INTRODUCTION:
DAW recently communicated the following to members of the Wyndham Lewis Reading Group:
[[ “We have to consider whether Lewis’s works are now simply part of a modernist archive that failed to repair modernity’s depredations. Lewis’s readily deconstructable sense of ocularcentric critical detachment (‘The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest’) has come under philosophical fire from Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational neo-pragmatism (truth becomes circumjacent, contingent, relative), and the world as we now know it. Marshall McLuhan’s disquisitions on ‘media’ are themselves paradoxical as a description of phenomena that cannot be contained, let alone mastered. Are we, then, to understand Lewis’s objective critiques of reality to be a species of objectivism, governed by Art as a master trope that supposedly constrains its anathemas, even as it aestheticizes them as non-rational? How is Lewis’s work to be re-framed in this context? I mention McLuhan not simply because one of our Reading Group’s regular USA contributors insists on his importance for Lewis, but because we need to reconfigure detachment to cope with something more sinister (and potentially more liberating?) than the zeitgeist discussed in Time and Western Man. It is now forty years since Hal Foster curated Postmodern Culture, which includes Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. Baudrillard’s prescient concluding paragraph throws down the McLuhanesque gauntlet to modernism, and indeed to the survival of critique beyond Adorno’s negative dialectical view of the culture industry. It seems to me that we need to sift Lewis’s work for any help it can give us, when the very idea of progressive social change has become dirempted by the means rather than the message. Here, the ‘schizo’ postmodern subject becomes one of Lewis’s cyphers in The Crowd. This subject (properly now she/he/they) becomes prey to the overexposure and transparence of a world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.
Is this too bleak a view? To what extent can Lewis, Adorno and Baudrillard be compared in McLuhan’s version of reality? To what extent do we academics, who present ourselves as rational experts or critics, have to re-read Lewis’s idea of the vortex – that collector of phenomena to be re-shaped for a Vorticist sense of self – with our contemporaneity in mind? What does it mean to read Lewis contextually in our media saturated ‘moronic inferno’? What has changed in the history of hermeneutics? What kind of identity can the self hope for in these circumstances?
Or if all this is beside the point, what exactly is the point of reading Lewis’s works? More blogs please… ]] – https://wyndhamlewissociety.org/2025/01/23/the-re-vamped-lewis-website-inaugural-blog/
[[ A few observations:
1). Contrary to Bob’s assertion I wouldn’t describe myself as a card carrying ‘poststructuralist’. My monograph on Lewis was written out of developments in ‘theory’ which may now be old hat, but which I still find compelling. It seemed to me that Lewis actually belongs to a trend, with post/Enlightenment contexts, that came to be called ‘theory’ and which arrived to upset conventional academic norms. If we are now ‘post theory’ the basic question doesn’t change: what’s the best way of understanding Lewis’s texts? What hermeneutic assumptions does a ‘best way’ involve? What would constitute an authoritative way of reading said texts? (You certainly need interdisciplinary credentials to see L’s work as a whole). And further, is the ‘best way’ necessarily compatible with an interesting and innovative way of reading texts, bearing in mind existing and current scholarship? Is academic humanities writing a form of art in itself, rather than some sort of scientific critical activity (remember scientific Marxism? – e.g. Althusser).
2). It’s a daily occurrence for me to read parts of texts multiple times to try and get a sense of what’s going on. So if Jo only took three attempts to figure out my monograph I take it as a compliment, and indeed a complement, given the way that reading works.
3). It’s certainly true that a) writing about difficult ideas is bound to reflect that difficulty unless it’s being watered down; this claim obviously asks questions about what a reading of a text should, or even can, accomplish, and b) some theory texts might be regarded as badly written anyway. How a) relates to b) strikes me as often problematic, especially where translations are involved.
4). Everyone is using some kind of theory to interpret the world – perhaps the most articulate theory makes this explicit (hence the call in Jameson’s 1971 essay ‘Metacommentary’). Ergo, the most applicable term for ‘post theory’ is ‘post/theory’, in the same way that ‘post/modernism’ forges a connection rather than an epistemological break. This assumes there was a moment for ‘theory’ and that it has somehow been superseded or accommodated into some other form of reading. But there’s no excuse for rejecting theory without reading it. The fact that a person doesn’t understand a theory text may well be because they are not party to its discursive frames and contexts. This is not an error, simply a lack.
5). I think McLuhan is important, and in many ways descriptive of the ELECTRONIC media we now inhabit. But reading this back into Lewis’s works is not straightforward, and one must always be wary of teleology. That said, if we take the McLuhan connection seriously it deserves more detailed work. I remain unclear about how post/structuralism, or any theory, has been superseded/remaindered/absorbed by the apparently engulfing effects of electronic media. ]] – DAW, in a private note to members of the Wyndham Lewis Society
[[
- What kind of ‘theory’ do we need to untangle his texts?
- Where is Lewis to be situated in the gardens of the West, especially if he thought they had already closed?
- How are we to assess Lewis’s various political statements in these contexts? ]] – https://wyndhamlewissociety.org/2025/02/12/blog-2/
First off, here’s my essay (2002) demonstrating how Marshall McLuhan anticipated most of the constitutive insights of the Era of Theory:
I appreciate DAW including Marshall McLuhan’s work in his meditations on the significance of Lewis’s cultural efforts.
McLuhan’s late promotion of Wyndham Lewis in 1969 and early 70s featured a new appreciation of Lewis’s “tactile eye”.
I have not encountered enough Lewis scholars who are familiar competently with McLuhan’s thought for me to clam up on my 30-year hand-waving about McLuhan’s incredible completion of Lewis’s thought and project.
I have been asked by our Wyndham Lewis Society Reading Group to take a moment and lead a discussion of McLuhan’s own thought and projection.
But this new “Lewis blog” is more suitable for what I think is required for the task.
So I would like to provide a “manual” to assist future discoverers of our Lewis blog in recognizing the main “theme” of Lewis’s output that has not received a satisfactory amount of published emphasis in Lewis Studies.
Lewis’s controversial value as a stylist, and his so-called anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, and elitist postures have received adequate discussion, argument, and disagreement to blind today’s and future generations to what, in the long run, is the genuine value of Lewis’s contribution to human artistic probing.
The first academic creation in the university world for the twenty-first century was an academic institution called the MEDIA ECOLOGY ASSOCIATION (MEA). It was inspired by McLuhan and Neil Postman’s phrase, “media ecology”, first uttered privately among McLuhan’s associates at Fordham University in 1968, although first explained publicly in Manhattan, without the phrase, by Ralph Baldwin in June, 1966.
Two important “influencers” in this new field were Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan – both acknowledged by the MEA among a dozen other twentieth-century thinkers.
However, what is not noticed by the MEA is the fact that Wyndham Lewis was a considerable influence and guide for both Innis and McLuhan’s published studies.
I would go so far and say that Lewis is the rightful “father of media ecology”.
Some Lewis scholars might argue that “media” is not a large enough theme in Lewis’s oeuvre to warrant saying it is his major accomplishment.
I disagree.
By laying out a template (which I can add to for the next long while on a stable site) of quotations from Lewis’s writings, I hope to nudge those interested into reassessing what was behind Lewis’s intuition that he was seeing something in the major public events of his lifetime that he felt hardly any other humans were perceiving and groping to articulate.
Now I present my response to DAW in FIVE PARTS:
PART ONE
“It is quite literally true that since printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie, radio and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development.” – H. Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media, Part VII (Exhibits), 1960, p.i
A.
“The sudden revival of interest in the iconic art of Wyndham Lewis has been brought about mainly through the influence of television. Like those of Seurat and Paul Klee and others, Lewis’ art and writing anticipated the rear-projection and the strong bounding lines of the iconoscope form of the TV image.
B.
“According to Lewis, ‘The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.’ And in his own writing Lewis foresaw many of the problems of today. Thus in his last work, THE HUMAN AGE, he portrayed the dehumanizing forces of what he called ‘the Magnetic City’. He started with the telegraph press and its power to generate cosmic political disturbances as a means of selling advertising copy, and he concluded with TV and its power to alter the images of self-identity on a worldwide scale. Lewis was truly a giant in Lilliput. (p.93)…
C.
“… Lewis was certainly nobody to put up with bureaucrats in any sphere of life. His writings sift them thoroughly. He saw the journalists and literati of London and Bloomsbury as a vast literary bureaucracy. These ‘apes’, as he called them, were people who were really mocking the true and literary function of inventing new kinds of perception. His APES OF GOD is a Rabelaisian satire of their goings-on. One has only to dip into sections like ‘Lord Osmond’s Lenten Party’ or to visit the arboretum of the higher Lesbian Apes to get an immediate sense of his gigantic masquerade. (p.97)…
1.
BLAST #1, 1914
“Messages from one to another, dropped down anywhere when nobody is looking, reaching brain by telegraph: most desolating and alarming messages possible.”, p.75
“THE NEW EGOS.”
“But the modern town-dweller of our civilization sees everywhere fraternal moulds for his spirit, and interstices of a human world….
“… but the frontier’s interpenetrate, individual demarcations are confused and interests dispersed….
“… We all to-day (possibly with a coldness reminiscent of the insect-world) are in each other’s vitals – overlap, intersect, and are Siamese to any extent….
“… THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY.
“It now, literally, EXISTS much less.”, p.141
”Orchestra of Media.”, p.142
“6. Cannot Marinetti, sensible and energetic man that he is, be induced to throw over this sentimental rubbish about Automobiles and Aeroplanes, and follow his friend Balla into a purer region of art?”, p.144
“Our Vortex.
“… Life is the Past and the Future.
“The Present is Art.”, p.147
“IF YOU DESTROY A GREAT WORK OF ART you are destroying a greater soul than if you annihilated a whole district of London.
“LEAVE ART ALONE, BRAVE COMRADES!”, p.152
2.
BLAST #2, 1915
“THE CROWD MASTER
“1914.
“London, July.”
“The Crowd.
“Men drift in thrilling masses past the Admiraltry, cold night tide….”
“The Crowd.
“The Crowd is the first mobilisation of a country.
“The Crowd now is formed in London. It is established with all its vague profound organs au grand complet.
“It serpentines every night, in thick well-nourished coils, all over the town, in tropic degustation of news and ‘stimung’.
“The Individual and The Crowd: Peace and War.”, p.94
3.
THE CODE of a HERDSMAN, 1917
“(7) Cherish and develop, side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: the next march down the street as E. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatisation of yourself. NEVER fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self – that you manage to be at any given time – must have five at least indifferent to it. You must have a power of indifference of FIVE to ONE. All the greatest actions in the world have been five parts out of six impersonal in the impulse of their origin. To follow this principle you need only cultivate your memory. You will avoid being the blind man of ANY moment. B will see what is hidden to D. = (Who were Turgenev’s ’Six Unknown’? Himself.”, p.4
4.
THE CALIPH’S DESIGN: Architects! Where is your Vortex?, 1919
“French Realism means, if it has a meaning, what these best Frenchmen had: they were almost realler than anything in the modern world. They have made France the true leader-country. But it is not what people generally mean, in this land or elsewhere, when they talk about the ‘realism of the French’. Reality is what you want, and not ‘realism’. And to find that, you must watch for some happy blending of the vitality of ‘Romance’, the coldness of ’science’, and the moderation and cohesion of a ‘classical’ mind.”, p.87
“But THE CALIPH’S DESIGN vividly and permanently encapsulates a moment when it seemed that that world might become real, when it was possible to believe that the artist had the power not only to invent ‘a mode that will answer to the mass sensibility of our time with one voice’, but that even the ‘ugliness… commonness and squalor’ of London could, with will and imagination, be transformed into what Lewis later called ‘a white and shining city, a preposterous Bagdad.”, p.160
5.
THE ART of BEING RULED, 1926
“That so much restlessness and dissatisfaction can be a matter of congratulation, as we began by saying, does not seem at first so obvious. The average man feels that he was not designed, as far as he can understand the purposes of his ’noble machine’, to live in the midst of a fever of innovation.”, p.23
“Short of abandoning the dogma that he is the ‘roof and crown of things’, he must have lapses in which such misgivings see the light.
“These misgivings are without foundation. Without this TECHNICAL dissolvent that has come to the assistance of philosophy and religion, men would have ceased to criticize life, perhaps, and a sad stagnation would have been the result. To be able at last to have a technique that enables men to regard life itself as something IMPERFECT, like a machine to be superseded, should far outweigh any temporary inconveniences, or even murderous absent-mindedness, of science
“Science, in making us regard our life as a machine, has also forced us to be dissatisfied at its sloth, untidiness, and lack of definition, and given us in our capacity of mechanics or scientists, the itch to improve it.”, pp.23-4
“In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of ‘freedom’, like a bastard brother of reform. With its WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS doctrine it enervates the populations. It is now, when crushed with debt and threatened with every form of danger, without and within, that the western countries are led in the great cities into a paroxysm of display and luxury. And the papers that call them to it with their massed advertisements admonish them on another page, which is quite safe, because they know it will be unheeded.”
“All education begins with reading and writing: and it is principally by means of reading that the ‘education’ gradually comes. At a certain age the work is done, not where the jesuit fixed it, for character only, but somewhere in the first years of adult life. It is rarely afterwards that the hard-working clerk, engineer, doctor, or mechanic has leisure or opportunity to supplement this basis of teaching. But even if he has, he seldom has the energy, on his own account, to modify what has been imposed on him. The contemporary European or American is a part of a broadcasting set, a necessary part of its machinery. Or he is gradually made into a newspaper-reader, it could be said, rather than a citizen.”, p.105
“In a very small percentage of cases better brains and good social opportunities enable a person to extricate himself from this ideologic machine. Like a mammal growing wings, he exists thenceforth in another and freer element. But this free region is not conterminous with the arts and sciences; and free spirits do not, as is popularly supposed, inhabit the bodies of men of science or artists. For art and science are the very material out of which the law is made. They are the suggestion; out of them are cut the beliefs by which men are governed. And the teacher is usually as much a dupe as the learner.”
“So what we call conventionally the CAPITALIST STATE is as truly an EDUCATIONALIST STATE.”, p.106
“The most fundamental of all questions for us, namely, War and Peace, is dependent on these questions of class and race. If there were not today communities with an exclusive race-consciousness (with or without sacred books, and the theologic paraphernalia of race), the future of CLASS, too, would be much more precarious than it in fact is. The people of the United States are or have been the nearest to an egalitarian ideal because they are the most racially mixed: this in spite of all the simple jokes to the contrary.
“But even if race were abolished by intermixture, it would still be possible, of course, to get your class-factor, and with it your organized war, by way of sex, age, occupational and other categories. ’The intensity of organization is increased’, as Mr. Russell points out, ‘when a man belongs to more organizations’. The more classes (of which, in their various functions, he is representative) that you can make him become regularly conscious of, the more you can control him, the more of an automaton he becomes. Thus, if a man can be made to feel himself acutely (A) an American; (B) a young American; (C) a middle-west young American; (D) a ‘radical and enlightened’ middle-west young American; (E) a ‘college-educated’, etc., etc.; (F) a ‘college-educated’ dentist who is an etc., etc.; (G) a ‘college-educated’ dentist of such-and-such a school of dentistry, etc., etc. — the more inflexible each of these links is, the more powerful, naturally, is the chain. Or he can be locked into any of these compartments as though by magic by any one understanding the wires, in the way the jesuit studied those things.
“To return to the question of the race origin of caste-feeling,…”, pp.109-10
“This is the distinction that we have constantly to make in dealing with western society today. We are in a mixed society, destined eventually to separate itself out. Of this mixture many corruptions and mongrel forms spring up. Almost every variety of mixture is to be found.”, p.134
“Marx deprecated all VALUATION of the great mass of new things dumped upon the world every day, ‘until the revolution’. Till that happened it did not matter very much how things stood, so long as the radical change was effected. To that we adhere: what values are popularly attached to things is of the slenderest importance, no doubt, in such a time.”, p.138
“Meantime press suggestion hammers at this discomforted little man.”, p.143
“The old ‘man’s world’ of the abstract (non-personal, non-feminine) life of the earlier European is, then, today, rapidly becoming extinct. The power of money and the vast interlocked organization of ‘big business’ has gradually withdrawn all initiative from individual males. BOURGEOIS or parliamentary politics is today such a thin camouflage – so harassed, pointless, and discredited – the puppets have so little executive power (Lord Curzon is reported to have said shortly before he died, for example, that he had not enough ‘power’ to send a messenger across Whitehall), that politics no longer afford an outlet for energy comparable for a moment with the opportunities of a game of tennis or a flirtation. Hence every one, ambitious in other ways or not, is sent indiscriminately to the SALON or the playing-field or dance-hall, and that is the only real battlefield left for masculine or feminine ambition. ‘Private’ life, in short, has taken the place of ‘public’ life.”, p.145
“But, drawn into one orbit or another, he must in the contemporary world submit himself to one of several mechanical socially organized rhythms…. And not ‘freedom’, or the eccentric play of the ‘personality’, but submission to a group-rhythm, is what men desire.”, p.149
“So THERE IS NO LONGER ANY FAMILY, in one sense: there is now only a collection of children, differing in age but in nothing else. The last vestige of the PATRIA POTESTAS has been extirpated. (The PATRIA POTESTAS is now that great organizing power that is the new, pervasive, all-powerful principle of our blind and complex life.)
“But in another sense, the FAMILY is more obsessing with us than ever. For the reliefs to the domestic atmosphere that formerly existed are no longer so satisfactory or so numerous from the point of view of the average man. Still, this ‘average man’ will soon disappear; and children get on better with each other than women do, for instance, between themselves. There is not the same need for a complementary and contrasting nature.”, p.167
“We live beset with civil wars, in the envenomed and bitterly organized world. Almost any generalization must range against you the legions of this or that zealous social host, daily subjected to press discipline, breathing defiance, whether really affected by your statement or not.”, p.185
“It is science that will lay by the heels the last descendants of the ‘colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer’ of the early world, as well as the ANIMALLY-WORKING pre-industrial man, substituting the machine, of far greater power than any animal or ’titan’, controlled by some creature, ectogenetically produced, with a small beardless shaven head, very fussy about specks of dust and dirt, very partial to ‘cosmic’ studies, bitterly resenting anything indecorous, with most of the beliefs and innocence of the nursery, a highly organized, shrewd, androgynous Peter Pan. That is the logical forecast from the tendency of the moment.”, p.188
“So there is a conflict between our interests (which are associational) and our pleasures, with the risks they entail, which are many of them individual and anarchic. That is why we all have such a very marked tendency to be socialists in theory and anarchists in practice, as far as ever our associates will let us – the difficulty, of course, of this excellent plan being that our associates are busy doing the same thing.”, p.309
“If today you must be a socialist of some sort, what order of socialist are you going to be? For, evidently, you will say, ‘socialist’ means very different and indeed opposite things. I have already said that in the abstract I believe the sovietic system to be the best. It has spectacularly broken with all the past of Europe: it looks to the East, which is spiritually so much greater and intellectually so much finer than Europe, for inspiration. It springs ostensibly from a desire to alleviate the lot of the poor and outcast, and not merely to set up a cast-iron, militarist-looking state. And yet for anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted today some modified form of fascism would probably be best. The United States is, of course, in a unique position: and for the moment it is the only country in the world of which you can say it would not benefit by a revolution. And eventually, with its great potentialities, it may be able to evolve some novel form of government of its own.
“The only socialism that differs very much in principle from FASCISMO is reformist socialism, or the early nineteenth-century utopias, or, to a somewhat less extent, Proudhon. All marxian doctrine, all ETATISME or collectivism, conforms very nearly in practice to the fascist ideal. FASCISMO is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to the tail, or, if you like, the head, of marxism: that is, of course, fascism as interpreted by its founder, Mussolini. And that is the sort of socialism that this essay would indicate as the most suitable for anglo-saxon countries or colonies, with as much of sovietic proletarian sentiment as could be got into it without impairing its discipline, and as little coercion as is compatible with good sense. In short, to get some sort of peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised.”, pp.320-21
“We have also to some extent reached a point at which we can see all the possibilities of human life, so far as it is to be physically constant and intellectually constant. That should enable us to interrupt the old RITOURNELLE described by Proudhon, to overcome the charm of the circle. If only we arrive at describing the fashionable circle quickly enough, we should virtually possess all its successive phases simultaneously. That point we have almost if not quite reached. Out of the integral impression we should construct our new political equilibrium.”, p.325
“That is why, far from molesting or subjecting to damaging criticism (of a vulgarizing description) the processes of STULTIFICATION which are occurring, everything should be done (publicly, and at large, of course) to hasten it. So it can be truly said with fullest good sense that whenever you see a particularly foolish play, read an especially idiotic article, full of that strident humbug to which we are so accustomed, you should rejoice. Mental food changes people in the same way as what they eat and the climate of their habitat. Those who like or can stomach what they are given in Western democracies today will change and separate themselves naturally from those who reject or vomit at that fare. A natural separation will then occur, and everybody will get what he wants. ’Nature’s ethereal, human angel, Man,’ will become segmented, and the divorce will be to the good of both these sections which are being forced apart.”, p.364
“But is not Christ’s too exceptional a phantasy for the average of human desires? The more discriminating arrangements of the hindu heaven – or system of heavens – respond probably more accurately to the reality of human wishes.”, p.372
