"The Medium is the Message"

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  • evola_as_he_is
    « An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things
    Message 1 of 3 , Dec 25, 2017

      « An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. » (http://izquotes.com/quote/124620)


      « Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. » (« The Mechanical Bride », 1951, p. vi)


      « I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. » (« Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews », 2003, p. 101-102 (http://answick.blogspot.be/2010/05/marshall-mcluhan-on-wyndham-lewis.html)


      « Invention is the mother of necessities. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


      « Homer was wiped out by litteracy » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


      « Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


      « There is a huge technology involved in TV which surrounds you – physically – and the effect of that huge service environment on you – personnally – is vast. The effect of the program is incidental. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw&t=4s)


      « The Brittish empire is the empire where the sun never sets because you cannot trust an Englishman in the dark. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


      « The close relation between sex and violence, between good news and bad news, helps to explain the compulsion of the admen to dunk all their products in sex by erogenizing every contour of every bottle or cigarette. Having reached this happy state where the good news is fairly popping, the admen say, as it were: “Better add a bit of the bad news now to take the hex off all that bonanza stuff.” Let’s remind them that LOVE, replayed in reverse, is EVOL—transposing into EVIL and VILE. LIVE spells backward into EVIL, while EROS reverses into SORE. And, we should never forget the SIN in SINCERE or the CON in CONFIDENCE. » ("Media Ad-vice: An Introduction by Marshall McLuhan",


      Of the fecund author who has just been quoted only one book has been translated into French, and yet this book was only published by a Canadian publisher (none have been translated into Italian or into German). Not all epoch-making authors, for good (Paul Friedland) of for ill (Walter Lippmann), have been translated into French, far from it. I am thankful to M. van den Heide for having drawn my attention recently to Marshall McLuhan, who, on theother hand, is well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world.


      I have not had the opportunity to read his first book, which is about mass culture and mass propaganda techniques, and more specifically about the use of woman, or at least her image, as a « selling point » in advertising. In « The Mechanical Bride », a collection of essays that was published a few years before Evola started to work on « Metaphysics of Sex », McLuhan « shows that there is a kind of inherent violence in the technological visualization/ objectification of a woman » (Helen J. Burgess, Jeanne Hamming, Highways of the Mind, 2014, p. 115).


      In fact, the « mechanical bride » is constituted by « the interfusion of sex and technology, and death ». « At the heart of this mystery [...] rests: 1) the pervasive sexualization of technology — engines, cars "bodies by Fisher," even a nuclear bomb nicknamed "Gilda" after reigning sex symbol Rita Hayworth; and 2) the corresponding mechanization of the female body into a set of fragmented, fetishized, and replaceable parts — legs, breasts, buttocks, forming what is basically a plastic mechanism, a hot number, a sex object, sex bomb, living doll, love machine. McLuhan relates this interfusion of technology, sex, and death to a hunger to "explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on the one hand, and, on the other to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. He draws our attention to the increasing movement, in both fact and fiction, toward the use of sadistic violence as both sexual thrill and metaphysical invasion and suggests that technology plays a critical rôle. By sexualization, McLuhan actually means feminization and hence ignores for the large part the masculinization of technology, particularly weaponry… » (Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime, 1987, p. 179-90), and quite rightly so ; http://a401.idata.over-blog.com/500x324/4/28/60/29/moulinex_libere.jpg.
      Meanwhile, in this light, Chinweizu’s characterisation of woman as a « terrorist » takes on an even more appropriate meaning.


      « The Mechanical Bride » was written decades before the transhumanist agenda was disclosed. One of the essays is called  "Love Goddess Assemble Line". Still Interestingly enough, after the pubiication of the book, McLuhan « complained of some vague homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and was trying to castrate his text » (Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger : a Biography, 1998, p. 118).


      He agreed with Wyndham Lewis, by whose writtings he was apparently ispired (« McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis’s writings. In particular, his idea of the critical rôle artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them », marshallandme.com/the-meaning-of-the-wyndam-portrait/ ; see also https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/on-vorticism-wyndham-lewis-influencers-of-mcluhan/), agreed with Lewis that « the "homosexual cult" was a direct result of the feminist revolt » (Philip Marchand, op. cit., p. 74). McLuhan had a first-hand experience of this « homosexual cult » in his Cambridge years. Chinweizu has provided in « Anatomy of female Power » a most insighful description of the « mama’s boy », without however seeing its homosexual « dimension » ; McLuhan has.


      « Understanding the Media » (1964) (http://robynbacken.com/text/nw_research.pdf), his third book,  is an epoch-making work, as it argues that what matters about media is not the content, but, precisely, the medium, and the psychological and social effects of media are studied for the first time, at least for the first time by an outsider. It is only tainted by some positive value judgments on so-called « new technologies », and, despite the awareness that « If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch » and the acknowledgment that « the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community » (see https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/a-massive-bauhaus-program-of-haptic-innovation/), by the conviction that so-called « new technologies » can « extend consciousness »; once those value judgments are cast aside and the term « consciousness » is changed to « subconscious », his thought-provoking analysis turns out to be most helpful to go deeper into the understanding of the mechanisms of the occult war as now waged mainly through media means.


      You may also want to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY, which stands as a remarkable complement to the considerations developped by Guénon on the switch from the oral to the written ; it is only tainted, this time, by the claim that the phonetic alphabet is a Greek invention, when it is almost certain that its origin is Phoenician (G Mason, The date and origin of the phonetic alphabet, 1838 ; the Maya, too, had a phonetic alphabet : Ignatius Donnelly, Plato, William Scott-Elliot, Francis Bacon and CJ Cutcliffe Hyne, The Atlantis Collection, e-artnow, 2016, chap 7: The Origin of Our Alphabet). What better way of making sure that the dissociative concepts that were disseminated, through philosophy and therefore through the written word, throughout the ancient “Western “world, would incubate than to convey these concepts through a language written phonetically, and therefore tending to produce dissociation ? There is nothing “mysterious” about the fact that the Church spread the use of the phonetic alphabet, as its first representatives were Semites (another thing : Romans did not attempt to “make them [laws] uniformly applicable to all men”; this attempt was made, and successfully so, later by Christians (Harold J. Berman, "The Influence of Christianity upon the Development of law", http://www.classicapologetics.com/b/berminfl.pdf ; J. E. A. Craken Early Christians and Roman Law, 1965), who had no difficulty in growing the seed of universality planted by the Stoicians in Roman law (Pierre-Marie Baude, Christinisme et modèles d’appartenance. In Pierre Marie Beaude,Jacques Fantino (es.), Le christianisme dans la société : actes du colloque international de Metz, Cerf, 1998, p. 288-9).


      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCrx0scCkM&t=6s might be the best introduction to his work (the passage where the so-called virtues of « dialogue » is discussed is the only dull part of the interview), or perhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqIq6UPvN0o is.


    • G. H.
      Find below Marshall McLuhan s preface to the original edition of The Mechanical Bride . Preface to the original edition Ours is the first age in which many
      Message 2 of 3 , Dec 29, 2017

        Find below Marshall McLuhan's preface to the original edition of 'The Mechanical Bride'.

        Preface to the original edition

        Ours is the first age in which many thousand of the best-trained individuals minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.

        Since so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness, and since these programs of commercial education are so much more expensive and influential than the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges, it seemed fitting to devise a method for reversing the process. Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlightening its intended prey ? Why not assist the public to observe consciously the drama which is intended to operate upon it unconsciously ? 

        As this method was followed, "A Descent Into The Maelstrom" by Edgar Poe kept coming to mind. Poe's sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. The present book likewise makes few attempts to attack the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress and in which everybody is involved. From the analysis of that action, it is hoped, many individual strategies may suggest themselves.

        But it is seldom the business of this book to take account of such strategies.

        Poe's sailor says that when locked in by the whirling walls and the numerous objects which floated in that environment :

        "I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement  in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several decents toward the foam below."

        It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as an amusement. Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stages of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced. Moreover, it is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide.

        Most of the exhibits in this book have been selected because of their typical and familiar quality. They represent a world of social myths or forms and speak a language we both know and do not know. After making his study on the nursery rhyme, "Where are you going, my pretty maid ?" the anthropologist C. B. Lewis pointed out that "the folk has neither part nor lot in the making of folklore." That is also true of the folklore of industrial man, so much of which stems from the laboratory, the studio, and the advertising agencies. But amid the diversity of our inventions and abstract techniques of production and distribution there will be found a great degree of cohesion and unity. This consistency is not conscious in origin or effect and seems to arise from a sort of collective dream. For that reason, as well as because of the widespread popularity of these objects and processes, they are here referred to as "the folklore of industrial man." They are unfolded by exhibit and commentary as a single landscape. A whirling phantasmagoria can be grasped only when arrested for contemplation. And this very arrest is also a release from the usual participation.

        The unity is not imposed upon this diversity, since any other selection of exhibits would reveal the same dynamic patterns. The fact that the present exhibits are not selected to prove a case but to reveal a complex situation, it is the effort of the book to illustrate by frequent cross-reference to other materials that are not included here. And it is the procedure of the book to use the commentaries on the exhibits merely as a means of releasing some of their intelligible meaning. No effort has been made to exhaust their meaning.

        The various ideas and concepts introduced in the commentaries are intended to provide positions from which to examine the exhibits. They are not conclusions in which anybody is expected to rest but are intended merely as points of departure. This is an approach which it is hard to make clear as at a time when most books offer a single idea as a means of unifying a troup of observations. Concepts are provisional affairs for apprehending reality ; their value is in the grip they provide. This book, therefore, tries to present at once representative aspects of the reality and a wide range of ideas for taking hold of it. The ideas are very secondary devices for clambering up and over rock faces. Those readers who undertake merely to query the ideas will miss their use for getting at the material.

        A film expert, speaking of the value of the movie medium for selling North to South America, noted that : 

        "the propaganda value of this simultaneous audio-visual impression is very high, for it standardizes thought by supplying the spectator with a ready-made visual image before he has time to conjure up an interpretation of his own."

        This book reverses that process by providing typical visual imagery of our environment and dislocating it into meaning by inspection. Where visual symbols have been employed in an effort to paralyze the mind, they are here used as a means of energizing it. It is observable that the more illusion and falsehood need to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood. Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

        Because of the circulating point of view in this book, there is no need for it to be read in any special order. Any part of the book provides one or more views of the same social landscape. Ever since Burckhardt saw that the meaning of Machiavelli's method was to turn the state into a work of art by the rational manipulation of power, it has been an open possibility to apply the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society. That is attempted here. The Western world, dedicated since the sixteenth century to the increase and consolidation of the power of the state, has developed an artistic unity of effect which makes artistic criticism of that effect quite feasible. Art criticism is free to point to the various means employed to get the effect, as well as to decide whether the effect was worth attempting. As such, with regard to the modern state, it can be a citadel of inclusive awareness amid the dim dreams of collective consciousness.

        I wish to acknowledge the advantage I have enjoyed in reading unpublished views of Professor David Riesman on the consumer mentality. To Professor W. T. Easterbrook I owe many enlightening conversations on the problems of bureaucracy and enterprise. And to Professor Felix Giovanelli I am in debt not only for the stimulus of discussion but for his prolonged assistance with the many publishing problems which have attended the entire work.

        Herbert Marshall McLuhan

        Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man (Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko, 2002), v-vii.



        Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
        Verzonden: maandag 25 december 2017 17:02:49
        Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
        Onderwerp: [evola_as_he_is] "The Medium is the Message"
         
         

        « An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. » (http://izquotes.com/quote/124620)


        « Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. » (« The Mechanical Bride », 1951, p. vi)


        « I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. » (« Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews », 2003, p. 101-102 (http://answick.blogspot.be/2010/05/marshall-mcluhan-on-wyndham-lewis.html)


        « Invention is the mother of necessities. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


        « Homer was wiped out by litteracy » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


        « Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


        « There is a huge technology involved in TV which surrounds you – physically – and the effect of that huge service environment on you – personnally – is vast. The effect of the program is incidental. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw&t=4s)


        « The Brittish empire is the empire where the sun never sets because you cannot trust an Englishman in the dark. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


        « The close relation between sex and violence, between good news and bad news, helps to explain the compulsion of the admen to dunk all their products in sex by erogenizing every contour of every bottle or cigarette. Having reached this happy state where the good news is fairly popping, the admen say, as it were: “Better add a bit of the bad news now to take the hex off all that bonanza stuff.” Let’s remind them that LOVE, replayed in reverse, is EVOL—transposing into EVIL and VILE. LIVE spells backward into EVIL, while EROS reverses into SORE. And, we should never forget the SIN in SINCERE or the CON in CONFIDENCE. » ("Media Ad-vice: An Introduction by Marshall McLuhan",


        Of the fecund author who has just been quoted only one book has been translated into French, and yet this book was only published by a Canadian publisher (none have been translated into Italian or into German). Not all epoch-making authors, for good (Paul Friedland) of for ill (Walter Lippmann), have been translated into French, far from it. I am thankful to M. van den Heide for having drawn my attention recently to Marshall McLuhan, who, on theother hand, is well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world.


        I have not had the opportunity to read his first book, which is about mass culture and mass propaganda techniques, and more specifically about the use of woman, or at least her image, as a « selling point » in advertising. In « The Mechanical Bride », a collection of essays that was published a few years before Evola started to work on « Metaphysics of Sex », McLuhan « shows that there is a kind of inherent violence in the technological visualization/ objectification of a woman » (Helen J. Burgess, Jeanne Hamming, Highways of the Mind, 2014, p. 115).


        In fact, the « mechanical bride » is constituted by « the interfusion of sex and technology, and death ». « At the heart of this mystery [...] rests: 1) the pervasive sexualization of technology — engines, cars "bodies by Fisher," even a nuclear bomb nicknamed "Gilda" after reigning sex symbol Rita Hayworth; and 2) the corresponding mechanization of the female body into a set of fragmented, fetishized, and replaceable parts — legs, breasts, buttocks, forming what is basically a plastic mechanism, a hot number, a sex object, sex bomb, living doll, love machine. McLuhan relates this interfusion of technology, sex, and death to a hunger to "explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on the one hand, and, on the other to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. He draws our attention to the increasing movement, in both fact and fiction, toward the use of sadistic violence as both sexual thrill and metaphysical invasion and suggests that technology plays a critical rôle. By sexualization, McLuhan actually means feminization and hence ignores for the large part the masculinization of technology, particularly weaponry… » (Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime, 1987, p. 179-90), and quite rightly so ; http://a401.idata.over-blog.com/500x324/4/28/60/29/moulinex_libere.jpg.
        Meanwhile, in this light, Chinweizu’s characterisation of woman as a « terrorist » takes on an even more appropriate meaning.


        « The Mechanical Bride » was written decades before the transhumanist agenda was disclosed. One of the essays is called  "Love Goddess Assemble Line". Still Interestingly enough, after the pubiication of the book, McLuhan « complained of some vague homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and was trying to castrate his text » (Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger : a Biography, 1998, p. 118).


        He agreed with Wyndham Lewis, by whose writtings he was apparently ispired (« McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis’s writings. In particular, his idea of the critical rôle artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them », marshallandme.com/the-meaning-of-the-wyndam-portrait/ ; see also https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/on-vorticism-wyndham-lewis-influencers-of-mcluhan/), agreed with Lewis that « the "homosexual cult" was a direct result of the feminist revolt » (Philip Marchand, op. cit., p. 74). McLuhan had a first-hand experience of this « homosexual cult » in his Cambridge years. Chinweizu has provided in « Anatomy of female Power » a most insighful description of the « mama’s boy », without however seeing its homosexual « dimension » ; McLuhan has.


        « Understanding the Media » (1964) (http://robynbacken.com/text/nw_research.pdf), his third book,  is an epoch-making work, as it argues that what matters about media is not the content, but, precisely, the medium, and the psychological and social effects of media are studied for the first time, at least for the first time by an outsider. It is only tainted by some positive value judgments on so-called « new technologies », and, despite the awareness that « If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch » and the acknowledgment that « the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community » (see https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/a-massive-bauhaus-program-of-haptic-innovation/), by the conviction that so-called « new technologies » can « extend consciousness »; once those value judgments are cast aside and the term « consciousness » is changed to « subconscious », his thought-provoking analysis turns out to be most helpful to go deeper into the understanding of the mechanisms of the occult war as now waged mainly through media means.


        You may also want to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY, which stands as a remarkable complement to the considerations developped by Guénon on the switch from the oral to the written ; it is only tainted, this time, by the claim that the phonetic alphabet is a Greek invention, when it is almost certain that its origin is Phoenician (G Mason, The date and origin of the phonetic alphabet, 1838 ; the Maya, too, had a phonetic alphabet : Ignatius Donnelly, Plato, William Scott-Elliot, Francis Bacon and CJ Cutcliffe Hyne, The Atlantis Collection, e-artnow, 2016, chap 7: The Origin of Our Alphabet). What better way of making sure that the dissociative concepts that were disseminated, through philosophy and therefore through the written word, throughout the ancient “Western “world, would incubate than to convey these concepts through a language written phonetically, and therefore tending to produce dissociation ? There is nothing “mysterious” about the fact that the Church spread the use of the phonetic alphabet, as its first representatives were Semites (another thing : Romans did not attempt to “make them [laws] uniformly applicable to all men”; this attempt was made, and successfully so, later by Christians (Harold J. Berman, "The Influence of Christianity upon the Development of law", http://www.classicapologetics.com/b/berminfl.pdf ; J. E. A. Craken Early Christians and Roman Law, 1965), who had no difficulty in growing the seed of universality planted by the Stoicians in Roman law (Pierre-Marie Baude, Christinisme et modèles d’appartenance. In Pierre Marie Beaude,Jacques Fantino (es.), Le christianisme dans la société : actes du colloque international de Metz, Cerf, 1998, p. 288-9)..


        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCrx0scCkM&t=6s might be the best introduction to his work (the passage where the so-called virtues of « dialogue » is discussed is the only dull part of the interview), or perhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqIq6UPvN0o is.


      • G. H.
        It is perhaps worth mentioning that the posthumously published Laws of Media (1988) was a continuation and expansion of Understanding Media (1964).. As
        Message 3 of 3 , Jan 2, 2018

          It is perhaps worth mentioning that the posthumously published "Laws of Media" (1988) was a continuation and expansion of "Understanding Media" (1964).


          As mentioned at http://siliclone.tripod.com/books/history/H072..html (which comprehensively lists the foremost representatives of the so-called "Toronto School of communication theory") : "Eric McLuhan (1941- ), a son of Marshall McLuhan, worked with his father on Laws of Media [MCLUHAN M & MCLUHAN E]. Although this book started out as a revision of Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, it finished up when finally published 8 years after his father's death to contain as much of the point of view of Eric as of Marshall. Eric has since published a book on his own entitled Electric Language which continues to explore his perspective." See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_School_of_communication_theory and http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/readinglist.html.

          An up-to-date overview of E. McLuhan's main works can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_McLuhan#List_of_works.

          More excerpts and quotes from M. McLuhan's "The Mechanical Bride" will follow soon.

          Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
          Verzonden: maandag 25 december 2017 17:02:49
          Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
          Onderwerp: [evola_as_he_is] "The Medium is the Message"
           
           

          « An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. » (http://izquotes.com/quote/124620)


          « Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. » (« The Mechanical Bride », 1951, p. vi)


          « I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. » (« Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews », 2003, p. 101-102 (http://answick.blogspot.be/2010/05/marshall-mcluhan-on-wyndham-lewis.html)


          « Invention is the mother of necessities. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


          « Homer was wiped out by litteracy » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


          « Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business. » (https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/)


          « There is a huge technology involved in TV which surrounds you – physically – and the effect of that huge service environment on you – personnally – is vast. The effect of the program is incidental. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw&t=4s)


          « The Brittish empire is the empire where the sun never sets because you cannot trust an Englishman in the dark. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY)


          « The close relation between sex and violence, between good news and bad news, helps to explain the compulsion of the admen to dunk all their products in sex by erogenizing every contour of every bottle or cigarette. Having reached this happy state where the good news is fairly popping, the admen say, as it were: “Better add a bit of the bad news now to take the hex off all that bonanza stuff.” Let’s remind them that LOVE, replayed in reverse, is EVOL—transposing into EVIL and VILE. LIVE spells backward into EVIL, while EROS reverses into SORE. And, we should never forget the SIN in SINCERE or the CON in CONFIDENCE. » ("Media Ad-vice: An Introduction by Marshall McLuhan",


          Of the fecund author who has just been quoted only one book has been translated into French, and yet this book was only published by a Canadian publisher (none have been translated into Italian or into German). Not all epoch-making authors, for good (Paul Friedland) of for ill (Walter Lippmann), have been translated into French, far from it. I am thankful to M. van den Heide for having drawn my attention recently to Marshall McLuhan, who, on theother hand, is well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world.


          I have not had the opportunity to read his first book, which is about mass culture and mass propaganda techniques, and more specifically about the use of woman, or at least her image, as a « selling point » in advertising. In « The Mechanical Bride », a collection of essays that was published a few years before Evola started to work on « Metaphysics of Sex », McLuhan « shows that there is a kind of inherent violence in the technological visualization/ objectification of a woman » (Helen J. Burgess, Jeanne Hamming, Highways of the Mind, 2014, p. 115).


          In fact, the « mechanical bride » is constituted by « the interfusion of sex and technology, and death ». « At the heart of this mystery [...] rests: 1) the pervasive sexualization of technology — engines, cars "bodies by Fisher," even a nuclear bomb nicknamed "Gilda" after reigning sex symbol Rita Hayworth; and 2) the corresponding mechanization of the female body into a set of fragmented, fetishized, and replaceable parts — legs, breasts, buttocks, forming what is basically a plastic mechanism, a hot number, a sex object, sex bomb, living doll, love machine. McLuhan relates this interfusion of technology, sex, and death to a hunger to "explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on the one hand, and, on the other to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. He draws our attention to the increasing movement, in both fact and fiction, toward the use of sadistic violence as both sexual thrill and metaphysical invasion and suggests that technology plays a critical rôle. By sexualization, McLuhan actually means feminization and hence ignores for the large part the masculinization of technology, particularly weaponry… » (Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime, 1987, p. 179-90), and quite rightly so ; http://a401.idata.over-blog.com/500x324/4/28/60/29/moulinex_libere.jpg.
          Meanwhile, in this light, Chinweizu’s characterisation of woman as a « terrorist » takes on an even more appropriate meaning.


          « The Mechanical Bride » was written decades before the transhumanist agenda was disclosed. One of the essays is called  "Love Goddess Assemble Line". Still Interestingly enough, after the pubiication of the book, McLuhan « complained of some vague homosexual influence in the publishing world that was horrified by the masculine vigor of his prose and was trying to castrate his text » (Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger : a Biography, 1998, p. 118).


          He agreed with Wyndham Lewis, by whose writtings he was apparently ispired (« McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis’s writings. In particular, his idea of the critical rôle artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them », marshallandme.com/the-meaning-of-the-wyndam-portrait/ ; see also https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/on-vorticism-wyndham-lewis-influencers-of-mcluhan/), agreed with Lewis that « the "homosexual cult" was a direct result of the feminist revolt » (Philip Marchand, op. cit., p. 74). McLuhan had a first-hand experience of this « homosexual cult » in his Cambridge years. Chinweizu has provided in « Anatomy of female Power » a most insighful description of the « mama’s boy », without however seeing its homosexual « dimension » ; McLuhan has.


          « Understanding the Media » (1964) (http://robynbacken.com/text/nw_research.pdf), his third book,  is an epoch-making work, as it argues that what matters about media is not the content, but, precisely, the medium, and the psychological and social effects of media are studied for the first time, at least for the first time by an outsider. It is only tainted by some positive value judgments on so-called « new technologies », and, despite the awareness that « If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch » and the acknowledgment that « the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community » (see https://inscriptorium.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/a-massive-bauhaus-program-of-haptic-innovation/), by the conviction that so-called « new technologies » can « extend consciousness »; once those value judgments are cast aside and the term « consciousness » is changed to « subconscious », his thought-provoking analysis turns out to be most helpful to go deeper into the understanding of the mechanisms of the occult war as now waged mainly through media means.


          You may also want to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY, which stands as a remarkable complement to the considerations developped by Guénon on the switch from the oral to the written ; it is only tainted, this time, by the claim that the phonetic alphabet is a Greek invention, when it is almost certain that its origin is Phoenician (G Mason, The date and origin of the phonetic alphabet, 1838 ; the Maya, too, had a phonetic alphabet : Ignatius Donnelly, Plato, William Scott-Elliot, Francis Bacon and CJ Cutcliffe Hyne, The Atlantis Collection, e-artnow, 2016, chap 7: The Origin of Our Alphabet). What better way of making sure that the dissociative concepts that were disseminated, through philosophy and therefore through the written word, throughout the ancient “Western “world, would incubate than to convey these concepts through a language written phonetically, and therefore tending to produce dissociation ? There is nothing “mysterious” about the fact that the Church spread the use of the phonetic alphabet, as its first representatives were Semites (another thing : Romans did not attempt to “make them [laws] uniformly applicable to all men”; this attempt was made, and successfully so, later by Christians (Harold J. Berman, "The Influence of Christianity upon the Development of law", http://www.classicapologetics..com/b/berminfl.pdf ; J. E. A. Craken Early Christians and Roman Law, 1965), who had no difficulty in growing the seed of universality planted by the Stoicians in Roman law (Pierre-Marie Baude, Christinisme et modèles d’appartenance. In Pierre Marie Beaude,Jacques Fantino (es.), Le christianisme dans la société : actes du colloque international de Metz, Cerf, 1998, p. 288-9).


          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCrx0scCkM&t=6s might be the best introduction to his work (the passage where the so-called virtues of « dialogue » is discussed is the only dull part of the interview), or perhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqIq6UPvN0o is.


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