Counterblast 1954

While I was at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, the whole world was celebrating Marshall McLuhan's centenary (100 years from his birth). There was a special lecture honoring McLuhan's legacy at the Canadian embassy in the Potsdamer Platz, a series of great lectures at Transmediale, and a special publication co-ordinated with Ginko Press (McLuhan's enthusiastic heirs). The book was 20 euro (pricey) but it was a special edition. The general publication of "Counterblast" dates from 1969, while this is the 1954 version he published via mimeograph and supposedly handed out on the streets of Toronto. Being a McLuhan lover, I had to have it!

Bibliographic Deets

 * McLuhan, Marshall 2011. COUNTERBLAST 1954. Transmediale, Berlin.

From Blast to Counterblast

 * Essay/Foreword by W. Terrence Gordon
 * Explains how Counterblast was McLuhan's response to a very similar work by Wyndham Lewis called simply "Blast." McLuhan and Lewis were friends and McLuhan was very inspired by Lewis' "vorticism"
 * Generally this essay works to contextualize many of the references/allusions of McLuhan's text

COUNTERBLAST

 * Introduction "The new media are blowing a lot of this baby powder around the pendant cradle of the New Man today. The dust gets in our eyes. COUNTERBLAST 1954 blows aside this dust for a few moments and offers a view of the cradle, the bough, and the direction of the winds of the new media in these latitudes."

BLAST

 * Injunction of curse/denouncement

haavatyaleprinceton, nurseries of the ivy-clawed adolescent, the creeper mind/ the printed b(oo)k moth-eaten / STRAIGHT JACKET of the Western mind / abstract art linked with / ABSOLUTE ZERO / and 1914"
 * "...THE NEW YORKER whimsical sycophant / of CREAM PUFF culture /


 * "BLAST all FURRY thoughs / The canadian BEAVER, / Submarine symbol of the / SLOW / UNHAPPY / subintelligentsias."


 * Mentions the Massey Report, which I looked up, a fascinating study on the American takeover of Canadian culture to the point that it is not differentiable.
 * Massey Report necessitated a re-invention of Canadian culture (aka National Film Board and other artists projects)

BLESS

 * "BLESS USA cornucopia of daily SURREALISM"


 * "The practical communism and cosmic conformity achieved by American / MASS_PRODUCTION"


 * "The starched SHIRT-FRONT symbol of the / printed page / of mass production and commercial / elegance"


 * "BLESS / French Canadian HOCKEY PLAYERS / for keeping art on ice / for our one contribution to / INTERNATIONAL CULTURE"


 * "BLESS the USA for SAVING canada from / the fate of Australia"

Media Log

 * Complex section in which McLuhan draws a circuit of literature, technology, and culture
 * begins with Lamartine calling the newspaper the end of the book
 * then Dickens using the newspaper to make books in reverse (newspaper content = book)
 * then Eisenstein and Griffiths using Dickens serial ideas to invent motion picture narrative
 * Next Browning and Poe using newspaper's idea of simultaneity to create new literary works/styles
 * Ends with Joyce's Ulysses.


 * Continuing host of intellectual culture history


 * "Photography and cinema have abolished realism as too easy; they substitute themselves for realism"


 * "Technological art takes the whole earth and its population as its material, not as its form"


 * "The media are not toys; they should not be in the hand of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms"


 * "Europeans cannot master these new powers of technology because they take themselves too seriously and too sentimentally. Europeans cannot imagine the Earth City. They have occupied old city spaces too long to be able to sense the new spaces created by the new media."


 * "The English have lived longer with technological culture than anybody else, but they lost their chance to shape it when the ship yielded to the plane. But the English language is already the base of all technology."


 * "Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx"

Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath

 * More aphorisms about media and sensory functions and history

Blowing off the Dust

 * Essay/Afterword by Elena Lamberti
 * Presented at Transmediale
 * Like Foreword, works to contextualize McLuhan, but this time with eye to future.