One paragraph on one page of a 1926 book (Wyndham Lewis’ The Art of Being Ruled) takes up most of this session, and by the end it has been turned against both men. Wyndham Lewis wrote that a very small percentage of people, given better brains and good social opportunities, manage to extricate themselves from the ideologic machine — like a mammal growing wings, existing thenceforth in another and freer element. Bob hears the wings as decentralization, the historical widening of a minority he takes himself to stand at the leading edge of. Cameron answers that what Bob calls decentralization is the machine , and names the disagreement as the one underneath all their others. Bob’s book’s p.160 does not open until the eighty-fourth minute, and when it does the Anthropomorphic Physical arrives with its sharpest formulation yet — not the user is the content, but the used is the content — and is immediately denied its date.
Key Topics
- Cameron’s case against McLuhan’s originality, argued from Paleface and the 1944 essay “Lemuel in Lilliput”: the mind was not better, only the kaleidoscope turned, and what the turn showed “is the oldest of the old” .
- The best single line of the session, on why McLuhan’s fame was not communication: “instead of getting stopped by being banned, he got stopped by being broadcast” .
- The two words Cameron spends an hour on — material, because Lewis names a matter neither physical nor merely psychological , and suggestion, which runs back to Aristotle’s answer to Plato that ideas have externality built into them.
- The verdict the series has circled for seventy sessions, stated flatly at last: on Lewis’ assignment, “McLuhan never succeeds in doing that but he comes… he comes close” .
- Bob’s periodization of the Android Meme flipping from shaping us to aping us , with the admission that he had the two terms backwards on the album for forty years .
- Zappa’s xenochrony offered as Bob’s own method of refusing the AP, and turned against him: if the technique only rearranges existing pieces, there is no removal from the AP — to which Bob’s answer is a word, “para-human”, rather than “post-human” .
Notable Quotes
"What you are calling decentralization I think is what Lewis and McLuhan call the ideologic machine. It's what traps people, not what sets them free."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:09:50
"and free spirits do not, as is popularly supposed, inhabit the bodies of men of science or artists."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:12:30
"100 years later, all the world has done is made concrete what Lewis could already see in the abstract."Cameron McEwen, on reading Lewis' Paleface in the age of wokeness, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:48:02
Outline
- 0:00:51 — Lewis’ Paleface and “the Men of 1914”
- 0:12:26 — The elementary form behind good ideas and bad
- 0:21:49 — Giedion, Lewis, and the two questions of 1943
- 0:30:02 — “Art and science are the very material”
- 0:38:12 — Attention is not communication
- 0:51:36 — “Suggestion”: Plato, Aristotle, and externality
- 01:00:06 — The Art of Being Ruled, p.111
- 01:19:01 — Take Today and Corinne’s verdict
- 01:24:25 — The used is the content
- 01:34:45 — Walls without walls
- 01:39:30 — The Prankquean and the rebuilt walls
- 01:45:13 — Lewis in the age of “wokeness”
- 01:50:11 — Shaping, aping, and the Android Meme
- 01:56:33 — Kroker’s gene astronauts
- 02:01:05 — Xenochrony and the non-Now
- 02:09:03 — Bob’s Voluntary ESP and quadrophrenia
- 02:14:24 — Nixon, woke, and the reversal of values
- 02:20:04 — Zingrone and the one-person caravans
- 02:24:30 — Close
Mentioned Resources
Works by Wyndham Lewis
- The Art of Being Ruled (1926) — p.111 supplies the session’s central paragraph on “the ideologic machine” and “the mammal growing wings”
- Paleface (1929, written 1927) — Cameron’s current blog subject; read here as an early report on a world taken over by morality
- Time and Western Man, The Apes of God, Blast — cited in passing for the satire of “free spirits” and “the claim to a new civilization”
Works by McLuhan
- “Lemuel in Lilliput” (1944) — the tribute essay to Wyndham Lewis written in St. Louis by McLuhan, built on the Lewis quotation about art and science
- “My Friend Wyndham Lewis” (Atlantic, 1969) — source of the line about admiring the carapace of his art forms
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972) — p.11’s “man has become both figure and ground”
- “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho”, Explorations, Volume 6, July 1956 — the walls coming down
- From Cliché to Archetype, Understanding Media, the December 1968 Playboy piece, and a New York Times essay of May 10, 1974
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh (1993) — the long passage on gene astronauts
- Frank Zingrone, The Media Simplex (2001) — the one-person caravans and the holographic point
- Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman — cited as the start of two decades of academic work on the residue of the human
- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976); Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944); James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (p. 21) (1939)
People
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and critic of “the Men of 1914”, whose books set the problems McLuhan worked on)
- Marshall McLuhan (the Canadian media theorist whose work the series reads)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian McLuhan met in May 1943, who asked how a plurality of first principles makes music instead of noise)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian theorist of “virtual reality” and “the electric body”)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan scholar and co-editor of Essential McLuhan (1995))
- Frank Zappa (composer whose studio technique of “xenochrony” supplies the session’s closing model)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator on Take Today)
- Felix Giovannelli (McLuhan’s St. Louis friend, who lent Lewis his apartment)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s student, source of the term “coenaesthesia”)
- John Fekete (Trent professor who took up “the valuation of values” in the 1990s)
- André Malraux (source of McLuhan’s “without walls” figure)
- Katherine Hayles, Jeffrey Meyers, Marilouise Kroker, Corinne McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Marge Stewart
Closing
Two men who agree on nearly everything find the exact sentence they disagree about, and it turns out to have been written in 1926.
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