Thirteen Satellite Dishes

23 Corridors

(With apologies to Dennis Cooper, from whom the idea for this was stolen.)

Zeroing in on McLuhans's Politics

[These are pretty scattered remarks that are more exploratory; they are not a Statement on Marshall McLuhan.]

Marshal McLuhan and Walter Benjamin often sound eerily similar, to the point at which it is impossible to evade the feeling that McLuhan is verging on plagiarism. (For example, his note on the influence of newspaper layout on avant-garde poetry seems to ripped out of xxBenjamin`s essay, with Joyce and Eliot standing in for McLuhan where Mallarmé stands for Benjamin.) There is, of course, no evidence as to whether McLuhan, despite his evident erudition, had ever read Benjamin, whose critical stock has only been at its current standard in the last twenty or so years.

What are their points of convergence? Clearly, they believe the form of media conveys as much, if not more, significance than the content of the media. Furthermore, they see new media like film or the popular press having social effects in advance of social movements per se; change in the dominant media experienced by the general populace/the masses leads inexorably to social change, for better or worse. This is the sense of which both Benjamin and McLuhan speak of their investigation as an analysis of the dream life of the collective.

Points of difference might be understood at a very basic level of the difference between Benjamin`s Messianic Marxism, to use Derrida`s phrase, and McLuhan`s less definable political leanings. In fact, it is exceedingly difficult to place McLuhan politically. His political divisions, despite the protestations of the immediacy and global village, are typical of that of the Cold War: the U.S. and the Russians; the U.S. and Europe; the U.S., Canada and England; the First World and the Third World (particularly Africa's putatively pre-literate, “tribal” nature). There is little to condemn here; McLuhan is simply, if somewhat uncritically, accepting the terms of how the world was divided in the 1950s and 1960s.

To be sure, McLuhan is no Marxist. His references to Marx are, as with his references to Freud and psychoanalysis in general, cursory at best, and often dismissive. He notes: “...[w]edded as they are to nineteenth-century industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could be more subversive of the Marxian [sic] dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production” (Understanding Media), suggesting that Marx, in his study of nineteenth century industrial forms, erred in his lack of attention to technology as a source of social change without reference to the specific configurations that these technologies might have taken at a particular historical juncture. To put it very roughly: Marx saw economic configurations, as embodied in base and superstructure and in class formations, as the basis for describing a sociopolitical situation as well as predicting its future configurations. McLuhan, on the other hand, asserts that prior to economic configurations come the technological developments that make these configurations possible. Therefore, technology is the base, with the rest as superstructural development.

There is, as is a tediously well-known fact, a founding ambivalence to McLuhan's attitude towards technology. Its a bit of a shock to read his early work The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951, thirteen years before Understanding Media), not the least of which for its surprisingly paternalistic dismissal of popular culture that is part and parcel with the vast tide of contemporary denunciations of comic books, advertisements, “the Great Books” etc.. The Mechanical Bride, unlike analogous jeremiads from on high on the people deluded enough to enjoy quizz shows, has the virtue of being hilariously funny – for the :Men of Distinction” section about whiskey ads, we have the question: “Why pick on the arts? Hasn't anyone in science or industry ever distinguished themselves by drinking whiskey?”, or , in an earlier section: “Are you the shy type? Then say it with tanks.” The sense that the mass media technologies have a liberatory potential, despite their current use for control through infantilized consumption, is not yet present in here. One further question to be addressed, then, perhaps in a later post, would be to investigate where the rupture in McLuhan's thinking occurs. Guttenberg Galaxy? The widespread availability of televisions that increased exponentially in the 1950s?

To return to the question of politics, McLuhan certain seems to align himself, at one point anyways, with the cultural conservativism that flourished in North America in the 1950s: suspicion towards pop culture, faith in the inherent, if not oracular, nature of high art. This brings McLuhan into frightening proximity with Cold War axiomatics: Richard Elman, in his book The Aesthetics of the CIA, notes that: “...the CIA not only engaged in a cultural cold war in the abstract and purely pragmatic way, but that they had very definite aims in view, and they had a very definite aesthetic: the stood for High Culture.”¹ But, despite McLuhan's anti-Marxism, there is still a progressive element to McLuhan's Understanding Media in its espousal of what were by that time becoming important sources of the social movements of the 1960s: youth movements, Civil Rights and feminism. While McLuhan does not quite abjure the pose of High Cultural mandarin looking down on the antics of the children below, his views on mass culture have clearly softened up somewhat – viz. the references to Bob Dylan and the photo of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable that make up parts of The Medium is the Massage. But this will have to wait for a further post.

1Quoted in Faces Stonor Saunders's sobering The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The documentation of the deliberate manipulation of the “non-Communist Left” and almost every seemingly apolitical art movement in the second half of the twentieth century – dodecaphonic music, Abstract Expressionism and Encounter being examples – is extensive, with everyone from Bertrand Russel to Igor Stravisnsky seeming to have accepted CIA coin. As I say, its a sobering read.

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

"Being exhausted is much more than being tired. It's not just tiredness, I'm not just tired, in spite of the climb.' The tired person no longer has any (subjective) possibility at his disposal; he therefore cannot realize the slightest (objective) possibility. But the latter remains, because one can never realize the whole of the possible; in fact, one even creates the possible to the extent that one realizes it. The tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible. The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize. 'That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else would be asked of me.' There is no longer any possible; a relentless Spinozism. Does he exhaust the possible because he himself is exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself in exhausting the possible, and vice-versa. He exhausts that which, in the possible, is not realized. He has done with the possible, beyond all tiredness, 'for to end yet again.'"

Gilles Deleuze, "The Exhausted"

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let in crumble in space like dust without honour! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe - where nonetheless everything repeats itself - will it ever come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: "I loathe this life I idolize?" The nullity of our deleriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is forseen, frightful and vain.

- E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

Life is only science now. The science of the sciences. Now we are suddenly taken up with nature. We have become intimate with the elements. We have put reality to the test. Reality has put us to the test. We now know the laws of nature, the infinite High laws of nature, and we an study them in reality and in truth. We no longer have to rely on assumptions. When we look into nature, we no longer see ghosts. We have written the boldest chapters in the book of world history, everyone of us has written it for himself in fright and deathly fear and none of us of our own free will, nor according to his own taste, but following the laws of nature, and we have written this chapter behind the backs of our blind fathers and our foolish teachers, behind our own backs; after so much that has been endlessly long and dull, the shortest and most important.

We are frightened by the clarity out of which our world suddenly is born, our world of science; we freeze in this clarity; but we wanted this clarity, we evoked it; so we cannot complain now that the cold reigns and we’re freezing. The cold increases with the clarity. This clarity and this cold will now rule us. The science of nature will give us greater clarity and will be far colder than we can imagine.

Everything will be clear, a clarity that increases and deepens unending, and everything will be cold, a coldness that intensifies ever more horribly. In the future we will have the impression of a day that is endlessly clear and endlessly cold.

Thomas Bernhard, Speech at the Award Ceremony for the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

"There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their dialectical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment is bloom is seen without the shade of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in the unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in the space of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent. The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses. The chance conversation on a train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth. Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, that concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker. The evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.... For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men [sic] that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains."
- Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia

A New Ennui Happy Holiday Message

"Anyways, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity."

- Roberto Bolano, 2666

Now You Know

Cleaning up the spam in revealed this little gem: 

I love coming here and reading about all the intresting things on this site everyday. There is nothing better than learning how to make money online and coming here really helps.

Anything I can  do to help!

send + receive v. 12

For the 12^th edition of send + receive, we are tying together threads of approaches with a loose string and wire theme…

Where wires are a constant at send + receive, simply by the nature of electronics and electricity, this year’s focus is unique in its extension from wires to strings and their uses in sonic exploration. We will see stringed instruments played in unorthodox ways by eminent and singular prepared guitarist Keith Rowe (UK), multi-faceted experimental violinist C Spencer Yeh (US), earth-shaking drone violinist Anju Singh (VAN), and riveting tonal guitarist Oren Ambarchi (AU).

We will see piano wire used as a conducting instrument in a play on the historic minimalist work ‘music on a long thin wire’ by Alvin Lucier, in our Friday daytime installation Alvin Lucifer by Ontario artists living abroad,Brian Joseph Davis and Steven Kado.

Wires and electric currents are quintessential to the above mentioned artists as well as to performers like Erin Sexton (MTL), with her hand built oscillators, Montreal group Artificiel with their sonic and visual illustration of electricity through their hand-built Tesla coil, and to the distorted resonances of Michel Germain’s (WPG) cymbal tones.

For more information, click here! I'll be there every night, and so should you.

Put the Book Back on the Shelf 3: The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

[These are really brief notes on an enormous book that was sparked by Douglas Murphy's post.]

For a book that deals with some of the worst moments in human history, the most surprising thing to me about The Kindly Ones was how difficult it was to put down. Douglas Murphy supplies a few reasons – the mythological underpinnings, the Forrest Gumpery. The latter is particularly effective, for although Maximillian Au is no ingénue, there is something of the Good Soldier Schwejk (with admittedly less beer drinking and farting and more Mozart and gay cruising) about him. He is the very idea of the bureaucrat (although Murphy notes the family tragedy which lifts him from the banality of evil stereotype, more on which later) whose insistence of his lack of personal responsibility seems almost genuine; while he is in the middle of (in)famous historic events, they don’t particularly effect him as much as stress him out.

Or so it seems. By making Au the main vessel of consciousness, Littell compels us to at least provisionally identify with him, at least if you want to get further than 50 pages into the book. Which is especially odd given what a neither/nor character Au actually is. On the one hand, we have a character right out of Visconti’s The Damned – a cruisy queer Nazi with incestuous feelings with his sister and homicidal feelings towards his mother. (Is there not something slightly clichéd about this? It seems as though Littell avoided the Eichmann-bureaucrat stereotype but fell right into another. Perhaps we should declare a moratorium on Queer Nazis; there weren’t that many to begin with, and by the 1940s there were a lot fewer.) On the other, there is the sentimental murderer, feeling sorrow over the possibility that he might never hear Bach again, or talk to someone about Tertullan.



What Au signally lacks is mediation between the private fact of his psychopathology and the larger pathologies of History. The mediators haven’t vanished in a Weberian sense; they have been withdrawn. Try as one might, its hard to avoid the Zizek point about “the totalitarian personality”, for want of a better term): the inner detachment and cynically distance from power, the “I personally have nothing against the Jews, but the if that’s the Law, then that’s the Law” syndrome that manifests itself in his revulsion by the more virulent anti-Semites in the SS, the tactical withdrawal into the rhythms of personal gemuchlikeit (tea, decent food, musical scores, privacy).

This purposed withdrawal of any affect mediating between personal and social might be linked to Au’s mental disintegration, as Murphy points out. (Confession: I thought that the sexual fantasies that take up part of the last third of the book were real.) What, for example, to make of the murder of his mother and step-father. Like the two detectives, we the readers are certain that Au probably did kill them, but there is nevertheless absolutely no textual evidence to support this, and Au retains not even a traumatic gap in his memory regarding what must have been a very bloody moment.

This apparent absence of trauma is one of the things that is interesting about Au’s character. But at the same time, he is not the typically sociopath that one would expect him to be; if anything, he often resembles his erstwhile opposite number: Leopold Bloom, in his desire to make his way in the world with as little fuss as possible. In what sense, then, is Au’s psyche broken-down? Or more specifically, what is the cause of this breakdown? The fact that he finds himself present at most of the major atrocities of WWII doesn’t seem quite enough. My sense is that it is his toggling back and forth between creaturely comfort and survival and the weight of History (e.g. when Hess makes his speech to the SS, making everyone complicit in the Holocaust) without a mediating affect that makes the link between an already pathological consciousness and the density of the Final Solution is the source of his mental collapse; the transitions between parallax are too traumatic as such.