[Nettime-bold] BUSH ANNOUNCES US DEPT. OF ART & TECHNOLOG

[Wyndham Lewis <lewis_wyndham@yahoo.com>]

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

Sir: 

How little 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.  At least McLuhan, like me, was at bottom an
enemy of all innovation and change.

Rolling in my grave, 


Wyndham Lewis


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