\n
Adam Lauder and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers<\/p>\n
McLuhan and the Arts after the Speculative Turn<\/strong><\/p>\n McLuhan and the arts is a well-trodden theme yet surprisingly still fertile ground for original scholarship and research-creation. Milestones include excavations by Richard Cavell and Elena Lamberti of the aesthetic sources of McLuhan\u2019s media analyses in the literature and visual arts of his time as well as his influence on a range of contemporary artistic projects, from happenings to installation art. Janine Marchessault and Donald Theall have also presented compelling portraits of the media thinker as himself an artist or \u201cpoet-artist manqu\u00e9\u201d (Theall, The Medium <\/em>6).[1]<\/a> More recently, case studies of specific artists and movements inspired by McLuhan\u2014notably Kenneth R. Allan\u2019s exploration of McLuhan\u2019s notion of the \u201ccounterenvironment\u201d as a mode of immanent critique practiced by conceptualists ranging from Dan Graham to the Vancouver-based N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.\u2014have lent additional definition and texture to existing accounts of the longue dur\u00e9e <\/em>of McLuhan\u2019s influential percepts. Yet no authoritative survey of McLuhan\u2019s global impact on contemporary art has emerged to-date. This special issue of Imaginations <\/em>does not, and for reasons of space alone cannot, fill this gap. Nonetheless, the articles and artists\u2019 responses gathered here, both collectively and individually, constitute a significant advance in our still evolving conception of McLuhan as a thinker and practitioner of aesthetics.<\/p>\n A notable acceleration in the uptake of McLuhan\u2019s thought in recent years points to something of a mutation in the trajectory of recovery, restoration, and revision initiated by the publication of his Letters <\/em>in 1987. It has become commonplace to attribute McLuhan\u2019s post-contemporary revival to the forces of retrospection and reassessment focused by centennial celebrations of his birth in 2011. Yet there is more than chronology driving this renaissance.<\/p>\n Richard Cavell has recently drawn parallels between McLuhan\u2019s thought and contemporary affect theory and new materialisms. It is also not coincidental that McLuhan\u2019s thought experiments have been the object of renewed attention amidst the intellectual sea-change spelled by the speculative turn. While it would be dubious and unfruitful to retrospectively claim McLuhan as a new realist avant la lettre<\/em>, compelling resonances between his transgression of disciplinary boundaries and present-day intellectual currents illuminate some of the leading concerns propelling the present special issue of Imaginations<\/em>. If the 1990s gave us a \u201cvirtual\u201d McLuhan who was simultaneously a philosopher of difference and a forerunner of the spatial turn, today the media analyst is ripe for reevaluation as the generatively unclassifiable thinker that he is.<\/p>\n In common with the proponents of various Speculative Realisms, McLuhan\u2019s writings are characterized by a profound wariness of the \u201cSubject\u201d produced by Enlightenment epistemologies and conserved, if profoundly reconfigured, by the linguistic turn which coincided with the waning of his own reputation after 1968.[2]<\/a> \u201cMan\u201d may be the unapologetic subject of McLuhan\u2019s media explorations, yet it is no liberal-humanist individual\u2014no Vitruvian Man\u2014that emerges from his collagiste<\/em> prose. Rather, McLuhan presents us with an oddly prosthetic and generic humanity that anticipates the contemporary French thinker Fran\u00e7ois Laruelle\u2019s provocative contention that \u201cthere are no longer subjects\u201d (\u201cIs Thinking Democratic?\u201d 233). Likewise anticipatory of Speculative Realism, McLuhan drew upon a range of scientific discourses to expand the scope of humanistic study beyond the confines of Greek metaphysics and Judeo-Christian theology. In particular, McLuhan emerges as a prescient critic of linguistics as the master signifier of the human. For the Toronto School thinker, as for contemporary realists, \u201contology is politics\u201d (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 16)\u2014an orientation made plain by his prefatory profession of faith in \u201cthe ultimate harmony of all being\u201d in Understanding Media <\/em>(5).<\/p>\n Yet McLuhan\u2019s non\u00ad\u00ad-Kantianism\u2014derived from Henri Bergson, as traced by Stephen Crocker\u2014thwarts any meaningful alignment with contemporary neo-Kantians such as Graham Harman or his noumenal world of \u201cobjects.\u201d It is, rather, the eccentric project of \u201cnon-philosophy\u201d elaborated by Laruelle that comes closest to McLuhan\u2019s non-standard humanism and best illuminates the experimental currents propelling this special issue.<\/p>\n Laruelle (b. 1937) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris X (Nanterre). Of his more than 20 monographs, some dating back to the 1970s, English translations have only begun to appear since 2010, although they are now being published at a rapid rate by the most distinguished academic presses. Laruelle began his career by extending but also hybridizing the seemingly incompatible post-structuralist theories of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. By the early 1980s, however, he was beginning to push against these \u201cPhilosophies of Difference\u201d to formulate his own non-philosophical alternative (discussed in detail below): a rethinking of the central assumptions of continental philosophy that nonetheless makes new, if sometimes unrecognizable and perverse, uses of its now-familiar concepts and vocabulary. Some commentators group Laruelle with Anglo-American thinkers associated with Speculative Realism\u2014an affiliation that the non-philosopher would likely reject. Nonetheless, Laruelle\u2019s project shares with SR an ambition to think beyond such hallmarks of French Theory as the linguistic metaphor and the centrality of the Subject utilizing techniques and terminology derived from science.<\/p>\n Like Laruelle, McLuhan is a gnomic thinker who defies standard disciplinary taxonomies and norms. Indeed, McLuhan\u2019s currently accepted designation as a media theorist or media philosopher is questionable, not only on the basis of his own oft-noted resistance to systemization; the Toronto School thinker preferred, like Laruelle, an aesthetic and experimental methodology substituting non-rational \u201cpercepts\u201d for the concepts of conventional epistemology. Even the default subsumption of McLuhan\u2019s protean speculations under the rubric of media studies is debatable, if only given his noted lack of training in communications and resolutely literary methodology. Like Laruelle, McLuhan\u2019s project is more accurately characterized as an irreverent bricolage of seemingly irreconcilable methodologies that effects a mutation of the central forms <\/em>of classical Western epistemology and its contemporary offspring.<\/p>\n The formal orientation of McLuhan\u2019s analyses was long dismissed as a methodological shortcoming, a holdover from the na\u00efve formalism practiced by an earlier generation of humanists. Jessica Pressman has persuasively argued for a recovery of McLuhan\u2019s approach as an innovative modality of New Critical techniques of close reading. In light of Laruelle\u2019s trenchant critique of the enduring form <\/em>of Western philosophy, however\u2014what he describes as its circular, \u201cdecisional\u201d structure (the constantly rearticulated yet functionally invariant dyads of Subject\/object, Idea\/representation, One\/multiple, Being\/beings, etc.)\u2014McLuhan\u2019s formal methodology emerges with renewed relevance as a perspicacious excavation of the a prioris<\/em> of Western epistemology and aesthetics. Indeed, there is a strikingly proto-Laruellian orientation to McLuhan\u2019s recognition of the dyadic figure\/ground dynamics of typography as an artefact of Western rationalism<\/em> and its binary apparatus of subjectivization. Anticipating the quantum chaos, or ch\u00f4ra<\/em>, that Laruelle opposes to the empirico-transcendental doublets of philosophy, McLuhan, himself partially influenced by developments in quantum mechanics,[3]<\/a> hypothesized a non-perspectival \u201cacoustic space\u201d in contradistinction to the dualistic positions structurally inscribed in print culture and perspectival optics alike (Counterblast <\/em>n.p.). Paralleling the originary \u201cblackness\u201d that Laruelle attributes to the Real (thereby rejecting standard metaphysical metaphors of illumination and enlightenment), McLuhan described this acoustic space as \u201cthe dark of the mind\u201d (Counterblast).<\/em>[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Moreover, McLuhan\u2019s acoustic space as well as the \u201cmosaic\u201d form that he developed to communicate its heteronomous essence (Gutenberg Galaxy <\/em>265) can both be likened to Laruelle\u2019s insistence upon the foreclosure of the Real to epistemological capture: a \u201cOne\u201d that unilaterally equalizes all attempts at its representation as necessarily incomplete. Laruelle\u2019s universe establishes an irreversible vector from <\/em>the Real-One to <\/em>its representations, thereby standing on their head the pretentions of philosophers to transform the Real. McLuhan\u2019s mediatic Real is likewise misconstrued as relational. After all, the medium <\/em>is the message<\/em>: the terms of this most celebrated yet persistently obscure of McLuhan\u2019s axioms being as irreversible as the variables in Laruelle\u2019s non-philosophical matrix. The medium is a vector that only travels in one direction. In other words, content, always inadequate as a description of the medium and secondary to its effects in McLuhan\u2019s writings, can be likened to Laruelle\u2019s view of philosophy\u2019s doomed attempts at capturing the Real.<\/p>\n The conflicting percepts superposed by McLuhan\u2019s textual mosaic issue unilaterally from a non-totalizable mediatic Real. His analyses thereby unfold \u201calongside\u201d the blackness of acoustic space in a manner consonant with Laruelle\u2019s non-philosophical project (Intellectuals and Power <\/em>32). The medium is the message <\/em>can also be understood as articulating a form of radical immanence; that is, the message does not transcend the medium, but is immanent to its form. This immanental orientation corroborates Donald Theall\u2019s likening of McLuhan\u2019s thought to that of Deleuze, whose 1968 text The Logic of Sense<\/em> influentially proposed a neo-Stoic reading of the \u201cblank word,\u201d which (like McLuhan\u2019s medium) \u201csays its own sense\u201d (79).[5]<\/a> McLuhan\u2019s maxim equally resounds in Laruelle\u2019s radical deconstruction of Deleuze\u2019s philosophy of immanence; the former proposing, in the words of John \u00d3 Maoilearca, a thought capable of \u201cdoing what we say we do<\/em>\u201d (45, original emphasis). What more concise description of McLuhan\u2019s medium than that it, too, says <\/em>what it does<\/em>?<\/p>\n McLuhan elaborated his prescient critique of the dyadic technics<\/em> of Western thought in a performative style that Richard Cavell has productively likened to performance art.[6]<\/a> Similarly, Laruelle has stated that, \u201cwhat interests me is philosophy as the material for an art\u201d (Mackay and Laruelle 29): an aesthetic project that he characteristically qualifies as non-standard aesthetics. The mosaic of quotations assembled by The Gutenberg Galaxy <\/em>\u201cclones\u201d\u2014as Laruelle would say\u2014its philosophical and aesthetic reference material through a scriptural reduplication that deliberately contravenes the hermeneutic norms of philosophical commentary and interpretation. McLuhan thereby reduces his chosen objects of study (Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais, Peter Ramus, The Tragedy of King Lear<\/em>, etc.) to so many \u201csimple materials\u201d (Laruelle Principles of Non-Philosophy <\/em>9) or, what he would term with Wilfred Watson, \u201cclich\u00e9s,\u201d stripped of their pretentions to transcendent Truth. This citational procedure\u2014which sets the stage for Laruelle\u2019s practice of radical paraphrase\u2014powerfully foregrounds the materiality of print as an instrument of rational thought while simultaneously exposing and sterilizing the dyadic representational machinery of Platonic epistemologies more generally.<\/p>\n The mannerist theatre staged by McLuhan\u2019s \u201cnon-book\u201d collaborations with designers Quentin Fiore and Harley Parker (Michaels, \u201cForeword\u201d 8) abounds in quotations and images gleaned from a beguiling gamut of pop-cultural and \u201cserious\u201d sources (not to mention their incessant paraphrase of McLuhan\u2019s own earlier, single-authored texts). Precedent for such assemblage is found in the ventriloquism of mass-media formats (comic-strip, editorial, newspaper) and the high-Modernist prosody performed by The Mechanical Bride<\/em>, the media analyst\u2019s first monograph. Yet McLuhan\u2019s d\u00e9tournement<\/em> of readymade materials can be traced further back to the anti-Bergsonian (yet, paradoxically, enduringly Bergsonian) rhetoric of Wyndham Lewis: the Canadian-born multimedia Modernist whose impact on McLuhan has been analyzed in depth by Lamberti and is the subject of the recent anthology Counterblasting Canada<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lewis\u2014whom McLuhan first read during his doctoral studies at Cambridge in the mid-1930s, and subsequently befriended during World War II while lecturing at St. Louis University and Assumption College (today\u2019s University of Windsor)\u2014was a prominent critic of the non-logical metaphysics of Bergson. Yet, as SueEllen Campbell and others have demonstrated, Lewis\u2019s anti-Bergsonian polemic remained perplexingly Bergsonian in its mere upending of the driving dualisms of Bergsonian metaphysics: \u201cmatter and memory, perception and recollection, objective and subjective\u201d (Deleuze, Bergsonism <\/em>53). However, where Campbell and other commentators on Lewis\u2019s fraught relationship to Bergsonian modernisms have tended to view the British artist-author\u2019s enduring if covert Bergsonism as an unwitting inconsistency, it is equally legitimate to recognize in Lewis\u2019s \u201cperverse\u201d (Edwards, \u201cWyndham Lewis\u2019s Vorticism\u201d 39) Bergsonism a deliberate logic of paraconsistency. A similarly heretical reuse of Bergsonian dualisms in tandem with borrowings from contemporary scientific discourse was made earlier by Marcel Duchamp (see Henderson; Luisetti and Sharp; \u00d3 Maoilearca), whose para-painterly masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even <\/em>(1915-1923) also informed McLuhan\u2019s Mechanical Bride <\/em>(see Cavell, Remediating McLuhan <\/em>50). Much as Duchamp seized upon the denigrated mechanical and rationalist pole of Bergson\u2019s dualist apparatus to enact an unauthorized, and pointedly anti-vital, reuse of the French vitalist thinker\u2019s conceptual apparatus, Lewis, too, can be understood as appropriating Bergson\u2019s popular writings as \u201ca whatever material\u201d for unsanctioned remediation (\u00d3 Maoilearca 164). Clearing a path for the non-philosophical \u201cclones\u201d of Laruelle as well as the clich\u00e9s of McLuhan and Watson, Lewis\u2019s heteroglossia of Bergsonian formulas belongs to a Bergsonian tradition and yet remains defiantly non<\/em>-Bergsonian in its divestiture\u2014and, indeed, overt satire\u2014of the transformational potential of philosophical concepts. In McLuhan\u2019s reworking of Lewisian strategies of pastiche, paraconsistency emerges as a primary characteristic of what he alternately termed \u201cpost-lineal\u201d or \u201cpost-alphabetic\u201d culture: neologisms that are strikingly consistent with the non-Euclidean model pursued by the egalitarian thought of Laruelle in their radical expansion and mutation (but not abandonment) of the schemata of classical epistemology.[7]<\/a> I<\/a>n advance of Laruelle, McLuhan was drawn to non-Euclidean models of space that liberated humanity from what he dubbed the \u201cstraight-jacket\u201d of the parallel postulate and the constraints of logical consistency, whose \u201cproof\u201d it purported to embody (Counterblast <\/em>n.p.). In the post-lineal world inaugurated by electronic media, \u201c[a]ll knowledges are equal\u201d (\u00d3 Maoilearca 28), just as no representation of the Real can dominate in Laruelle\u2019s democracy of thought.<\/p>\n Much as Laruelle has strategically appropriated theoretical material from the neo-Bergsonian Deleuze, whose imperative (as paraphrased with collaborator F\u00e9lix Guattari) to \u201ccreate concepts\u201d (5) he has divested of its metaphysical impulse, Lewis mimicked Bergson\u2019s metaphysics of creative evolution in his 1930 masterpiece, The Apes of God<\/em>. The latter text stages a carnivalesque pageantry of modernist clones mocking the French philosopher\u2019s artistic acolytes, who are represented as little more than stereotyped \u201cwalking ideas\u201d (Edwards, Wyndham Lewis <\/em>320). Occupying the perspectival centre of Lewis\u2019s literary vortex is the absentee philosopher Pierpoint (or \u201cpeer-point\u201d) (Miller 117), whose insights are parroted by the denizens of Lewis\u2019s counterfeit \u201csociety of creators\u201d (Deleuze, Bergsonism <\/em>111). Acting as the prototypical medium<\/em>, the Virgil-like Horace Zagreus \u201cbroadcasts\u201d (Apes <\/em>271, 418, 433, 434) Pierpoint\u2019s views via mock-radiophonic performances of the reclusive guru\u2019s \u201cencyclical\u201d (125) as he guides protagonist Dan Boleyn through a Dantean Bloomsbury. Lewis\u2019s satirical reversal of the dynamics of Bergsonian comedy (as theorized by the French thinker in his popular essay Laughter<\/em>)\u2014which Lewis dubbed \u201cnon-moral satire\u201d (Men Without Art <\/em>107-108) in opposition to the socially corrective function that Bergson attributed to the mechanical essence of the comic\u2014can be likened to John \u00d3 Maoilearca\u2019s description of non-philosophy\u2019s \u201cmockery of the philosopher\u2019s truth\u201d (176): a mockery enacted through a quasi-behaviourist, \u201cpostual\u201d miming of philosophical positions (see also Hokenson). Similarly, Theall situated the Menippean satire of academic norms practiced by McLuhan\u2019s irrevent non-books within a tradition of \u201clearned satire\u201d with which he also connected Lewis (The Virtual Marshall McLuhan<\/em> 41).<\/p>\n A key point of tension between the non-Bergsonian mimicry practiced by both Laruelle and Lewis emerges from the latter\u2019s emphatic anti-humanism, which cannot be reconciled with the persistence of the Human in non-philosophy. Laruelle insists that the \u201cnon-\u201d prefix which he appends to his minoritarian practice of thought is in no way synonymous with the negation implied by anti-philosophy. Non-philosophy does not aim to overturn or nullify philosophy, but\u2014on the model of non-Euclidean geometry, which accepts the axioms of classical geometry yet adds seemingly incompatible postulates thereto\u2014sets out to expand the scope of humanistic study by multiplying and mutating its disciplinary resources, even at the risk of inconsistency. The persistence of the Human in Laruelle\u2019s thought is framed in emphatically futural terms, as the open question of humanity\u2019s \u201csalvation\u201d (Smith, Laruelle <\/em>6), a formulation that recalls the future tense in which McLuhan cast his prophetic pronouncements on social and sensorial transformations that he associated with the proliferation of electronic media. A shared modality of science fiction is an additional manifestation of the two thinkers\u2019 common literary orientation: a re-description of philosophical and extra-philosophical materials that Laruelle theorizes (in reference to his own project) as \u201cphilo-fiction.\u201d Refusing to abandon the contents of conventional philosophical discourse, Laruelle instead \u201csuperposes\u201d\u2014an operation transplanted from quantum physics\u2014concepts and vocabulary from divergent domains to fabulate novel thoughts that are real but fictive: not authoritative descriptions of the Real but rather fictions composed of statements that, however conflictual or incomplete, are nonetheless real in themselves.<\/p>\n A contemporary artist whose work suggests compelling analogies with Laruelle\u2019s practice of philo-fiction is Robert Smithson (1938-1973), whose photo-essays transgress disciplinary boundaries and protocols to spin unreliable narratives cannibalizing the work of other creators. The early Smithson text \u201cEntropy and the New Monuments\u201d is axiomatic in its transformation of a conventional survey of recent art (in this case, Minimalist sculpture) into a free-ranging meditation on the ineluctable fatum <\/em>of an entropic cosmos, weaving references to everything from tourist guides to Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss into a deliberately anti-academic heteroglossia. Smithson\u2019s compulsive fabulation echoes McLuhan\u2019s reconfiguration of the \u201ccritic as creator\u201d (Cavell, Remediating McLuhan <\/em>79) through his innovation of the multimodal \u201cessai concr\u00e8te\u201d (Theall, The Medium <\/em>240).<\/p>\n \u201cIncidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,\u201d Smithson\u2019s signature 1969 mock-travelogue, reported on a recent tour of the Mexican peninsula in a satirically hypertrophied impersonation of the first-person narrative conventions of embedded journalism that may have been inspired by the artist\u2019s familiarity with the ironic travel writings of Wyndham Lewis, whom he referred to as his \u201cfavorite author\u201d in 1965 (qtd. In Crow 37).[8]<\/a> \u201cIncidents of Mirror-Travel\u201d is eminently philo-fictive in its superposition of its host text\u2014the 19th<\/sup>-century American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens\u2019s 1842 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucat\u00e1n<\/em>\u2014with more dubious \u201chistories\u201d of the mythical continents of Atlantis and Mu by James Churchward and Ignatius Donnelly. This pseudo-scientific travesty of Atlantean utopias effects a ludic \u201crevers[al of] Platonism\u201d (Deleuze, Logic of Sense <\/em>291).<\/p>\n Smithson recounts his temporary installation of \u201chypothetical continents\u201d along his Yucat\u00e1n itinerary based on the imaginative cartographies of Churchward and Donnelly: piles of seashells or stone conjuring the conjectured coastlines of the \u201clost\u201d landmasses of Lemuria and Mu. In thus materializing a specious facticity, Smithson manifests a logic of paraconsistency anticipatory of Laruelle. \u201cContrary to affirmations of nature,\u201d writes Smithson, \u201cart is inclined to semblances and masks, it flourishes on discrepancy\u201d (\u201cIncidents of Mirror-Travel\u201d 132).<\/p>\n \u201cIncidents of Mirror-Travel\u201d simultaneously mobilizes the camera in unconventional ways that clear a path for Laruelle\u2019s discourse on \u201cnon-photography\u201d as an instantiation of \u201cvision-in-One,\u201d the French thinker\u2019s term for a unilateral modification of human perception. Photographs accompanying Smithson\u2019s textual account of his Yucat\u00e1n expedition pointedly depart from the formalist conventions of a medium then struggling to acquire critical legitimacy. Smithson\u2019s defiantly casual photographs redirect the reader\u2019s touristic gaze away from the expected archaeological monuments portended by the title\u2019s nod to Stephens. They record instead an anti-spectacular inventory of sites\/sights: ephemeral arrays of square mirrors, or \u201cmirror displacements,\u201d installed by the artist on beaches and the jungle floor. Perversely, these crude grids refuse a specular optics, reflecting instead monochromatic expanses of sky or dazzling solar flares. The rigorous abstraction constituted by the \u201cbroken geometry\u201d (127) of these mirrored arrays can be likened to the \u201cmatrix\u201d that Laruelle posits as the a priori <\/em>of a (non-)photographic vision preceding the emergence of the technical apparatus of the camera\u2014which, in his account, is only incidental to a longer trajectory of philosophy\u2019s \u201conto-photo-logical\u201d unfolding (Photo-Fiction <\/em>3).[9]<\/a> The alternating flares and mottled obscurity manifested by Smithson\u2019s arrays can also be likened to the \u201cblinding of the light of logos by the really blind thought of photography\u201d postulated by Laruelle as a refusal of the representational metaphysics of Platonism (The Concept <\/em>58). As Smithson writes, \u201cmirror surfaces cannot be understood by reason\u201d (\u201cIncidents of Mirror-Travel\u201d 124).<\/p>\n
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