[re:] <nettime> BUSH ANNOUNCES US DEPT. OF ART & TECHNOLOGY

[Wyndham Lewis <lewis_wyndham@yahoo.com>]

RANDALL M. PACKER, SECRETARY
US DEPARTMENT OF ART & TECHNOLOGY

Sir: 

How little do you  seem to know about me, but how
could I be surprised?  I am partly communist and
partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism
in my marxism, but at bottom an anarchist with a
healthy passion for order.  Mainly, I detest
everything American - all that is obsessed with
technique, mindless change, the 'time-mind' which
withers away at individual reflectiveness.  I wrote
about this clearly enough in the 1920s, but vacuous
American technological optimists like you just don't
ever seem to get it.   Whacked over the head a hundred
times, you just want to keep coming back for more.  

That Canadian catholic poseur mystagogue, McLuhan,
whom I got to know during my agonizing and none too
short years in Windsor, Canada, admittedly picked up a
few things from me, which seems to be about all you
and your sensation-loving American techno-artist kind
have noted from my many books.  That claptrap about
the earth becoming a  'global village', for instance.
But Marshall missed my darker point, as do you all in
your vain and plainly misguided use of my name.  The
fashionable artists and philosophers I denounced in my
time - Joyce, Pound, Bergson, Stein - were more
reflective of the capitalist-advertising-technological
juggernaut than comprehending of it.  McLuhan was
always muddled-up on this point:  wishful thinking, I
always thought, to imagine that advanced modernist art
works would or could ever be simplistically de-coded
as negative beacons of the future.  An idiotic
fantasy.  

The future these literary modernists "predicted" in
their works has occurred, no doubt, and you wretches
are living in it. I tried everything I could to stop
it.  BAt least McLuhan, like me, was at bottom an
enemy of all innovation and change.

Rolling in my grave, 


Wyndham Lewis

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net