Part I: History of the Logos

Logos against forces of the Occult!

I’m trying to get to Boston mid-March to speak at the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, LibrePlanet 2023. We must understand, and be in control of our computers, not vice versa. If you’d like to help fund my trip, I’m welcoming contributions at my PayPal account. Or shoot an email to clinton@ this website’s domain name! You’ll be thanked in the next installment of this series, part III!

Framing McLuhan

Last year, I decided making internet videos on McLuhan would be counter-productive. His books and public speeches are like poetry. You can’t summarize them, abstract from them. That kills them dead, results in “theories” or “philosophies” or “concepts” like every other thinker he’s counteracting, undercutting, running circles around. Because you’re reading McLuhan, you’re reading what he’s reading, not reading him. McLuhan scholarship doesn’t catch hold today because so many secondary sources are distracting from deep, lingering, thorough engagement with two levels of primary sources: his books and lectures, and the many books and articles he read to write his books and lectures. Most of my time is sunk in the latter.

So in this video format, nothing made on McLuhan’s content, or message, will get across what’s really of value to a new crowd. The way into McLuhan is commitment to reading McLuhan. Directly!

So I stopped making videos. I doubled down on reading and writing privately. That changes now!

I’ve realized: I can frame where it is McLuhan can enter larger discourse. I can inform readers of McLuhan towards those ends. Help them know what they’re looking for when they start his stuff. And I can encourage a long-term commitment to this rewarding mission to those viewers who would undertake it. I’ve been at it for five years, myself, in a dedicated sense. It is totally worth it. 🙂

Keep watching, even if you don’t think you’ll pick up a pile of books. I might change your mind, or at least get you asking questions, feeling curious. There are no “concepts” out of his books I’d like to explain. But I think I can paint some intentions, approaches, and influences, inspirations, historical contexts, and applications.

Demystification

McLuhan’s media theory is a demystification of what might variously called mysticism or occultism or, in a very, very ideosyncretic sense of the term, “gnosticism.” It’s what Mircea Elliade talks about as religion, which is why in Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan rags on Elliade so hard: mere psychological processes, which are conditioned by environmental factors, aren’t ‘religious.’ They can be explained in material terms. Those who used studied such traditions, and used them to create and shape the perceptions of others, were ‘artists’ to McLuhan. Let’s see how his art-criticism approach lead to his awareness of these traditions being used in arts.

His PhD at Cambridge was in English—he studied literary criticism as it was before, on the one hand, semiotics, structuralism, and French theory and, on the other, archetypal theory, re-constituted the field. McLuhan’s doctoral thesis was an analysis of “logos,”—speech, or “the Word” capital-W—as it changed throughout 2500 years of Western history, from the Axial age up to through the Socratics, the Stoics, the classical rhetors like Cicero and Seneca, into the medievalexegetical work of the Patristics and the Scholastics, and into Neo-Platonist, alchemists and hermetic thinkers who were retrieving the Axial and classical period. And only then did his thesis get started on his ostensible subject.

The thesis was supposed to be localized study of a single writerly feud from the 16^th century, but as he dug in, he found all the scholarship about the era he was reading didn’t match the facts or explain the primary texts from the time! All the secondary sources sucked. So, he had to reverse engineer for himself the cultural reasons for the feud. The context, the belief systems, their origins, the education system and in a few years of study his thesis blossomed into the longitudinal, two-milleia spanning analysis of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic: the classical trivium.

As a scholar and professor throughout the 1940s he paid particular attention to the French origins of the techniques of T.S. Eliot, the first of the English modern poets. The discontinuous, allusive, aphoristic style—more Senecan than Ciceronian—defined the era.

The point for us here is that he took language apart and back together over and over and over again, meticulously, reinventing and refining its nature in an elaboration which lead to his life-long deep study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

It wasn’t until the early ‘50s—shortly after his first published book, The Mechanical Bride, was released—that McLuhan “woke up” to some perception of occult tradition, ritual, and initiation within the contemporary art world, both art itself and art criticism. Modern artists, as McLuhan had been teaching in his classroom, had reverse-engineered the stages of their own apprehension—the psychology of perception—and played back those stages in their art in order to inspire others. These impetus behind these artistic practices, he suddenly realized, was the attempt at the recreation of ancient initiatory cult rituals. It was, he figured in a catch-all phrase, Gnosticism.

All these techniques they depended on the exacerbation, cultivation and exploitation of an innate mind/body duality, or “dissociation of the senses,” in T.S. Eliot’s terms. The Gnostic subject sought escape from this fallen world, and a return back to their true home, from which they to have fallen.

McLuhan’s work thereafter would entail strategies for addressing the mind-body split, undercutting the efficiacy and effect of these artistic strategies when used for spiritual warfare.

Let’s look at two types of Gnosticism McLuhan identified within arts in the next video.

Part Two: Lost in Time, Lost in Space

Help me get to Boston to speak at the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, LibrePlanet 2023, on March 18-19. I’ll thank you in the next video. You can help at my PayPal account, or email clinton@ this website’s domain name. Thanks.

Strange Times

In the wake of the groundbreaking comparative anthropology of James Frazer and his popular book The Golden Bough, Western culture at the beginning of the 20^th century experienced a greatly-heightened appetite for the occult. Theosophy, Secret Societies, Tarot Cards and divination, spirit channelling, revivals of Egyptology went mainstream, feeding the minds of the curious, credulous public. Feeding them what? Well, that’s besides the point.

McLuhan, as a respectable scholar of poetry and literature, had been ignoring all of this. Ignoring it, mind you, not out of any particularly strong prejudice. More like just as how everyone must, by necessity, ignore most of nonsense fads or trends which goes on in the larger culture around us. He was just really busy. He was staring a family, and he was hard at work teaching literary studies with academic seriousness and rigour. But, when these two distinct fields—popular occultism and literary theory—were revealed to be different ends of one-and-the-same-thing, he had to start his studies all anew. This revelation, which made him very angry to discover, happened in the summer of 1952, according this letters to Eric Voegelin.

Two Types of Gnostics

As McLuhan began looking for how the art theory he had been naively studying had actually fit into occult rituals and initiatory rites within the art world, he roughly divided the practices into two general approaches or types.

These schools held some things in common. The gnostics sought escape from the hell of the fallen world we live in. They both general spoke of having or being true selves in some sense that transcended their body, implicitly or explicitly something which was older than, or lived longer than it’s life and time on earth. McLuhan’s faith, as an adult convert to Catholicism, put him well outside these perspectives.

McLuhan interpreted two different strategies for “escape” from our fallen world in each school. These strategies guided the approaches toward poetic and artistic technique which adherents in each school used. The Western “Time” school seemed to be looking throughout history for some timeless, transcendent ideal of beauty and wisdom and culture to manifest and create, in emulation of a higher plane of heaven from which their souls fell, and to which they wished to return. It was Aristocratic, elite, and in art sought perfect aesthetics to capture universally-known and felt emotional states. Snapshots of ideal archetypes.

The Eastern approach of the “Space” school, on the other hand, ultimately taught the falsity of the ego, of the self, and sought it’s annihilation. The ego, they taught, only resisted one’s necessary melting into, and merging with the still point at the centre of the universe. Initiates into to this spiritual path were exploring the spatial world of the present, seeking and running headlong into new situations and sensations, constantly dying and being reborn through with violent encounter of each new experience. Art in this style captured the subtle effects of such overwhelming, mystical encounters; not the simple, arrested emotions of the time school, but countless complexities of proportion and analogy present in any of the infinite possible situations in life.

The time school, and its search for timeless beauty and ideals, sought to escape the hoi polloi, the little people, by rising above them. Adherants sought to create for themselves, as individuals, an elite, private heaven like that from which it felt it had fallen. The space school ran into life, ran into the darkness, and seeking to break free of the bonds of social commitment and material attachments and the lies and manipulations of power, ultimately to be free of both the self and the world.

More ways

The situation is, of course, so much more infinitely complicated than that. But I elucidate these aspects, in simplified form, to lead to this point:

The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis was contemporary with and colleague to his fellow English Modernists Eliot, Joyce, and Ezra Pound. His approach, McLuhan said, was a strange, hyper-individualist hybrid approach of both the time and space schools. Lewis was diametrically apposed to the fluxing, every-changing view of reality taught by the French scholar, meta-physician, and public lecturer Henri Bergson. Lewis believed in the importance of stasis.

If you read a biography of Lewis, you realize Lewis was a real ass-hole. An anti-hero, perhaps, if we must be polite. Lewis basically exploited everyone who was ever foolish enough to become his friend; exploited them either for money or as the subject of cruel satire and mockery in one of his novels. He got blacklisted everywhere sued for defamation many times. His literary journal, written to lambast and attack the mainstream of English literary culture in the 1920s, was called The Enemy. Lewis was the enemy—the enemy of every establishment.

Lewis thought people searching through time for enduring ideals of beauty and humanity became Romantic, dream-stricken, hallucinating, out-of-touch snobs at best. And he thought people who ran and melted into space, surrendering their ego, became the helpless puppets of the ideology propagated by these time snobs. Art, for Lewis, had to become environmental in the present. When nature was our environment, art had to take on, and take over nature. With industrialism, as nature became replaced by machines, the “nature” which art captured and controlled had to become more machine-like. Then you could see how people were becoming machine like. Lewis’ approach to training his own sensibility was a game of chicken. He got as close to the flux of things, the environment, the world, and the people in it as he possibly could without losing himself. He maintained his individuality by always pulling out, betraying those he’d been getting close to, and savagely vivisecting them—tearing them apart—in paint and print. He had the elitism of the Time School and the immersion into the world-as-it-is of the Space school.

It takes an ass-hole like Lewis to spend his life innovating such an approach, and a Christian like McLuhan to abstract good technique from it with good intention, humanity and grace. Meditate, for now, on the phrase “being in the world, but not of it.”

Anyway, Lewis always observed the changes in the eternal now, as they differentiated from last-year’s, last decade’s, last century’s eternal now. He mixed time and space in his Vorticist school.

The way Lewis explained it, there are two ways to lead a person to see their society as an alien, from the outside. One is to make some make-believe fantasy world—such as in Gulliver’s Travels, or modern science fiction and fantasy genres—and then incorporate aspects of our reality onto them. The second is to get as close as possible to the world of the audience, to see it through their eyes, and then present the world you learn they live in as you see it, from your radically different perspective. The second was Lewis’ approach. And McLuhan’s. I think of this second approach as a David Lynch kind-of thing. Present the world as it is, not as people make themselves think it is. Acknowledge the strange real natures of reality of which people can’t and don’t speak.

Consideration of all of these approaches to reality, either escape from reality, or observance and fashioning of reality, went into McLuhan’s strategy for counteracting the influences and vulnerabilities of the mind body split.

The next entry, titled Embodiment, will get into the elements of McLuhan’s approach to media and environmental studies which targeted this mind-body split, treating to restore a sense of human scale, and presence.

Please help me pay my way to Boston to speak at the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, LibrePlanet 2023.

Help me out with my PayPal account. Or shoot an email to clinton@ this website’s domain name!

You’ll be thanked in the next installment of this series, part III!

Update: Part III is out! And it is not title embodiment. Boo!