Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net The Artist’s Emergent Journey Clinton Ignatov—The McLuhan Institute—[email protected] To examine computers as a medium in the style of Marshall McLuhan, we must understand the origins of his own perceptions on the nature of media and his deep-seated religious impetus for their development. First we will uncover McLuhan’s reasoning in his description of the artist and the occult origins of his categories of hot and cool media. This will prepare us to recognize these categories when they are reformulated by cyberneticist Norbert Wiener and ethnographer Sherry Turkle. Then, as we consider the roles “black boxes” play in contemporary art and theory, many ways of bringing McLuhan’s insights on space perception and the role of the artist up to date for the work of defining and explaining cyberspace will be demonstrated. Through this work the paradoxical morality of McLuhan’s decision to not make moral value judgments will have been made clear. Introduction In order to bring Marshall McLuhan into the 21st century it is insufficient to retrieve his public persona. This particular character, performed in the ‘60s and ‘70s on the global theater’s world stage, was tailored to the audiences of its time. For our purposes today, we’ve no option but an audacious attempt to retrieve, as best we can, the whole man. To these ends, while examining the media of our time, we will strive to delicately reconstruct the human-scale McLuhan from what has been left in both his public and private written corpus. Especially, we will compare his rarely- publicized thoughts on spiritualism and religion with those of the one of the fathers of our medium: Norbert Wiener. One can only hope McLuhan would find this humble attempt at imitation of his art—in both his definition and his performance of it—at least flattering. The Artist The goal of the artist is to show us “what our world is made of,” according to McLuhan’s definition. Prerequisite to fulfilling this prescription, he insists, is a long tenure of dedication to perceptual training. Reacting against art intended to serve in a religious or spiritual capacity for secular society—resulting in the ascendance of the artist to performative godhood above those captive to their illusions—McLuhan conscripted the artist instead in a solemn, dangerous, comparatively unrewarding and only-apparently mundane duty of service to humanity. Rather than enchant the world, he says the artist’s role is to perceive first the present collective condition and render its make-up re-cognizable to the rest of us. 105 Clinton Ignatov What does this mean in practical terms? The artist is to leave the safety of socially-constructed, institutionally-founded, and culturally-inherited forms of perception, and open themselves to the maelstrom of ungated sensory stimuli. The artist is to become raw to the complexity of combinatorial-explosion and to embody runaway processes of prehensive interpretation. In their willing submission to battery by resonating meaning from all directions, the artist’s waking-life becomes a manic parade of ad-hoc, synchronistic symbols comprising many layers of signs ripped from their familiar contexts in memory and ontology. From this state, their work is then the re- establishment of poise in relation to space and in time, feeling and researching their real origins and form. Finally, the means for achieving this poise must be patched into pre-existing culture as an artistic production tailored toward the public audience the artist has been simultaneously working their way back into being sociable member of. In other words, the artist heads into chaos and returns with a broadly-communicable means of coping with—or structuring—the otherwise traumatic encounter with the contemporary real. Undertaking this mission himself in the 1950s, McLuhan’s saw that humanity now existed in a post-historical all-at-onceness of changing and rebounding proportions and cycles of retrievals and obsolescences of old and new. His proffered rescue-craft to us—for use in our mechanized world undergoing electrification and simulation—was perception of the self as consciously aug-mented by its artificial extensions, externalizing a now-numbed function of the human body. The resemblance of this questing into chaos and return with invaluable artistic treasure to the “Hero’s Journey” of Joseph Campbell is no accident. Moreover, the deliberate difference between McLuhan’s secular artist explaining the material world and Campbell’s spiritual hero is key to appreciating McLuhan’s “New Science”. Secularizing the Spiritual Early on, McLuhan had securely ensconced himself within a longitudinally-vertiginous, ancient vein of Western and Catholic pedagogical tradition during the development of his 1944 doctoral thesis on Thomas Nashe and the Classical Trivium. He styled himself as a New Thomist, practicing a tradition reinvigorated by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson1. Owing this atypical line of personal development, McLuhan in the early 1950s stood firmly rooted in moral opposition to each-and-every approach to ritual initiation into higher-states of being, or adult maturity, on offer by the non-Catholic world. In this time he published numerous analysis of two traditions of European Manicheanism, which he variously categorized as pagan or gnostic. The substance of his analyses echoed those made by both Jacques Maritain and the artist Wyndham Lewis against 1 “Whereas St. Thomas was a great abstract synthesizer facing a unified psychological world, the modern Thomist has an abstract synthesis of human knowledge with which to face psychological chaos. Who then is the true Thomist? The man who contemplates an already achieved intellectual synthesis, or the man who, sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos? I say ‘sustained’, not guided by, that synthesis; because the Catholic Thomist does not know the answers to contemporary problems in social and political ethics. He knows only when a particular line of action is promising and analogically consistent, whether it will tend to support a valid solution, and whether it is in conformity with reason and being.” (McLuhan 1948) 106 The Artist's Emergent Journey the metaphysics of Henri Bergson, and also those by Eric Voegelin against gnosticism2. Their rough consensus was that worldviews outside the long Western philosophical tradition (going through the Medieval Catholic church) were, even at their best, infantile (Lewis, 1932), irrational (Lewis, 1927; Maritain, 1951), and exploitable by design (Lewis 1926). By the late 1950s McLuhan was becoming the media scholar who was to become well known for not making moral value-judgements. But the earlier McLuhan of the 40s and early 50s had no lack of indignation and scorn while describing the disservices in an ostensibly secular world mythologically-enchanted by demiurgic, sell-out artists. In ‘The Heart of Darkness’3, a review of a book on demonic subtext in the works of Herman Melville, he quotes a passage by Father Victor White, O.P. from Blackfriars (a Catholic magazine) regarding the supposed atheist nature of Leninist-Stalinist communism (which Voegelin consistently identified as gnostic): Marxism, in short, only denies God in the sense of setting on record that he is, in our society, in practice denied and ineffectual, and in the sense of echoing the Satanic assurance, ‘You shall be as God’. Its power against contemporary Christianity lies in the fact that it has stolen Christ’s thunder: the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, of the triumph of the Son of Man, the reign in some new dimension of reality of the despised and rejected. It has made its own the eschatological preaching of deliverance for the oppressed and damnation for the powerful and rich, wherewith Christianity itself first gained the masses of the Roman Empire. But just because it is the ape of God and his Christ, the Christian must see in Marxism a supreme embodiment of the spirit of Anti-christ; the corruption of the best which is worst of all. (White, 1952) As expressed in his well-known February, 1953 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan had recognized rather suddenly that advertisements and political propaganda were “The use of arts for sectarian warfare! ugh. The use of arts as a technique of salvation! as a channel of supernatural grace!” (McLuhan 1987, 235) His personal revulsion, however, was not toward the study and application of the means and methods of pagan initiatory rituals. The letter continues, “The validity of the rituals is entirely in the cognitive order. Art is imitation of the process of apprehension. clarification [sic] of [the process of apprehension.]” As he puts it in ‘Hearts of Darkness’: The arts from Homer to the present day indeed form an ideal order, as Mr. Eliot has said, because they have been representations of the spiritual quests of the pagan rebirth rituals. ‘Rebirth’ in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of descent of the soul in the hell of matter and chaos which is existence. As such, the pagan rituals are in reality representations of the process of abstraction, or 2 See Maritain’s first book, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism and Lewis’ Time and Western Man. Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics focuses entirely on his perception of contemporary secular ideology as identical with the gnostic tradition, especially in its revolutionary aspects (i.e. “immenantizing the eschaton”). 3 Digitized at http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com/2011/08/heart-of-darkness.html. 107 Clinton Ignatov the stages of human apprehension. From this point of view, may not the pagan rituals be valid as art and metaphysics in spite of their own assumptions, but impotent as religion? James Joyce seems to have been the first to grasp all of these relationships.