direction of the winds of the new media in these latitudes.51
Fifteen years later, in the new edition of Counterblast, he replaced the final sentence with some remarks presenting his new approach as a media theorist: his focus is no longer on the final goal, but mostly on the technique he intends to adopt to make the observation possible:
The term COUNTERBLAST does not imply any attempt to erode or explode BLAST. Rather it indicates the need for a counter-environment as a means to perceive the dominant one. Today we live invested with an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to a fish. At the beginning of his work, Pavlov found that the conditioning of his dogs depended on a previous conditioning. He placed one environment within another one. Such is COUNTERBLAST.52
Through time, McLuhan’s counterblasts can therefore be defined not only in terms of an operative project (‘to blow aside the dust for a few moments’), but also in terms of a formal strategy to pursue in order to achieve such a goal (‘to place an environment within another one’). Hence, McLuhan was no longer ‘fearing’ the new environment, but was playfully probing it; he was, in fact, applying the method of art analysis to assess his mediascape, taking advantage of the perceptive energy released through montage and juxtaposition.
Consistently, McLuhan’s mosaic places an environment inside another through its paratactic elaboration, which merges literacy and orality and offers a newly conceived ecological approach to a series of media and environmental issues. It’s a hybrid energy which combines spatial and time philosophies to blow aside the dust that new tyrants continue to throw into our eyes.