Clinton Ignatov on McLuhan’s Gnosticism

BOB DOBBS COMMENTARY on the TWO VIDEOS:

Next time, say that McLuhan got his PhD in 1943, not 1942.

Also, declare that T.S. Eliot published THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK in 1915 or 1917, not 1912. He apparently first wrote it in 1910.

And next time, point out how McLuhan studied the Occult as a “medium”, on its own terms, not with value judgments.

McLuhan says “the validity of the rituals is entirely in the cognitive order. Art is imitation of the process of apprehension, clarification of the process of apprehension.” (LETTERS, p.235)

Today, in a time of endless hyper-bickering over cultural values and biases, McLuhan’s detached-and-involved approach is compulsory if one wants to be of any appropriate assistance.

Don’t fall into the Mark Stahlman trap (only the latest replay of the original anti-McLuhan noise) of stating that McLuhan was “at war” with the Gnostics.

McLuhan told me personally that one has to explore, engage, and put on the services of the Occult to get one’s bearings in the Art world (McLuhan meaning by “Art”, the content of the Global Membrane).

Now on to Part Two to hear what you offer.

Part 2 is a little better but you are still putting it in the context of a Gutenbergian mind-body split.

AND you are describing H. Marshall McLuhan in the 40s, not “Marshall” McLuhan.

Maybe you will get to that in Part 3.

Meanwhile, here’s the clue for the post-Catholic McLuhan of the 40s and early 50s:

“Now disregarding if you can whatever your political views may be (and mine are partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist with a healthy passion for order)… ” – Wyndham Lewis, THE ENEMY, Vol.3, p.70, 1929

Instead of the political categories used by Lewis to demonstrate his latent “quadrophrenia”, substitute “the Men of 1914″ – cultural archetypes – for Lewis’ mosaic:

Joyce – PhD in the early 40s

Eliot – book with Kenner in the mid 40s

Pound – Washington, D.C., visit and letter exchange/dialogue in the late 40s and early 50s

Lewis – under cover of McLuhan’s respectable Innis “enthusiasm” (Innis was greatly influenced by Lewis) in the mid 50s after SELF-CONDEMNED (novel by Lewis in 1954 wherein McLuhan is a character)

“Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media EN BLOC as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)… Lewis now refers to the Magnetic City as ‘Third City’ and makes it explicit that this particular level of the Dantesque comedy is the BBC’s Third Program:… The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It’s this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell. The Devil, Pullman sees as:
‘He was now arranging for the contamination of the angel nature – for the destruction of something which had endured since the beginning of time. He was going to mix it up with the pettiness and corruption of mankind. He had built for it, in Angeltown, a sort of comic Hollywood. Now he was forcing upon it woman – with all her sexishness, her nursery-mind, her vulgarity.’” (this quotation is from p.168 of the Jupiter Books edition of MALIGN FIESTA, 1966 [originally published in 1955]) – Marshall McLuhan, “Third Program in the Human Age”, VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL EXPLORATIONS, Something Else Press, 1967, originally published in EXPLORATIONS #8 (McLuhan’s magazine, 1957), pp.16-18

Underneath this academic quadrophrenia, McLuhan was breaking into a completely original drama of cognition and language.

He realized the “macroscopic gesticulation” (the Global Village, but especially the later Global Theater and Global Membrane) surrounding him was acting-out/miming the quadrophrenia of discarnate people, solarly.

Humans weren’t in the communication complex anymore (see Kroker’s “surplus flesh”).

So McLuhan left behind the “Men of 1914” with his summary essays on each one of them in the early 50s (presented in THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE, 1969) and began witnessing the beginning of the AI matrix/Android Meme (precedes the Tech Body).

See his correspondence with his mother in LETTERS, p.217:

“THE MECHANICAL BRIDE (1951) is really a new form of science fiction, with ads and comics cast as characters,… a new kind of novel.”

Or note how he says, in a video (produced by the ABC network) of McLuhan before a large audience in Australia in 1977, that in FINNEGANS WAKE, “the media are the characters.”

All McLuhan’s cultural/media productions from that point on (1954) were not “made” by McLuhan.

They were being created by “the media” around and inside him.

For example, THE GUTENBERG GALAXY and UNDERSTANDING MEDIA is an epyllion (usually 2 books – see first 10 lines on p.165 in FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, 1971) displaying the “book’s” response to the AI matrix.

McLuhan was becoming the greatest tactile “actor” of his day, bypassing the acts of the cultural products by the Men of 1914.

AND he was intuiting the coming of the Tech Body in the 21st Century.

iON says McLuhan was the closest of his generation in anticipating the Tech Body.

This is why McLuhan still “speaks” to the post-Boomer generations more than anybody else from the 60s.

The Millennials and younger “feel” McLuhan is addressing their personal, obsolete quadrophrenic, multi-body dilemmas (see Kroker’s BODY DRIFT, 2012).

And since I have bypassed McLuhan as the edgiest actor of OUR time, no wonder the coming Aliens (footage of their antics are being and have been registered by smart phones all over the planet every day and night for the past couple of years during Lockdown BobRule) want to meet with me.

They’re no fools.

Well, that’s enough “mansplaining” for now.

I look forward to hearing how close you get to what actually happened to/with “Marshall” McLuhan in your Part Three.