Over the past six years I’ve typed out some 4000 personal notes of many various sorts. There have been weeks where I’ve typed some 5-10 thousand words a day, and some weeks where I haven’t written a thing. Many are commentaries on books, films, and online discussions with excerpts, page references, and time-codes. Many are snippets of stray thoughts and ideas, or delicate words which had floated into mind which I had fancied enough to preserve. A great many are long dumps of stream of conscious thoughts, begun with the intention to write-down a conscious thought-in-mind, but which sprawled outward during the recording into unforeseeable tangents and strange destinations.

Ideally I’d take some of these long essays and polish them, or dissect them, into proper essays or papers. But in reality, I’ve seldom the time nor inclination to revisit my past writings at all, let alone do any serious work with them. When the odd motivation strikes, then, I’ve resolved to post them here with minimal alteration beyond fixing misspellings.

2020-03-05 9:04 P.M.

McLuhan is a double agent, on a secret mission. He’s “for” electric man and the youth, insofar as he relates to them, wants them to relate to what he’s saying, and wants them to put on his account. But his account is a very, very, well-crafted piece of art, with two possible identifications. As scholarship, his work has lead to him being called a crank. But that is neither here nor there. Because it’s second role is far harder to detect, and far more effectual.

The second identification of McLuhan’s post-50s oeuvre is that of an integrating perceptual balm for the fractured, sensibly-dissociated Western psyche, delivered straight from on-high. The “theories” which are distilled and articulated with any explicitness (hot-cold, electric vs. gutenberg humanity, etc.) are vehicles for the preponderance of transjective observations which, once apprehended and perceived by the astute novice, will serve to pull them into an analogically-proportionate sensibility or unity of being. The “supporting” evidence of his many applications are in fact the payload, and the summary of his ideas can be taken or left behind at one’s whim.

Basically, McLuhan’s vast enumerations—or “inventories”—of percepts are numerous enough to allow any given *some* of them to become apparent to anyone who puts them on and entertains them in their life. Taking even some of the bait in following through, at one’s own rate, an observation, is to put on his perception. Do it enough times, and one begins to alter one’s sensibility to conform with the underlying integrity of the mind which perceived them. And what integrity is that? That of a devout Catholic. It’s all the spirit, and all soul, with absolute no trace of the sermon. It’s proportioned, embodied being delivered by a ceaseless drilling—death and rebirth by a million cuts and sutures. For the age full of, as we say now, socially-constructed logical thinkers, there were books of prosaic know-how and explanations. For the world of socially-constructed dreamers of the spectacle, he gives us as many metaphors, pulled from as much of history and domains and cultures as one man can explore and gather in a life time. All delivered with the minimum of pretense and ambiguity necessary to spread his message to those most in need of it.

The gig has been up for a very long time. He leaked his own intentions and beliefs and viewpoint enough times, and since then the availability of publication of his private letters and unpublished writings seal the deal. At the century’s half-way point, he woke up to the horrific, abysmal flip-side to the euphoric triumphalism of the existence and apotheosis of human artistic genius. The diabolic capacity latent in divine creative ability, and the inevitability of its emergence, sunk in to his visceral, immediate being. And he stood gifted himself enough to do something about it, and smart enough to not get crucified doing it. In fact, that was the very premise of the final chapter of the book which confirmed for him the stakes for which he was convinced he was playing for: The Foundations of Social Survival by John Lindberg.

Through our senses, we incarnate the external world within us, and live straddling the objective and subjective in imperfect union, as bodies existing in and moving about and sharing in this world. That all that is inside of us is representative of what is outside of us was, for me long ago, the surest proof of the illusory nature of the ego. What McLuhan demonstrated, while being neither here nor there on what sort of category of truth this is, is that the divine aids in the proportionality of the parts with the whole. Fine grained or coarse, the ratios and clearly-delineated, sufficiently empty spots of ignorance which our mortality leaves inevitable are the more important thing. And so the story of the self needs a congruent, complementary story of the world in which it fits.

This is a message which is suitable and agreeable to a secular audience, who live in a secular world, written by a devoutly religious person who had the long history of the Catholic church as his rock. It’s survival across many existential crises does not so much suggest practical means or approaches to handling any given apocalyptic catastrophe as merely encourage faith in the very possibility of survival at all. Hence, McLuhan’s faith in the Church does not necessitate any secular reader of McLuhan share any of his opinion of Catholicism or Christianity upfront. What it does demand is recognition of how it is that McLuhan strove to exist as a fixed point in the turbulence, and urged artists to do the same, so as to help reorient culture through birth of new constellations in the transjective firmament as relativity unmoored Newtonian space.

McLuhan incessantly foregrounded the technological development of electricity relative to the preceding and receding mechanical world. It was our relation with this underlying material environment to which he attributed changes in human character. This new environment, which only featured the apparent world as content, was consistently rendered salient and placed within historical contextualization for the sake of fostering an integral perception which would route around the spectacle of sensory illusion.

The ultimate balance, the analogical proportioning, comes from the consistency of human nature and the ways in which we use the same-old biology and same old minds to adapt to every-changing environments over the span of history. The all times-are-now, all places-are-here perspective of the modernist world furnished its early adopters an advantage over the laggards that rendered them megalomaniacal. Beneath the intellectual and technological advances lurked a concomitant surge of interest in occultism and human deification. The private, individual movement from detached study and recognition of cult beliefs into perception of power of enchantment and self-plausible identification with divinity demands proportional burden and weight for self-plausible humility. McLuhan fought enchantment through spectacle with derision and wilful ignorance in favour of emphasizing the far heavier, and far more serious responsibility of enchantment through the shaping of total human environment.

Artists working in the content of a medium have reality as a fallback, as a limitless frame and surround, as a fixed truth or reality to return to. McLuhan’s artists, for whom the new, ubiquitous, mass-produced commodity or service which will be constitutive of reality for all the rest, have no fallback but that inflicted upon the self-ordained Good Shepherd. It is the weight of history which McLuhan lays piece-by-piece upon the shoulders of those enacting their more efficacious will, through extension into technology, over and under the public-cum-mass of humanity who live the consequences.

In an essay called ‘THE ELECTRONIC AGE: The Age of Implosion’ McLuhan answers with these leading questions:

How can we elude the merely technical closure in our inner lives and recover autonomy? What is the cultural strategy of the suspended judgement, of the open-ended proposition?

Is there the possibility of new freedom in the aesthetic response to the models of perception outered from us into our technology? If we contemplate the technological forms that we set outside ourselves as art objects, rather than the inevitable patterns of utility, can we escape the swift “closure” of our senses? Since any new outering of ourselves is innered again with consequent displacement of sense ratios, is there any means of avoiding this displacement of inner life resulting from what Adolphe Jonas calls the “auto-amputative property?” (See _Irritation and Counter-irritation_, Vantage Press, New York 1962)

Insofar as those innovating in the realm of technology failed to recognize or shoulder the weight of responsibility proportional to the enactment of their will—insofar as they played as God in a sandbox rather than recognize the role they played as God of the mortal realm—than technological determinism was fated.

Whereas Guy Debord called McLuhan “the spectacle’s first apologist”, fooled by McLuhan’s relative disinterest in the content of media and its importance, Harold Rosenberg recognized the truth in his 1965 review of Understanding Media for The New Yorker:

Of all crisis philosophers, McLuhan is by far the coolest.

McLuhan [perceived and reacted] to the crisis presented by [mass media, propaganda, and the wild oscillations] between [total and zero institutional authority] which circumstance [afforded and rescinded] [to and from] all [social institutions and individuals] alike. (square brackets added for clarity.) He kept his cool through his fixity in the well documented, readily available history of human scale relationship to the totality of being as recorded, handed down, and inherited by all who are serious in putting it on for themselves and peeking around at their own time and place through its senses.

Final paragraph omitted.