In view of his survey, it appears that McLuhan took from Baudelaire his commitment to exploration and contemplation, from Lewis the charge that reworking the vision of Dante would have to be done as the enemy, and from all the artists after Austen a commitment to detachment, not merely a tactic, but a way of life and “survival strategy”:
The need to retain an attitude of complete clinical detachment is necessary for survival in this kind of work …. The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. If one lacked this sense of superiority—this detachment—it would be quite impossible to write about them. It would be like an octopus attacking the great pyramids.264
262 McLuhan, “Crack in the Rearview Mirror,” McGill Journal of Education 1, no. 1 (1966): 31–34.
263 Through the Vanishing Point, 254. Emphasis mine. “The new media have blurred the boundaries of inner and outer. The omnipresence of news and views has merged man's inner and outer life. Uninhibited mechanization is totalitarian at many levels. And this fact is merely another facet of the cycle mechanization, in returning us to the state of collectivized, emotional consciousness of archaic man,” (McLuhan, “Space, Time and Poetry,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 13, 10–11). Originally published in 1955. 264 McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool Interview,” 70.
It also appears that, to manage his involvement with the herd, McLuhan turned again to Lewis. McLuhan apparently saw that Lewis’s strategy, possibly as articulated in his “Code of the Herdsman,” was the most viable strategy for involvement with the world/herd under electric, X- Ray conditions:
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 dramatization 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.265
Subsequently, with a view to “inventing himself properly,” both as a “serious artist” and as a Christian, McLuhan appears to have taken up Lewis’s aesthetic, becoming a “duet in everything”:266
265 Wyndham Lewis, “Code of the Herdsman,” Ginko Press,
http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_lite/_codehea.htm (accessed 22 November 2006). It might not be irrelevant that critics have discerned as many as six distinctly different voices in Swift’s Tale of a Tub. Edward Timms, “The Christian Satirist: A Contradiction in Terms?,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 31, no. 2 (1995): 110.
266 Or coming at the matter another way we could say that McLuhan adopted the “tradition” posture of the Christian satirist, the homo duplex, as a necessary measure to conduct a satirical programme without recourse to anonymous authorship. Edward Timms, 104. “The versatility with which Erasmus deploys the contrasting voices of satirist and Christian has led him to be identified as the archetypal homo duplex,” (Ibid.).
McLuhan as homo duplex is captured in the two portraits of McLuhan by one of his friends, York Wilson. See York Wilson, “Marshall McLuhan, Abstract Portrait” (1976) and “Marshall McLuhan” (1978).
The entire aesthetic of Wyndham Lewis presents the case for paradox, as in "Vortex No. One—Art Vortex—Be Thyself":
You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion.
You must also learn, like a Circassian horseman, to change tongues in mid-career without falling to Earth.
You must give the impression of two persuaders, standing each on a different hip—left hip, right hip—with four eyes vacillating concentrically at different angles upon the object chosen for subjugation.
There is nothing so impressive as the number TWO. You must be a duet in everything.
For, the Individual, the single object, and the isolated, is, you will admit, an absurdity.
Why try and give the impression of a consistent and indivisible personality?
You can establish yourself either as a Machine of two similar fraternal surfaces overlapping.
Or, more sentimentally, you may postulate the relation of object and its shadow for your two selves.
There is Yourself: and there is the Exterior World, that fat mass you browse on.
You knead it into an amorphous imitation of yourself inside yourself.
Sometimes you speak through its huskier mouth, sometimes through yours.
Do not confuse yourself with it, or weaken the esoteric lines of fine original being.
Do not marry it, either, to a maiden.
Any machine then you like: but become mechanical by fundamental dual repetition.
For the sake of your good looks you must become a machine.
Hurry up and get into this harmonious and sane duality…267
267 Wyndham Lewis cited in From Cliché to Archetype, 161–162. Immediately following this quote from Lewis, McLuhan and Watson cite Rosalie Colie on paradox from Paradoxia Epidemica: "…paradox equivocates. It lies, and it doesn't. It tells the truth, and it doesn't…The one meaning must always be taken with respect to the other—so that the Liar paradox is, literally, speculative, its meanings infinitely mirrored, infinitely reflected, in each other," (Ibid., 162).
McLuhan’s adoption of Lewis’s aesthetic, when combined with his Christianity, appears to have afforded him some measure of levity. His subsequent way of being in the world and general approach to his scholarly activities became infused with a serious commitment to play,268
even while his vision grew steadily more apocalyptic.269 It also means
that from this point on, McLuhan largely “disappears” behind his mask
or persona, and would make his Christianity a private matter: “…There
is no need to mention Christianity — merely it is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian.”270
268 “…specialists have little sense of humour. Early Christians called themselves ‘fools in Christ’ and there world became for them a playground. They could literally laugh their way to the Lions,” (McLuhan, “Popular Cultural Mosaic,” MS., 14).
269 “Apocalypse is not gloom. It is salvation. No Christian could ever be an optimist or pessimist, that is a purely secular state of mind,” (McLuhan, “Future Church: Edward Wakin Interviews Marshall McLuhan,” U.S. Catholic 42, no. 1 (January 1977): 7). Eric McLuhan suggests that a deeper understanding of McLuhan’s posture in this regard might be had via Ellul. See Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury Press, 1967). Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is also an invaluable resource for a better grasp of McLuhan’s posture here.
270 McLuhan to Clement McNaspy, 15 December 1945. McLuhan’s strategy itself in a variety of ways. In the first it means that his Christianity, which was made a private and personal matter, was largely kept out of his public works until the final decade of his career, during the “new religious age.” This, however, is not to say that his “private” self was inactive. On the contrary, through his “private” correspondence McLuhan sought to influence ordained ministers within the Church. For example, in 1947, we see McLuhan trying to guide the Jesuit Walter Ong to revive the Patristics by way of a study on the figures of speech: “What is now needed is a great revival of patristic study in light of these things. But current translations of the Fathers won’t do for this purpose I fear. How grand if you, Walter, could do a series of selections from the fathers, Latin and English on opposite pages -English translation capturing all the effects of the figures of speech,” (McLuhan to Walter Ong, December 1947). In classical rhetoric the figures of speech, thought, and emotion were accepted as basic postures of the mind — basic attitudes and states of feeling and emotion. See McLuhan, “La Révolution de l’Informatio,” (address, Biennale Internationale de l'Information, le Toquet, 20 June 1973), 11.
I would not hesitate to add personally to you that only
supernatural means are proportioned to the needs of the case. I deliberately keep my Christianity out of all these discussions lest perception be diverted from structural process by doctrinal sectarian passions. My own attitude to Christianity is, itself, awareness of process. As John Culkin says, “I don’t believe in shoulding on people.271
It was not just his Christianity that McLuhan made “private,” it was everything he regarded as personal. As McLuhan notes in a letter to Margaret Mead:
If I were to write personally, I would have to indicate that my own role of exploring and understanding situations tends to exclude the moralistic observation or political action ... I am not entirely sure why I choose to avoid a personal manifesto of my feelings or attitudes in such matters. This may be merely personal to myself, but I am always baffled when people ask me how I am feeling. As a form of greeting, it makes me wince with its callous and careless unconcern masquerading as good-will. Sometimes I stop these people and ask them point-blank: “Do you really want to know? Because it may take quite a while to tell you!” Perhaps some of this centers into my feelings about personal expression concerning the odious and sickening manifestations of human greed and aggression. I would wish to avoid any appearance of moral superiority in confronting human depravity. It is so easy to borrow virtue by juxtaposing oneself with viciousness.272
His public scholarship, on the other hand, will tend to deal with the Church and religious themes in much the same way as any Western intellectual that acknowledges that the history of the West is
inconceivable without a history of the Church, e.g. “The Place of Thomas
271 McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, 23 July 1969.
272 McLuhan to Margaret Mead, 25 January 1973. McLuhan adds, “On the other hand if one has a name or a position which could be used to mitigate evils, it would be
Nashe in the Learning of his Time.”273 There is, for example, little in Take
Today that does not apply equally well to the Church and modern American corporation.274